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.

ElfQuest, The TV Series

059, Comic Review, Paul Driggere, TV Review

Well, it’s taken 42 years, but it looks like ElfQuest fans, young and old, who have grown up with Richard and Wendy Pini’s creation since 1978, may have finally reached sorrow’s end.

Fox Studios confirmed a script commitment has been inked for a series of hour-long animation shows through Modern Magic, a production studio helmed by Rodney Rothman (director of the Spider-man “Spiderverse” movies) and Adam Rosenber, (formerly of MGM Studios as senior and exec vice-president). Emmy-award-winning studio Bento Box Entertainment, fresh off its successful first season of the critically acclaimed musical animation gem, Hazbin Hotel, is in line for the animation. Susan Hurwitz Arneson, producer of The Tick and Preacher shows, will write the adaptation, showrun, and be an executive producer.

ElfQuest is a fantasy story about a band of elves of different types, including the Wolfriders of the verdant forests, the Go-Backs of the cold mountains, and the SunFolk of the heated deserts, struggling to survive and peacefully co-exist on a primitive planet similar to Earth, but with two moons in the night sky. The 1980s saw the underground comic series win many awards for its art, style, and stories. Over the years, ElfQuest has held the distinct honor of being the most successful independent comic creation of all time. Through their comic company, WaRP Graphics, the Pini’s ElfQuest series was blessed to grace the covers for Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse Comics.

In February of 1978, the first ElfQuest story, “Fire and Flight,” illustrated the tale of a group of elves, led by a chief named Cutter, suddenly forced from their forest holt by the evils of man. They embark on a journey of discovery to find a new place to call home. The series followed the elves as they traversed the hot desert and met the SunFolk, elves like themselves but more advanced in technology and magic. Cutter met and fell in love with Leetah of the SunFolk, and through “recognition,” they became life-mates. She joined the Wolfriders on further adventures.

But let’s not howl at the moons just yet, ElfQuest fans. We’ve been down this painful path before, haven’t we?

In 1982, the Pinis announced they were in talks with Nelvana to bring an animated film to the screen to celebrate its 20th issue, but nothing more was ever said.

In the early 1990s, an animated adaptation of ElfQuest was considered, but the Pinis soon informed readers they’d withdrawn from the deal. A 50-minute VHS tape from Abby Lou Entertainment, copyrighted in 1992, was released, but it was mostly color still images from the comics mixed with some animation and dialogue. The “animated” video is available on the official ElfQuest website.

In 1994, the Pinis signed a development deal with film producer Edward R. Pressman, who had produced Street Fighter and The Crow at the time. Jeremiah Chechik, fresh off his success directing Benny and Joon, was set to direct. Again, nothing happened.

In 2008, Warner Brothers announced its intention to bring ElfQuest to light, with Rawson Thurber (Skyscraper and Red Notice) serving as writer and director. However, this, too, didn’t pan out. I suspect personally that Warner Brothers very likely didn’t want ElfQuest competing with their film, The Hobbit, which was released in 2013. So, again, nothing happened.

The only thing fans have seen as far as motion goes was a fan-made trailer created by Stephanie Thorpe and Paula Rhodes in 2011. That video trailer can be viewed on YouTube here. It had the full backing of the Pinis; they even helped with dressing and fundraising.

So, hang tight, everyone. While it’s exciting to hear, once again, that ElfQuest could finally get its shot at the silver screen, we should observe cautious optimism at this point. But the Pinis seem more hopeful this time. “ElfQuest couldn’t be in better hands,” they said in a statement to Deadline. “Our collaborators trust the story. We have the highest regard for their previous achievements, and they have our blessing and input. We know their adaptation of ElfQuest will be a dream come true.”

Let’s hope it is.

Forty-two years is a long time to wait for dreams to come true.

But someone reminded me that if your dreams come true, it doesn’t matter how old you are.

Perhaps I will howl at the moon tonight.

Mythical Monster Stories

059, Art, Comic Review, Peter Dobbin

It is quite rare that I get sent books of any type these days. It is even more rare for me to get sent a graphic novel. So I was very surprised when Peter Dobbin asked me if I would like a review copy of his book, Mythical Monster Stories.

Dobbin is a professional artist, with many years experience in computer games and illustration. You can see some of his work on his website. Most interestingly from my point of view, he worked on a computer game based on The War of the Worlds. He’s also been involved in a couple of games about that boy wizard chap. Mythical Monster Stories is more of a personal project.

What Dobbin has done with the book is collect monster stories from around the world, do a feature image of each one, and also write a page or so of comic story about the monster doing the thing it is best known for. The book features 39 monsters from all corners of the globe. There are some famous names such as the sasquatch, banshee and yeti, but there are many that I had not previously heard of.


‘Madremonte’

The feature illustrations are, as I hope you can see from the few I have featured here, absolutely spectacular. If you like beautiful art, the book is well worth it for that alone. I note that the book more than doubled its goal when Dobbin ran a Kickstarter campaign for it.

The comic art is inevitably simpler, and the panels are drawn in shades of blue-gray rather than full colour. The story plots are interesting, and often heartwarming, but the actual text is a little simplistic. I have some sympathy here, firstly because Dobbin is still far better at words than I am at art; and also because he’s very limited on space. It is a small criticism, but one you notice because the rest of the book is so beautiful.




‘Basilisk Attack’

Dobbin tells me that he’s working on a second book, and I’m sure that will breeze through Kickstarter as easily as this one did.

For complicated Amazon reasons, the book is currently unavailable at Amazon. Hopefully it will be back soon. But you can get it from Waterstones.




‘Book Opening’

book cover
Title: Mythical Monster Stories
By: Peter Dobbin
Publisher: Twisted Spirit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Enheduana

059, Feminism, History, Sophus Helle

When I reviewed Sophus Helle’s new translation of Gilgamesh I made the point that Helle brings a highly unusual mix of talents to the task. He’s familiar with the literary world, and learned wordsmithing from his father who is one of Denmark’s foremost poets. But he is also an Assyriologist who can read Sumerian and Akkadian in their native cuneiform, and who has an excellent grasp of the cultures from which works such as Gilgamesh originated. This makes him the ideal person to also produce a translation of the first works of literature in human history to have been credited to an individual author. Hence, to give the book its full title: The Complete Poems of Enheduana, the world’s first author.

Enheduana was the daughter of Sargon of Akkad (the real one, not the far-right troll who uses that name on social media), a man who also staked his claim in history by becoming the world’s first emperor. It was Sargon who united the fiercely independent city-states of Sumer under his control, and who began the linguistic shift to the use of Akkadian rather than Sumerian as the principal language of the region.

Religion was a key instrument of social control at the time, so Sargon gave his daughter the key post of the High Priestess of the city of Ur. While the Sumerians broadly worshipped the same pantheon of gods, each city had a chief god to whom the main temple was dedicated. As High Priestess of Ur, Enheduana’s first duty was to Nanna, the god of the Moon. But she also seems to have had a particular fondness for Inana, the wild and unpredictable goddess of love and war (better known by her Akkadian name of Ishtar).

One of Enehduana’s surviving works is a lengthy hymn of praise to Inana. This is the work in which she describes the various powers of the goddess, including the ability to turn men into women, and women into men. Enheduana’s works make it clear that gender ambiguity was a key facet of Inana’s cult.

But the work for which Enheduana is most famous, because we have a complete copy of the text, is the one we now call “The Exaltation of Inana”. We have that copy because, 500 years after her death, Enheduana’s works were a key element of the curriculum in the schools of the Old Babylonian Empire. An archaeological excavation in Babylon chanced upon a building that must have housed a scribal school, because multiple, inexpertly written copies of the Exaltation were found there.

Because she was governing a Sumerian city, and was serving as High Priestess of a Sumerian god, Enheduana wrote her poems in Sumerian. That in itself is remarkable. The world’s first known author wrote her best-known works in her second language. But, in much the same way as Latin became the language of the church in mediaeval Europe, Sumerian was preserved as the language of religion for the Babylonians. And they trained their scribes on the work of the best known writer from (their) antiquity, who was a woman.

One of the benefits of having Helle write this book is that he is able to explain just how good a poet Enheduana was, because he is familiar with the language in which she was writing.

The Exaltation is not just a hymn of praise for a goddess. It is also autobiographical. Indeed, the fact that it needed to be may have been what prompted Enheduana to insert her name into the text. The Sumerians were not exactly happy about having been conquered by Sargon. In Ur, a rebellion led by a man called Lugal-Ane deposed Enheduana and forced her into exile. Having appealed to Nanna for help in vain, Enheduana turned to her favourite goddess instead. And that appeal is what the Exaltation is all about.

Our knowledge of the history of those times is inevitably sketchy, but we have a limestone disk showing an image of Enheduana performing her religious duties and inscribed with her name. It was found by Katharine Wooley, who oversaw much of the excavation of the city while her husband, Sir Leonard, was off giving lecture tours about how he discovered the birthplace of Abraham. We have also found the graves (identified by their personal seals) of her hairdresser, her steward, and one of her scribes. Her tomb, if it was in Ur, was probably looted and destroyed, because Ur was sacked by the Elamites after Sargon’s empire collapsed some decades after his death. Enheduana was most definitely a real person.

I’ve gone on a bit, but there are a few other things I would like to highlight. Firstly, at one point during the Exaltation, Enheduana says:

“Inana: I will let my tears stream free to soften your heart, as if they were beer.”

Ah, Sumerians, they did so love their beer. But, as Helle points out, there is also the implication that Inana finds human suffering intoxicating. Gods are weird people.

Next up, Helle notes that Enheduana describes the action of authorship as a form of weaving with words. He goes on to explain that, in the ancient world, originality was less valued than it is today (and copyright didn’t exist). What was valued was taking existing strands from well-loved works and weaving them into new and different forms. In other words, fanfic was a common form of literary expression (and The Aeneid is totally Homer fanfic).

What Helle doesn’t say is that weaving is, and pretty much always has been, women’s work. And if authorship is a form of weaving, that to me suggests that it too was probably practiced mostly by women.

Finally there is the question of Enheduana’s position in the annals of feminism. There is no doubt that, today, the fact that she is the world’s first known author is of great importance to women. However, Helle states that reading the Exaltation as a proto-feminist text would not make sense because, at the time of writing, “feminism had not yet been born.” I’d like to unpack that a little.

Comments like that always remind me, uncomfortably, of the people who claim that trans folk cannot have existed in the past because being trans had not been invented then. But that claim is heavily dependent on a definition of being trans that they, and generations of cisgender doctors, have created.

So when was feminism born? And who birthed it? Was it Mary Wolstonecroft? Margaret Cavendish? Christine de Pizan? Hypatia?

If we follow Marie Shear and define feminism as, “The radical notion that women are people,” then feminism will have existed as long as men have looked down on women as lesser beings. That, I suspect, takes us back well before Enheduana’s time. Helle himself notes that neither Inana nor Enheduana are typical of Sumerian womanhood:

“Women were expected to look after the house, cook, clean, wave, mash, manage the domestic expenses, and look after the children. They were supposed to be healthy, humble, caring, quiet, and attractive to look at.”

It is entirely true that Enheduana’s outrage at being deposed and exiled by Lugal-Ane is the outrage of the daughter of an emperor who has been rebelled against by one of the conquered. But we laud the suffragettes as feminist despite the fact that most of their leaders (Sylvia Pankhurst excepted) were not keen on allowing working class women the vote. They were not too keen on women of colour either, save for the fantastically wealthy princess Sophia Duleep Singh.

So my view is that Enheduana was doing the sort of feminism we might expect from an elite woman who had been deposed by a man of inferior status who very probably had told her that she, being a woman, had no right to rule over him. Also she suggests that he insulted her by claiming that she was not behaving as a woman should, but rather like that awful Inana of whom she was so fond.

In Enheduana’s time, poems did not have titles. They were known by the first line of the text. The Exaltation was therefore known as “Nin me ŝara.” That translates literally as “Queen of all the me,” where me is a Sumerian word meaning a skill or power. So metalworking, weaving and writing are me, but so are wisdom and justice. Weirdly the Sumerians seem to have believed that, at least in the divine realm, me took physical form and could be stolen by one god from another. Which is how Inana managed to steal a whole bunch of me from a male god called Enki, including the me for giving blow-jobs. I want to know what Enki was doing with it in the first place.

Helle translates the first line of the Exaltation as “Queen of all powers”, which is a good attempt to render me in a way that is understandable to modern readers. I would have rendered it as, “All-powerful Queen,” because Enheduana goes on to state that Inana is not just one god among many, she is the most powerful god of all. And claiming that the supreme god is female is, I submit, a profoundly feminist statement.

If anyone thinks that I need support from a professional Assyriologist, I note that Julian Reade suggested that Sennacherib might be a feminist.

That quibble aside, Enheduana is a wonderful book containing beautifully executed translations of Enheduana’s works, and insightful essays about them and their place in human and literary history.

book cover
Title: Enheduana
By: Sophus Helle
Publisher: Yale University Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Dune 2

059, Movie Review

When the first part of Dune came out I was still very much avoiding movie theatres. This time I was able to see the film in the beautiful little cinema at Brynamman, which is very much how it was supposed to be viewed. I even got an ice cream in the intermission between the tailers and the main feature.

I mention that piece of cinema tradition because the thing that came to mind most after seeing Dune 2 is the work of Cecil B DeMille. This was movie-making on a grand scale. It was what movies were made for. The canvas was vast, the stakes epic, the visuals stunning, and the soundtrack arresting. I expect the film to feature heavily in next year’s Oscars.

I’m also planning to buy the film on BluRay so that I can watch both films back-to-back when I get the chance (probably next Yule).

And yet, and yet, I worry.

Some people, I am sure, will object to changes made to the plot of the book. Some of these were done to avoid having a “ten years later” interlude, but I think maybe the story works better with Paul becoming a dangerous demagogue with him being still a teenager and having so little life experience to temper his behaviour.

Other changes are perhaps more fundamental. Paul’s sister, Alia, has not yet been born. There is no sign yet of his son with Chani. Chani herself has undergone a major change in character. Some of these, I think, will make it easier for Denis Villeneuve to pitch a third film to the studio. Others, particularly the Chani one, are for the better. It is a long time since I read the books, but I do remember them devolving into an unfocussed mess. And also, if you have Zendaya in your movie, you’d be an idiot not to give her a bigger and more important role.

My main concern about the film, however, is that, despite its length, it tries to fit too much in. The characters aren’t given enough time to develop naturally, and instead have to rely on brief staged scenes to convey their changes in view. Consequently Stilgar ends up seeming like a bit of an idiot, and the Harkonnens are way too cartoonish in their villainy.

I also worry that anyone who isn’t familiar with the book will be completely lost as to what is going on. Personally I had some difficultly spotting the difference between Princess Irulan and Lady Margot. And if I’m confused, heaven help anyone who hasn’t read the books.

So where did all the time go? Dune 2 is 11 minutes longer than the first movie, giving a combined total of 321 minutes. That’s still almost 100 minutes short of the running time of the John Harrison TV series, which I thought did a decent job with the plot. You can fit a lot of plot into 100 minutes. Also Villeneuve spends a lot of time giving us amazing visuals, which is great, but doesn’t advance the plot.

Of course there is probably no way Villeneuve could have got permission to make 3 extra-long films to get this far. Especially as he clearly wants to make at least one more film. So we have to be grateful for the stunning movie experience that he has given us. I’m not going to complain. Much.

