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.

The Fiction Writer’s Guide to Alternate History

055, Book Review, Jack Dann

I discovered The Fiction Writer’s Guide to Alternate History thanks to an interview with Jack Dann on The Coode Street Podcast. If you want hear Dann discussing the book and its origins with Gary Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan, you can do so here.

In terms of writing manuals, this one is very specific, unlike the far more general work by Angus and Nolan reviewed elsewhere in this issue. This allows Dann to go into a lot more depth. He starts off by defining what (he thinks) Alternate History is. He then talks more generally about history as a practice. He gives an example of an Alternate History short story. He talks about the problems that writers will face writing this sort of work and how they should be tackled. He then has a round-table discussion with a bunch of authors, in which several of them profoundly disagree with him. Finally he talks about his own journey writing an Alternate History novel, and shares some thoughts about how you, the reader, might go forward from there.

Dann’s definition of Alternate History is quite narrow. In particular he references Tom Shippey, in whose opinion a true Alternate History (or Counterfactual Fiction) should be based on a single divergence point from actual history (sometimes known as a “Jonbar Point”) which should be 1) plausible; 2) definite; 3) small in itself; and 4) massive in consequence. This is history viewed through the lens of the nursery rhyme, “For the Want of a Nail”.

I have some fairly strong disagreements with that, as did many of the authors who participated in the round table. However, I’m going to leave most matters of definition for the talk I’m giving at Bristol Central Library next month as part of their support of the British Library’s Fantasy exhibition. That talk will become an essay that you can all read sometime next year.

For this review I want to focus on the usefulness of Dann’s book as what it purports to be: not an academic examination of what Alternate History is, but a guide for practitioners. The definitional material is useful as a launch pad for discussion, but in my view the real value of the book is in the advice Dann gives, and the round table.

Two key bits of advice that Dann gives are concerned with worldbuilding, and with how to stop it taking over your book. He discusses the Dos Passos technique of inserting quote from invented media material (newspaper clippings, quotations from politicians, long lyrics and so on) which has been used to great effect by the likes of John Brunner and Lyda Morehouse. But he also cautions against getting lost in the rabbit hole of your research and allowing that to gush out onto the page.

In the round table, Dann starts off by citing Shippey’s definition, and some ideas of his own, and asks the various writers whether they think those concepts are central to creating Alternate History. Some authors enthusiastically agree, but others are much less convinced. Harry Turtledove, whom you might think knows what he’s talking about on this topic, says:

“Central? I don’t think in such terms. Nothing is central to a story except plot, characters, and style, not necessarily in that order at all.”

Janeen Webb is more specific in her criticism. She says:

“I agree that counterfactual fiction is defined by its relationship with known historical events. But I disagree about the necessity for a single divergence point.”

It isn’t mentioned in this book, but Webb is Jack Dann’s wife. They’ve been together for almost 30 years, so definitions of Alternate History are clearly not important to their relationship.

Some writers are very keen to stress the need for believability. There is massive disagreement over Howard Waldrop’s story, “Ike at the Mic”, in which Dwight D Eisenhower becomes a jazz musician and Elvis Presley becomes a politician. Some writers celebrate this as groundbreaking, while others dismiss it as wanton breaking of the sacred rules of the genre. John Kessel describes it as “completely bogus”.

Some writers think that to great a deviation from actual history will make a book mere fantasy. Charlaine Harris, on the other hand, states:

“It was relatively easy to pick the divergence point for the Sookie Stackhouse novels: vampires have decided to make their existence public.”

My favourite contributions come, rather surprisingly, from Chris Priest. His responses tend to be of the forms, “No”; “-a longer phrase meaning ‘No’-”; and “No -followed by a justification of his rejection-”. At one point he comments:

“I didn’t become a writer so that I could follow the rules of others. The moment I hear about a rule I either ignore it or look for a way to subvert it.”

And he’s right. Perhaps not in the way he wants to be, in that he might see himself as special and different, but because every writer is different. What I love about this book is that it takes a fairly small part of the speculative fiction field and demonstrates that there is massive disagreement amongst respected and successful writers as to how such works should be crafted, and even about why one should attempt them in the first place. That’s a valuable lesson for any wannabe writer.

book cover
Title: The Fiction Writer’s Guide to Alternate History
By: Jack Dann
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Spec Fic for Newbies

055, Book Review, Tiffani Angus, Val Nolan

This book from Luna Press Publishing is subtitled, “A Beginner’s Guide to Writing Subgenres of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror”. It is worth noting that the two authors, Tiffani Angus and Val Nolan, are both academics, though Angus has a novel to her name and Nolan has had a short story shortlisted for the Sturgeon. I think their experience in academia informs how they have approached the subject.

Spec Fic for Newbies is divided into three main sections: science fiction, fantasy and horror. Each section is subdivided into chapters on key themes. So the science fiction section contains chapters on aliens, robots and dystopias; fantasy has chapters on witches, sword & sorcery and paranormal romance; and horror has chapters on vampires, zombies and cosmic horror. Those lists of contents are by no means exhaustive.

Each chapter contains information on the history of the use of the concept, some famous examples, and some discussion as to different ways the concept has been deployed. There are also suggestions in each chapter as to how the concept might be taken in a different direction. These are called “activities”, which makes them sound a bit like part of a school lesson, but they are useful.

This is probably starting to sound very dry and, well, academic, and it would be were it not for the way in which it is done. I don’t know Val Nolan well, though he is at Aberystwyth so I’m sure our paths will cross soon. Tiffani Angus, on the other hand, is a friend I have known for some time since she was a student of Farah Mendlesohn’s at Anglia Ruskin. Angus has an infectious personality, and that bleeds through on every page of this book. When I read it, I can hear her voice in my head. That makes the book great fun to read.

Of course it is not a page-turner. The structure of the book makes it very much a reference work, not the sort of thing that you would read from cover to cover. It is also “for Newbies”. Given that I have been reading and reviewing speculative fiction for (ahem) many decades, there’s not a lot in this book that is new to me. There are some things, obviously, and you can always learn something from reading new material, but a lot of it is very familiar.

While the book does purport to being a guide specifically for writers, I think it is just as useful for wannabe critics who are new to the field. It is a much easier, and shorter, read that the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia. It also allows you to bone up on “the Classics” without having to read them all. This book does what it says on the tin, and it does it with style and humour. You shouldn’t ask for much more from an introductory volume.

Oh, and if you’ve read the review of the Jack Dann book on Alternate History elsewhere in this issue, I note that Angus and Nolan end their introduction with the following sentence:

“Just remember, there are no rules.”

Quite.

book cover
Title: Spec Fic for Newbies
By: Tiffani Angus & Val Nolan
Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Eating with the Tudors

055, Brigitte Webster, Cookery

One of the things that I find hard to resist is ancient recipe cookbooks. Most of mine are still stranded in Nevada, but recently I heard a podcast interview with the author of a new one that I had to get. The podcast in question was an episode of Not Just the Tudors with Prof. Suzannah Lipscomb. You can find the episode here. The interviewee is Brigitte Webster, author of Eating with the Tudors.

Webster is one of those lucky people who is both obsessed with ancient recipes, and wealthy enough to spend her time recreating them. She and her husband own a small Tudor manor, and they have turned the cookery passion into a business, hosting Tudor-themed events at which authentic dishes are served. That’s serious historical re-enactment.

Because of the need to recreate the recipes for customers, Webster’s book is not just a list of recipes cribbed from musty tomes in the British Library, it is both a practical manual for creating Tudor dishes with present-day supplies, and a piece of historical research in its own right.

The key thing about the Tudors is that they lived in a time before refrigeration. It is well known that they went absolutely bananas for sugar when it became easily available (to the detriment of their teeth). But they were not just addicts. Sugar meant that the wealthy could enjoy fruits (in the form of jam) in the middle of winter. Technology! It was the latest thing, and no wonder everyone who could went for it.

Nevertheless, the Tudor housewife (of whatever gender) still needed to be acutely aware of the seasons, and well-versed in various methods of food preservation. One of my reasons for snapping up the book is because I have friends who own a small-holding that has just come through the glut of autumn vegetables and is looking down the barrel of the long, fallow winter months.

I should note, however, that the book is not great for vegetarians. Not that the Tudors didn’t eat veggies, but meat was a prestige food, and most cookbooks were written by the wealthy, for the wealthy. Consequently, most of the recipes involve meat of some sort.

That said, the Tudors did eat a lot of fruit, and not just the common varieties. There are recipes in the book for things like quinces and medlars which, as it happens, I can get hold of. (Thanks, Roz & Jo!). They also ate a fair amount of fish. You might think that the old Catholic idea of eating fish on Fridays would have died a death after the Reformation. And it did, for a time. But Elizabeth I had a Navy to pay for, and one way of financing them was to have them turn to fishery when they were not out sinking Spaniards. Eating fish became a patriotic duty (and a legal requirement).

Recipes involving the likes of tomatoes, potatoes, sweetcorn and chilies are thin on the ground, because such exotic new foods were only just beginning to be imported from the New World at the end of the Tudor period. I was fascinated to discover that the oldest recipe in the book featuring one of these ‘modern’ foods was for the sweet potato. It features in a “tarte” that, so the recipe says, “will provoke courage either in man or woman”. Other ingredients include quinces, dates, lots of eggs, and “the braines of three or foure cocke Sparrowes”. Fortunately the sparrow brains are optional, though Webster does not say whether she has tested her version of the recipe for its courage-giving properties.

Which reminds me, the Tudors were still working with Galen’s theory of the Four Humors, so their ideas about what constituted healthy eating were quite bizarre at times.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to working my way through some of the recipes. It is good Hallowe’en cooking, because the Tudors loved making pies and tarts that are basically pastry filled with stuff. The empty pastry cases were known, at the time, as ‘coffins’, so the recipes frequently tell you to “fill youre coffins with…”

Spooky.

book cover
Title: Eating with the Tudors
By: Brigitte Webster
Publisher:
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Ahsoka – Season 1

055, TV Review

I should start by noting that Star Wars is not my favourite TV/movie franchise. I’ve given up on The Mandalorian. I bailed on Boba Fett about half way through. I bailed on Andor in the first episode, apparently before it got good. I did not expect to find Ahsoka quite enjoyable, but I did.

I can think of two good reasons for this. The first is Grand Admiral Thrawn. He’s the first Imperial commander I can think of who is not a complete idiot. Indeed, he seems quite smart. This is a very welcome change.

Of course he is still burdened with the endless well of incompetence that is the Imperial armed forces. I swear at one point in the series I saw an Imperial Stormtrooper hit Sabine Wren in the head with a shot from his pistol. She wasn’t wearing her Mandalorian helmet at the time, but she still shrugged off the hit. I have come to the conclusion that Imperial Stormtroopers load their guns with marshmallows.

The other main reason is that several of the main characters are quite interesting. Sabine Wren is not a super-powered Jedi, at least to begin with, and isn’t even sure she wants to be one. Hera Syndulla isn’t a Jedi at all, she’s a rebel soldier who became a general in the wars, but is also a mother with a young kid. And of course you can’t go wrong with a droid played by David Tennant. These characters were all interesting enough that I want to go back and watch the Rebels cartoon series to find out more about them.

I’m less enamoured with the lead character, though I gather she is something of a fan favourite, which why she’s got a series of her own. Rosario Dawson’s performance reminds me a lot of Hugo Weaving playing Elrond: that is, we have a very competent actor who, as Weaving said in his case, has no idea who the character is, or what their motivations are. Dawson spends a lot of time staring mysteriously into the distance.

What worries me about the series, and bear in mind that I have not watched the Prequels, is that is seems like it might be intended as a vehicle to somehow rehabilitate Anakin Skywalker.

Reaction to the series online hasn’t been great. I’ve seen complaints that it is slow, and fair enough. Most of it was. The season finale wrapped things up much too quickly, which also wasn’t great after all that build-up. But at least it did leave some threads unresolved.

The main complaint about the series, however, seems to have been that it makes Star Wars look like fantasy. It is entirely true that the alien world on which much of the action is set is rather reminiscent of parts of Middle Earth. Characters get to ride creatures that are very reminiscent of wargs. And just to rub it in, the season finale is titled, “The Jedi, the Witch and the Warlord”. Well guess what?, this is a franchise about Space Wizards, who fight with swords made of light. There are witches in this series, three of them, of course, but if they are inspired by anything it is as much the Bene Gesserit as Macbeth. I’m happy to see the folks at Disney embracing the story for what it is.

BristolCon 2023

055, Convention Report

Another year, and other small but (mostly) perfectly formed BristolCon.

This year should have been spectacular, because I’d been offered the book launch slot for the new Juliet McKenna novel, The Green Man’s Quarry. However, circumstances conspired to thwart this. Firstly the diary gremlins attacked Juliet. A family event that she absolutely had to attended turned up on the Saturday. She kindly offered to drive over to Bristol for the Friday night only, and the convention offered to put on a launch event then. The diary clashes also affected me, in that the Chengdu Worldcon moved its dates to clash with BristolCon. That meant that I spent the Saturday evening updating the Hugo Awards website. It kept me away from the karaoke, which I’m sure everyone else was very grateful for.