I will, however, complain bitterly if we don’t get a third film, because we are yet to see a Guild Steersman, or a Face Dancer.

This Year’s Hugo Finalists

059, Awards

Well, here we go again. And with many people in fandom having declared that the Hugos are over and deserve to die in a fire, what are we to make of this year’s crop of finalists?

First up, Glasgow seems to have made a good job of presenting the finalists. There is inevitable muttering about the list being released over the Easter holiday weekend, but that is when Eastercon happens so for a UK Worldcon it is the obvious timing. Also not every fan in the world is a Christian, or even lives in a Christian country.

Nicholas Whyte promised in advance to give a full list of any recusals and disqualifications when the finalists were announced, and he seems to have made good on that. Transparency, as I have said, is a two-edged sword. It is only because the Hugo process is so transparent that we know about the shenanigans in Chengdu. But once you commit to transparency you have to embrace it, and that is what Glasgow appears to have done.

Dell Magazines, who are the owners of the Astounding Award, have kindly asked that Xiran Jay Zhao, one of the victims of political censorship by Dave McCarty and his crew, be given another year of eligibility. This is, of course, only possible because the Astounding is Not A Hugo, and because Dell Magazines is a private company, not a club run by town meetings as is the case for WSFS. They can take whatever decisions they want about their award without having to ask permission from the members.

I’m delighted to see a significant number of Chinese works among the finalists. I very much hope that some of the Chinese fans who have come on board WSFS as a result of Chengdu will stick with the Hugos and buy supporting memberships for subsequent years so that Chinese works can continue to grace the ballot.

Also, kudos to Glasgow for getting someone who can read Chinese and pronounce it well to read the nominees. Good work, Sophia Xue. They also had someone who can correctly pronounce Pádraig Ó Méalóid, which I haven’t managed after years of trying. Good work, Nicholas Whyte.

Kudos too for the decision to list the translators along with the authors on all of the translated finalists.

As to the actual finalists, as usual, I am well out of step with fandom. I have read four of the Best Novel finalists and did not nominate any of them. Two of my picks got onto the Novella list. Surprisingly I’m more in tune with the movies. I’m disappointed that The Marvels didn’t make the list, but I will have a hard time choosing between Barbie, Nimona and Across the Spider-Verse.

I look forward with interest to see if and how the Best Game finalists are represented in the Voter Packet, and very much hope to see something other than a computer game next year. Hint, hint.

Adrian Tchaikovsky was full of praise for David Thomas Moore at the BSFA Awards ceremony. It is great to have an editor from a smaller UK press on the list.

That The Library of Broken Worlds did not make it onto the Lodestar ballot is an absolute travesty. But it won a BSFA Award so I am slightly mollified.

Museum Bums

059, Art, History, Jack Shoulder, Mark Small

If you followed me on Twitter, back in the days when it was not just a propaganda tool for fascists, you may well have seen me retweet posts by the Museum Bums account. Well they were funny. Also I had a personal connection. I’ve known Mark Small for many years via OutStories Bristol. He and Jack Shoulder were clearly having a lot of fun with their account. And because fun sells, that account is now a book too.

The basic concept of Museum Bums is that our museums and art galleries are chock full of representations of naked buttocks. Much of that is due to prudishness about the depiction of genitals, especially those of the male variety. The other side of the nether regions was so much less likely to cause outrage. And clearly wasn’t anything to do with sex. Unless…

Unless you happen to be a couple of gay boys with a wicked sense of humour, in which case the sight of all those tight male derrieres can be quite overwhelming.

To give them their due, the book isn’t entirely about enticing male buttocks. The cover has a nice bit of gender balance, featuring an engraving of Venus and Mars by Angelo Bertini. The first chapter is devoted to bottoms of the female persuasion. And there is one chapter entirely about things that look like bums but are not bums. Peachy!

The rest of the book, on the other hand…

I should also note that not all of the images that are included were intended to titillate our homophilic friends. There’s an entire chapter on religion, much of which is devoted to one of my favourite paintings: ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Hieronymus Bosch. That is absolutely stuffed with images of naked bums. Us girls manage to sneak into that chapter too, partly because we inhabit the afterlife as much as men, and partly thanks to the wonderful Luis Ricardo Falero’s depictions of witches’ sabbats and the like.




Part of ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ by Hieronymous Bosch

You’ll note that I’m wittering on about artists. Small and Shoulder know a lot more about art than I do, and their knowledge is one of the joys of the book. They couldn’t have done it otherwise.

But the book is also full of puns. It is cheeky about both cheeks. Because how can you not have a book all about naked bums and not descend into silliness at every available opportunity?




‘Allegory of Purity and Lust’ by Luis Ricardo Falero

The great thing about this book is that it is both a very erudite coffee table book full of beautiful images of amazing works of art, and a very irreverent book about the joy of a shapely pair of naked buttocks. It is just the sort of thing with which to torment your racist uncle.

Or just to have a quiet giggle over yourself.

book cover
Title: Museum Bums
By: Mark Small & Jack Shoulder
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Spirited Away

059, Movie Review

Because of the connection with The Library of Broken Worlds, I decided that I should finally get around to watching Spirited Away. It is on Netflix, after all. I realise that I am very late to this and I’m assuming that almost everyone reading this has already seen the film.

Because I am going deaf, I have subtitles enabled on Netflix. But most of the dialog was quite clear, and it was obvious that the subtitles were often quite different to what was being said. I have no idea why, but it was very distracting.

The animation is very simple, but that may be a stylistic choice and in any case things have come along way since 2001. Besides, the simple style served to accentuate the surrealistic nature of the narrative.

The story is very fairy-tale-like and heartwarming. I suspect that, if you can approach it as if you were watching something like Alice in Wonderland, you’ll be perfectly OK with it. But I spent much of the film worrying that I didn’t understand Japanese culture enough to get the subtext.

Imagine watching Alice in Wonderland and worrying that you don’t understand the English enough to get the subtext. They are, after all, strange and inscrutable people.

Having read a bit about the film online, I can see that Miyazaki has put a lot of Japanese culture into the film. Also (and this was fairly obvious), there is a lot of criticism of Western consumer culture. Chihiro’s parents are drawn to look very Western, and they drive a German car. The river spirit who arrives seeming exceptionally stinky is that way because he (and the river he represents) is full of garbage. However, how all of this plays out in a Japanese context isn’t clear to me.

I think I need to watch The Boy and the Heron, both to understand how Miyazaki’s art has developed over the years, and to see what caused Nimona to not win the Oscar it so richly deserved.

Editorial – March 2024

059, Editorial

Awards are funny things. I was very disappointed that Glenda Larke’s The Tangled Lands did not make it onto the Aurealis Awards short lists. I still think it is a brilliant book. I was less surprised, but also disappointed, that the Green Man books did not make it onto the Best Series short list in the Hugos. I was not feeling particularly confident about awards. And then The Green Man’s Quarry went and won Best Novel in the BSFA Awards. Reader, if you heard a shriek of delight emanating from South Wales at that moment, it was me.

Obviously huge congratulations are due to Juliet, who absolutely deserves what is her first major award win. Also congratulations to Toby Selwyn, the editor, and to Ben Baldwin, the cover artist. Both of them have been with the Green Man books from the start, and both do superb work. For this particular book, Juliet also thanks Shona Kinsella, the Scottish cultutral consultant, and Liz Williams for help with ritual practice.

I am utterly boggled.

This is also a good time to mention the annual Locus fundraiser. There is no way that Locus can do what it does on the basis of subscriptions alone. It is therefore reliant on these fundraisers to fill the gap in the finances. There are just 5 days to go, and while it is a flexible goal so they will get some money, they currently have less than half of what they need. I’d much rather people subscribed, because that’s what magazines need, but there are a whole lot of creator-related goodies up for grabs should you be so inclined. Our field would be much the poorer without Locus, so do please donate if you can. Full details here.

Next weekend I will be off to Malta for my once-every-two-years dose of Assyriology. After that it is straight off to Luxembourg for Luxcon. There will be trip reports in the next issue, and hopefully I will get a lot of reading done while on planes.

Issue #58

Issues

This is the February 2024 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


The Dawnhounds

058, Book Review, Sascha Stronach

Update: This review has been corrected for pronouns because the “About the Author” section in the book is out of date. I have a sneaking suspicion that I should have known this, but I’m old and the memory is not what it was. Anyway, I’m now even more happy that I loved the book.

Sometimes the influences on a book can be fairly obvious. On reading The Dawnhounds you will likely be quickly reminded of China Mièville’s New Crobuzon. The book has the same mad alchemical science that fuses technology and biology. Where Mièville has his Remade, Sascha Stronach has Blanks. Equally the book draws something from Jeff Vandmeer’s Ambergris, because mushrooms are a key part of the biotech. The other obvious major influence is Star Trek: Discovery, because like the Discovery, Stronach’s world has a spore drive.

This is not intended as a criticism. Lots of science fiction books have warp drives, for example, and many of them are set in cities that are reminiscent of William Gibson’s Sprawl. But New Weird as a sensibility is harder to pull off. It is less familiar, more gruesome. You have to work at describing the setting and the technology. Stronach is brave enough to attempt this, and good enough to succeed.

The book has an interesting history. Back in 2020 there was a Worldcon in New Zealand. Thanks to COVID, very few of us were able to attend. Stronach presumably did as she lives in Wellington. Indeed, she is Māori. At that convention, The Dawnhounds won the Sir Julius Vogel Award for Best Novel. That’s the New Zealand national awards. They are not normally a path to publishing success. But fellow Kiwi, Tamsyn Muir, has been championing the book, and maybe she had a hand in Simon & Schuster picking it up for wider publication.

Thematically, the book could easily be about the UK in 2024. The city of Hainak is going through a difficult time. The current government is doing badly in the polls. Our central character, Yat Jyn-Hok, has joined the police hoping to do something good for the city, but she quickly discovers that the police exist mainly to protect the powerful from the poor. Worse still, they look down on anyone who breaks social norms by, for example, being gay.

Here’s a quick example of the social message of the book:

“Folks like us? We die often, in the quiet places, and nobody talks about it because to those who decide things, we barely even count as people. We only matter when we’re keeping their factories running, when we’re filling their pockets. If we stopped working for them, we would hold no value in their eyes.”

As for Yat, technically she’s bisexual, but she can’t resist a pretty girl, and for the social conservatives that’s enough:

They’d always been looking for defects in her, as if women were defective men, and women who loved women were defective women who loved men. As if anybody who loved both wasn’t a part of the equation and could be sorted into one or the other without their consultation. She would never be good enough, because she wasn’t the person they wanted her to be.

There are two other significant characters in the book. Sargeant Yit Kanq-Sen is an older, working class policeman who has taken Yat under his wing, hoping to protect her until she can curb her naïve idealism and honesty. Fans of police-themed TV series will doubtless recognize the character.

In addition we have Sibbi, the lesbian pirate captain. There is definitely a lot more to her than meets the eye. The world of The Dawnhounds has a complex religious system with many animal-themed gods. The government of Hainak is run by the Crane Cult, and birds do their bidding. Yat, who loves climbing, has been noticed by Monkey. Sibbi, being a pirate and a lesbian, fights against the government, yet she too is a devotee of Crane. But then Sibbi seems to have had a very long life. She knows what it means to get involved with the schemes of gods.

Yat, of course, is young and naïve, but she’ll learn. After all, she hasn’t died even once yet.

Yet.

I really enjoyed this book, and wisely Stronach has left a lot of the world unexplained. There’s a sequel due out in August. I will be pre-ordering it.

book cover
Title: The Dawnhounds
By: Sascha Stronach
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
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The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles

058, Book Review, Malka Older

As you have probably noticed, the big trend in genre publishing these days is ‘cozy’. Books are getting marketed as ‘cozy’ even if they are anything but. Allegedly the world is now such a scary place, that only warm and unchallenging fiction will sell. I see the point. Sean McMullen’s Generation Nemesis is a brutal examination of just how awful a post-climate-collapse world might be. I really like the book, but it is not selling as well as I’d hoped. At Eastercon last year people straight up told me that they didn’t want to read anything that was depressing.

The challenge for writers, then, is to produce work that is at least superficially cozy, but also has something that readers can get their teeth into if they want. Malka Older is doing this brilliantly.

On the face of it, the Pleiti and Mossa books are charming detective stories about two middle-aged women who had a relationship while they were at university, and are now finding each other again. There is some peril involved for them in the process of investigating bad guys, but it is peril made mild by the knowledge that all will come out right in the end.

Where, then, is the depth? Well to start with the mystery element of the novellas is very well done. This time I managed to work out who the bad guy was before the end, but Mossa was well ahead of me in solving the case as a whole. That’s how it should be. Mossa is, after all, the Holmes of the partnership.

Next up there is the worldbuilding. The stories are set a few hundred years in the future, at which point Earth has had to be abandoned, and humanity has settled on a series of platforms orbiting Jupiter. Older has clearly put a lot of thought into how this all works. In this book we get to learn a lot more about the history of the colony, including the fate of the original colony, which was established on Io.

Colony, of course, is a word loaded with significance, and the process of telling the history of how Jupiter was settled allows Older to examine the whole process of settlement: who gets to do it, what type of world do they hope to create, and how might that turn out in practice? The latter, of course, is often very different from what was envisaged, especially if the people doing the settling were wealthy and privileged, and therefor knew little about survival.

So there you have it: The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles is another lovely little story about two middle-aged lesbian ladies who endure mild peril to bring nasty murderers to justice. Plus, along the way, plenty of things to think about should you be so minded. Perfect for today’s publishing market.

book cover
Title: The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles
By: Malka Older
Publisher: Tor.com
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The Four Deaths and One Resurrection of Fyodor Mikhailovich

058, Book Review, Randall A. Major, Zoran Živković

A new book from Zoran Živković is always welcome here, though the latest one does take me a little out of my comfort zone. It is called The Four Deaths and One Resurrection of Fyodor Mikhailovich, and the Fyodor Mikhailovich of the title is, of course, the man better known to Westerners as Dostoevsky. Živković is fond of books that comprise several short stories with a linking theme, which he calls “mosaic novels” rather than “fixups”, a much nicer title. This book comprises four stories, and poor Dostoevsky dies in all of them.

Živković is a massive Dostoevsky fan, so it doesn’t surprise me that this book exists. What concerned me on receiving it (and Živković is one of the few authors who still regularly sends me copies of his new books) was that I know almost nothing about the great man. I wondered if this would impair my enjoyment of the book.

I’m happy to say that it mostly didn’t. The first story is a science fiction tale of parallel universes, inspired by Dostoevsky’s novel, The Double. Interestingly that novel got a scathing review from the Russian literary critic, Belinsky, who felt it was too fantastical for serious fiction. We feel your pain, Fyodor Mikhailovich, we really do.

Story 2 is a detective piece about a possible murder in the restaurant car of a train. I think I probably enjoyed it more because I haven’t read Dostoevsky and therefore had no hope of guessing the denouement. Story 3 is a hilarious rant about the state of modern publishing, told by an AI copy of Dostoevsky who has been created, at great expense, to continue the great man’s career.

The story which requires the most knowledge of Dostoevsky is the final one, which delves deeply into various incidents in his life. However, I found that there was much interesting history to be uncovered, and was happy to start reading about Dostoevsky’s life having been primed to do so by Živković.

I should note that Cadmus Press has once again treated us to a beautiful cover by Youchan Ito. Randall A. Major has done a fine job of turning Živković’s Serbian original into very readable English.

book cover
Title: The Four Deaths and One Resurrection of Fyodor Mikhailovich
By: Zoran Živković
Translator: Randall A. Major
Publisher: Cadmus Press
Purchase links:
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Amazon US
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The Last to Drown

058, Book Review, Lorraine Wilson

I’ve been meaning to get to Lorraine Wilson’s work for some time because it has been clear from the way she’s getting reviewed by others that she’s a special talent. Having a book of hers in the Luna Press novella series was a perfect opportunity. And it turns out that my esteemed colleagues are dead right about her ability.

The Last to Drown is a story about Tinna, a young woman who was born in Iceland but now lives in Scotland. Two things about her life are important. The first is that, when she and her brother were very young, her mother and her aunt fell out, and her mother took her family off to the UK. The other is that Tinna has been in a car accident. She has some horrific injuries, but her beloved husband, Ben, is dead.

Wilson is something of an expert in writing about trauma. It is her thing, apparently.

Tinna has chosen to visit the old family home on the coast of Iceland and stay with her aunt Lilith as her body tries to recover from its injuries. It is soon obvious that aunt Lilith is deeply superstitious, as she won’t let Tinna go anywhere near the sea and refuses to explain why. Is this perhaps what Tinna’s mother and aunt fell out over? The trouble is, as anyone who has ever contemplated suicide knows, the sea can hold a fatal fascination.

This, then, is a story about grief, and the inability to let it go. If you can’t, it can easily consume you. That may mean that you don’t want to go on living. It may also be powerful enough to bring you back from the dead to wreak vengeance on those who caused your loss.

The Last to Drown is great little book, and Wilson is clearly a superb writer, albeit one who produces work that can be very difficult to read, especially if you are emotionally fragile yourself. Well done to Francesca and the Luna Press team for discovering her. I understand that Wilson’s latest book, Mother Sea, is from a literary small press, and I was delighted to spot it on the shelves in Blackwells when I was in Oxford.

book cover
Title: The Last to Drown
By: Lorraine Wilson
Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
Purchase links:
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Amazon US
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The Meat Tree

058, Book Review, Gwyneth Lewis

Gwyneth Lewis is not the sort of writer who normally features in these pages. She’s primarily a poet, and her achievements include being made the inaugural National Poet of Wales in 2005, and winning the Bardic Crown at the 2012 National Eisteddfod. (The Crown is awarded for free verse, as opposed to the better known Chair which is for a long poem in strict metre.) If you have ever been to Cardiff, the words inscribed on the roof of the Millennium Centre were written by her. That’s serious mainstream literary credibility.

And yet, Lewis has written science fiction. The Welsh publishing house, Seren, commissioned a series of re-imaginings of The Mabinogion, and 2010 saw the publication of The Meat Tree, a science fiction novella by Lewis based on the Fourth Branch. Lewis notes in her Afterword that she has long been fond of science fiction, and made a point of studying it before writing the book. This is no arrogant literary author slumming it in a genre they know nothing about, this is the real thing.

I’m not going to recap the plot of the Fourth Branch (as much as anything in The Mabinogion can be said to have a plot). Suffice it to say that it is the section that contains the stories of the rape of Goewin, and the tale of Blodeuwedd, the woman made of flowers. It is very weird.

The Meat Tree, in contrast, at least starts in a sensible and predictable manner. The story has just two characters. Campion is an Inspector of Wrecks. It is his job to visit newly discovered derelict spaceships and find out what happened to them. This is to be his last mission. Management has decided that the job is better done by robots. Campion thinks this is daft, because robots don’t understand humans and will never get to the bottom of a wreck mystery. But he’s also old, possibly too old, and terrified of the boredom that retirement will bring.

Nona is new to the job. As physical inspections are to be discontinued, she doesn’t understand why she’s been sent on this crazy mission with an old fool who keeps muttering about the good old days and treats her like an idiot. Having never been on such a mission before, she is indeed an idiot much of the time. The story revolves around how these two very different people come to understand each other better, and appreciate each other’s strengths.

The wreck is a very old Earth vessel. So old that there is actually a cassette tape player on board. (It does not belong to Peter Quill.) The logs say that it had a crew of three: two men and one woman, but there is no sign of any bodies.

What Campion and Nona do find is a very sophisticated VR system. Clearly the crew needed something to while away the time during a long voyage. Perhaps the game that they were playing will throw some light on the mystery of what became of them.

Thus our two heroes find themselves partaking in a VR re-telling of the Fourth Branch. They end up taking the parts of various characters including Gwydion, Math, Goewin, Arianrhod, and Bloduewedd. It is not a pleasant experience for either of them.

Another comment in the Afterword tells how Lewis was inspired for part of the plot by meeting Joan Roughgarden while working at Stanford. Roughgarden is the trans Professor Emeritus of Biology whose book, Evolution’s Rainbow, has been invaluable to my writing on gender in the natural world.

I can’t tell you too much more, because the book is only a novella and I don’t want to give too much away. Suffice it to say that the ending is sufficiently strange to do justice to the source material. I wish I had known about this book back in 2011, though Ted Chaing won the novella Hugo that year with The Lifecycle of Software Objects, and I don’t think Lewis would have begrudged him his victory.

book cover
Title: The Meat Tree
By: Gwyneth Lewis
Publisher: Seren
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
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Chengdu Revisited

058, Awards, Con Running

Well, what a month or so it has been. I’m not going to try to debunk all of the crazy that is happening out on social media, because frankly it has spiraled well out of my ability to play whack-a-mole. I will content myself with a couple of favourites. First up, it is not true that Kevin and I (and presumably Gary Wolfe as he was also a director of the Translation Awards) are the secret owners of the WSFS service marks. And secondly, the WSFS Mark Protection Committee is not laundering vast sums of money for China Telecom. Can we talk about more reasonable things, please?

I should start by saying that I’m not going to go too much into what happened in China. I can’t read Chinese, and know very few people who can. I’m sure that there is a story to be told from the point of view of Chinese fans, but I’m very poorly placed to tell it. I’m going to concentrate mostly on the “where the fuck do we go from here?” question. My focus will be on trying to find a way forward that will minimize occurrences of Hugo Drama while maintaining an acceptable level of transparency, so that we can rebuild trust in the awards.

One thing that I think people need to do, is get a better idea of what is actually involved in Hugo Administration. On the one hand I have seen some folks claiming that the Hugos have been corrupt for years (and citing the fuss over Mary Robinette Kowal’s “The Lady Astronaut of Mars” novelette as proof). On the other hand some people are saying that this year’s situation is totally unprecedented because Hugo Administrators don’t normally rule anything as ineligible. If you want to know more about what goes on in the process of Hugo Administration, I highly recommend the Administrator Decisions report produced by Nicholas Whyte, Kathryn Duval and Brent Smart for the Helsinki Worldcon.

Sadly subsequent Worldcons have not matched this level of transparency. Partly I suspect that’s because it is too much work, and partly because it may have been deemed Too Much Information. Sadly the capacity of commenters on social media to find conspiracies in the most innocent decisions mitigates against transparency. However, I note that Nicholas Whyte has committed to doing something similar for Glasgow, which is a very good thing.

Of particular interest in the Helsinki report is the section numbered 3.9.4 on page 15. Here the authors talk about what happens when the E Pluribus Hugo system (EPH) determines that a finalist is ineligible and has to be removed. In order to keep the workload to sensible proportions, Hugo Administrators generally only make in-depth checks regarding eligibility for works/people who are likely finalists. You can’t know that until EPH has been run. As the authors note in this section, if one or more finalists is then removed, EPH is not then re-run in their absence. It occurs to me that this may explain some of the weirdness in the EPH data from Chengdu.

For a much more in-depth look at the issues with the EPH data from Chengdu, see this report by Camestros Felapton and Heather Rose Jones.

I don’t understand the EPH system well enough to comment further on how that might have affected the Chengdu results, but I continue to be of the belief that the EPH system, despite its obvious benefits, is too complex for awards with a transparent data policy because the data is so difficult to understand.

Moving on now to the future, I want to return to the discussion of how we can modify the Hugo Award process, and the method of governance of WSFS, to try to avoid a repeat of the Chengdu disaster. As part of this I’m going to cite blog posts by the Nerds of a Feather group, and by Abigail Nussbaum. I don’t mean to single them out for criticism. I’m using them as examples mainly because they have produced well-written blog posts that are easy to find, as opposed to commentary on social media which is a format notoriously lacking in nuance.

It is clear that many commentors still believe that a “WSFS Board” or similarly named body of people exists, either because they refer to it (witness this comment by Jonathan Cowie talking about the “WSFS board” on a post wherein I explicitly stated that no such body exists), or because they call for actions that can only be undertaken by such a body.

The Nerds of a Feather post, for example, calls for all of those people who participated in Hugo Administration to be forever banned from working on the Awards again. But how can this be enforced? Each Worldcon is a law unto itself. If it chooses to ignore a command from the WSFS Business meeting (BM), there is no accountability. In addition, Chris Garcia, in his personal addendum to the post, calls for the Mark Protection Committee (MPC) to remove all representatives of the Chengdu Worldcon and its Hugo Administration team from the MPC membership. There is no mechanism for this. Ordinary members of the MPC are appointed by the BM and can only be removed by the BM, or if they resign (which Dave McCarty did, but Ben Yalow did not). The Chengdu Worldcon is entitled to a representative of their choosing by dint of being a Worldcon. That’s baked into the Constitution.

There are also people calling for the Glasgow Worldcon to declare the Chengdu Hugos null and void, and to re-run the vote. Glasgow has no power to do any such thing. Can you imagine the chaos there would be if individual Worldcons had the power to overturn the results of the Hugos from their predecessors? And please don’t tell me that they would only use such powers for good. The last few years of US and UK politics should have taught us what happens when you rely on tradition and convention to ensure that people don’t do anything bad.

The point here is that if we spend our time demanding things that either cannot be done, or cannot be enforced, this will not help the Hugos. Indeed, it will reduce confidence in them, because people will see action being demanded, and that action not happening. It will lead to more people asking why the “WSFS Board” has not done what is asked of them, from people who are unaware that the “WSFS Board” does not exist.

Nussbaum, to her credit, spotted this problem, but the only solution she could suggest was direct action by fandom through things like a boycott of Worldcon. Aside from the fact that this sounds disturbingly like mob rule, the trouble with it as a general solution is that problems often only come to light when it is too late. We can’t punish Chengdu by boycotting Glasgow.

Some people have pointed to the existence of something called Worldcon Intellectual Property (WIP). This is non-profit organization that was set up to be the legal owner of the WSFS service marks because the authorities around the world that deal with registering service marks don’t like dealing with unincorporated organizations. In theory, WIP’s membership is identical to that of the MPC, and it too is subservient to the Business Meeting.

Some people who are keen to see Ben Yalow punished have suggested the WIP could change its bylaws to allow it to expel directors. This may be possible, but consider what this would mean if it is.

Firstly there is no guarantee that Yalow would be kicked off. Remember that the MPC is made up of SMOFs who have known Yalow for years. The vote to censure him was only 8-5, and boards of directors are generally less wiling to hand out punishment if it is more than a slap on the wrist. My guess is that if WIP did decide that it could kick people out, the first person to go would be Kevin, because he keeps insisting that WIP should be subservient to the Business Meeting.

But if WIP does give itself the power to remove directors without reference to the BM, it can presumably give itself the power to appoint them too. And that would mean that membership of the WIP board could no longer be controlled by the WSFS membership. As owners of the WSFS marks, they could presumably also create a body to administer the Hugos separate from Worldcons, and decide whether a convention could call itself Worldcon. These are both things that people on social media have been calling for, but that power would be vested in a group of SMOFs that WSFS members no longer have any influence over (including Ben Yalow and four of his good friends). I submit that this is not actually the outcome that people want.

What I think we need to look at here is a change in the method of governance of WSFS, so that when something goes wrong there is a possibility of action being taken well before the next Business Meeting, and a possibility of those who have done wrong being held to account by the membership in some way. There are, broadly, four options.

1. Dave McCarty has advocated keeping the current system whereby individual Worldcons are a law unto themselves and cannot be held responsible for their actions. That, of course, is what someone who has been a Worldcon chair might be expected to say. I suspect that significant numbers of people in the Worldcon-running community agree with him. It is in their interests not to be able to be held to account.

2. We change the WSFS Business Meeting in some way so as to make it more able to react quickly in cases of crisis, and more able to hold Worldcons to account. This includes suggestions that it be held online at times other than during Worldcon.

3. We allow the current directors of WIP to effectively stage a legal coup and take control of WSFS away from the membership.

4. We switch to a representative system of governance.

The final option requires a bit of explanation. Broadly speaking, a democracy can either be participatory or representative. In a participatory democracy the individual members of the community all have a voice in how decisions are taken. The WSFS Business Meeting is a system of participatory democracy. All WSFS members are, at least in theory, able to attend the BM and to vote on how WSFS should act. It is based in part on ideas about governance explored in Heinlein’s novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which in turn was inspired by the Town Hall Meeting system of government adopted by some of the early American pioneers, which in turn was inspired by the method of government used in Classical Athens.

It should be noted that in Athens only adult male citizens were allowed to vote, and the USA no longer uses participatory democracy at state or federal level. Even when it is used at town level, it is sometimes only used to elect people who will then to the day-to-day running of the town.

In contrast a representative democracy allows for the election of a group of people who handle the day-to-day business of government. Ordinary citizens participate directly only in elections, in referenda if they are allowed, and possibly in recall motions if an individual representative has done something very bad. They may, of course, lobby their representative to behave in particular ways.

Most nation states are (or at least pretend to be) representative democracies, but many other organisations use a similar approach. SFWA, for example, is a representative democracy, because the officers of the Association (who do much of the work of running it) are elected by the members.

Participatory democracies have problems. The first is that, the larger the group becomes, the harder meetings become to manage. Everyone supposedly has a right to be heard, and that’s a lot harder if you have 3000 members than if you have only 30. You end up adopting some sort of formal set of rules for conducting meetings, such as Roberts Rules of Order, which are traditionally used for the BM. And then you run into trouble with people who study the rules so as to be able to use them to their advantage.

Some people (Nussbaum included) have called for WSFS to get rid of Roberts. But you can’t just run a big meeting without rules. Every parliament in the world knows that. There may be an existing set of rules that would be easier for people to understand and learn that we could use instead, as Nussbaum suggests, but the idea that fandom could somehow come up with a new set of meeting rules that are superior to any previously developed is, I’m afraid, ‘Fans are Slans’ nonsense.

This Wikipedia article on the concept of town meetings also has a section on democratic theory. I draw your attention to the claims that large meetings of this type tend to favour those who are self-confident and well-educated, while disadvantaging those who are less able to put their arguments across. That would be a major issue in an international organization where some members are not native English speakers. It is also a major issue for neurodiverse people.

Another problem with participatory democracies is that they are easily undermined by bad actors. Exploiting the rules of parliamentary procedure is only one such trick. Meetings can be held at inconvenient times and in inconvenient places so as to discourage most members from turning up. (This is true of the existing BM.) You can gum up the works by talking on and on, and by introducing endless, pointless procedural motions so that most people get bored and leave. You can insist that important issues must be adopted by consensus, and then refuse to compromise on anything. You can demand that any vote you lost be reconsidered at the next meeting because you claim the original vote was invalid. The objective is to make participation in the meeting so unpleasant than only your own extremist faction will have the patience to stay to the end and win the vote.