The gods, however, were not done with us. I was vaguely aware that terrible weather was forecast for Scotland that weekend. The drive from South Wales was largely uneventful, though it did piss it own between Port Talbot and Bridgend. I did notice signs about an M4 closure around Swindon and hoped it was minor. No such luck. There had been a major accident that closed both carriageways. Also parts of Swindon station were underwater and around 75% of trains from London to Bristol were being cancelled. Rail issues were also affecting travel from Exeter and Birmingham.

There’s nothing you can do about this sort of thing. The book launch was very sparsely attended, as was the open mic event that followed it. Shrug.

The weather was better on Saturday, but some people had clearly given up on trying to get to the convention. Footfall in the Dealers’ Room was low. So low that I had a lot of chocolate and cupcakes left at the end of the day. But, thanks to Juliet having a new book out, sales were only just below last year. BristolCon is the only con where it is remotely economic for me to have a dealer table, and I continue to be grateful for that.

I did one panel. It was about AI, and I was able to recycle a lot of what I had learned on the similar panel at Pemmicon. Programming appeared to be well attended.

Next year the guests of honour will be Peter F Hamilton and Joanne Harris. If you have not been to BristolCon before, that sounds like a perfect excuse to try it out.

WorldCon Chengdu

055, Convention Report

So, Worldcon happened, and the sky did not fall.

Prior to the event, all sorts of fannish conspiracy theories were floating around, from the Chinese packing the Business Meeting and throwing out the WSFS Constitution, to all of the Hugo winners being Chinese, and to the whole event being a vehicle for Chinese Government propaganda.

Needless to say, none of this transpired. I didn’t go, because there was little chance of my getting a visa, and because it clashed with BristolCon. Those Westerners who did go seem to have had a wonderful time. That includes Kevin, who will hopefully get around to sharing his experiences when he’s had a chance to recover from the travel and catch up with having been offline for over a week.

One person who has been blogging enthusiastically about the event is Nicholas Whyte. His report on Doctor Who fandom in China is particularly heartwarming.

The Hugo winners were duly announced. There were a few Chinese winners, which was lovely, but the majority of awards still went to Westerners. I was particularly pleased with the fan awards. Richard Man joins the stellar list of Hugo winners who are members of the Bay Area Science Fiction Association, and is a brilliant photographer. Chris Barkley has been working his socks off for Worldcon for many, many years and also thoroughly deserves the award. And Best Fanzine was won by a Chinese publication. I know nothing about the fancast winner, but they’ve joined Chris in recusing themselves from the awards in future years so they are clearly good people.

On the professional side I’m delighted that Neil Clarke has finally won Best Editor: Short Form. The Graphic Story category has attracted a lot of attention because it is a very European production. The writer, Bartosz Sztybor, is Polish, and the Hugo Awards page on Farcebook has been getting a lot of happy attention from Polish fans. Naturally everyone in the UK is delighted that Adrian Tchaikovsky won Best Series, and so are the giant spiders.

I have no idea when we will get the full voting breakdown. The few SMOFs who attended the convention were rushed off their feet. Dave McCarty will get round to it eventually. The full list of winner is available here.

The Business Meeting also happened. Attendance was fairly low, but there were some Chinese fans present and interesting things happened. Kevin has posted the videos, but I don’t have time to watch them. As far as I can gather, nothing terrible happened. And even if it did, we can deal with it in Glasgow.

The Best of all Possible Worlds

055, Book Review, Karen Lord

This review is reprinted from Cheryl’s personal blog.

Karen Lord’s second novel has been greatly anticipated by the many people, including myself, who fell in love with Redemption in Indigo. When I saw an ARC available on NetGalley I pounced on it immediately. I have, however, taken a while to produce this review. That’s partly because I don’t believe in publishing reviews long before you can buy the book — that has always seemed like bragging on the part of the reviewer, and not very helpful to the prospective reader. But it is also, rather unusually, because I wanted to talk to the author first. The reasons for that should become obvious as you read this review, but first I should introduce the book.

The Best of All Possible Worlds opens in dramatic fashion. We are introduced to Dllenahkh, apparently a busy chap with a responsible job who, every so often, has to go on a meditation retreat to help him handle the stress of his life. He’s on retreat when we meet him, but his peace is interrupted by the arrival of a spaceship pilot with bad news. Their home planet has been attacked and laid waste. The entire population is dead.

With a standard genre novel, what would follow is a revenge-based piece of military SF in which Dllenahkh tracks down and kills those responsible for this atrocity. What we get is nothing like that at all. Most of the rest of the book is told from the point of view of Grace Delarua, a minor civil servant in an outpost world where Dllenahkh and some other surviving members of his race, the Sadiri, have come in search of sanctuary and, hopefully, wives.

A digression on the world building is in order here. The galaxy is populated by a number of species of humans, all of which can interbreed, but which are genetically distinct in the same way that our own species and Neanderthals were distinct. The Sadiri have their own culture, and are quite stuffy and conservative. This, compounded by the disaster that has befallen them, has made the few (mostly male) survivors rather obsessed with breeding. Delarua’s planet, Cygnus Beta, is home to a number of settlements of taSadiri — people who couldn’t stand the strictures of traditional Sadiri culture and left to set up home elsewhere. It is therefore a prime source of eligible females.

Hopefully you can begin to see the shape of the mess that Delarua and her colleagues have to negotiate. On the one hand they desperately want to help the Sadiri (there are economic reasons for this, as well as the humanitarian ones). But on the other hand they need to prevent the sort of diplomatic incidents that might arise when a group of sex-starved misogynists go in search of wives.

That’s probably a little unfair on the Sadiri. There are worse males in the universe. Indeed, one of the reasons that Dllenahkh has been sent on this mission is that he’s assumed to be disciplined enough not to cause an upset. Nevertheless, it is a delicate situation, and if you were part of a relatively small remnant population with very little chance of getting a wife, you might be a bit eager too.

The structure of the book is somewhat unexpected as well. Most chapters are, in a way, separate stories telling of particular encounters that Dllenahkh, Delarua and their colleagues have at different settlements on Cygnus Beta. There is an overall thread to the book, but if you are brought up on fast-paced novels that end each chapter in a cliff-hanger then this slower, more disconnected structure may jar. I expect to see reviews that complain about Lord failing to use the prescribed structures you are taught in creative writing classes and, shock horror, having characters in the book who don’t serve the purposes of the plot. I guess what she’s done will be irritating to anyone who is convinced that slavish adherence to a formula is the only way to get published.

At its core, the book is a love story between, as you might have guessed, Dllenahkh and Delarua. I use the term “love story” rather than “romance” very deliberately. Romance tends to be a very adolescent genre, full of horrible misunderstandings and raging emotions. It is fiction for people still trying to understand the opposite sex, and the process of sexual attraction. The Best of All Possible Worlds is a much more adult affair in which two people thrown together by work gradually come to admire each other, and rely on each other. If there is uncertainty it is probably worry that attempting sex will jeopardize the relationship that is building.

Of course the book is, in many ways, all about sex. You have a bunch of alien males in search of wives, and several female characters who might just be interested if the cultural issues can be overcome. Occasionally this results in banter that almost makes you feel like you’ve fallen through a wormhole into a later-period Heinlein novel. Although one of the characters turns out to be asexual, this is mostly an avowedly heterosexual book with mating as a core theme. It also tackles the issue head-on in a very practical way. Personally, as an older, heterosexual female, I was perfectly happy with it. I suspect that some lesbian feminists will be outraged.

I note, by the way, that the nature of the relationships formed is important to Lord. Some of the characters have limited psychic powers, and the occasional arrogance and stuffiness of the Sadiri is contrasted with the genuinely abusive behavior of others. We should not forget where the title comes from. While there is no benevolent god in the book whose failure to address the shortcomings of the universe needs to be interrogated, we are still very much stuck with Leibniz’s central idea that we need to deal with the real world as it is. Annoying and imperfect the universe may be, but we still need to strive for the best.

The final, and most important, point I want to make about the book also deals with the way in which the real world annoyingly fails to fit our neat ideas as of how thing should be. Most modern equality theory is based on the idea that, biologically speaking, all human beings are identical. There are no different “races” of humans, just humans with different appearances. We are all the same species, in just the same way that our best friend, canis lupus familiaris, is, despite coming in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes. Feminism holds that the same is true for the sexes: childbearing aside, there are no significant differences between males and females.

In The Best of All Possible Worlds Lord does something very brave. She populates the galaxy with a variety of different species of humans that can interbreed, but are not only culturally, but also biologically different. There are things that some species are better at than others (that is, when large populations are sampled for a characteristic, the difference in performance between species is statistically significant). There is a reason why Sadiri make good starship pilots and people from other species don’t.

Of course we have seen this many times before in 20th Century SF. Mostly we criticize it as proxy racism; attempts to show that the (mysteriously all-white) humans are somehow better people than the funny almost-humans with lumps on their brows and darker skin. That, I submit, is not a charge that one can reasonably bring against a Caribbean writer. There may still be some racial stereotyping in the book, but the central point that Lord is making here is that genuine racial differences do not excuse racism. The various human races in the book are still all human, and they still need to get along. In most cases, the differences between species don’t matter very much, and in any case cultural differences tend to be greater than biological ones. Nevertheless, we only live in the best of all possible worlds, not an ideal world defined by political theories. It is up to us to make the best of it.

book cover
Title: The Best of all Possible Worlds
By: Karen Lord
Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Galaxy Game

055, Book Review, Karen Lord

This review is reprinted from Cheryl’s personal blog.

The trouble with reviewing a Karen Lord novel is that you know you are dealing with a very smart author. This causes (at least) two problems. Firstly you have to somehow tiptoe your way around all of the subtle ideas in the book to make sure that you don’t give too much away. And second, you know that next time you see Karen she will smile knowingly at you, and you’ll know you need to go back and re-read the book to see what you missed.

Here I go, cautiously embarrassing myself.

The Galaxy Game is pretty much a direct sequel to The Best of All Possible Worlds. There’s a prologue that is set a few decades into the future, but after that we skip back to just a few years after the previous book. The central character is not Grace Delarua, though she does feature in the narrative. Rather Lord has chosen to tell us the story of Grace’s nephew, Rafi Abowen.

Those of you who have read The Best of All Possible Worlds will remember that Rafi’s father was a powerful and abusive telepath. Rafi has inherited strong psi talents, and wants to avoid misusing them. He ends up in The Lyceum, a special school for the Abnormally Gifted. This, however, is not an X-Men story, or a Harry Potter one. Rafi and his two young friends, Ntenman and Serendipity, soon find themselves out in the galaxy at a time of great political upheaval.

The book is quite a slow starter. For a long time you’ll think that this is nothing more than a story of a troubled young man finding himself through professional sport. (Yes, you did read that correctly.) But not all is as it seems, and around page 200 Lord drops a massive revelation about the sport that Rafi plays. From then on you are in the middle of a fairly fast-paced piece of space opera.

There are several themes in play here. Chief amongst them is that of a society undergoing a period of instability, with associated security paranoia. The destruction of the planet Sadira, which opens The Best of All Possible Worlds, is still a major political issue. The surviving Sadiri, who are mostly male, have started to go to extreme lengths to secure full-blood wives. This inevitably brings them into conflict with Grace, Dllenahkh and the small community of Sadiri-in-exile that they have set up on Cygnus Beta. Meanwhile the rest of the galaxy is starting to discover what life is like without the moralistic and officious Sadiri around to play policeman so that they don’t have to.

Don’t expect this to be a shoot-out with space battles, however. In a Karen Lord novel, conflict is solved by diplomacy. You look for mutually beneficial trading opportunities that might make it less attractive to go to war. Failing all else, you put together an alliance and drop a political bombshell on the enemy. Lord has been a diplomat (and a soldier). She knows her stuff. Also, coming from Barbados, she has a very different view of geopolitics than someone who has grown up in the USA or UK, which is very refreshing.

Then there is the gender stuff. Readers of The Best of All Possible Worlds may remember Lian, a character who is genderless. Well, Lian turns up again in The Galaxy Game, and the whole gender thing is mentioned just once, in passing. Most readers, I suspect, will never notice that Lian’s gender is not specified. I spotted just one use of a gendered word, and that was from Ntenman which, as it later turned out, was only to be expected. There is a trans character in the book too, and I love the way that Lord has handled Ntenman’s journey to acceptance of her.

Talking of Ntenman, one of the more unusual aspects of the book is Lord’s decision to tell his story in first person, and the rest of the book in third person. Ntenman isn’t the primary viewpoint character, though he is fairly significant to the story. I don’t think it distracts majorly from the book, but I’m not sure what it adds, or at least was intended to add. Were I to be interviewing Lord about the book, this is the first question I’d put to her.

I guess I should talk about societies too. Much of the action takes place on Punartam, which is an Ntshune planet and very different culturally to Rafi’s more Terran home on Cygnus Beta. On Punartam who you are and who you know are massively important. I have this image of people from saner parts of the globe finding themselves in England and struggling to make sense of all of the class politics.