In addition, a participatory democracy is vulnerable to what is called the ‘Tyranny of the Majority’. For example, if most of the attendees at the WSFS BM are white Americans, you might expect their decisions to be biased in favour of the interests of white Americans. (The vast majority of the existing directors of WIP are white Americans).

Back in 2022, Kevin proposed a system of elected government for WSFS. You can find it here. It was more of a discussion document than a fully fledged proposal, but in any case it went down like a lead balloon with fandom.

In theory, representative democracies are intended to solve a lot of the issues with participatory democracies. Ordinary members don’t have to spend a lot of time in meetings, and don’t have to learn complex rules of parliamentary procedure. They rely on their representatives to do that. And if the representatives don’t do what they want, they can be voted out, or even recalled. So why don’t we have one for WSFS?

Back in the early days of WSFS, there was a proposal to turn the society into a corporation and elect a board of directors. That idea was voted down, primarily because fans didn’t trust anyone else to run WSFS on their behalf. Now we face a major crisis of confidence in WSFS, and a seeming demand for a strong authority than can hold Worldcons to account. But are we seeing discussion of new methods of governance for the Society? No, what we are seeing is people calling for the Business Meeting to be held online on a regular basis so that everyone can have their say.

People, this is exactly the same attitude that got us into this mess. If you keep insisting that you will not trust anyone else to run WSFS on your behalf, then we will continue to end up with no one running it, and Worldcons free to behave however they want without consequence. Or WIP will manage to extricate itself from control by the BM.

Now you may say that if we have elected representatives then the SMOFs will still end up running WSFS, because they are the only ones who will run for office. That’s probably true. But they would be SMOFs who had been elected by popular vote, and might be subject to recall if they misbehaved, rather than SMOFs elected by the Business Meeting that we then can’t easily hold to account.

So what people should be doing now is discussing what form of representative government they want, and how it should be constituted. Do we want a board of directors (i.e. WIP but somehow under the control of WSFS members), or a large Council of WSFS such as the idea Kevin floated? Do we want representation from outside of the Anglophone world baked in so as to encourage a move towards a more international community? Do we want to require important changes to the Constitution to be subject to popular ratification by a vote of all members? Do we want to be able to recall members of the governing body who misbehave?

There are, I am sure, people out there who know much more about systems of governance than me who could weigh in with suggestions. I don’t claim to have the answers. But I am convinced that, unless we start to think seriously about this, the opportunity to effect change at the Glasgow Business Meeting will pass us by, and we will once again be locked into the cycle of disaster and outrage that has been all too typical of Worldcon and the Hugos for the past few decades. Or worse, the directors of WIP will find a legal way to wrest control of WSFS from the Business Meeting and we will never have a say in how the Society is run again.

What If? – Season #2

058, TV Review

The first social media post I saw about the new season of What If? said that it was much worse than season 1. The second one said it was much better. Needless to say, the truth is somewhat in between.

There are a few one-offs in this season, but also there is an over-arching plot that some people will like and others won’t. There is a strong focus on Peggy Carter, or rather Captain Carter as she is in the What If? Universe. That too will divide viewers. There’s also a thing where Happy Hogan gets Hulk powers, leading to a running gag about “Hulk Hogan”. Seriously? And Stephen Strange is still insane, which I’m sure Benedict Cumberbatch loves, but Strange fans will probably hate.

I found good and bad in the episodes too. Probably the worst was the one in which Tony Stark doesn’t come back to Earth after the Battle of New York, but instead lands on Sakaar where he challenges The Grandmaster to a motor race. This is basically an excuse for a lot of extended Whacky Races sequences (and possibly a bit of Hot Wheels product placement). There’s very little plot.

On the other hand, the story in which Peter Quill is picked up by Ego and ends up attacking Earth in 1988 is wonderful. The star of the show is a very young Hope van Dyne. Captain Carter is charged with putting together a team of heroes to counter the threat, and governments around the world pitch in to help. King T’Chaka comes from Wakanda, for example. If you think that animation can’t compete with live action when it comes to showing emotion, check out the look on Peggy’s face when she sees The Winter Soldier walk off the plane that President Gorbachev has sent.

There is also a very silly episode set in 1602, but Thor is King of England, Wanda is Merlin, and a time travelling Peggy Carter must seek aid from a group of notorious green-clad outlaws.

Possibly the most interesting episode is the one in which the Tesseract falls to Earth in the 16th century and a young Mohawk girl called Kahhori acquires super powers from it. There’s a bit of a cop-out in that North America is being colonized by the Spanish rather than the British, but it is an episode that is guaranteed to trigger the broflakes. Also Kahhori becomes a recurring character. It would be nice to see her get a live action TV series one day.

Overall I enjoyed the season. Marvel clearly like giving their scriptwriters a bit of a holiday in doing this stuff, and if the episodes don’t always come off, well we are repaid for that by those that do.

Masters of the Universe: Revolution

058, TV Review

It is a source of amazement to me that a toy franchise, which is what Masters of the Universe is, manages to give rise to so many inventive re-workings. We’ve had the magnificent She-Ra and the Princesses of Power series, and more recently two competing Masters of the Universe series. There is no canon. All of these series exist entirely in their own part of the multiverse.

Masters of the Universe: Revolution is the latest season of the Kevin Smith helmed incarnation of He-Man and his pals. It is a direct sequel to Masters of the Universe: Revelation. The series is most notable for an absolutely stellar cast, led by Mark Hamill who hams it up magnificently as Skeletor. We’ve also got Lena Headey (Cersei Lannister) as Evil-Lyn. This season also adds William Shatner as He-Man’s evil uncle, Prince Keldor.

He-Man himself is played by Chris Wood, whom you may remember as Mon-El from Supergirl. This season the role of He-Man’s sorceress girlfriend, Teela, is taken by Supergirl herself, Melissa Benoist, who is also Wood’s wife. Presumably they can manage the chemistry. Another replacement for this season is Gates McFadden who takes over the role of He-Man’s mother, Queen Marlena. See what I mean about a stellar cast?

Anyway, to the plot. In Revelation, Evil-Lyn managed to destroy Preternia, the heaven of the MotU universe. At the start of Revolution, He-Man’s father, King Randor, dies. There is no afterlife for him to go to! Teela resolves to use her magic to restore Preternia, but soon finds that she needs far more power than she currently has, forcing her to go on a quest for new sources of magic.

Meanwhile, He-Man, in his role of Prince Adam, is about to take the throne of Eternia when his long lost uncle, Keldor, turns up and claims to be the rightful heir. Relieved that he doesn’t have to become king, and can carry on being He-Man instead, Adam agrees. Little does he know that this is all part of an evil plot by Hordak to conquer Eternia.

I must say that I prefer the She-Ra version of Hordak to this one, who is just another all-powerful baddy that He-Man has to overcome. But there are interesting character arcs in this season, not the least for Skeletor and Evil-Lyn.

There are only 5 episodes to this season. It is easily bingeable, and a lot of fun.

Percy Jackson and the Olympians

058, TV Review

I’d enjoyed the one Rick Riordan book I have read (Magnus Chase and the Hammer of Thor, featuring a gender-fluid child of Loki), so when I saw a Percy Jackson series pop up on Disney+ I was interested. Then some of my Classicist friends started saying good things about it, so it moved up the watch list.

For those of you not familiar with Riordan’s work, he specialises in YA books about teenagers who are the children of various pagan gods. The Percy Jackson series was the first, and features Perseus Jackson, a son of (redacted, spoiler). The TV series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, is based on the first Percy book, The Lightning Thief, in which our hero and his pals have to return a stolen thunderbolt to Zeus in order to avoid a war in Olympus.

Riordan’s success is doubtless a result of the readability of his books, and the likeability of his young protagonists. However, he is also well known for his commitment to diversity and inclusion. He was heavily involved in the production of the TV series, and I’m told that he used the opportunity to change a few things from the original book that, with hindsight and feedback from young readers, he wishes he’d done differently. The contrast between him and that other hugely successful writer of YA fantasy could not be more stark.

What Classicists love about Riordan, however, is that he has a solid understanding of his source material, and presents it in interesting ways. There are many different versions of the Greek myths, written at different times in Graeco-Roman history, by people with very different agendas. We tend to know the versions that Victorian-era Classicists thought we ought to know, and those tend to be heavy on the patriarchy and queer erasure.

The TV series uses a couple of stories which Riordan uses to get his viewers to question what they know of the myths. One is the legend of Medusa, and the other the relationship between Ares and Aphrodite. I suspect that he goes into both in much more detail in the book. The series also features Procrustes, who is little known and quite fun. I’m a little confused by the role of Echidna, but it would be a spoiler to explain why. Maybe I need to read the book.

The young actors who play Percy and his friends do an excellent job. I am also totally convinced that Hephaestus would build a mad theme park. Having Lin Manuel Miranda as Hermes seemed excellent casting, and the guy who plays Ares is apparently a former wrestler, which explains why he was so good at being thuggish. I was much less impressed with the casting of Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, though I did like the use of a Black actor for Zeus because it will trigger the broflakes. Olympian gods can, of course, appear in any form they choose.

Overall I’d recommend this series if you have an interest in Greek myth, and assuming that you are OK with stories about precocious kids. I’m certainly hoping there will be a second series.

Editorial – February 2024

058, Editorial

Thank goodness for the extra day in February. Without it I would most definitely not have got this issue out on time. Of course, when I re-started this magazine, February was one of the months I said I would skip, because I spend so much time on the road. LGBT+ History Month hasn’t gone away, but I was so busy in January that I elected to skip that month instead. Anyway, I have an issue done. Hopefully you will enjoy it.

This year looks like being a bumper year for Wizard’s Tower. We’ve just published paper editions of the original four books in Lyda Morehouse’s AngeLINK series. There’s one more to come. Plus we have a fun new space opera novel from Lyda. I have a new Crater School book from Chaz which is magnificent. And there are things happening in the world that may lead to me taking on a new author or two.

On International Women’s Day I will be off to Swansea for the launch of a new organisation called Women Publishing Wales. The Welsh publishing industry badly needs a shake-up. Hopefully this new organisation will do the trick.

Other than that, March is fairly quiet. I will not be at Eastercon. That’s mainly because in early April I will be off to Malta for an Assyriology conference, and then to Luxembourg for LuxCon.

Issue #57

Issues

This is the December 2023 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


Cover: Suffragette Tree

057, Art, Iain J Clark

Once again it is time to use a piece of art by the very wonderful Iain J Clark on the cover. This is the time of year when trees feature heavily in the seasonal mythology, so I thought this piece would be perfect. As well as being a lovely tree, it also features the Hugo rocket, to remind you that the Glasgow Worldcon is not far away now, which is the primary purpose of running these images.

Iain titled this piece “Suffragette Tree” because of the colours. I’m always happy to see those colours used for good, because these days they have been co-opted by the anti-trans lobby to represent a bizarre misinterpretation of feminism. I’m pretty sure that Iain agrees with me on that point.

As usual, you can find a larger, unadorned version of the art below.


The Glasgow committee noted:

Glasgow 2024 has been incredibly privileged to have been supported by the donated artwork of Iain J Clark. He was a Hugo nominee in the ‘Best Fan Artist’ category for three consecutive years and he won the BFSA award for best artwork in 2020 with ‘Ship Building Over the Clyde’ and in 2021 with the ‘Glasgow Green Woman’ which are available along with his other beautiful work at https://www.etsy.com/shop/iainjclarkart

If you want to know more about the Glasgow Worldcon, their website is: https://glasgow2024.org/.

A Midwinter’s Tail

057, Book Review, Lili Hayward

Ah yes, it is that time of year when the entertainment industry pumps out vast quantities of soppy seasonal material. I’ve never felt any particular desire to watch Hallmark Christmas movies, or any other Christmas movie for that matter (and yes, that does include Die Hard). So what on Earth tempted me to pick up a copy of A Midwinter’s Tail by Lili Hayward?

Well, cats obviously. Also I know the author, and have liked the work she puts out under one of her many other pen names. Plus the blurb mentioned Cornwall.

Reader, the book is not set in Cornwall, it is set somewhere even better.

The Phoenicians, and later the Romans, knew of a large island off the coast of south-west Prydain. The Romans called it Scillonia insula, the Island of Scilly (or possibly Sulis, the same goddess who gave her name to Bath). It was a useful stopping off point on the tin route to Cornwall. This much we know from archaeology and Roman sources.

But the people of that island failed to pay proper respect to the god of the sea. Whether you call him Manannán mac Lir, Manawydan fab Llŷr, Poseidon or Neptune, he is an angry god who is merciless to those who offend him. And so much of the island was drowned. Nowadays it is known as the Islands of Scilly, or Lyonnesse, the drowned land. The ferry service from Penzance to Hugh Town uses a ship with a specially shallow keel to allow it to navigate the drowned lands without bottoming. (And yes, sailors, that does make her roll awfully in the swell off Land’s End.)

Hayward picks up on a Cornish folk tale version of this story, involving a sea goddess called Morgelyn (“Sea Holly” in Cornish) and her cat, Murr.

There’s no actual island in Scilly called Morgelyn. Nor is the wealthy family that owns much of the land there called Penhallow. The family in question is much wealthier than that, because most of Scilly is part of the Duchy of Cornwall. But don’t let these things spoil the story.

There is a holiday cottage on Scilly called Morgelyn. It is up on McFarland’s Down, where I spent a happy couple of weeks for several summers years ago. Also Morgelyn is popular girl’s name amongst the Cornish.

The story is one of a young woman struggling to survive in the highly competitive environment of London office life. One December she receives a letter from her godfather, a Scillonian painter whom she hasn’t heard from since she was eight. The envelope includes a key, and the message in the letter is simple: “take care of her”. A little inquiry reveals that godfather Davy is ill in hospital and may not live; his pet cat, Murr, is alone in his cottage on the beach on Morgelyn. This is odd, because Mina remembers Murr from her childhood holidays on the island, and the cat wasn’t young then.

What follows is classic Christmas movie fare, in which Mina makes a dash to Morgelyn to carry out her dying godfather’s wishes, has trouble with the locals, discovers some dastardly goings on, discovers some truths about her past, and eventually puts everything right. It is a solid goal tear-jerker. Someone absolutely should make a Christmas movie of it.

Note to American women – you should no more marry someone with a cottage on Scilly than you should marry someone who has a castle in Scotland. The weather is awful much of the year. You’d hate it. Though the cottage on Scilly is much more likely to have a roof.

So yes, it was all very predictable, but it was well done with some lovely descriptive passages. Also there is a nicely diverse cast. I’m particularly fond of Paola, the very efficient office manager who is the only nice person at Mina’s place of work.

As and when I win a lottery, I will take Kevin to Scilly in the summer. We’ll get to sit on quiet beaches, eat cream teas and delicious fish, peer into rock pools and peer at seals, and in the evening we’ll sit out in the iron age village on Halangy Down and watch Lleu Llaw Gyffes lay his spear across the sea. Until that time I shall have to rely on books like A Midwinter’s Tail to remind me of that magical place. Thank you, Lili, that was beautiful.

book cover
Title: A Midwinter's Tail
By: Lili Hayward
Publisher: Sphere
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Doctor Who: The Return of Russellon

057, TV Review

Russell T Davies sure knows how to make an entrance. Also he is not afraid to upset people, particularly the pro-bigotry brigade. How he gets away with this on the BBC I do not know, but I’m very glad he does.