In summary, Karen Lord novels are fascinating things. They are not fast-paced space adventures, but they are very thoughtful and will reward re-reading. Also, while there is a series being built here, the books are fairly complete in themselves. You do need to have read The Best of All Possible Worlds before reading The Galaxy Game, but you won’t be left hanging at the end of either book. Of course we do want to know what happened to Commander Nasiha, and that probably means finding out what awful things are happening on New Sadira, but that’s a tale for another book, please, Karen.

book cover
Title: The Galaxy Game
By: Karen Lord
Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Editorial – October 2023

055, Editorial

The Dark has risen. Winter is approaching here in the Northern hemisphere and the clocks have gone back in the UK. You may have noticed that I have not yet got round to reviewing the final volume of Susan Cooper’s legendary fantasy series. That’s mainly due to having too many other good books clamouring for my attention, but it has turned out to be quite convenient. It will be in the next issue, alongside my thoughts on the Fantasy exhibition at the British Library, which I am booked to see early in November.

Other than that trip to London, I’m not planning to go very far for several months. Convention season is pretty much over, and SMOFcon is in Boston this year so I can’t go even if I wanted to. I think my next con trip will be to LuxCon in April (and I am not going to EasterCon so it won’t be able to prevent me from getting to Luxembourg this time).

Hopefully being stuck at home for a few months will give me time to work on some more books. We have Lyda’s lesbian space opera book to come, and there should be some new Chaz next year.

Other than that, I expect to spend several months keeping warm, trying new recipes, and reading books.

Issue #54

Issues

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


Cover: The Green Man’s Quarry

054, Art, Ben Baldwin

It is that time of year again. Juliet McKenna has produced a new Green Man book. Pre-orders are open (links here), and there will be a launch on the Friday night of BristolCon. Also there is new cover art from the brilliant Ben Baldwin. I think this is my favourite cover since the first one. While the character in the book is absolutely not T’Challa, the cover does remind me of him. We did pick up on some of the colour choices from the Black Panther movies in designing the cover. The purple is there for another reason too, which will become obvious when you read the book.

The unadulterated art is shown below.

Mammoths at the Gates

054, Book Review, Nghi Vo

No matter how much of a funk I am in about reading, nothing gets me rushing to my Kindle app faster than a new Nghi Vo Singing Hills novella. Nope, not even Murderbot. By the way, I say “Kindle” because getting hold of Tor.com novellas in the UK is expensive. I do want paper versions of these books eventually. And I am trying to remember to buy on Kobo or Weightless Books instead because that’s a good thing to do. The point is that when Mammoths at the Gates arrived, I dived straight in.

So, what is happening with Cleric Chin? Well, as the story begins, Chin has just arrived back at the Singing Hills monastery. Yes, at last we are going to get to see something of that famous repository of memories, and the other monks who inhabit it. Or at least we would, except for two things.

Firstly, most of the monks have gone. Royal engineers have drained a reservoir called Snakehead Lake. The town of Houshi, which the creation of the reservoir had drowned, is accessible again for the first time in years. The monks have four months in which to work, before the dam is repaired and the water brought back. There are a lot of ghosts to interview.

The other issue is rather more obvious. Camped outside the gates to the monastery are two large royal war mammoths. Their rider, and her sister, are very unhappy with the monks for some reason. Having experience of such beasts elsewhere, Chih is well aware of the damage that they could cause. Negotiations are in the hands of the temporary senior monk, Chih’s childhood friend, Ru.

That’s how the story is introduced. If you are used to these books, you will know that it is not what the story is all about. Inevitably there are deeper currents driving events. Chief amongst these is the death of Cleric Thien, one of the oldest of the residents of the Singing Hills, and the man who was tutor to both Chen and Ru when they were novices.

The problems with the mammoths and their riders even affect the neixin aviary. And we meet more of these amazing birds. There is a male neixin called Cleverness Himself, who seems determined to live up to his name. We get to meet Almost Brilliant’s chick, who is currently named Chiep, but will presumably adopt a more serious name when she is an adult (who knows, neixin culture is a mystery to us). Anyway, she’s adorable. And finally there is Myriad Virtues. She was the neixin companion of Cleric Thien, and she’s dying of grief.

In that magical way she has, Vo draws all of these threads together to provide a satisfactory solution to the problem of the mammoths, telling us much about Cleric Thien, about the childhood of Chih and Ru, and about neixin, along the way. It is all very clever and beautifully told, and I expect this book to be on the Hugo ballot next year.

book cover
Title: Mammoths at the Gates
By: Nghi Vo
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Tolkien, Race and Cultural History

054, Book Review, Dimitra Fimi

One of the things that we have learned over the years about social media is that it has an almost total lack of nuance. Arguments rage, but they can never resolve because you can only ever be for or against a very simplistic position. Some of those arguments concern Tolkien. Was he a racist? Was he ‘just a man of his time’? Was he a great man whom none should dare question? These questions do not have simple answers. And this is where we can turn to academics for some in depth analysis.

Dimitra Fimi is an acknowledged expert on Tolkien. She’s also one of the senior academics at the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic. I should note that she’s also a friend and was one of the editors of the recently published volume on Celtic Fantasy that I had an essay in. She’s very well placed to look into these issues. Tolkien, Race and Cultural History: From Fairies to Hobbits, is the result of her investigations.

The main point that needs to be made here is that the Legendarium, that is the complete world created by Tolkien in which he set his books, was not created overnight. Rather, its creation was a continuous process starting when Tolkien was a teenager and moving on through the publication of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. During that time, Tolkien grew up, studied a lot, married and had a family, and lived through two World Wars. It should not be surprising that his attitudes and objectives did not remain constant throughout his life.

When Tolkien first embarked on created a “mythology for England” he was very young and living through a particular time in history when such a thing might have seemed necessary. Britain had witnessed the rise of Celticism, led by characters such as the notorious inventor of Welsh tradition, Iolo Morganwg. England had nothing of this. If you went too far back, everyone was Welsh anyway. The Romans had gone, the Normans were only ever conquerors (and French at that!). So England focused instead on its Germanic invaders. Fimi notes:

It was mainly during the nineteenth century that Anglo-Saxonism became a national myth; it is not accidental that this happened during a period when the British Empire was slowly declining.

Something very similar can be seen in the present day, when Anglo-Saxonism was first deployed as an excuse for Brexit, and then as a crutch when the real effects of that political disaster hit.

Tolkien, however, did not have to live through Brexit and its aftermath. Instead he lived through two deadly wars in which Germany was the main enemy. This didn’t seem to shake his love for Nordic culture, but that didn’t mean he was overly fond of the Germans. Famously he described Hitler as “a ruddy little ignoramus” who is:

“Ruining, perverting, misapplying and making forever accursed that noble Northen spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.”

We’ll come back to the racism question later, but first I should note that Fimi presents another motivating force for the creation of the Legendarium. Tolkien, as we know, was a huge fan of languages. He loved inventing them. Sindarin was based on Welsh, and Quenya on Finnish (which Tolkien fell in love with after reading the Kalevala (another piece of national myth-making). It appears that being a language nerd was something that Tolkien was a bit embarrassed about, and the process of creating Middle Earth gave him a very plausible excuse for his hobby. The point here is that Tolkien wasn’t just engaged in myth-making. There were other reasons for the ways in which his work developed.

There was also a third force acting on Tolkien and his writing: the need for a book. The Hobbit was hugely successful has his publishers were desperate for a sequel. Quite rightly, they rejected his attempt to fob them off with the mess that was The Silmarillion. (It is less of a mess now, having been extensively edited, but I still couldn’t finish it.) So Tolkien embarked on creating The Lord of the Rings, and in the process he had to stop fiddling about with hobbyist ideas about mythology and language, and instead create a functioning novel for adults. That caused him to change a lot.

Back with the racism question, as is always the case, it is complicated. Where I disagree with Fimi is when she says that racism is a modern concept that can’t be applied to Tolkien’s time (pg 157). This is rather like saying that people couldn’t have had same-sex relations before homosexuality was invented as a concept (1869, thank you for asking). Racism is something that people do, not an airy concept. What we can say, however, is that Tolkien grew up in a society that was institutionally and culturally racist. In addition, as Fimi points out, the theory known as “race science” was very much accepted as factual by the (white) academic community for much of Tolkien’s life. It isn’t surprising that he developed racist views of the world, because pretty much everyone did. Heck, I have enough trouble dealing with ideas that got drummed into me as a kid, and I’m a couple of generations younger.

So what matters is what Tolkien did with his views. In some ways he clearly grew up. His teenage enthusiasm for ethno-nationalism was severely broken by his experience of how Nazi Germany used such ideas. However, his portrayal of non-white peoples in The Lord of the Rings leaves much to be desired. Saruman is clearly a eugenicist, but equally the fact that he is suggests that eugenics works.

Which brings us to the orcs. Here there’s an issue that I felt lacking in the book: class. Fimi is Greek, so like every other foreign visitor to the UK she’s probably struggling with the complexity of the British class system. But it is relevant. The hobbits are clearly rural English, divided into gentleman farmers such as the Bagginses, and “sons of the soil” like Sam Gamgee. The dwarves are noble artisans such as a village blacksmith might have been, whereas the orcs are working class labourers that you might find in a coal mine or steelworks. The humans have all of the usual range of social classes. And the elves, well they are clearly upper class, above even human royalty. They live apart from the rest of society, and yet they are supposedly in charge of everything. At least, when they can be bothered to exert themselves. Elrond, being famously half-Elven, is notoriously snooty about human-elf relationships, just as you might expect.

Tolkien doubtless regarded himself as upper middle class, at least when he became an Oxford don. Quite how he felt class impacted his subcreation of Middle Earth I can’t say (though I’m hoping that someone will look into it with the same depth and rigour that Fimi brings to her book). What I can say is that, consciously or not, it will have influenced him.

Niggles aside, this is an excellent book, full of sharp observations about Tolkien and the times through which he lived. If you have a deep interest in the Legendarium, I highly recommend it.

book cover
Title: Tolkien, Race and Cultural History
By: Dimitra Fimi
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Follow Me: Religion in Fantasy & Science Fiction

054, Book Review, Francesca T. Barbini

It is somewhat dubious for me to review a book that I have an essay in, but I am very fond of the Academia Lunare series from Luna Press Publishing, so I want to encourage you to buy the books.

Follow Me: Religion in Fantasy and Science Fiction, is the latest volume in the series. The theme should be obvious from the title. The ways in which contributors have engaged with the theme differ widely.

There are several essays on Tolkien, which is hardly surprising. Religion was very important to him, and he created an entire mythology for Middle Earth. That may not be obvious if you’ve only watched the movies, but it is all there in the background. What’s more, there are Tolkien fans who have adopted that mythology as their religion, as Elyse Welles explains in her essay, “Neo-Pagans and the Ainur Pantheon”.

One of the most fascinating essays in the book is Steph P Bianchini’s discussion of the Zelazny novel, Creatures of Light and Darkness. I know I read that book a very long time ago. Given what Bianchini says about it, I suspect that I didn’t understand it very well. Now I want to go back to it, because it seems that it was a very interesting work that would reward in-depth reading with the knowledge of Ancient Egyptian religion that I now have.

The other essay that really leapt out at me is the one by Giovanni Carmine Costabile about the video game, Final Fantasy X. I know nothing about that series of games, nor did I know anything about the French philosopher, René Girard, until I read Costabile’s essay. Now I’m intrigued about how much thought video game writers can put into their work.

The one thing that is missing from the book is an examination of Earthseed, the religion that Octavia Butler created for her Parable books. That was the first thing that occurred to me to write when I saw the call for papers, but I then thought that I should leave that to a person of colour to write. Eugen Bacon, whom I thought might write it, has an essay in the book, but she has chosen a different topic. As no one else stepped forward, we have gone without. Hopefully someone will write that essay for another venue at some point, because it needs writing.

My own contribution to the book is about queer gods. To whet your appetites, here’s the abstract:

In modern Western society, we tend to assume that religion is the enemy of the LGBTQ+ community. Some religious people certainly give us plenty of ground for thinking that. Outside the Abrahamic religions, however, attitudes towards queer people could be very different. Some gods were decidedly queer. Also the history of the Abrahamic religions is nowhere near as heteronormative and cisnormative as some modern church leaders would like to make out.

This paper will look at queer gods from history and their provenances. It will look at how the gender of god/s is understood. It will also argue that for much of human history, religious cults were one of the main safe spaces for queer people.

book cover
Title: Follow Me: Religion in Fantasy & Science Fiction
By: Francesca T Barbini (ed.)
Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Glorious Angels

054, Book Review, Justina Robson

This book came out in the UK in 2015. It being science fiction by a woman (and having a fair amount of sex in it), it did not get the promotion it deserved. Now, at last, there is a US edition, thanks to Book View Cafe, and there is a promise of the long-awaited sequel. So I am re-printing my review in the hope that the book will get more attention this time around.

Reading Justina Robson can be a bit like reading Gene Wolfe: you get to the end and you realize that the author is much smarter than you are, and that you need to go back and re-read the book to find all of the things you have missed. I don’t really have time for that, and anyway there’s plenty enough to enjoy in a single reading, so here I go with my imperfect understanding of Glorious Angels.

Let’s start with the setting, because that’s easy. There is a planet, there is an empire of some sort, and it appears to be aging and decrepit. Certainly there is an awful lot of technology that is indistinguishable from magic. There may also be magic, who can tell?

The action is centered on the city state of Glimshard, ruled over by the Empress Yaphantine Shamuit Torada. Here is a description of the city:

Over its high top they were able to see most of the capital’s sprawling hillsides climbing steadily towards the clustered citadels of the Terrace. From the Terrace’s heart a thick trunk of what appeared to be many fine crystal stems drew a straight line upward in shining facets of rose and turquoise. Ever-undulating internal lights seemed faint in this hot afternoon of glare and dust, the outer veils of this stem flickering and unreliable in auroras of changing hue. The Gleaming, its heavy flowerhead, was mostly lost in hazy cloud but occasional spires and towers of the Arrays far above them caught the light and glinted down.

Yes, it is probably in part a nod to the city of Sky in NK Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. But it is much more than that. Don’t forget that description of the city, because it will mean something later in the book.

The Empire is comprised of eight city states. Each city is ruled over by an Empress. The eight are telepathically linked. That does not mean that they all get on. The other Empresses look down upon Torada, mainly because she is just a teenager, but also because she prefers to rule by being loved than by being feared.

Loving Torada is not hard. She has pheromones that can win over all but the most steely-minded citizen. Provided, of course, that she can get close enough to exert her influence.

The central character of the book is Tralane Huntingore, Professor of Engineering at the Glimshard Academy of Sciences. Tralane has no real idea why the various machines she works with operate. Disciplines such as physics are but hazy memories. But she is a genius at getting things to work. She is also a single mother with two teenage daughters who have just arrived at that annoying age where any man you might hope to date is likely to be more interested in your daughters than he is in you. Not that this bothers Tralane too much. She’s much happier in oily overalls taking strange machines apart than in a ballgown. And anyway, she’s a powerful noblewoman; if she wants a man, she can have one.

Yes, this is a world in which women rule. Don’t ask why, they just do. I mean, why shouldn’t they? There has been no global catastrophe to do away with patriarchy. There never was patriarchy. At least not in living memory. Equally this is not some radical lesbian feminist utopia. Torada, who rules by love, is happy for her citizens to find it where they may. The city’s language has more words for genders than Justina can easily translate into English. Sex is central to the rose-like city, and men are a key part of that equation.

Nevertheless, a city cannot run on sex alone. Mastery over ancient technology is key to prosperity. Archaeologists from Glimshard have discovered a significant deposit in the far south. Few people in the city, not even Tralane, have much idea what it is, but everyone knows that it must be hugely valuable because so much money and manpower is being poured into securing it. The trouble is that the Fragment, as it is known, is too big to move, and is located in the forest lands of the Karoo.

The Karoo are ignorant primitives with no grasp of technology.

The Karoo are bioplastic and telepathic. They are far closer to nature than mere humans could ever hope to be.

The Karoo, once you get to know them, are fucking terrifying.

The people of Glimshard do not know that. Which is why, when a lone Karoo male arrives in the city and volunteers to serve as a mercenary in the city’s army, most of the women of the city can’t wait to get a glimpse of him. General Borze and his aide, Parillus, having provided us earlier with our view of the city, take in the newcomer.

Head and shoulders taller than any Empire man with a muscular physique that was spare and clear-cut, he looked like a stone sculpture of some legendary fighter. That was where the extent of his resemblance to men of the Empire ended however. He was blue-grey and white, and colours marbled darkly on his back and on the backs of his arms, light on his front and undersides. He was also as thickly maned as Parillus’s horse, with silvery-white hair that surged not only off his head in great hanks but from his neck and along the length of his spine too, disappearing under his belt in finger-length tufts. To either side of this, tiger stripes of intense sunburnt orange spread out around his ribs and waist, feathered the edges of his neck and emerged either side of his head in triangular ears, their thickly furred points tipped with lynxlike purple feather hair that flicked whenever the ears turned — something they did independently of each other in a way Borze found disturbing.

Phwoah!

Trust me here: I have only skimmed the surface of this book. Most of what I have given you above is set-up in the first few chapters. Actually I have left out the first chapter entirely as I want you to enjoy reading it as it was intended. There is so much more: about Glimshard and Torada; about Tralane’s daughters; about the Karoo; and about the Fragment. Never forget, also, that Justina has a philosophy degree. That fact will crop up and surprise you when you least expect it.

It is possible, of course, that this book is not for the faint-hearted. Certainly it is not for the dudebros, who will be utterly squicked out by all that sex and matriarchy and stuff. It may also squick out younger women who think the idea of a mother of teenage girls having sex is just, ewwww, gross! Suck it up, kids, you’ll be in our position eventually. Finally, of course, there is thought required. You can read and enjoy Glorious Angels on a skim through, but you will get so much more out of it from thinking hard about what you are reading.

book cover
Title: Glorious Angels
By: Justina Robson
Publisher: Gollancz/Book View Cafe
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Where the Drowned Girls Go

054, Book Review, Seanan McGuire

Keeping a series going is a skill. Not all writers have it. Juliet McKenna has certainly got the knack as she keeps churning out Green Man books for me. Seanan McGuire, however, is a queen of series writing. Where the Drowned Girls Go is the seventh novella in the Wayward Children series, but that’s nothing; the October Daye series is already up to 15 full novels. I don’t know how she does it.

The other thing about a series is that you have choices to make about how stand-alone each book is, and how much character development you put it. Personally (and with a great deal of publisher bias) I think that McKenna has got that about right. Where the Drowned Girls Go is much more tied in to previous books in the series.

The book’s main protagonist is Cora, the mermaid girl, but it also features Sumi from Beneath the Sugar Sky, and Regan from Across the Green Grass Fields. What’s more there is a developing plot. If Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children is in some ways modelled on Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters (and McGuire is a massive X-Men fan), then there must be a Magneto to oppose it. That comes in the form of the Whitethorn Institute, a strict and brutal place that promises to teach wayward children to forget their lives in magical realms and become ordinary, boring members of the mundane world.

Cora, thanks to her adventures on The Moors in Come Tumbling Down, has been haunted by beings called The Drowned Gods. Although The Moors are not the world in which Cora became a mermaid, they are very watery. The Drowned Gods, who are blessed with far too many teeth and tentacles, have seen a fellow water-spirit in Cora and are determined to have her. Being unable to shake them off, Cora takes a desperate step and asks Miss West for a transfer to Whitethorn. Maybe there she can learn to forget.

The point of this is to allow McGuire to explore Whitethorn from the inside, but rather more importantly it explores the sort of place that children might get sent if they are deemed too different by their parents. I was struck by this passage:

“… because we’re still legally children, our parents get to decide what’s true for us. They get to say they want their ‘real’ kids back, the ones they wanted, and not the ones they ended up with.”

This reminds me very much of the sort of thing that is said about trans kids. Parents who believe in made-up psychiatric conditions such as “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” believe that their ‘real’ kids have somehow been brainwashed into being trans, and that this can be reversed if sufficient cruelty is applied to the problem.

Of course the same is true of many other aspects of childhood. Parents have expectations for their children, and those expectations are not always fulfilled. The above quote could easily be about a kid who has decided she wants to study astronomy, or to play tennis, when her parents have their hearts set on her becoming a lawyer. Whitethorn is a place that stamps out individuality and enforces social norms. Magneto was fighting for mutant rights, just as Xavier was, but in a very different way. Whitethorn is far more evil. An X-Men equivalent to Whitethorn would try to cure the pupils of being mutants.

All this is well and good, but this is also Hugo reading. I enjoyed the book, as I enjoy all of the Wayward Children series. However, the Novella category is fiercely competitive these days so my vote might go elsewhere. Truly, we are living in a golden age of novellas.

book cover
Title: Where the Drowned Girls Go
By: Seanan McGuire
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

What Moves the Dead

054, Book Review, T Kingfisher

My Hugo reading has suffered from my extreme busyness this month, but I have managed to get through the novellas. Even that has its challenges though. Read on.

What Moves the Dead by T Kingfisher starts off in a very intriguing manner. First up there is a guest appearance by a thinly disguised version of Beatrix Potter, who was an expert mycologist as well as a famous writer and illustrator of books for children.

It quickly becomes obvious that we are in a story inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”, because Roderick and Madeline Usher, and their tumbledown mansion, are key characters in the story.

Poe’s narrator is anonymous, but Kingfisher’s is not. Easton is a former cavalry officer who has known the Ushers since childhood and who was Roderick’s commanding officer in a recent war. Easton is also a “sworn soldier”, a version of the Albanian sworn virgin whereby people assigned female at birth can sign up for the army. As ka (the correct pronoun in Easton’s language) explains, people do this for many reasons, but one of those is to be accepted as neither male nor female, but a soldier.

All in all, it is a great set-up, and I wanted to know what Kingfisher does with this. But there the ePub version made available in the Hugo Packet ends, with a plea to buy the full book. Suffice it to say that I was not happy.

Then I had an idea. The Hugo Packet generally contains more than one format of each work. I checked, and there was a PDF of this one. What’s more, it was complete. It had some formatting errors, as PDFs sent out by publishers often do, but it was readable. This is a very strange thing for a publisher to have done. I hope for Kingfisher’s sake that other voters did not give up in annoyance on finding the ePub truncated.

Anyway, onwards with the book. Kingfisher is known for her interest in biology, and I guess the best way to describe this book is that it is a horror story with a science-fictional underpinning. Knowing a bit about fungi myself, and knowing what to expect of the Ushers’ fate, I could see the plot a mile off. It is an interesting re-working of the story, but not exactly revolutionary.

One thing that did bug me is that the presence of Miss Potter in the area is a rather too convenient coincidence. Then again, the character does allow Kingfisher to rail against 19th Century misogyny and to have a joke at the expense of her own people. Potter has complained before about her expertise in mycology not being respected by the men in the field. Then we get this:

“There is an American,” she said, pronouncing the word with distaste, “who claims to have seen gilled mushrooms in a river in their far west. But his report is unsubstantiated by any reputable observer.”

It must have been terribly galling to be barred from an organization merely because one lacked the proper genitals, when disreputable Americans were allowed to join and write about underwater mushrooms.

I confess to having giggled a bit at that.

Easton, of course, is able to make observations like this because ka would be seen as not having the proper genitals to join the British army.

Overall this was a nicely written and entertaining story with an interesting scientific underpinning. That’s good, but not enough to make it a Hugo winner. It certainly isn’t the best horror story about fungi around at the moment. Kingfisher admits in her Author’s Note that, while working on the story, she read Sylvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and “shoved the whole thing in a virtual drawer and took heavily to the bottle.” I would have done the same in her position, because Mexican Gothic is brilliant. Of course she eventually finished it, because this is her fungi story, not Moreno-Garcia’s, and because authors need to eat. However, I can’t help but think that if this story had been submitted by someone with less than Kingfisher’s stellar reputation, it would have been dismissed as derivative. Publishing can be a cruel business.

book cover
Title: What Moves the Dead
By: T Kingfisher
Publisher: Titan
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

FantasyCon

054, Convention Report

FantasyCon was somewhat different for me this year. As I no longer have a car I can use to get books to conventions, I did not have a dealer table. I’ll be renting a car for BristolCon, because I’m doing a launch for the new Juliet McKenna book there, but I’m not sure how much dealer presence I will have at conventions in the future.

I did, however, have two panels. One was on seeing yourself in books as a member of a minority group. I think we all agreed that things have got a lot better since we were kids. Indeed, I found myself nodding along with Omar Kooheji when he said that there used to be hardly any Arabic writers of SF&F, and now he can’t keep up. I have exactly the same problem with trans writers. But there is still room for improvement. Big publishers still tend to see minority status as a marketing gimmick. Also it is hard to make a minority character a villain, if only because you are likely to be jumped on by well-meaning but clueless people on social media who think this must mean you are a bigot.

Still on the subject of that panel, Chris McCartney, who was one of my colleagues, is part of the triumvirate that has recently launched Bona Books, a specialist queer SF&F imprint based in London. This is a very good thing to have in the world.

My other panel was about building author websites. This one went well too, but could easily have gone on another two hours. There was a huge amount to talk about, and we only scratched the surface of the material we needed to cover. The audience seemed grateful to benefit from our advice, so I hope that future conventions will take this on board and run similar panels, perhaps with a slightly narrower remit so that things can be covered in appropriate depth.

There was a dealers’ room, and I bought lots of books. There were also many launches, most significantly one for the posthumous collection of work by Maureen Kincaid Speller, which I am looking forward to reading.

The Leonardo (formerly Jury’s Inn) on Broad Street in Birmingham has good points and bad points. It is very near New Street station, and there are plenty of places to eat nearby. Also the tram network seems to be mostly built by now, so there is far less construction going on. The trams even seem to be working. Or at least they are as long as some stupid copper doesn’t park his van right on the tram lines and go off and leave it. There was plenty of room on the pavement. I hope he got a good chewing out from his bosses.

However, the function space is quite cramped, and social spaces are limited. Being conscious that COVID infection rates are soaring, and having not yet had my autumn booster, I was wearing a mask most of the time. I was one of the few people who was. I haven’t heard of an Eastercon-like superspreader event but, like Eastercon, the COVID policy at Fantasycon seemed to be to not have one.

Because of that, and because of a particularly unpleasant incident that I don’t want to talk about publicly until I’ve had a chance to talk to the con committee, I spent very little time at the con once I’d done my panels. There was a lot of good rugby on the TV and I was happy to stay in my hotel room and watch it.

Babylon 5: The Road Home

054, Movie Review

Well there’s a blast from the past. After all this time, who would have thought we’d get a new Babylon 5 story. Also, is it still good?