Thus far in his new stint at the helm of Doctor Who we have had four episodes. One was an adaptation of a rather thin 2000 AD story enlivened by some amazing trans representation and a brilliant performance by Miriam Margoyles. One was a very creepy science fiction story. One was an excuse for Neil Patrick Harris to camp up an evil genius role to the max while the plot blew vast holes in the tattered remnants of the Who canon. And finally we had a full-on fantasy episode with a song-and-dance number and a new Doctor whose titanic screen presence has already made him a fan favourite.

Follow that, anyone? Fortunately for the world of TV showrunners, no one has to, because Davies will be back with a new series in the spring which promises, among other things, a meeting with the Beatles.

So yeah, that was impressive. I was, for obvious reasons, particularly pleased with the very positive trans representation in the first of the David Tennant specials. I note also that there was a trans woman in the cast of the Christmas special, and a trans man is slated to appear in the new series. Davies isn’t messing about. As a result, the UK’s anti-trans lobby has now become The People Who Hate Doctor Who, which I’m sure is doing their public image a world of good.

Having not paid a lot of attention to the original Tennant run, I didn’t fully follow a lot of the references to the past adventures of the Doctor and Donna, but Davies clearly felt that there was a wrong that he needed to put right. Also no one in their right minds would say no to having David Tennant do another three episodes.

The idea that there is a retired Doctor living in Camden while the new Doctor heads out across the universe doing the adventure thing is a bit batshit, but then the ability of the Doctor to travel through time has always meant that things could get very weird. Season #2 of Loki picked up on that same weirdness to great effect when Loki spent a thousand years becoming an expert in astrophysics while a few seconds passed in the lives of the other characters.

As for Ncuti Gatwa, he’s absolutely delightful. Thus far he’s a sort of Puck version of The Doctor who is determined to have fun as well as adventures. The kids will love it, and that will allow Davies to continue to offend the sensibilities of Daily Malice readers. Sooner or later, Who fandom will find an excuse to be outraged too, but in the meantime let’s all enjoy this splendid renaissance.

The History of the Welsh Dragon

057, History

This past month I have experienced two supposed histories of the dragon in the UK, neither of which made any reference to the one part of the country that actually has a dragon on its flag. One was a History Hit documentary from Jasmine Elmer (whom I met at HistFest earlier this year). The other was an episode of Rhianna Pratchett’s Mythical Creatures, reviewed elsewhere in this issue. This doesn’t surprise me. “British” history, as it is taught in English schools, and portrayed in the English media, tends to ignore Wales entirely unless it is being conquered by the English. Also a lot of the sources are in mediaeval Welsh which is rarely studied outside of Wales. But the story of why there is a dragon on the Welsh flag is interesting, so I’m making a stab at telling it.

Please note that this is very much a first pass. There is a lot of follow-up reading that I would like to do, but that requires a trip to Aberystwyth to visit the National Library of Wales, and I won’t be able to do that for a while.

Our story begins in ancient Romania and Moldova. Between the Carpathian Mountains and the Black Sea lived a people whom the Romans called Dacians. The Romanian car company, Dacia, is named after them. Their precise ethnicity is a subject of some debate as they seem to have been influenced by the Greeks to the south, the Celts to the north and the Scythians to the east, but we do know that they caused the Romans an awful lot of trouble. Domitian and Trajan both fought extensive wars against the Dacians, and though parts of their territory were conquered they continued to be a thorn in the Roman side until the late 3rd Century when Aurelian gave up and abandoned the province.

The Romans were great adopters of ideas. If any people that they incorporated into the Empire did something well, they would take that idea and make it their own. The Dacian military impressed them greatly, and one of the innovations that they adopted was a standard that the Romans called the Draco.

A Dacian draco was a metal image of a wolf’s head (the Dacians particularly revered wolves) behind which trailed a long fabric tube. The standard was carried by cavalry. At speed, the wind would rush through the draco, causing the tail to stream out and making a howling sound as it passed through the head. The Romans thought this looked like a dragon, and adopted it for their cavalry.

However, the Dacians may not have invented the draco standard themselves. They did, after all, live on the western border of Scythian lands. And if anyone was going to invent something neat involving cavalry it was the Scythians. The Greek historian, Arrian (86-160 CE approx.), said that the Romans got the idea of the draco from the Scythians, and we do know that at least some Scythians used it.

In 175 CE Marcus Aurelius scored a notable victory over a people called the Sarmatians. They were culturally Scythian and lived in the region to the north-east of the Black Sea, so bordering on Dacian territory. As part of the peace treaty, the Romans demanded the service of 8,000 Sarmatian cavalry to serve in the Roman army. Rather cruelly, he sent more than half of them to Britain.

Being nomads, the Sarmatians probably brought their families with them, so that was a sizeable influx of steppe horse people into Britain. I’ve seen estimates of as many as 20,000 people. Recent DNA analysis of a grave in Cambridgeshire has proved that at least one of them died here. The Sarmatians were originally based at Deva (Chester) alongside Legio XX Valeria Victrix. Some of them may have been moved back to the continent, but we have evidence of one wing of the unit being based at Bremetenacum (Ribchester in Lancashire) as late as the end of the 4th Century. Famously there is a funerary monument at Chester showing a Sarmatian cavalryman carrying a draco standard.

On a tangent, Herodotus tells us that the Sarmatians were descended from a group of Amazons from Themiscyra (it is a real town in northern Turkey) who got captured by maritime raiders, slew their captors and, not being very good with boats, ended up on the north shore of the Black Sea. There they made a deal with the locals, trading sex for any female babies thus resulting. The men wanted the Amazons to marry them, but the Amazons refused to live in a patriarchal society. They said that and man who wanted to continue a relationship with them must come and live with them in a gender-equal society. And this was the origin of the Sarmatians.

There were probably women warriors in the Sarmatian cavalry unit sent to Britain, because the graves of two of them were found at Brovacum (Brougham Castle in Cumbria). They were buried together with horses and weapons, and may be the first recorded lesbian couple in British history.

The Sarmatians were known to use cataphracts, heavy cavalry where both the horse and rider are covered in scale mail. However, it would have made no sense for Marcus Aurelius to send such troops to Britain. What he wanted was light cavalry who could patrol the northern border region and get to instances of trouble very quickly. Nice as it might have been for Arthuriana, our Sarmatians would have looked nothing like mediaeval knights.

But, when the Romans left, some military units may have stayed behind. Our story now moves to the region between the Hadrianic and Antonine Walls, and a people known to the Romans as the Votadini, and in Welsh as Y Gododdin. They are the subject of a famous Welsh poem (in which they were the losers in a battle with the Angles from Deira (North Yorkshire)) and in the founding myth of the Kingdom of Gwynedd. It is Gwynedd that will occupy the rest of our attention.

Legend has it that a king of the Votadini called Cunedda took his people to North Wales and founded Gwynedd. This would have been in the early 5th Century, long before the famous battle, so clearly some of the Votadini remained behind. The royal house of Gwynedd traces its descent from Cunedda.

The first King of Gwynedd we need to consider is Cadwallon I, known as Cadwallon Lawhir (Longhand) because of his very long arms. He is credited with driving the Irish out of Anglesey, allowing the island to become a stronghold for Gwynnedd from then on. I mention him for two reasons, one of which is that he is probably the Cradelmant of Norgales (North Wales) featured in the Arthur story.

The other reason is because there’s a story that I’m still trying to track claiming that, in the battle with the Irish, the Welsh tied their legs to their horses. This sounds suspiciously like someone who had never seen stirrups trying to describe them. And that’s notable because the Sarmatians are one of the two peoples vying for the credit for inventing stirrups (the other is the Chinese). There’s no evidence that the Romans used stirrups until Byzantine times, but they may have known about them.

I go on about the Sarmatians and Welsh cavalry because it is necessary to establish that Welsh cavalry existed. The Saxons, bless them, did not think much of fighting on horseback. Famously, Harold Godwinson’s crack troops rode down from Stamford Bridge to Hastings and then dismounted to fight in a shield wall. The Norman cavalry taught them a lesson about warfare. And because of this, English historians tend to assume that the Welsh knew nothing of cavalry until they saw the Normans.

However, the Romans, from Julius Caesar onwards, noted the fondness of the native Britons for chariots. We have plenty of archaeological evidence for the use of horses by people such as the Brigantes and Silures. In addition to the Sarmatians at Chester, there was a unit of Hispanic cavalry stationed at Brecon. Cadwallon Lawhir is said to have used cavalry against the Irish. There’s even a section of one of Taliesin’s poems in which the army of Urien of Rheged mocks their Pictish enemies for the smallness of their mounts, so the Welsh clearly took pains to breed quality cavalry horses. And if they inherited ideas about cavalry from the Romans, they would have known about the draco standard.

The first mention of dragons in association with Wales comes from Gildas, who was very much as grumpy as Lucy Holland portrays him in Sistersong. He made great show of excoriating various Welsh kings for their lack of bravery and moral fibre. He reserves his greatest ire for Maelgwyn of Gwynedd, who he calls the “Dragon of the Isle”. (The island in question being presumably Anglesey.)

I note in passing that the Welsh for chief dragon would be Pendraig. If Welsh cavalry were called dragons because of their standards, a Pendragon would be a leader of cavalry.

The first King of Gwynedd known to have used a dragon on his standard is Cadwalladr the Blessed, called thus because he was very pious and founded many churches. He’s not exactly the sort of figure to be associated with dragons but, as we shall see, history has made him thus. The true dragon from whom the legend descends is likely to be his father, Cadwallon ap Cadfan.

We are now very much in real history. Cadfan’s gravestone can still be seen at a church in Llangadwaladr on Anglesey. He didn’t have a great time as King of Gwynedd. During his reign, the Welsh (mainly Powys rather than Gwynedd) suffered a great defeat at the Battle of Chester at the hands of the Angles under the Northumbrian King, Æthelfrith. Perhaps because of this, Cadfan chose to foster a pretender to the Northumbrian throne, Edwin of Deira. From that, much disaster ensued.

Sharp-eyed readers will note that we are now firmly in Hild territory. Edwin is Hild’s great uncle, and a major character in Nicola Griffith’s Hild. He did, with the help of the Saxon king, Rædwald (he of Sutton Hoo), eventually overthrow Æthelfrith, and one of the first things he did on becoming king was attack Gwynedd.

So what’s up here? By this time Cadwallon was King of Gwynedd. He and Edwin would have grown up together at Cadfan’s court, and we can only assume that the two princes came to hate each other. Certainly they spent the rest of their lives in open warfare. Edwin had the initial advantage. Cadwallon was driven from Anglesey. He took refuge for a while on Ynys Seiriol (Puffin Island) at the north-eastern end of the Menai Strait, and eventually ended up in exile in Ireland.

Time passed, and Cadwallon was able to return to Britain. He found an ally in the form of Penda, King of Mercia. As we learn from Menewood, that led to the Battle of Hatfield Chase near Doncaster where Edwin was killed. Cadwallon then went on a lengthy rampage through Northumbria, looting and killing as he went. He finally met his end at the Battle of Heavenfield up near Hadrian’s wall where he was defeated by an army led by Æthelfrith’s son, Oswald (or, if you prefer, by Hild of Elmet).

Cadwallon is the main villain of Menewood, and to anyone from Northumberland, from the Venerable Bede to Griffith, that’s entirely unsurprising. However, Welsh sources, including Geoffrey of Monmouth, describe him as a great national hero. Geoffrey even has him surviving Heavenfield and living to the ripe old age of 84. A more neutral account can be found in Max Adams’ excellent book, The King in the North.

My point here is twofold. Firstly, the way that Cadwallon’s army operates suggests that it contained a significant amount of cavalry. And secondly, the way that he lays waste to Northumberland is very dragon-like.

Mention of Geoffrey of Monmouth brings us to the famous prophecy of Merlin concerning the red and white dragons that are fighting for the future of Britain. The story also appears in the tale of Lludd & Llefelys from the Mabinogion, but Geoffrey’s work is older than any surviving Welsh-language source. This story took on particular significance during the Wars of the Roses, in which one side had a red badge and the other white. Interestingly, Edward IV claimed descent from Cadwaladr, but the Tudors had a far more believable claim. The Tudor ancestral home was the village of Penmynydd (Mountain Top) on Anglesey. Henry Tudor used a red dragon on his coat of arms to denote his descent from Cadwalladr.

Annoyingly, Henry VIII, having grown up in London, seemed to have no particular interest in his Welsh roots, and Welsh influence over the Tudor court quickly waned. The red dragon did not officially become a symbol of Wales until the creation of the United Kingdom as we now know it in 1807. The Welsh flag was created in 1959. But the dragon on it can be traced back to Cadwalladr, and from him to the Romans and Sarmatians.

So yeah, the Welsh dragon was gifted to us by a people from the Asian steppes who claim descent from the Amazons.

Bookshops and Bonedust

057, Book Review, Travis Baldree

Based on reading Legends & Lattes, I was pretty sure that I knew what to expect from the next Travis Baldree book. It would be a quick read, unchallenging, heartwarming, and likely to make you hungry. Reader, I was not surprised in any way.

Bookshops & Bonedust tells of Viv the orc’s early days in the mercenary business when she is young and headstrong, and dangerously confident of her own ability. This leads to her having to spend several weeks recuperating from a leg wound while the rest of her team continue their pursuit of the necromancer, Varine the Pale.

Viv is left to kick her heels in a small and run-down seaside town with the unprepossessing name of Murk. Oddly enough, she does not end up being menaced by frog-faced denizens of the deep. There are bad guys, eventually, but much more importantly there is a run-down bookshop in need of rescue, and great deal of delicious bakery.

Said bookshop is run by a ratkin lady called Fern who is deep in the throes of depression paralysis. She knows that her business is failing, and is long past having the tenacity to do anything about it. The relentlessly optimistic Viv is just what she needs to pull herself out of her funk.

From then on the story is all about the love of books, and selling them, plus a little love for a cute dwarf lady with a huge talent for bakery. It is all very lovely and very predictable.

Then again, lovely and predictable is sometimes what people need, especially these days when each day’s news seems to double down on the world’s descent into climate disaster and Fascism. Baldree has found his niche, and fills it very well. Maybe from there he will eventually branch out a little.

book cover
Title: Bookshops & Bonedust
By: Travis Baldree
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Normal Women

057, Book Review, Feminism, History, Philippa Gregory

For whose who don’t know, Phillipa Gregory is one of the most successful writers of historical fiction in the UK. She specializes mainly in mediaeval and Tudor times, but her novel about the slave trade, A Respectable Trade, is memorialized on a plaque in Bristol Docks and was, for a long time, the city’s only public memorial to that shameful part of its history. I think Marvin Rees has done something about that now, but I am a bit out of date.

Anyway, Gregory’s historical fiction is very good, and writing good historical fiction requires good research. Normal Women is her first non-fiction book. Given that it got featured on Prof. Suzannah Lipscombe’s Not Just the Tudors podcast, it comes well recommended by a top flight historian. And that’s good, because what Gregory attempts is something that most historians would blanche at.