The first thing that is important to note here is that everyone who was involved in making Babylon 5 is much older now. Quite a few of them, including Andreas Katsulas and Jerry Doyle, are no longer with us. So doing live action clearly wasn’t an option. Animation allows the characters to be presented more or less as we remember them, and that seemed to work. By that I mean that they were recognizable and familiar. Well, they were except for Dr. Franklin, which worried me a little as he’s also the only Black character in the cast. But it may also have been because when we first meet him he is much older.

Obviously some of the characters had to be voiced by new actors. That too seemed to go well and, judging by the extras on the disk, the people hired to play those roles took the responsibility very seriously.

Other characters were played by the original cast. Londo was his usual disreputable self, and Ivanova was magnificent as always. Pretty much all of the main cast were involved, though Vir was notably absent. That’s a shame because he was a great character. My assumption is that they could not find someone to stand in for Stephen Furst who embodied the character well enough.

As to the plot, shortly after the end of the Shadow War, President Sheridan and Delenn are on Mimbar for an official visit. Sheridan is asked to officiate at the opening of a new, experimental power station. But the plant uses a lot of tachyons and Sheridan becomes unstuck in time and space. (The explanation for why this happens is in the original series.) As the title suggests, he then has to find his way home.

Who is best suited to help him with this? Why Zathras, of course. But nobody listen to Zathras, so…

Of course it all comes right in the end. My overall impression is that this was an exercise in nostalgia, much like the final series of Picard. The cast seem to have been as grateful for the opportunity as fans will no doubt be. But it is also a proof of concept. Straczynski can still turn in a decent script, and the animation concept works. All it needs now is sales, and we can presumably get more Babylon 5 stories, which would be a rather lovely thing.

The Pleasure of Drowning

054, Book Review, Jean Bürlesk

In his blurb for this book, Peadar Ó Guilín describes Jean Bürlesk as, “a scoundrel and a charlatan.” He should perhaps have added that Bürlesk is a charming scoundrel and charlatan. He is also a professional tour guide, and thus used to telling stories. He has something of the gift of the gab, which is perhaps why an Irishman admires him so. Anyway, Bürlesk presented me with a copy of this book while we were in Uppsala for the Eurocon. He said he hopes to lure me to his mysterious homeland of Luxembourg, doubtless for nefarious purposes, though he insists that it is only for a convention.

The Pleasure of Drowning is a very short book. It contains a number of even shorter stories, and one poem. These pieces of writing are mostly variations on classic fairy tales. Sometimes they are very odd variations. Bürlesk clearly has a deeply warped imagination, and his fiction is all the better for it.

I can’t really tell you much about the stories, because merely doing so would reveal the bizarre twists that Bürlesk has imposed upon them. Suffice it to say that you will meet the likes of Cinderella, Snow White and Beauty in guises that you might not expect. You will also meet Melusina, the serpent-woman whose legend is bound up with the history of the city of Luxembourg. They are all quick reads. Just the thing for when you have a few minutes spare and want to read something short and superficially pleasant that will have you thinking, “he’s done WHAT!” by the end.

book cover
Title: The Pleasure of Drowning
By: Jean Bürlesk
Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Titans: Season 4

054, TV Review

DC’s attempts at doing television and movies are notoriously bad. I did like the Supergirl TV series, but I couldn’t motivate myself to watch much of the other series in that group. The only movies I’ve really liked are Wonder Woman (the first one), and Aquaman (for the giant war crabs, obviously). But there is a second group of DC shows that appear to exist in an entirely different part of the DC multiverse (and the various Superman shows may be a third reality). This group comprises Titans and Doom Patrol, and I quite like them. They are somewhat darker than the Arrowverse shows, and perhaps that makes them less silly.

Both shows have had their final seasons. DC apparently made the decision to cancel them even before they announced that James Gunn was being brought onboard to try to bring some sense and order to the DCU. I’m way behind on Doom Patrol, but I am caught up on Titans.

Season 4 opens with a bang: Lex Luthor is murdered. That’s a fairly bold statement, and one that clearly separates these shows from the Arrowverse and anything Superman-related. I’m not sure that Lex would be quite that easily taken in, but I applaud the concept.

The plotline for the season once again revolves around Rachel’s demon father, Trigon. The Titans might have defeated him, but he still has a cadre of fanatical devotees on Earth who are desperate to bring him back. Obviously this involves Kory as well, as she was originally sent to Earth from her homeworld in order to kill Rachel and thereby prevent Trigon from gaining power.

As plots go it is pretty thin, and parts of the resolution seem to happen much too easily. But along the way some great things happen.

To start with. Kory has some totally kick-ass costumes. Whoever was in charge of costume design did a magnificent job for her.

There is also character development. Let’s start with Connor. This version of Superboy was created by Lex using both his own genes and those of Superman. Connor is therefore a man with two fathers, who happen to hate each other. This is not good for his mental health, and in this season he tries to deal with being part-Lex, with some pretty awful consequences.

Next up is Tim Drake, who is keen to become the new Robin now that Jason Todd has made such a mess of his life. Obviously he needs training so there’s growth happening there. But in addition he gets to be canonically gay, having a relationship with a STAR Labs scientist called Bernard who is adorably geeky.

Garfield Logan gets to find out a whole lot about his past and his role in the world as Beast Boy. He’s so much more than a kid who can turn into green animals. In the process he learns some awful truths about Niles Caulder, and there’s a cross-over episode with Doom Patrol.

This season also introduces Jinx, who in this reality is a kind of cheeky, female version of John Constantine. She and John clearly know each other, and are friends in that limited way that either of them can be friendly with anyone. Lisa Ambalavanar absolutely steals the show in the role, and I’m very sad that there won’t be another season because I’d love to see more of her.

Dick, Kory and Rachel have less development to do, which is partly because Kory and Rachel are so heavily involved in the whole Trigon thing. Dick just needs to find peace, and to somehow be happy as himself rather than as the kid whose life was turned upside down by Bruce Wayne. Now that the show has ended, perhaps he will get that.

Editorial – September 2023

054, Editorial

After all of the reading I got done last month, this month has been a bit of a disaster. That’s partly because I have had a lot of work come in, and partly because I unexpectedly ended up on an award jury and can’t review books I’m reading for that. So this month is mainly short fiction, plus one academic book and one novel review reprinted from 2015. Thankfully I had two media reviews held over from last issue, so this one isn’t too thin.

In view of this I’m very grateful to Raz Greenberg for sending me his long and thoughtful piece about the television director, Rudolph Cartier, who amonsgt other things was responsible for the legendary Quatermass series. As I remarked to Raz when the article came in, my dad was huge fan of Quatermass, but I was too young to be allowed to watch.

Something else that has been occupying my time this month is getting The Green Man’s Quarry ready for publication. That’s due on October 21st, but there will be a book launch at BristolCon the previous Friday evening. I hope to see some of you there. In the meantime, pre-orders are open, and you can find links to sale pages I know about here. Note that includes reserving a copy for pick-up at BristolCon, and ordering a signed copy to be mailed to you after the con, both at the special, convention rate.

Finally I should note that Wizard’s Tower is starting a newsletter. The first issue will come out on October 11th and you can sign up here.

Issue #53

Issues

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


Cover: Ion Trails

053, Art, Frank Wu

This issue’s cover reproduces the art that Frank Wu made for the cover of Ion Trails, the in-flight magazine of the starship WSFS Armadillo. If you have no idea what that is all about, read the article on the Glasgow Worldcon site that appears in this issue.

The unadulterated art is below.


Some Desperate Glory

053, Book Review, Emily Tesh

The two novellas that Emily Tesh has out are fantasy. Her debut novel is space opera. Of course, depending on your view of such things, that might class as fantasy too, but it is certainly a very different thing. I was intrigued.

In some ways Some Desperate Glory reminds me of Suzy McKee Charnas’s Holdfast, because we start our tale in a patriarchal enclave that sees itself very much under siege. However, Gaea Station does not exist past the end of the world, only the end of Earth.

Let me unpack that. Holdfast is set in a post-nuclear-apocalypse world. While other worlds and other civilisations doubtless exist, no one on Earth knows or cares about that. Some Desperate Glory is set after a galactic war which ended with the destruction of Earth. Those few humans who are left have dedicated themselves to building up their military capability so that they can get revenge.

Except it soon becomes obvious that these are Not Nice People. Indeed, the central character, Kyr (shorty for Valkyr), is particularly obnoxious. She’s what passes for nobility on Gaea. She’s top of her cohort in everything military-related, and quite probably better than all of the boys except for her brother, Magnus. They are the pride of Gaea’s eugenics breeding program. And Kyr has swallowed the Gaea philosophy hook, line and sinker. It is no wonder that the other girls in her cohort hate her.

Meanwhile it is also becoming obvious that the enemy is not as bad as the folks on Gaea make out. They seem to be some sort of galactic technocracy ruled over by a benevolent AI called Wisdom who just wants all living beings to have happy and fulfilling lives. You start to wonder why they destroyed the Earth, and if they had been left with no choice.

And then, about half way through the book, Tesh pulls the rug out from under the expected narrative and goes off in a completely different direction. I love it when authors do that.

I can’t tell you much about the rest of the book because that would be way too spoilery. I can say that there is some interesting character development, and quite a bit of gay stuff. Also the abilities of Wisdom are such that this will tip the book over into fantasy for some readers. But hey, who cares about genre boundaries?

The usual suspects are not going to like this book much. In addition to the gay stuff, one of the major characters is black, and a lot of major characters are women. The main alien character doesn’t have gender. More than all of this, however, the book has definite Brexit vibes, except rather than being about British exceptionalism it is about human exceptionalism. The desire to stay out of a progressive civilization to preserve Patriarchy is the same. To her credit, Tesh has the galactic civilization have problems too.

I want to end with a slightly extended quote because it is a good example of the sort of character growth that Kyr goes through in the book. The other character is Cleo, the black girl who is the only one of Kyr’s cohort who comes close to matching her, and is actually a better shot.

Then she thought of something else. “But you shot at me,” she said. “When I was running away, in the Victrix hanger. You shot at me and missed.”

Cleo folded her arms and gave her a pointed look.

“…Oh,” Kyr said. “Right. Thank you.”

“You want to know something? You are the first person to ask me that question,” Cleo said. “They sat me down and interrogated me after you’d gone. Every single decision I made. They did not want to lose you and they wanted someone to blame. But you know what? No one said, Hey, Cleopatra, how come you missed that shot. I thought they would. They had my training scores and range records any time they wanted to check. But not once did it occur to those sons of bitches that I was better than that.”

Feminist fist bump!

book cover
Title: Some Desperate Glory
By: Emily Tesh
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Barbie

053, Movie Review

Why yes, of course Barbie belongs here. It is about someone who travels from an imaginary world to the real world. How much more fantasy can you get?

So yes, in Greta Gerwig’s film, Barbie, a doll, ably assisted (or not) by her loyal boyfriend, Ken, travels to the real world to try to solve a problem that is making Barbieland less than perfect. Barbieland is, of course, that ideal world of the imagination in which all Barbie dolls (and Kens) exist. No one has to climb stairs, because a little girl can just pick you up and put you where you need to be. No one eats or drinks, though their homes are full of boxes, bottles and crockery. And, most importantly, no one has any genitals.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well, the primary source of discontent seems to be that a girl in the real world is having sad thoughts playing with her Barbie. This is bad, because it is Barbie’s job to make little girls happy. And because of this, things are starting to go wrong in Barbieland. Our heroine has discovered that her feet have gone flat, and therefore no longer fit perfectly and painlessly into high heels. Worse, her pristine plastic skin has started to develop blemishes that look suspiciously like cellulite!

Also, though this will only become an issue later, Ken is sad. Barbie is a doll for girls. In Barbieland, every night is Girls’ Night. While Ken sees himself as a fine figure of a man who might stand a chance with a girl as perfect as Barbie, she only sees him as a pleasant accessory. Ken is starting to grow up, and Barbie is still a girl.

At this point I should note that Barbieland is full of Barbies. Our heroine, played by Margot Robbie, is Stereotypical Barbie, but she has many friends. There’s President Barbie, Physicist Barbie, Famous Author Barbie, Doctor Barbie (played by Hari Ness) and many others. All of them are perfect, and they run Barbieland. There are many Kens too. They have nothing to do except admire the Barbies.

When things start to go wrong, Stereotypical Barbie is sent to see the great sage, Weird Barbie, beautifully embodied by Kate McKinnon. Weird Barbie is not perfect, but she does know a thing or two about getting to the real world. She sends Stereotypical Barbie on her way. Ken (Stereotypical Ken, that is), desperate to get the girl to notice him, tags along. And things go downhill from there.

There are a bunch of additional fine performances. I should have already mentioned the wonderfully sarcastic narration provided by Helen Mirren. Will Ferrell does a fine job as the CEO of Mattel. Simu Liu (previously famous as Shang Chi) out-dazzles Ryan Gosling as a rival Ken. Ncuti Gatwa has a Ken role as well, and as he’s now Doctor Who the possibilities for fanfic are endless. I was particularly pleased to see a staring role for America Ferrera that does not require her to be ugly. Indeed, as she (Gloria) and her daughter (Sasha) get to travel to Barbieland, they get to spend part of the film being impossibly gorgeous, because every woman in Barbieland is impossibly gorgeous (except Weird Barbie).