Normal Women sets out to tell the history of women in Britain over the course of 900 years, so roughly from the Norman Conquest until now. Even for a 650 page book, that’s massively ambitious. It means that it is impossible to cover any individual story in anything like the sort of detail that a normal history book would.

What Gregory does instead is pick a bunch of themes that are important to women’s lives, and follow those through a succession of historical periods. The amount of space spent on each period tends to increase as we get closer to the present day because of the much greater amount of historical evidence available. Some of the themes covered include women’s roles in politics, religion and war. She looks at marriage and sex work; at women’s roles in the slave trade, and the fight for women’s rights. Along the way there is a magnificent amount of feminist snark.

One of my favourite themes in the book is the question of the nature of women. Most people don’t realise how radically this has changed over the centuries. In mediaeval times women were believed to be sexually insatiable, but by the end of the Victorian era we’d become timid creatures who had to be coaxed into having sex. Mediaeval people also followed the ancient Greeks in believing that women were imperfectly-formed men, and that therefore they might naturally transform into men given the right stimulus (such as overly enthusiastic physical exercise). I was particularly struck by a quotation from the apocryphal Gospel of St. Thomas in which Jesus says of his mother, Mary:

I, myself, shall lead her, in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.

Pleasingly, Gregory also spends a lot of time looking at sex and sexuality. Despite that fact that, for most of her period, men believed that sex between women was impossible because no penis was involved, Gregory has unearthed a wealth of examples of women at least being very fond of each other and providing loving companionship.

My favourite parts of the book are the various snarky comments. Here are a few examples:

The idea of ‘women’s work’ was invented to identify work so disagreeable or badly paid that men did not want it.

John Locke – one of the great thinkers of the Enlightenment – advised women that lifting heavy objects ‘belongs not to their sex’ and ‘endangered their health’, blind to the world around him filled with labouring women working alongside men.

Gregory also pokes fun at the Bayeaux Tapestry, which famously contains 93 depictions of penises and only 5 of women. To be fair, however, most of the penises belong to horses, not to humans. It is possible that the women who would have sewn the thing were just having fun putting dick pics into their work to annoy Bishop Odo.

And there is this magnificent denunciation of the Church of England’s 1966 report into the question of the ordination of women:

It’s an extraordinarily complete summary of the reasons men have given over nine centuries of English history (and longer) to keep women from authority, from wealth and from interesting work. It was the last stand of patriarchy on the last hill. Women were not the spiritual equals of men in the eyes of God nor in the view of his church. They could not be priests. They never had been priests – it was not natural. It would ruin the priest business if women were to do it. Women and men are the opposite of each other and cannot do the same work. Women could not be both priest and mother and wife – it would ruin the home, and not even women want this. And finally, women do their own feminine work so beautifully that this work should be improved and extended, and they should do nothing else.

Much of this, of course, is claimed to be fundamental feminist belief by the anti-trans lobby.

Which brings us back to the trans issue. Firstly we should note that the idea of their being only two sexes is by no means universal. Gregory cites the Elizabethan legal expert, Sir Edward Coke, as claiming that humans came in three sexes: male, female and hermaphrodite.

The idea of assigning sex at birth falls victim to the Gregory snark:

Doctors made snap decisions based on the appearance of infant genitals, almost always naming a baby with a small penis as a girl, since it was thought better to be a girl with what looked like a large clitoris than to be a boy with what looked like a small penis. On this simple male vanity, many lives were wrecked.

Gregory’s narrative is very inclusive when it comes to trans women. I was delighted to see the likes of Eleanor Rykener, Charlotte de Beaumont, Roberta Cowell and April Ashley being accepted unquestioningly as women. Even better, there is an apparent example of a trans couple. A legal case from June 1602 reports that a couple named Rose Davies and John Littlewood were arrested for both dressing as the opposite sex.

Sadly, attitudes to trans men in the book are much less inclusive. Gregory seems to have been taken in by the anti-trans narrative that trans men are ‘really’ women who think that becoming men is the only possible route to female emancipation. Including trans men as women broadens her definition of women yet further, but those she co-opts into femininity might not be very happy about it.

What worried me most about the book, however, was the errors. There’s not a lot of history that I can claim to be an expert on, but trans history is my thing. Gregory’s coverage of trans people contains a number of basic errors. Michael Dillon did not become the heir to a baronetcy on officially changing his gender: he had an older brother. Roberta Cowell was not the first person to undergo male-to-female genital surgery: Lili Elbe and others did so much earlier. And the section on de Beaumont is taken mainly from the mythology that grew up around her rather than historical fact.

This, I’m afraid, is a consequence of trying to cover far too much in one book. And if things that I know about are wrong, how many errors are there that I’m not qualified enough to spot?

Sad. But the snark is still great. And the general theme that views on the nature of women and the role of women in society have changed radically – and not always for the better – over the past nine centuries is very much valid.

book cover
Title: Normal Women
By: Philippa Gregory
Publisher: William Collins
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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Mythical Creatures

057, Audio Review, Rhianna Pratchett

As far as I’m aware, most of Rhianna Pratchett’s career so far has been in video games, which I dont play because I’m completely useless at them. In her position, I’d probably run as far away from the parental profession as possible. These days, however, she seems open about claiming the label of Fantasy Writer, and part of that has been to helm a series for BBC Radio 4 called Mythical Creatures.

This is a 10-episode set of programmes of around 15 minutes in length. They were broadcast on air over the past few weeks, but were also available on the BBC Sounds podcast feed. The basic format is that each episode focuses on a particular type of creature, and Pratchett investigates the stories around it.

Sadly there was much about the format that did not work for me. To start with, each episode contains some dramatisation of a story featuring the creature of the week. I’m really not good with audio dramas. That’s probably me, because other people seem to like them, but I do wish people would not feel the need to inject dramatic episodes into factual programmes.

In addition, most episodes contain some element of psychoanalysis. That is, having presented the creature of the week, Pratchett and her guest experts go on to pontificate on the ‘real’ meaning of the stories, and why people in past times felt the need to invent such silly tales. This strikes me as a very BBC thing to be doing. Traditionally the Corporation has hated fantasy, and would only allow it in material for children, or if some supposedly rational explanation could be found for the stories. I have my suspicions that the inclusion of such material was necessary in order to get the Beeb to buy the series. There does seem to be a movement away from it as the series goes on.

There are several episodes that I enjoyed despite my reservations. The dragon one, despite not mentioning Wales at all, is quite amusing because it details the efforts of the Lambton family to cash in on their ancestor’s famous adventure with the Lambton Wyrm. The episode that does centre on Wales is the one about giants. That’s because it features Idris the Thoughtful Giant, who is a lovely chap and not at all the horrible monster of Susan Cooper’s The Grey King. He just wants to sit there on his mountain and contemplate the mysteries of the universe.

I was particularly taken by the episode on selkies. Selkie stories are often tales of gender-based violence, in that a human male forces a selkie woman to become his wife by stealing and hiding her seal skin. While such stories may have had social functions in fishing communities of the past, they are now being re-purposed by people who specialise in supporting the victims of gender-based violence, which shows that fantasy tales have modern relevance, and can be re-imagined for different purposes.

The selkie episode is number 8 in the sequence. Pratchett returns to the theme of re-writing for the final episode which is all about the wulver.

The what? No, I hadn’t heard of it either. The wulver is Shetland’s Friendly Neighbourhood Wolfman. He specialises in helping people in trouble, usually by leaving them a nice fish so that they have something to eat. That’s not traditional behaviour by folkloric monsters, and it is perhaps no surprise to learn the at the wulver is not an ancient myth, but a 20th century invention.

The folklorist responsible for the invention of the wulver, Jessie Saxby, is often portrayed as a villain who invented what is termed ‘fakelore’. But, as Pratchett points out in the show, folklore is not a static thing that belongs to the past. Nor does a mythic creature have a single, fixed meaning. Stories evolve constantly. New creatures get invented. That’s how this all works. Maybe the wulver is just the sort of mythical creature that the world needs right now. (Along with the Hob, of course. Everyone who has to do housework wants one of them.)

Thus the series ends with a defence of the story-teller’s art. I don’t know whether the BBC executives who commissioned it will have been happy about that, but I know that I am.

The Celts on Amazon Prime

057, History, TV Review

It used to be the case that there was never anything worth watching on TV over the holidays. That’s no longer true, because now we have a ton of streaming services all groaning under the weight of content more varied and potentially interesting than any Christmas dinner table. Even someone of my relatively limited tastes in TV can be guaranteed to find something worth checking out.

Scrolling through documentaries on Amazon Prime, I found a short series of history programmes titled, The Celts. My initial reaction was to expect nonsense, and that was dialed up to the max when the first episode opened with a view of Stonehenge. But then the commentary started talking about mythbusting, and things got better for a while.

It turns out that the series was made in 2000, so long before it was decided that every history documentary on mainstream TV should look and sound like it was made by The Hitler Channel. Also it was made by S4C, so actual Celtic people were involved in the show, not just English or Americans.

The first two episodes focused on what we mean by “Celts”, the origins of Celtic culture, and the wars of the Celtic-speaking peoples against the Romans. The third looked at Celtic religious beliefs. All three were better than I expected. They included interviews with the likes of Barry Cunliffe, Colin Renfrew and Miranda Aldhouse-Green, all of whom mostly said variations on “we don’t know”. There was also quite a bit of focus on sites in central Europe that we don’t normally hear much about on these islands. Despite being 20+ years old, most of the material seemed fairly up to date.

Sadly that didn’t continue. Probably the weakest episode was the one that focused on the early mediaeval period. It was badly out of date with respect to Viking culture, and contained some obvious errors. What we now know as Whitby Abbey is not the ruins of the place where Hild held her famous synod. That abbey was sacked by the Danes in the mid-9th century and the site remained abandoned for 200 years until the present, and very obviously Norman, abbey was built. Also Alfred the Great was not a contemporary of Hywel Dda.

Episode 5 looked at the fate of the Celtic nations during the early modern period when nation states were on the rise, and episode 6 looked at the at where things are now, or at least were at the turn of the millennium. These seemed OK, but are probably best viewed in conjunction with David Olusoga’s recent series, Union.

As far as TV history goes, I thought this was pretty good, especially the first three episodes. It was certainly good to see Celtic history being covered by actual Celtic people. I was pleased at the inclusion of Brittany, which you would probably not get from an English- or American-made show. There could have been more about Kernow, but hey, can’t have it all. If you fancy checking the show out, I advise doing so before Jan. 29th when Amazon is going to start interrupting all of their content with advertisements after the manner of YouTube.

Editorial – December 2023

057, Editorial, Uncategorized

This is a very unusual issue. That’s not because I have been slacking over the holidays; quite the opposite.

Firstly I have been very busy with the day job. The downside of being self-employed is that you have to take work when it comes. A contract that I have for a minimum of 40 hours a month has produced over 100 hours in December. The money will be useful.

In addition, the nature of the Crawford Award has changed. There is now an official jury, rather than just a group of people giving Gary Wolfe suggestions. This means that there are a bunch of books that I have to read, and am not allowed to review. Add in Wizard’s Tower work as well, and in December I have read 3.5 novels that I can’t review here.

So I’m very grateful to Paul Driggere for providing me with some additional SF&F content. Scavengers Reign sounds like a great series. I hope to get to watch it some day.

There’s also a lot of history content in this issue. It is something I was able to write about when I was in need of content. I know it is not usual SF&F fare, but I hope you will find it interesting.

And so to 2024. It is traditional at these times to look back over the past year. All in all, 2023 has been a bit shit. I got COVID. I crashed my car (albeit probably saving my own life and that of an idiot other driver in the process). Things could have been better. But I really enjoyed my trip to Uppsala for the Eurocon, and Juliet McKenna has continued to produce amazing books for me. Mustn’t grumble. Also I have my own house, which kind of eclipses everything else.

In terms of publication, I have essays in two volumes published in 2023. They are Follow Me: Religion in Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Imagining the Celtic Past in Modern Fantasy. The latter is now available as an affordable paperback so you can go and grab a copy. Should those books be up for awards (and I hope they will be), any glory will go to the editors, not me.

Talking of awards, next year’s Worldcon will be in Glasgow and there will be more UK voters in the Hugo voting pool than usual. I note that Juliet McKenna’s Green Man series is very much eligible in Best Series, and I encourage you all to consider it.

Looking forward to 2024, there is a new online non-fiction magazine called Speculative Insight due to debut. It is edited by Alex Pierce who is best known for the Galactic Suburbia podcast but also edited Letters to Tiptree and Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler. She now reviews for Locus. Alex kindly asked me to submit something, so I gave her the text version of the lecture about fantasy that I did for Bristol Central Library. That will be available to read on January 6th.

As to the rest of the year, well, I hope to get to Luxcon, Finncon and Worldcon. I also hope to get a new car, but that is dependent on the UK government not finding a creative new excuse to deny me a pension. I don’t think it will be long before government pensions are means-tested and only those people who can afford a creative tax accountant will get one.

There will also be major elections in the UK and USA in the coming year. The US one may turn out OK, but if it doesn’t the results will be disastrous. The UK, thankfully, can do less damage to the planet. But, regardless of which of the two major parties wins, trans people are going to get screwed. It would not surprise me to see parties competing on promises to be “tough on trans” as part of the election campaign, because the media will ask them about it incessantly. And then, whoever wins, we will end up with a government whose policies are well to the right of Margaret Thatcher. In all of my 60+ years (which includes living through the Cold War), I have never felt less optimistic about the future.

Issue #56

Issues

This is the November 2023 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: Soldier: This issue's cover looks suspiciously like a picture of Murderbot.

  • The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport: Just in time for Panto season, Samit Basu produces a science fiction version of Aladdin (oh no he doesn't - discuss)

  • System Collapse: Martha Wells returns with a new Murderbot novel. What is everyone's favourite killing machine up to now?

  • A Fire Born of Exile: Aliette de Bodard's latest Xuya universe novel is inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo

  • My Brother’s Keeper: Tim Powers reveals the secret lives of the Brontë family. Yorkshire Moors, werewolves, what could possibly go wrong?

  • Fantasy at the British Library: There is a big, new exhibition. Cheryl happened to be in London and went to see it.

  • The Marvels: Captain Marvel is back, and this time she has help. Well, one pissed off adopted niece, and one obsessive fangirl (plus her very protective family).

  • Spirit: A re-print of Cheryl's review of another science fiction novel inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo. This one is by Gwyneth Jones.

  • This is Not a Grail Romance: Natalia Petrovskaia digs deep into Welsh Arthuriana. Cheryl is fascinated.

  • Silver on the Tree: Cheryl finishes her read through of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence

  • Masques of the Disappeared: Judith Clute has an art book out

  • Loki – Season #2: The God of Mischief is back. Will he finally get a redemption arc, and will anyone believe him if he does?

  • Lower Decks – Season #4: The Lower Decks crew are back in action, so no one in Starfleet is safe.

  • Editorial – November 2023: Cheryl is battening down the hatches for winter

The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport

056, Book Review, Samit Basu

The new novel from Samit Basu is billed as a science fiction version of Aladdin, which it is, but it is also so much more.

Shantiport (shanty port) is a far future city on a dying Earth that is somehow part of a galactic civilization. There are aliens, there is space travel, but for most of the citizens of Shantiport such things are a distant dream. So much, so Blade Runner.

The city is ruled over by the Tiger Clan, a mixture of royal family and corporation whose interests are much wider than one failing spaceport. Technically the ruler of the city is the Jomidar, Kumir Saptam, but he is beholden to his masters in Tiger Central. Also he has to reckon with other powers such as the oligarch, Shakun Antim, and the crime lord, Paneera.

There are those in the city who dream of revolution, of a return to a more democratic society. Some years ago, a group of such revolutionaries got hold of some alien tech, which they hoped would help them overthrow the Tigers. But they were betrayed, and their leaders made to disappear. These days few remember, but those revolutionaries had family. And they had alien tech.

Zohra was once a brilliant bot scientist. Now she is a frightened, ageing mother, trying to keep her two children safe from the Tigers, while never letting the flame of revolution die. Those children are Lina, now a beautiful young woman, and Bador, who is a monkey-bot.

Lina is a classic cyberpunk heroine. This is how Basu has another character describe her:

You’re augmented, capable of incredible physical feats. That body is a masterpiece. You owe your uncanny beauty to gene-editors, your self-healing body to bioengineers, I wouldn’t be surprised if your parents had pheromone work done to make you extra-sexy.

Bador is something very different. In appearance he is a cyborg langur, but he has enough human DNA to make him legally Lina’s brother. He has enough war-bot components to make him an impressive fighter. But he’s a bot. Zohra daren’t trust him with family secrets, because if he is ever captured he won’t be able to avoid giving them up. Also she programmed him to love his family. And he does love them, but he hates knowing that he had no choice in the matter.

So where does Aladdin come into all this? Remember that alien tech? Somewhere in the city, treasure has been concealed. If Lina and Bador can find it, anything is possible. Instead they find Moku.

Who is Moku? He is our viewpoint character. He is a bot. An alien bot, yes, but one who has been programmed to collect and tell stories. Lina and Bador seem interesting people, so he is willing to hang around with them and help out. Having a lot of ethics programming, he’s somewhat dubious about their activities, but most of the humans in Shantiport seem morally grey to him.

This being a Samit Basu novel, The Jinn-bot of Shantiport is full of his wry sense of humour. Here he is explaining why Earth is safe from aliens:

Your planet’s admin has been on leave for the last two of your centuries, and all requests pending to destroy or invade your planet would have been on hold in any case. But none have even been made.

He has a splendid description of Paneer’s lair:

As a crimelord den, it doesn’t disappoint. It looks like someone took a gigantic submarine, scooped out all the equipment, stuck it far underground, and then built a replica of an ancient cathedral in it. We walk through a central line of marble pillars, behind which lie dark alcoves suitable for dragging people into. A quick scan reveals closed circular doors lining the walls, no doubt leading to many exciting deaths, possibly involving hungry fish.

Basu also has a fine line in putting down oligarchs. Here is Zohra on Shakun Antim:

“Shakun is no genius,” Zohra says. “He just spends a lot of money convincing people he is one. He might be too powerful for any system or legal process to punish, but what oligarch isn’t? His ideas are stolen, his moves are remakes. He just invests heavily in large teams that study his opponents, prepare him for every situation, and then he presents their work in the most dramatic way possible. He isn’t even that charismatic! He just acquires that reputation though influence.”

To be fair, he sounds a lot smarter than Elon Musk.

Anyway, there is, eventually, a jinn, with a lamp and three wishes. In addition we get a magic ring, and a roc-bot. Bador has plenty of opportunities to show off his martial arts moves in fights with giant bots that have clearly been designed by anime fans. Lina gets to meet a handsome prince (who, rather delightfully, has a character reminiscent of a Bond girl), and Bador gets to meet an actual alien space hero.

As Basu admits in the Acknowledgements, the connection to the actual plot of Aladdin gets somewhat lost along the way, but that doesn’t matter. By the end of the book you’ll end up loving Lina, Bador and Moku; you’ll be thinking about the practicalities of revolutions and about bot rights; and you’ll be wondering if parents try to program their biological children as ruthlessly as they might program a bot.

book cover
Title: The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport
By: Samit Basu
Publisher: Tor.com
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System Collapse

056, Book Review, Martha Wells

A new Murderbot book is always a delight and, even though this one was a novel, I tore through it in a day. It is, as you would expect, highly entertaining. But by now a Murderbot book has to advance the story, which is what I will be focusing on here.

One thing you should be aware of is that this book is a direct sequel to Network Effect. So Murderbot, its human friends, plus ART and his crew, are still at the distant planet whose colonists they are trying to rescue. The agents of the Barish-Estranza corporation are still hanging around causing trouble, and hoping to drag the unfortunate colonists off into indentured servitude. And of course there is now a serious risk of further interactions of the sort that happened in Network Effect. Because this planet is also home to an alien virus that can infect the minds of both bots and humans, and resulted in Murderbot having to fight what it euphemistically calls Targets, and we readers doubtless refer to as Zombies.

A consequence of this being a sequel is that everything starts very much in media res. It you are picking this book up blind you are likely to be very confused as to where Murderbot is, what has happened to it recently, and so on. You may not know that Perihelion is ART’s real name. Network Effect and System Collapse are very much two halves of a single story, and need to be read as such.

A major theme of this book is that Murderbot is suffering from considerable trauma thanks to the events of the previous book. Having to kill some humans, even if they were undead, was a deeply unpleasant experience. And Murderbot has probably seen enough horror movies to know what zombies are like. It does contain some human neural tissue, and it probably doesn’t want that eaten.

There are also problems with the colonists who, being humans, are behaving in illogical and unreasonable ways. In their defence, they have recently survived a zombie infestation, but with Barish-Estranza hanging around they need to be thinking more clearly.

What emerges from this is a story of Murderbot working under considerable stress, and discovering that having emotions is not good for your efficiency. Not having a governor module is fine when things are going well. But when you are barely recovered from serious injuries, missing a lot of your usual equipment, suffering from mental trauma, and have some of your humans in deadly danger, emotions tend to take over.

It is a good job that Murderbot has watched so much human media. At least it knows what emotions are, and can recognize them when it has them.

Rather delightfully, Murderbot’s knowledge of media also comes to the rescue in a most unexpected way in this book.

System Collapse also introduces a human called Tarik who is a former corporate mercenary. Like Murderbot, he sickened of his job and quit. The contrast between a human trained killer and a cyborg trained killer is something that I hope Martha Wells will explore in future books in the series. I suspect we will find that there isn’t much difference.

Anyway, Murderbot continues to be a delight. You knew that would be the case. You don’t need me to recommend this book.

book cover
Title: System Collapse
By: Martha Wells
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

A Fire Born of Exile

056, Aliette de Bodard, Book Review

The latest Xuya universe novel from Aliette de Bodard is billed as inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo. It is less of a re-telling than Gwyneth Jones’s excellent Spirit (my review of which is re-printed in this issue), but the story definitely benefits from the inspiration.

The action is set in a remote part of Xuya civilization, the Scattered Pearls Belt, far from the Imperial Court. The Belt is ruled over by the Prefect, Tinh Đức, who has a reputation for ruthlessness. She is ably supported by General Tuyết. (Aliette, I hope I have got the accented characters right; my apologies if not.) Some years ago, a major rebellion broke out in the Empire, centered on the Belt. These two formidable women have made it their business to make sure such a thing never happens again, no matter how many innocents have to suffer in the process.

The book, however, is not primarily about these women. It is about the Prefect’s daughter, Minh, and her best friend, Heart’s Sorrow, a mindship who is the General’s son. Into their lives comes Sủỏng Quỳnh, known as The Alchemist of Streams and Hills, a beautiful and wealthy socialite who, perhaps bored with court life, has decided to spend some time in the Belt. Of course, as you might guess, the Alchemist has a secret history, and is bent on revenge against those who have wronged her in the past. She’s not above manipulating a couple of rich and naïve teenagers in order to get at her targets.

However, the best laid plans for revenge often founder. In this case, the primary cause of Quỳnh’s problems turns out to be Thiên Hoà, a pretty young engineer. Hoà and her sister have been employed by a group of rich kids to repair an ancient mindship, and from that simple fact much will unravel.

Mention of mindships reminds me that de Bodard’s ships are significantly different from those of other space opera writers such as Banks and Powell. As noted above, Heart’s Sorrow is a child of General Tuyết. Other mindships in the book are also family members. Mindships are born, raised and educated by humans. That’s something I hope to see de Bodard explore more in future books.

Regular readers will know that I’m not a big fan of romance as a genre, and one of the main reasons for that is the formulaic nature of the plots. In particular the need for the two main characters to have a falling out part way through the novel, and then a reconciliation at the end, leads to all sorts of convoluted and atypical behaviour. You may recall that this caused my one reservation about de Bodard’s previous book, The Red Scholar’s Wake.

I am happy to report that A Fire Born of Exile has a much more complicated plot, full of opportunities for misunderstanding and betrayal. Because of this, the falling out between Quỳnh and Hoà is entirely believable, and indeed predictable.

One of the interesting things about reading the Xuya books is the insight that they give into Vietnamese culture. The whole auntie thing is a bit of a mystery to me. So is the use of ‘big sis’, ‘little sis’ and so on, which I think is related to the profusion of pronouns that you get in Vietnamese. In this book I found something else interesting:

… she seemed to only think of being wanted in terms of usefulness. Such an odd, sad way of looking at the world.

Oh, Aliette, let me tell you about the Protestant Work Ethic. But I suspect you know, and said that deliberately.

I have something else to thank de Bodard for, but that needs to be private. In the meantime, this is a good book. But you knew that, right?

book cover
Title: A Fire Born of Exile
By: Aliette de Bodard
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
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Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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My Brother’s Keeper

056, Book Review, Tim Powers

Hallowe’en has come and gone for another year, and what better way to mark the season than with a novel about terrifying supernatural goings-on on the Yorkshire Moors, staring none other than Emily Brontë?

By now most of you are doubtless familiar with the fantasy worlds that the Brontë children created when they were young. They are a major feature in the Fantasy exhibition at the British Library (thereby claiming some of Britain’s most famous and beloved writers for the fantasy genre). Possibly less is known about the Brontës themselves. Wikipedia has this to say about Emily: “Emily Brontë’s solitary and reclusive nature has made her a mysterious figure and a challenge for biographers to assess.”

Most of what we know about Emily comes from her sister, Charlotte. But modern biographers fear that the eldest Brontë sugar-coated the truth somewhat. One, “argues that Emily evidently shocked her [Charlotte], to the point where she may even have doubted her sister’s sanity.” And yet a schoolmaster remarked of Emily:

She should have been a man – a great navigator. Her powerful reason would have deduced new spheres of discovery from the knowledge of the old; and her strong imperious will would never have been daunted by opposition or difficulty, never have given way but with life. She had a head for logic, and a capability of argument unusual in a man and rarer indeed in a woman… impairing this gift was her stubborn tenacity of will which rendered her obtuse to all reasoning where her own wishes, or her own sense of right, was concerned.

And of course Emily produced Wuthering Heights, which is clearly the most bonkers part of the family output. One Victorian critic described as, “unchecked primal passions, replete with savage cruelty and outright barbarism.”

Clearly Emily deserves to have a book written about her, and who better to do it than Tim Powers?

Powers, of course, is already well-known for his interest in 19th Century British writers, most notably the reclusive poet, William Ashbless. He also produced The Stress of Her Regard, which is a great book about Byron, the Shelleys, Keats, and vampires. In My Brother’s Keeper he turns his attention to the Brontës with the not-entirely-unbelievable presumption that the family had a history of being menaced by werewolves. I mean, what else would they be doing on the Yorkshire Moors?

The brother of the title is Branwell, the artist sibling of the famous sisters. He is portrayed as a rather incompetent young man, tormented by the fact that his lack of ability has prevented him from becoming the glorious success that his position as the male heir in a household of women clearly destined him for. These days he’d be joining incel groups on the Internet, but in the 19th Century he instead falls under the influence of werewolves. Charlotte is too sensible to believe in such things, and Anne too young and timid. So it falls largely to Emily to keep the family safe, and to put an end to the terrible scourge that has followed them from Ireland to Yorkshire.

Tim Powers has been writing novels since I was at university, which is a very long time ago. Also, in his younger days, he was a close friend of the great Philip K Dick. He knows what he is doing with a book. That should be all of the recommendation that you need.

book cover
Title: My Brother's Keeper
By: Tim Powers
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Fantasy at the British Library

056, Exhibitions

The British Library recently opened a major new exhibition titled, Fantasy: Realms of Imagination. If you can get to London, it is well worth a look. As I was in town anyway for Judith Clute’s book launch, I popped in to take a look.

The thing that stands out about the exhibition is that it does things that only the British Library can do. It has the original copy of Beowulf (there is only one in existence). It has a 14th Century copy of The Iliad. It has a copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, complete with an illustration showing the knight wandering around with his head in his hands. It has Charles Dodgson’s original draft of the book he was going to call Alice’s Adventures in the Underground. It has Ursula K Le Guin’s original notes for A Wizard of Earthsea. That’s just ridiculous.

However, the exhibition is by no means focused on the past. There are plenty of contemporary works there too. And interviews with contemporary authors. A reasonable attempt has been made to include works from a wide variety of cultures.

The exhibition has also avoided focusing on written literature. Comics, films and TV, and video games all have their place. So too do Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer and Magic the Gathering. Middle Earth and Westeros as represented as much by Gandalf’s staff, and Arya Stark’s sword, Needle, as they are by books.

An exhibition can make points simply through what is chooses to include or exclude, but it can also do so through text. The label for Percy Shelley’s poem, Queen Mab, explains that Shelley used the poem as a vehicle for promoting his radical, utopian politics. Thus the idea that putting politics in fantasy is somehow a very modern thing is neatly punctured.

My Finnish readers will be happy that Tove Jansson makes an appearance in the exhibition. While the label acknowledges her creation of the Moomins, she’s mainly there because of her illustrations for the Swedish edition of The Hobbit. Tolkien was apparently sufficiently annoyed by her depiction of Gollum to actually amend the text in future editions to make his vision for the character clear.

Oh, and Irma, they have one of Mervyn Peake’s notebooks showing a rather fine drawing of the Prunesquallors.

One of the more surprising items on display is a Hugo Award trophy. It is not one for a famous book. It is Jeanette Ng’s Related Work Hugo, which she won for her speech in Helsinki when she won what was then called the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. The point is to show that fantasy can and does change when it needs to.

If there is one thing that I thought might be under-represented in the exhibition it is contemporary fantasy, in particular paranormal romance which is a huge part of the genre. The modern fashion for mythological fantasy was also missing, though of course they did have The Iliad. However, you can’t include everything, and given how hard the curators worked to be inclusive I think they can be forgiven for not being perfect.

If you can’t get to London, there are satellite exhibitions being staged at a number of city libraries around the country. I saw the one in Bristol when I was invited to give a talk there as part of the support program. I’m not sure which libraries have exhibitions, but it is worth checking your local establishments. Obviously they won’t have the spectacular items that are in London, but it would be good to support them if you can.

My talk in Bristol has been turned into an essay, and I’ve just signed a contract for it to be published elsewhere next year.

If you want a flavour of the online events, the one with Neil Gaiman and Roz Kaveney is available in full via the Living Knowledge Network. It is well worth a listen. They both have interesting things to say. They encourage everyone to read John M Ford. And I’m particularly pleased that they got to talk about A Game of You. I can defend Neil until I’m blue in the face, but it is unlikely that any of the Angry Online Trans People will believe me. They might listen to Roz.