The film is very funny, or at least it is if you are female. Many of the jokes are at the expense of men and their obsessions. The Zack Snyder joke, in particular, will never cease to be hilarious to me.

Saying any more about the film would require serious spoilers and feminist critique. That will come, but before I need to scare away those of you who haven’t seen the film yet, I have one small complaint.

At the start of the film there is this brilliant 2001 pastiche in which we are told that, from the dawn of time, all dolls were babies intended to teach little girls the joys of motherhood. This supposedly changed when Barbie arrived. Reader, this is so not true.

The first known doll-like figures are neolithic and we don’t know a lot about them as they were mostly organic and don’t survive well. There are doll-like figures from ancient Egypt, but they are basically just a shaped piece of wood with hair attached and it is hard to know what they were for. By the time of Classical Greece, however, little girls absolutely had articulated, humanoid female figures to play with. And reader, they were not babies. Let me introduce you to Warrior Princess Barbie.

Photo credit: Adrienne Mayor; the doll is from the 5th Century BCE and is currently in the Louvre.

Yes, girls from Classical Athens got to play with Amazon Warrior dolls. How wonderful is that? The whole baby thing didn’t start until around the middle of the 19th Century. It wasn’t actually the Victorians who were responsible, but rather their cousins in Germany and France. But of course the idea that little girls should play with toys that would equip them with the skills to become little wives quicky became popular in Britain and America too. Thank goodness we have mostly escaped from that.

And now…

********************************SPOILER ALERT!!!**************************************

I really recommend that you see this film unspoiled, but if you have seen it, or are unlikely to see it, read on.

When she arrives in the real world, Barbie discovers that the lot of women there is far from the perfection of Barbieland. Ken, meanwhile, discovers a concept called Patriarchy, and he rushes back to Barbieland to implement it there. Barbie has a lot of running away from Mattel goons to do. When she is finally rescued by Gloria and Sasha, and makes her way home, it is too late. Barbieland has become Kendom, and most of the Barbies have become simpering, brainless tarts who exist only to serve and adore their Kens. It is all very Joanna Russ.

Naturally there has to be a revolution. Weird Barbie is a key part of it as she’s not the sort of Barbie any Ken would want. Gloria is also able to help by explaining to the Barbies what life is like for women in the real world. But there is another character who is part of the revolution: Allan.

In Barbie mythology, Allan is Ken’s best friend. However (Grease allegory coming up), while Barbie and Ken are the perpetual Sandy and Danny of Barbieland, Allan is more like the guy Danny tried to pretend to be after seeing what Sandy was like in school. This isn’t in the film, but in Barbie history Allan married Barbie’s friend Midge, and they have a son in addition to Midge’s pregnant bump. Ken sees himself as an alpha male, whereas Allan is way down the pecking order. So far down that he succumbs to the dangers of matrimony. Russ would have had him as one of the Half-Changed.

In the film, Allan is played for laughs. I think this is sad, because Allan is basically an actual nice guy. He sees the Barbies as people. He respects them. And he knows full well that Patriarchy will be as much of a disaster for him as for them.

As I hinted earlier, much of the problem of Barbieland is that Ken sees himself as a man whereas Barbie still sees herself as a girl, albeit a woman-shaped one. Part of the message of the film seems to be that Barbie needs to grow up. I think that’s valid. It is all very well little girls being given positive role models, but unless they learn to cope with the real world (and the Patriarchy that infests it) they are not going to realise their dreams. Inevitably, learning to cope with it means learning to manage relationships with men.

And I do mean with men here, because Barbie is a very straight film. There is no Lesbian Barbie, and the perpetual Girls’ Night is just a slumber party. (There was once an Abby Wambach Barbie, but you couldn’t buy her.) The Kens might all look like refugees from the Village People, but they have only one thing on their minds, and that is Barbies. (They can’t think about their dicks because they don’t have any.)

However, while Barbie is very straight, it is not at all cis. One of the most talked about parts of the film is the end sequence where Barbie, having become human, visits a gynecologist, presumably to get herself a vagina. There are, of course, other explanations for this. When she became human I don’t see why her anatomy shouldn’t have followed suit. It is entirely possible that her visit to the doctor is about a pregnancy. But, given the jokes about her lack of genitals, her need to get a vagina seems a highly likely explanation. It also makes the ending one of pure transfeminine joy, seeing someone who desperately wants female genitals finally being on the brink of getting them.

The anti-trans lobby, of course, is also keen to see the trans-related ending, because it gives them an excuse to be outraged. They live for outrage.

The montage of (female) human life that Barbie sees before making the decision to become human is much more gender-essentialist, being basically all about family and raising children. It shouldn’t need to be pointed out that this is not the inevitable lot of human females, and that no one should be forced into it. However, our Barbie is a sovereign individual, and if that’s what attracts her to life as a human we shouldn’t criticize her for it. It is one of the things that is least available to her in Barbieland, after all. (There can be only one Pregnant Barbie, and Midge has that role.)

To my mind, however, the most trans part of the film occurs much earlier when Gloria is making her big speech about the lot of women. Towards the end she says this:

“And it turns out, in fact, that not only are you doing everything WRONG, but also, everything that happens is YOUR FAULT.”

I’d been nodding along with her throughout, because you can’t live as a woman in this world for 26 years (which I have) without getting a very good idea of the lot of womankind. That final line really hit home, because it is absolutely the lot of trans women. Everything we do we are told is wrong, and apparently all of the bad things in the world, specifically the bad things that are done by cis men, are our fault.

This, I think, explains a lot of the attraction of the anti-trans movement to a certain type of cis woman. They get to treat trans women the way that cis men treat them. It is a classic bullying victim reaction: if you can’t stand up to the bully, then you find someone even less fortunate than yourself and bully them in turn. And this is why it is pointless to use reason with transphobes. They know the things they are accusing us of aren’t true. They know that what they are doing causes hurt and distress. That’s the whole point. You don’t stop someone being a bully by telling them that being a bully is cruel, because being cruel is precisely what they want to do.

Barbie, thankfully, sees being cruel as bad. She’s as much on the side of trans girls as she is on the side of cis girls. Good for her. And you know, Barbie has come to the real world without Ken. He didn’t want to be human, and she decided that she didn’t need him. Maybe we’ve finally got a Lesbian Barbie after all.

The Coral Bones

053, Book Review, E J Swift

This is a book that has been getting a lot of good press in the UK of late, not least because it was a finalist for this year’s Clarke Award. It didn’t win, but it was highly fancied and I can see why.

The Coral Bones is a tale of three women from different times in Earth’s history, each of whom has a special relationship with the Great Barrier Reef. Judith is the daughter of a 19th Century English sea captain and is desperate to study the natural world, just like the famous Mr. Darwin. Hana is a Japanese-Australia scientist from the present day, studying the dying reef. And Telma is a descendant of refugees in a near future Australia where most forms of animal life except humans are functionally extinct.

I don’t know what E J Swift’s personal connection with Australia is, but speaking as someone who lived there for two years and who has swum on the reef a couple of times, she seems to know her stuff. Reading the book certainly made me homesick for Melbourne, and Cairns though I’ve barely spent more than a week there.

Adam Roberts’ cover blurb says that the book is “Beautifully written,” and I most definitely agree. Quite why this book ended up with the now sadly defunct Unsung Stories rather than with a mainstream publisher is a mystery to me. I’m particular in awe of how Swift managed the voice of Judith, because 19th Century folks do write very differently from us. She even had the little list of topics at the start of each chapter.

Judith was my favourite character for other reasons too. Hers is a very feminist narrative, and manages to be so despite the fact that she’s very privileged and treats her maid very badly. Judith loves Australia and its wildlife, whereas most of the British see it as a primitive backwater there to be exploited. She persuades her father to let her accompany him on a scientific expedition to the Reef. Poor Belinda gets dragged along as a chaperone. Judith gets to do actual science, despite the best efforts of a bunch of not very bright men.

Hana’s story is something of a murder mystery, in that it begins with a body being discovered with an environmentalist slogan daubed on it. However, if you want that to be the focus of the story you will be disappointed. Hana is in way to much of a depressive funk, partly because the reef that she loves is dying, and partly because she’s just split up with her wife. Parts of the narrative come in the form of a letter Hana is writing to Tess, but this doubles as info dump about their life together and the reasons for their breakup, much of which Tess will actually know. It comes over as quite creepy and obsessive.

Finally we have Telma whose job involves investigating environmental crimes, mostly raising extinct creatures from stored DNA and selling them to wealthy collectors in other countries. Her bosses get wind that a leafy sea dragon (an absolutely wonderful creature) has been spotted in the wild, and she is dispatched to Queensland to investigate. As is a requirement for books of this type, all three narratives will eventually be brought together in some way, and the sea dragon quest is a key part of that. However, Telma’s narrative is as much, if not more, about her inability to come to terms with the death of one of her daughters, who was a firefighter, and her withdrawal from the world as a result.

The quality of the writing and the obvious love of the Reef were the high points for me in this book. Unfortunately there were also a couple of those “you’ve got that wrong” things that tend to throw you out of any science fiction novel. And frankly this book is not intended for the likes of me. It is written to appeal to a literary fiction audience.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Heaven knows, the more people who get to worry about the state of the climate the better. And if writing a book that is mostly about three flawed characters and the bad things that they do will get that message to a wider audience then I’m all for it. I, however, already have the message, and what presumably sugar-coats it for other people did pretty much the opposite for me.

book cover
Title: The Coral Bones
By: E J Swift
Publisher: Unsung Stories
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Visiting Spaceport Glasgow

053, Con Running

We are now just under a year away from the next Glasgow Worldcon. A lot of excitement is building up on this side of the Atlantic. However, as is usual for a Worldcon, lots of people are keen to know more about the location. Obviously we had a Worldcon in Glasgow in 2005, but a lot can change in 18 years, and some of our 2024 members would not have been born then. As I had been asked to give a talk at the University of Glasgow this month, I took the opportunity to scout out the site and take a few pictures.

The first thing to note is that you may be able to save money by staying away from what is now called the SEC (Scottish Event Campus). In 1995 I stayed in student accommodation on the other side of the city. It was possible to get to the convention and back fairly easily, though I did have a car. If you are somewhere in the city centre, you will probably want to travel by train.

The University put me up in the ABode, which is about 10 minutes walk from Glasgow Central. Queen Street is closer, it Central is where you catch the train to the SEC. The hotel isn’t hugely accessible, but if you have accessibility issues you’ll probably want to be on the campus anyway. It is a lot cheaper than the big hotel chains, though if you are collecting points there’s a Hampton Inn right next door.



A feature of the ABode is this splendid cage elevator. The building itself is lovely too.



There are loads of restaurants in the vicinity, and the hotel does a fine Scottish Breakfast. The smoked salmon and scrambled egg on sourdough toast is very good too.



The hotel serves milk in these cute little milk churns.



Glasgow Central is huge, and finding the train to the SEC can be challenging. As you look at the platforms, you want to head as far to the right as possible, and look for the stairs/escalators down to platforms 16 and 17. Trains are cheap and very regular, and it is only two stops. Despite just missing one train, I still made it from the hotel to Exhibition Centre station in half an hour.

Scot Rail has signage in both English and Scottish Gaelic. Sadly there are no signs in Scots, the English-like language mostly spoken in Lowland Scotland. If they had them, visitors would find it much easier to understand the locals. The Scots for Glasgow is Glesgae.



The station is about a 5 minute walk from the station to the SEC. It is mostly covered, but just to make sure you get the full Scottish rain experience it stops just short of both station and exhibition halls. You can see the end of the covered walkway to the right of the picture below.



The bulk of the convention will take place in the main SEC halls. However, in 2005 the Events Division were given the Armadillo in which to play. This is a large, purpose-built auditorium which is exactly the sort of space that things like the Hugo Ceremony and Masquerade need. In 2024 I believe that all programming will take place in either the SEC or the Crowne Plaza hotel, but Kevin and I ran Events for 2005 and I couldn’t resist going to see the old place.



In keeping with the convention’s theme of Spaceport Glasgow, we made the Armadillo an interstellar cruise liner operated by White Star Federated Spacelines (WSFS) with Kevin as the captain and me doing my best Susan Ivanova impression as First Officer. This is why you will sometimes see Kevin wearing a ship’s captain uniform at conventions. The header image for this article is a part of the painting of the spaceport that Jim Burns did for the convention, shpwing the Armadillo taking off. It was great fun. We even put together an in-flight magazine for the ship, and this issue’s cover is the art Frank Wu did for that.

This year there is a new ship in the spaceport: the OVO Hydro. Outer Void Operations is an adventure holiday company that promises to take you where no sentient lifeform has been before. Thanks to its somewhat risky flight plans, the Hydro often has to hire private security. Earlier this year they were using the notorious space pirate, Simon Le Bon, and his Wild Boys gang. However, they seem to have moved on. There is no word as yet as to who you might find aboard the Hydo next August.



Across the car park from the SEC and Armadillo there is a bevy of hotels, and also the giant crane that Iain J Clark has made famous in his art for the convention. Here you can see the Hilton Garden Inn, the Radisson Red, and the Campanile.



Here’s another view with the Radisson, Campanile and the Courtyard by Marriott.



Across the river there is a Premier Inn. Thanks to the footbridge, it is closer to the Crowne Plaza than the hotels above. Of course it may be full of BBC Scotland people.



The Crowne Plaza is tucked away behind the Armadillo.



There are plenty of tourism opportunities, starting with the Glasgow Science Centre which is next to the BBC Scotland building. The odd-coloured lump between them is an IMAX cinema.



Loch Lomond is apparently 20 minutes miles from the Crowne Plaza by bicycle.



Not so far away, and walkable for most people, is the Riverside Museum and a lovely Tall Ship.



But the most exciting new development is this building. You can see the rear of the Armadillo in the background, so you can see how close it is.



And what is that building? It is the Clydeside Whisky Distillery!



Guardians of the Galaxy – Volume 3

053, Movie Review

There’s a theme going around social media these days that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is finished. There are, I think, legitimate reasons for thinking this: major stars wanting out, Jonathan Majors turning out to be an awful human being. But it doesn’t follow that all of the new content will be rubbish. Guardians of the Galaxy 3 has had some pretty terrible reviews. I don’t understand why.

Obviously there is the whole StarLord-Gamora thing. Gamora was murdered by Thanos in the Infinity War sequence, but then came back after the Blip with no memory of what had gone on during that period. Peter Quill is a pain at the best of times, but a lovesick Peter Quill is not a pretty sight.

That apart, the film has a legitimate message. The main villain is the High Evolutionary, who is basically a Marvel version of Doctor Moreau with the identifying marks filed off. That is, he’s a eugenicist. He wants to use the power of evolution to create perfect people to inhabit a perfect world. So he happens to start with species other than humans: so what? It is the same idiot idea.

We find all this out because early on in the story Rocket is seriously injured and the team can’t cure him because of a mysterious device implanted in his body preventing the use of modern surgical techniques. So they have to find the person who uplifted him. Guess who?

The plot revolves around the idea that, far in the past, Rocket was the High Evolutionary’s only success. He’s not just intelligent, he’s super-smart (though he hides that from the team most of the time). Of course, being an arrogant human male, the High Evolutionary didn’t welcome Rocket as a potential colleague. Instead he wanted to take Rocket’s brain apart to see what made him such a good experimental subject.

By the time our heroes get involved, the High Evolutionary has begun experimenting on human children. Naturally they want to rescue the kids. Rocket has to make the point that all of the other species that the High Evolutionary has held captive are victims too, and are just as deserving as rescue. So there’s your moral arc. It might be hedged around with super hero silliness (and the Guardians films are more comedic than most of the MCU), but it is a valid argument and I expect to see academic papers written about it for conferences on animal rights.

This being the third film in the series, things will now change. Jim Gunn has gone off to helm the DC movie universe. Quill has decided to try to grow up (though apparently we will get a whole film of him doing so – sigh). And Mantis, having finally shown how amazingly powerful she is, is also going off to find herself. Drax (obviously) and Nebula (!) decide to look after the rescued children. And we get a new Guardians team led by Rocket.

The team has a number of new members. Kraglin finally manages to master the use of Yondu’s whistle-arrow during the film, so is now much more useful to the team, and with him comes Cosmo the Space Dog. One of the children turns out to be Phyla (Quasar?), though probably not the Phyla-Vell of the comics as she’s not obviously Kree and the Mar-Vell of the film doesn’t appear to have had children. And finally we have Adam Warlock.

As you may recall, Adam was created by the Sovereign as a weapon against the Guardians, but he was hatched out of his cocoon early and is still basically a child, albeit one with enough power to give Carol Danvers a run for her money. This film sees him do a lot of growing up. Despite being 2.5 hours long, it didn’t really have time to do that story justice, which is a shame. So I hope we get to see the new Guardians again at some point so that the character can be explored in more detail.

I did enjoy the bit at the end where the new Guardians were discussing their favourite Earth music. Being a fan of Adrian Belew is so very Adam. If there is an Adam Warlock solo movie it should have an entirely prog rock soundtrack.

There is one further thing to look forward to. Much as I would like to avoid any further mention of Peter Quill, he does, in the comics, for some utterly inexplicable reason, end up in a relationship with Kitty Pride. That brings in the X-Men at last. And possibly even Lockheed.

Even Though I Knew The End

053, Book Review, C L Polk

Somewhat later than usual, it is Hugo reading time. As is generally the case these days, the novella category is the hardest to judge. Normally voting for Nghi Vo would be easy, but the Adrian Tchaikovsky story is great too, and the Alix Harrow is a lot of fun. I have three to read, and this one was first on the list.

I guess a genre definition of Even Though I Knew the End would be something like Gumshoe Lesbian Vampire Hunters meets Good Omens. Helen Brandt is a detective, a sorcerer, and a former member of the Freemasons, er, sorry, Brotherhood of the Compass. She got thrown out of the order because she sold her soul to the Devil in order to save her brother’s life. Such debts are payable in 10 years, and Helen has only a few days left to live. But one of the advantages of being known in Hell is that you attract interesting clientele. Someone in Chicago committing terrible magical crimes, and Helen’s wealthy patron, Marlowe, wants them caught. The payment, if successful, will be the return Helen’s soul.

This will be very timely. Helen hasn’t told her devoutly Catholic girlfriend, Edith, that she has only a few days to live. Edith has just landed a plush job in San Francisco and is making plans for the pair of them to move out West together. So the serial killer known as the White City Vampire has to be caught.

It gets more complicated from there.

This is a fine little story, and one that I am very pleased to see as a Hugo finalist. In addition to the above, C L Polk throws in some of the sort of Christian mythology you used to find in Storm Constantine stories. I can’t say too much more about that without creating dreadful spoilers, but it is nicely done.

What I can say is that possession features in the story, and that this can break the mind of the victim leading to incarceration in a mental hospital. This gives Polk the opportunity to go on an extended rant about the terrible way mental health diagnoses are used as a form of social control, about the awfulness of aversion therapy, and about the contempt that male psychiatrists have for women (especially queer women). This wasn’t strictly necessary to the plot, but I could have stood up and applauded at that point.

I have two more novellas to read, both by hugely popular writers. Goodness only knows how I am going to decide on my votes.

book cover
Title: Even Though I Knew the End
By: C L Polk
Publisher: St Martin's Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Gilgamesh

053, Book Review, Sophus Helle

You are probably all at least vaguely familiar with the story of Gilgamesh. This, however, it not a review of the epic itself, but rather of one particular translation.

I should note at the start that Sophus Helle is a friend. He’s been very helpful to my own research on trans lives in ancient Mesopotamia. However, once I explain the value of this translation, I think you’ll understand why I love it.

In the past, translations of Gilgamesh have fallen into two groups. The first are academic works by Assyriologists that tend to be a bit dry and which focus on accurate translation of the original texts. At the opposite extreme we have versions by professional writers who seek to make the text glow, but who know little or nothing about the sources. They work solely from the academic translations.

For example, I have a copy of Stephen Mitchell’s well received 2004 translation. In it, he says:

I don’t read cuneiform and have no knowledge of Akkadian: for the meaning of the text, I have depended on literal translations by seven scholars.

Mitchell is a professional poet, and his bringing his own skills to the job. His version reads very well. But it misses so much about the text.

Helle comes to Gilgamesh via Assyriology. He can read cuneiform. But he’s not disconnected from the literary world either. He cut his teeth on the epic when he produced a version of the text in his native Danish. For that he worked in collaboration with his father, Morten Sødergaard, who is a poet. Helle’s command of English is excellent (rather better than many native-speaking academics), so he is able to render a translation that reads well.

However, in addition he brings to the job an in-depth knowledge of the history of the epic, of the various cultures of ancient Mesopotamia, and in particular of their religions. This is all invaluable. So while the text is good, the really interesting parts of this book are the introduction and the series of essays that follow the main text.

Why is this important? Well to start with, the history of the Epic of Gilgamesh is not simple. We are reasonably sure of the basic text of the Iliad. We believe that it was put in its present form around 300 BCE in Alexandria. The Greek scholars who did that work produced written versions which have been copied down the ages. We have hundreds of complete copies, and while there are differences due to copying errors and idiosyncrasies of individual copyists, the text is broadly the same in all of them.

Contrast Gilgamesh: although it is a story about a Sumerian king, there is no extant Sumerian version. We are not even sure that there was a Sumerian version of the whole epic. Our best guess is that the epic, in its current form, was put together in Babylon a few hundred years after Sargon of Akkad conquered Sumer, possibly assembled from a collection of Sumerian poems about the legendary king. That version would have been written in Old Babylonian. The most complete version we have is written in Standard Babylonian, but that copy was found in the Library of Ashurbanipal and may have been made a few hundred years after the original. There are also versions in Middle Babylonian (found in the Syrian city of Ugarit) and Assyrian. Bits of several versions were found in the Hittite capital of Hattusa, including one translated into the Hittite language. Given that the real Trojans seem to have been a Hittite client kingdom, it is entirely likely that King Priam (if he existed) owned a copy.

None of these copies is complete. Indeed, we still don’t have the entire text. So creating a modern version of Gilgamesh is a bit like trying to piece together the Iliad if all you have to go on are fragments of a version from Rennaisance Italy, Roger Lancelyn Green’s Tales of the Greek Heroes, Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles, Raoul Schott’s version in German poetry, and the script of Brad Pitt’s movie, Troy.

Knowledge of cuneiform also allows Helle to understand the beauty of the puns, alliteration and so on that can be found in the original(s). This is a work that has been refined over centuries by scribes who would have obsessed over it the way we obsess over Shakespeare. They were smart people, and they did amazing things with the text that an English translation can only approximate.

Understanding of Mesopotamian culture is key to the epic as well. What exactly was the role of a king in Sumer? How much did he have to rely on the good will of the people. What were the social roles of characters such as Shamhat, the priestess, or Shiduri, the tavernkeeper? What does it mean when the text says that Gilgamesh obtained knowledge of “the deep” (the Apsû)? These are all questions that Helle is well-equipped to answer. And because of this, his version of the epic is way more interesting than any literary translation.

book cover
Title: Gilgamesh
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

Strange New Worlds – Season 2

053, TV Review

Two seasons in, and Strange New Worlds continues to be the most Trek-like of the Trek spin-offs. Once again it has a huge variety of episodes, while somehow managing to maintain a more-or-less coherent whole.

There’s a courtroom drama episode, a time travel episode, a weird alien planet episode, a Vulcans are crazy episode, a brutal flashback to the Klingon war episode, a musical episode, and even a cross-over with Lower Decks. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

A major theme of this season is relationships. Pike’s romance with Captain Marie Batel is rocky throughout and is one of the things left hanging in the balance in the end-of-season cliff-hanger. La’an gets an affair with Kirk (Jim, not Sam, obviously), but it is in a time travel episode and is made not real, at least for him. The Spock-Chapel relationship is on then off again. The amount of emotional angst deployed in considerable.

Also notable is the cautious working towards The Original Series. Uhura is getting opportunities to grow into the character we know and love. And the final episode of this season introduces us to a very young Montgomery Scott. He’s surprisingly cute, in a loveable teenage super-nerd sort of way.

Like most people, I was very much looking forward to the Lower Decks cross-over. Obviously that has to involve time travel too, and the sight of Boimler trying to avoid altering the timeline while getting to meet a group of people that he has hero-worshipped all his life was obvious comedy gold. Both Boimler and Mariner were played by the actors who voice them in the cartoon, and that seemed to work very well, though Jack Quaid is Very Tall.

I was a little disappointed in the court martial of Number One for being an Illyrian. It seemed to get wrapped up too quickly, easily and neatly. However, there’s a moment in the Lower Decks cross-over that makes it all worthwhile.

My favourite moment of the series is at the end of episode 6. The main story is an opportunity for Uhura to demonstrate her intelligence, but at the end she also gets to introduce Jim Kirk (who is shadowing Number One prior to taking up his First Officer post on the Farragut) to Spock. There’s a definite poetic brilliance to having Uhura being the person who introduces them, but the moment is made by the setting. They are in the Enterprise bar and a jazz band is playing an old 20th Century classic song called “’Till there was you”. You may know it as it was later covered by a pop group called The Beatles. The lyrics are here. It is perfect.

The one thing I’m a bit unhappy with is Carol Kane as Pelia. She’s clearly a great character, but I have hearing difficulty these days and I can’t understand a word she says most of the time. I’m sure there must be some way to get subtitles, but I haven’t managed to figure it out yet.

There will be a third season. Or at least there had better be because episode 10 ends on a massive cliff-hanger. I am a little worried that Erica Ortegas is going to die, as the script contained a couple of hints in that direction. I hope not. I like her, and there’s time yet to swap the bridge crew for the TOS people.

Begin Transmission

053, Book Review, Tilly Bridges

You are probably all aware of the idea that parts of the Matrix films are a trans allegory; the most famous example being that the red pill actually represents Premarin, a common form of estrogen medication back in the 20th Century. Just how much else there is in the films is open to question, but the thesis of Begin Transmission: The trans allegories of The Matrix by Tilly Bridges is that the entire film cycle (including the animated shorts and the fourth film) form one massive and intricately crafted allegory of trans life.