The Marvels

056, Movie Review

Captain Marvel is one of my favorite productions from the MCU, and I loved the Ms Marvel TV series, so I have been eagerly awaiting the movie in which Carol Danvers and Kamala Khan finally get to meet. The addition of Monica Rambeau, whom we first met as a young girl in Captain Marvel, is an added bonus.

I should say right up front that you may struggle to follow some of the events of The Marvels if you have not seen certain other parts of the MCU output. The Khan family will be unknown to you if you have not seen Ms Marvel, though they very quickly establish themselves as central to the movie. Kamala’s relationship with her mother is a wonderful thing, and if you haven’t seen the TV series then you should. Also Monica acquires her powers during WandaVision. This is faintly alluded to in the film, but the explanation may be confusing if you didn’t know which witch she is referring too.

Worse still, there is a whole huge piece of the plot that Marvel managed to lose. After the events of Captain Marvel, Carol travelled to the Kree homeworld, Hala, and destroyed The Supreme Intelligence, the AI who ruled over the Kree. Her intention was to put a stop to the Kree-Skrull wars, but her actions precipitated a civil war amongst the Kree which led to an ecological disaster on Hala. This was, apparently, originally part of the first movie. Quite rightly, it got cut, but in the sequel it is told only in flashbacks and I worry that the entire motivation for the Kree is unclear.

The film also directly contradicts one of the key points from Secret Invasion. In that TV series it is asserted than Carol and Nick Fury were unable to find a sanctuary world for the Skrulls, but in this film we get to see a world that Skrulls have settled.

Anyway, our main villain is Dar-Benn, a Kree woman who has taken over the job of Ronan the Accuser (whom you may remember met a sticky end in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1), and who blames Carol for the problems the Kree are having. She acquires a powerful weapon that allows her to steal natural resources from other worlds so that she can restore Hala to life. The fact that those other worlds are inhabited is entirely irrelevant to her.

So that’s our plot, but frankly none of this matters. Because what we have here is a gloriously silly film full of entertainment aimed largely at a female audience. We have the Kahns, of course. We have the complication that Carol promised young Monica that she’d be back soon, and then never returned to Earth (except briefly for Endgame). There is an interlude in which we discover that Carol has a whole other life as a Disney Princess on a planet of singing and dancing aliens. We have angst, we have sisterhood, and of course we have Goose, the alien squid-cat thing.

Reader, I have not laughed so much at a movie in decades. I cried quite a bit too. I can’t wait to see it again.

Thinking back on it, there are loose ends that worry me. Most importantly, I want to know what happened to the singing-dancing aliens because it seemed like our heroes failed to prevent the Kree from destroying their planet. I think that Kamala needs to go back there and do a Bollywood dance number.

Also there are the credit scenes. We are now very much heading into the creation of the Young Avengers (and l loved the reference to Fury’s original recruitment speech to Tony Stark). I very much want to see Kamala Khan, Kate Bishop and America Chavez in action together. We also got a brief view of someone special that caused me to squeal with delight.

Yep, I’m a hopeless Marvel fangirl. I’m sure there are more good movies to come.

Spirit

056, Book Review, Gwyneth Jones

This review was first published on Cheryl’s personal blog in March 2009. It is reprinted here to accompany the review of A Fire Born of Exile as both books are inspired by The Count of Monte Cristo.

My first thought on seeing the back cover blurb explain that the new Gwyneth Jones novel, Spirit, is a science fiction re-working of The Count of Monte Cristo was that this might give too much away. “Oh noez,” I could hear people say, “spoilerz!” Well yes, it is. But you know there are only so many stories in the universe, and endless ways of re-telling them. Many supposedly “new” books actually telegraph much of the plot, and in many cases that is exactly what readers want. Predictability has market value in genre fiction. I find the whole spoiler panic scene a bit ridiculous. In what follows I am going to assume that all of you are familiar with the basic plot of Dumas’ classic novel. Because, you know, you really should be by now.

Our heroine is Gwibiwr, known as Bibi. She comes from a place called White Rock, which I suspect may be Maengwyn, the place that the English called Wrexham. Her parents were rebels who made themselves such a pain that the Government eventually had to wipe them out. Bibi got adopted, and was raised by the high status family of General Yu and Lady Nef. Not in England, of course. We are in a world somewhere in the far future of the Aleutian Trilogy. The aliens have come and gone, and the dominant culture on Earth is now Chinese. There is political conflict between Reformers and Traditionalists, between those who believe in a republic and those who believe in empire. It is, you may note, a clever parallel to the world of the Dumas novel, in which France is divided between supporters of the Revolution and supporters of Napoleon.

At some point or other I expect to see academic papers that study how Jones has adapted her source work to her purpose. There is plenty to study, and that’s the main issue I want to highlight in this review. I’m currently reading a YA novel. People occasionally claim that books intended for young people are not as “good” as books intended for adults. That’s not really accurate. A book written for young people can have just as good a plot, description and characterization as a book written for adults. But books written for young people are rarely deeply sophisticated, and sophistication is something that Spirit has in spades.

I’ve now gone to check dictionary definitions of “sophisticated”, because I’m sure some people will read it as meaning “snobbish”. I was pleased to find this: “altered by education, experience, etc., so as to be worldly-wise,” which is exactly what I mean. (Literally, of course, it means “with added wisdom.”) Young people have all sorts of good qualities, but two things that they tend to be short on are education and experience. You get those by living a long time. Just as a trivial example, I can’t imagine Jones quoting from a Kinks song in a book that she writes as Ann Hallam, but she has no qualms about doing so here.

There is, of course, much more to the book than that, and one area you will all be expecting is gender. After all, the original Aleutian series was a fascinating exploration of gender issues. Actually there isn’t a lot new in Spirit, but you are doubtless expecting me to highlight what there is so let’s get it out of the way.

As I said, the story is set many years after the events of the Aleutian Trilogy. Earth is apparently still reeling from the effects of the Gender Wars. These are not explained. Possibly Jones has written some short fiction about them. If she has, I’d be grateful if someone would point me at it, because I’d love to read it. By the time of Spirit, however, things are more or less back to normal. Traditionalist families still treat young women appallingly, and Jones has a good go at them on that count. That’s something we can all agree on.

The one change to the world is the presence of the “Undecided” – people who choose not to have a gender. Here’s one of them:

Navigator T’zi, Reformer by birth and conviction, explained the validity of the undecided gender to Lady Nef – who had always thought that there must be a better term.

‘You want to call us a third sex,’ said T’zi. ‘But Undecided means what it says: fluctuation, drift, mosaic sexuality that never “settles”. It is the will of God: In time all Blues will pass beyond the either/or. A process which the Fundamentalists of your party are trying to reverse by force-‘

It is an age-old battle. Those without an attachment to any particular gender are always in conflict with those who firmly believe that there should be two, and only two, into which all humans should fit. Some Traditionalists (for example the current Iranian government) are quite happy with transsexuals, as long as they confirm to their desired gender, but Traditionalists always hate the Undecided.

What about transsexuals? Does the book have them? Of course it does. Many of them are half-castes, and as usual they end up earning a living on the wrong side of the law because they can’t get jobs in polite society. Our heroes meet some.

They moved around the square, politely accosting illegal sex-workers – presenting as women, but actually male: for some reason this was the arrangement that half-castes preferred. Bibi and honesty kept making the ‘he’ mistake, they couldn’t help it. Mahmood never did.

What is this supposed to mean? Well, it is fairly vague, but the way I read it is as follows: “men are clueless creatures who go by appearances, but real women can always tell a fake.” I may be misjudging Jones here, but this is fairly typical of the arrogant despite with which many feminists view transsexuals.

That was the gender part of the book. Those two quotes pretty much summed it up. The politics is much more interesting. I’ve already written about one passage in which Jones talks about how ineffective people who are clueless about politics can be. What she is saying is that to people who are older and perhaps wiser, rebels are an annoying pain in the butt, even if their politics are correct. This is a lesson that a lot of people could do with taking on board, especially those who are determined to continue the fight until no one is even slightly Wrong on the Internet, and they have no friends left. Jones, however, is equally wary about reformers. Here’s Lady Nef (who is a Traditionalist):

‘I believe that the Reformers are right, and that they must always be defeated, because in power they are monsters. It’s a difficult position, but one learns to put up with it.’

That could be simply a disillusioned reaction to New Labour, but I think it is more generally applicable. Remember that The Count of Monte Cristo is set in France after the fall of Napoleon.

Which brings us back to the plot: Bibi, as I said, is raised in the household of General Yu and Lady Nef. She proves bright, and has a promising career ahead of her. But there is politics, and betrayal, and a long period in prison. That part of the book moves fairly slowly, but eventually Bibi escapes, armed with a secret that will make her fabulously wealthy. Instead of the Count of Monte Cristo we have the Princess of Bois Dormant — the princess of the sleeping wood, or Sleeping Beauty. Yes, it is a fairy tale reference. And at one point in the story we get a little bit of Celtic mythology. There are almost elves. There are lots of things in this book.

Before that there is the Princess. Earth society is dazzled by her wealth and charm (Bibi learned a lot from Lady Nef during their incarceration). Oh, but where do you go to, my lovely, when you’re alone in your bed? You dream of revenge, of course. Those who put you away are currently on top of the political pile, and can’t believe that they are on the eve of destruction. But they are.

Sorry about the music references, but the book has quite a few. Think of them as Easter eggs. They are fun to spot.

Music, however, is not the only thing that the book references. We are, after all, reading a science fiction novel that is based on a classic of world literature, written by one of the cleverest science fiction writers around. Is this book part of the ongoing conversation that is science fiction? You bet it is. It touches on a whole range of issues, from the origins of intelligent life in the universe to the future of humanity, and some of the best aliens ever written (the Aleutians).

So despite a little annoyance on the gender front, I really enjoyed this book. Possibly you have to be fairly well read, especially in science fiction, to appreciate it fully, but the story works as well. The prison section is a bit slow, but the second half of the book moves along very smoothly and the ending is thoroughly satisfying. I’m hoping that someone in the US decides to publish it.

book cover
Title: Spirit
By: Gwyneth Jones
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

This is Not a Grail Romance

056, Book Review, Natalia Petrovskaia

Academic books don’t come much more obscure than ones examining mediaeval literature. However, I’m assuming that you folks have at least a passing interest in Arthuriana, and in the origins of literature, so hopefully you will find the following of interest.

One of the most famous writers of Arthuriana is Chrétien de Troyes, and one of his most important works is Perceval, which forms the basis of the story of the quest for the Holy Grail. De Troyes, of course, wrote in mediaeval French, but there is also an extant parallel story in mediaeval Welsh. It is called Peredur son of Effrog, and it is of unknown authorship. A translation is usually included in books titled The Mabinogion, though Peredur is not part of that cycle. It is Peredur that is the subject of This is Not a Grail Romance, by Natalia Petrovskaia.

Perceval is not just a Grail romance, it is the ur-Grail-romance, so it is a bit surprising to see someone claim that the Welsh version is no such thing. Yet Petrovskaia makes a very good case. Traditionally (particularly by English and French scholars) it has been held that Peredur is a badly written Welsh knock-off of the French original, but that too Petrovskaia seeks to debunk.

Part of the problem with Peredur is that it comes in four (or possibly three) parts. Part 1 tells of the arrival of Peredur at Arthur’s court, and echoes much of the narrative of the French story. (It is also the basis for Nicola Griffith’s Spear). Parts 2 and 3 (sometimes called 2a and 2b) are further adventures of Peredur which do not appear in the French. They are found together in Welsh, which is why they are sometimes held to be a single story, but they have different settings. Part 4 (or 3) is separate, and contains elements of the Grail legend found in De Troyes.

Petrovskaia suggests that it is helpful to think of these stories as being similar to a modern media franchise. They are, perhaps, like a collection of Bond movies. They are about the same character, but in each film you have a different director, different script writers, different location, different love interest for the hero, and a different actor playing Bond.

The basic thesis of Petrovskaia’s book is that Part 1 is probably an original Welsh tale which found its way into France, and upon which De Troyes embellished the story of the Grail Quest. Parts 2 and 3 are separate Welsh stories which did not find their way to de Troyes (or did not interest him). Part 4 is a separate work created by someone who was aware of Perceval, and who was attempting to retcon the whole thing into a single narrative, but without the actual Grail.

Much of the evidence for this comes from the structure of the stories. The first three parts all show signs of having been constructed to a pattern. There are three stories, each of which has a discrete beginning, middle and end, and each of those is composed of three scenes. This sort of nested-threes structure is found in all mediaeval Welsh literature; not just fiction, but histories and law codes as well. Petrovskaia suggests that it is a type of aide memoire, a bit like a memory cathedral, which Welsh bards used to help them remember the text in absence of written versions. Part 4 does not follow this structure, suggesting a later composition.

Another piece of evidence is internal consistency. Each of the four stories references events elsewhere within the story, but no events outside of the story (though Part 4 does revisit locations from Part 1, and all four parts use familiar characters such as Arthur, Cai and Gwalchmai).

An old Welsh word for a storyteller is cyfarwyddwr, which literally means someone who puts signs together. These days it means a director, including a movie director.

What, then, of the Grail? The Welsh version does have the famous procession. It occurs in Part 1 before Peredur is accepted at Arthur’s court. It does have the spear dripping blood, but there is no Grail. Instead there is a salver bearing a severed head. That is a much more Celtic thing. Petrovskaia’s suggestion is that what Peredur is witnessing is not some sort of Christian ritual, but rather a funeral procession. This would also explain the hero’s refusal to ask what the heck was going on, because in mediaeval Wales it was deemed impolite to ask the name of the deceased at a funeral especially if, as in this case, they were family, because of course you should know who it was. There was an actual law stating that you could punish someone for being so rude.

Part 3 is quite interesting because the love interest for this story is a woman called the Empress of Constantinople, or rather the Empress of Cristinobyl, a place name that is usually translated as Constantinople, even though that spelling for the city is not found anywhere else in Welsh literature. Peredur marries her and lives with her for many years. The meaning of all this is unclear, but one possibility is that this is a reference to the Holy Roman Empress, Queen Matilda of England. If that is so, then Part 3 of Peredur is political fiction about the civil war in England between King Stephen and his wife, Matilda. Stephen died in 1154, and was succeeded by Matilda’s son, Henry II. Chrétien de Troyes was born in 1160, so if this interpretation is true it would suggest earlier composition of the Welsh stories.

Another fascinating element of Petrovskaia’s argument concerns the Witches of Gloucester, who are allies to Peredur in Part 1, but become his enemies in Part 4. They are very unusual witches, because they never do any actual magic. They do, however, teach the young Peredur fighting skills. Petrovskaia suggests that they may be more akin to characters such as Scáthach and Aife who appear in Irish legend and also teach warcraft to young men.

I find all of this fascinating. But what really got me to sit up and take notice is an unexpected twist at the end of Part 4. The plot of this section of the story is driven by an ugly woman called the Black-Haired Maiden who keeps turning up and sending Peredur on quests. At the end of the story, Peredur is back at the castle of the Fisher King and he is approached by a young blond lad who explains that there was no black-haired maiden. Rather it was he, a young man in disguise, who had played that part. There is no explanation for this. It is just left there hanging for the reader to try to make sense of.

Sometimes mediaeval fiction can be very weird.

book cover
Title: This is Not a Grail Romance
By: Natalia Petrovskaia
Publisher: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura
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