Back in Emerald City days I found myself fascinated by books that claimed to reveal all of the clues hidden in Gene Wolfe’s massive New/Long/Short sun books. There’s no way I could verify that they were right, if only because I would have to become as obsessive as the books’ authors in order to check everything. But reading them was sure fun. Begin Transmission is a book in a similar vein. It is chatty rather than claiming academic rigour, but the issues are the same. I have not gone back and watched the films again, stopping them at each time mark to verify what Bridges says about them. But I did enjoy going down the rabbit hole.

The central thesis of the book is that Neo is a trans woman. The Matrix represents the false world that she’s forced to live in, and by taking the red pill (estrogen) she can enter the real world as her true self. But the path of transition is never smooth, and there are friends and enemies along the way. Trinity represents Neo’s post-transition self. Moebius (dream) represents her unconscious, the Oracle her heart and so on. Smith, with his constant misgendering (Mister Anderson) represents the forces of transphobia.

Other members of the cast represent various types of trans person. In particular The Merovingian is a trans woman who is afraid to transition and supresses her desires.

But wait, there’s more. Bridges suggests that the choices of colour in the film have meaning. Red represents truth, blue doubt, and yellow fear. By looking at how scenes and characters are lit, you can tell how Neo is feeling at the time.

The four films represent different aspects of the trans experience. The first one is about the initial decision to transition. Reloaded is about the post-transition experience. Revolutions is about dealing with the forces of transphobia in the world. And Resurrections picks up Neo’s story after she has had a crisis of confidence and decided to detransition.

Oh, and there are a whole lot of other visual cues as well, many of which are visible only if you are the sort of obsessive who keeps stopping the film to see exactly what’s on screen. My favourite example is that the length of Neo’s jacket in Resurrections keeps changing. The shorter it is, the more she is backsliding into detransition. The longer it is, the more it moves like a dress.

Oh, and there’s the whole ‘denial beard’ thing. Trans women often grow a beard in an attempt to masculinise themselves and avoid the pain of transition. (I couldn’t even manage a moustache, and hated facial hair, but that’s another story.) In Resurrections, the detransitioned Neo sports a denial beard. Once she has made the decision to retransition, the beard goes away.

Do I believe all of this? I certainly believe that the Wachowskis are smart enough to have done it. I’m not going to sit down and check every claim that Bridges makes. And I don’t think I have to. What I will say is that Bridges has provided a fascinating, in-depth reading of the films. What she says about them is absolutely a valid interpretation.

However, I would be very wary of saying that Bridges has uncovered “The Truth” about the films. First up, I think that the Wachowskis are smart enough to have layered other meanings into their work as well. Second, I believe that any work of art is a collaboration between the creator and the consumer. If a film has a particular meaning for you, that is a valid meaning. I do not subscribe to the idea that a work of art has one, and only one, correct interpretation, which is that which the creator intended for it. Indeed, the foremost champion of that type of literary criticism is one K*thleen St*ck, who also has some very extreme views about people having only one correct interpretation. No trans person should want to find themselves on her side in an argument.

Having said that, Begin Transmission is an amazing piece of work, and a great example of the sort of film criticism that can be done if you put your mind to it. It also has a Trans Mission. Bridges clearly hopes that her book will be read by many cis people, and has carefully explained a whole lot of key points about trans people and trans politics along the way. Quite how many cisgender readers she will get, I don’t know. Trans people are doubtless snapping up the book, but we are few in number. Whether it finds a wider audience is another matter. But I am reviewing it here because I think you should give it a try. If nothing else it will tell you a lot about how clever some filmmakers are.

book cover
Title: Begin Transmission
By: Tilly Bridges
Publisher: BearManor Media
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Silures

053, Book Review, Ray Howell

Back in issue #50 I ran a review of a small book called Celtic Wales, written by two very eminent historians who are experts on the country during the Iron Age. I found that book by chance in the local history section of Swansea Waterstones. As I happened to be back in the shop recently I had another look in that section to see if they had anything else. I was immediately rewarded.

Silures: Resistance, Resilience, Revival, is a solo effort by Professor Ray Howell, and he’s probably the world expert on that particular group of ancient Welsh people. That’s Silures, not Silurians. The Silurians are lizard people named after the Silurian geologic period, which was in turn named after rocks first identified in the part of Wales that the Silures inhabited.

So who were the Silures? According to the Romans, they were a tribal grouping that occupied south-east Wales prior to the invasion. In modern terms their territory was Glamorgan and Gwent. My home is at the eastern end of the territory of a different tribal group, the Demetae.

Following the Claudian invasion, the British war leader, Caractacus (I’m using the Roman version of name for ease of look-up) found sanctuary among the Silures. After a defeat in a close-fought battle he fled north where we was betrayed by Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes (sorry Nicola, Yorkshire women were a bit sus in those days). The Silures, however, kept on fighting. It took 25 years of warfare for the Romans to finally subdue them, and even then peace was only achieved by offering the Silures a degree of self-rule. They became a civitas, with their own senedd at Venta Silurum (Caerwent).

While Celtic Wales is very much a contribution to an academic debate, Silures is much more of a popular history book. Professor Howell doesn’t even use his academic title, and his style is very conversational. He reminisces about his occasional appearances on Time Team, and openly speculates in ways that he could never do in an academic volume. His style is very engaging and I found myself wishing that I’d had him as a lecturer.

The purpose of the book is to shine more of a light on this fascinating group of ancient Welsh people who thoroughly terrified the Romans. Tacitus wrote that neither atrocity nor clemency had any effect on them, they were resolutely opposed to Rome. But, being Welsh, they are very little studied by the archaeological establishment in the UK. Howell notes that, of over 50 known Silurian hill forts in Gwent alone, only 3 have been professionally excavated since WWII.

So what do we know about them? We know that they were very warlike. We know that they loved horses (well, Welsh ponies) and would have used chariots. And we know that they lived in roundhouses and built an impressive number of hillforts. Howell notes that these formed a social network: each hillfort was in line of sight view of at least one other. Of course the term “hillfort” is a bit of misnomer as they probably served as much as a civic hub as a defensive position. They were not, like Norman castles, intended to dominate the local population, but rather provided it with various services and a sense of identity.

Howell, being from south Wales himself, likens the hillfort network to the fact that every village has its own rugby club. And our fiercest rivalries are probably with the people from the next valley over, unless those red-crested soldiers (or red roses on white uniforms) are spotted, in which case we immediately unite against the common enemy.

Of course, over a few hundred years, the enemy does not always stay the enemy. One of the best stories in the book concerns a high status Roman burial from around the end of the second century CE that Howell was called in to investigate after a builder’s digger cut through the coffin. Isotope analysis of the teeth showed that this man was a local, born and raised in Silurian territory. But he was clearly very wealthy and presumably well thought of in Roman society. A facial reconstruction was commissioned, and a photo appears in the book. Even before I read the accompanying text, I had immediately jumped to the same conclusion: this was a face I have seen in a rugby shirt.

book cover
Title: Silures
By: Ray Howell
Publisher: The History Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Secret Invasion

053, TV Review

While I was happy to defend Guardians 3, I am much less enamoured of Marvel’s latest TV production. I’d been looking forward to something involving Nick Fury and the Skrulls. Sadly, what we got was a below par effort that tried to follow in the footsteps of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and had some very obvious problems.

I guess I should not have been too surprised. Anything that Marvel does with a title beginning “Secret” is likely to be a mess. (Ditto anything DC does labeled “Crisis”). But it is a shame because Secret Invasion does try to make a valid point.

The set-up of the series is that, back before the Infinity War, Nickl Fury and Carol Danvers promised to find the Skrulls a new home after their own world had been conquered by the Kree. In the meantime a large group of Skrulls, led by Talos, has been hiding out on Earth, using their shape-shifting powers to remain undetected.

However, Fury and Danvers have been unable to deliver on their promise. Part of this is due to the Blip, which meant Fury was dead for 5 years, but at one point in the series he says that it became obvious early on that finding the Skrulls a new home would be impossible. Given the size of the galaxy, that seems a little strange.

In the meantime, the Skrulls left on Earth have become more and more disaffected. Talos’s leadership has been questioned, and they have turned more to a young radical called Gravik who advocates taking over Earth. Somehow, Skrulls have managed to replace Rhodey (who is now a senior security advisor to the US President), the UN Secretary General, the British Prime Minister and various other world leaders.

At the start of the series, Gravik takes on Fury’s shape to murder Maria Hill. This is a fairly clumsy piece of fridging, and I suspect it was done mainly because Cobie Smulders wanted out of the MCU.

On the other hand, we get the introduction of Olivia Colman as Sonya Falsworth, a ruthless and somewhat bloodthirsty MI6 operative. As you might expect from Colman, she totally steals the show.

The point of the series is that Fury, despite his sympathy for the Skrulls, and his many super-powered friends, is helpless in the face of a refugee crisis. I’m guessing that the showrunners wanted to make a point about how badly the real world is dealing with such things right now, and that racism is a major component of this. However, the way that the story unfolds rather suggests that desperate refugees will turn to violence, and then they will need to be dealt with severely. That’s not a very convincing moral arc.

Worse still, the show has some gaping plot holes. By far the worst is the question of how you prove that someone is a Skrull in disguise. Towards the end of the series, Fury is unable to prove to President Ritson that Rhodey is a Skrull, because, it was claimed, he would have to kill him to do so. However, soon after, Sonya demonstrates that a Skrull has infiltrated MI6 by wounding him. These scenes are a few minutes apart. It doesn’t take a PhD in narrative studies to spot the flaw. Goodness only knows what went on in the writers’ room.

Talking of writers, I should note that the series got off to a really bad start when it was revealed that the opening titles were AI-generated. So maybe there weren’t any writers either. It sometimes felt like it.

Editorial – August 2023

053, Editorial

Well that was a surprise. Not only did I have enough material for an issue in August, I had more than enough and am leaving a couple of reviews for next month. Of course traveling to Glasgow and back by train was a big help. Though I did also read the new Green Man book on that journey. Obviously I’m not going to review that. I’m waiting patiently for Ben to finish the cover so I can start doing publicity.

This month I have a couple of Kickstarter campaigns that I’d like to recommend. The first is Filling your worlds with words, a book about using language in worldbuilding. I’m really looking forward to this. If you want to get some idea of the flavour of the book, check out C D Covington’s column at Tor.com. Now imagine that but in much more depth. The campaign is already funded, so you can just buy the book at the cheapest price.

The second is Embroidered Worlds: Ukrainian Fantastic Fiction, from the lovely people at Atthis Arts. As the title suggests, it is an anthology of fantastical stories written by Ukrainian writers and members of the Ukrainian diaspora. This one launches on Friday. There will be more information about it up then.

For UK folks, I will be at FantasyCon in September, but I won’t have a dealer table. I still don’t have a car that I would trust to get me all the way to Birmingham.

Looking further ahead, I may be at Octocon virtually, but we are holding a writing workshop in Llandybie that weekend too. If you are interested in spending a weekend in the wilds of Wales with Roz and Jo for tutors, let me know. (Their web presence is on Farcebook so I can’t point you at it.)

Issue #52

Issues

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


  • Cover: Sailing Over Glasgow: This issue's cover is another of the pieces of art created for the Glasgow in 2024 Worldcon by Iain J Clark..

  • Menewood: Nicola Griffith's sequel to Hild has been long-awaited, but it will be here soon. Cheryl has had an ARC.

  • Dragonfall: L R Lam returns with a triumphant new fantasy trilogy.

  • Good Omens – Season 2: Crowley and Aziraphael are back, more cute and loveable than ever. Gabriel, meanwhile, appears to be having a mid-eternity crisis.

  • Nimona: It is turning into a fine year for animated movies. This one is the latest offering from Nate Stevenson of She-Ra fame.

  • Promises Stronger Than Darkness: Charlie Jane Anders concludes her YA space opera series in fine form.

  • Pemmi-Con: With Worldcon being in Chengdu, there was a NASFiC this year. Unusually, it was in Canada, which meant that Cheryl could attend.

  • The Pemmi-Con Masquerade: Small, but full of quality. Not quite the bee's knees, but definitely the chicken's legs.

  • Black Adam: The latest DC movie offering tries to do something interesting, but gets very confused.

  • The Western Kingdom: The kingdom of Cornwall, or Dumnonia as it was known in ancient times, has a long and fascinating history.

  • Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: The Dungeons & Dragons franchise gets a spin-off movie. Is it a pub full of happy hobbits, or just a big, sad gelatinous cube?

  • Editorial – July 2023: In which Cheryl and Air Canada have a falling out

Cover: Sailing Over Glasgow

052, Art, Iain J Clark

This issue sees the second in my series of covers donated by Iain J Clark from the collection of images he has created for the Glasgow in 2024 Worldcon. This one is called “Sailing over Glasgow” and presumably celebrates the shipbuilding industry of the Clyde.

The building in the foreground is the Tolbooth Steeple, which is all that remains of a notorious building from Glasgow’s history that had, at various times, been a council chamber, a pub and a site of public executions.

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/.

Menewood

052, Book Review, History, Nicola Griffith

Nicola Griffith’s foray into historical fiction, Hild, has been hugely successful. The book won a Lammy and was a finalist for a bunch of other major awards, including the Nebula, Otherwise and Campbell. (Yes, that Campbell which is an award for science fiction novels). Given that the book only covered the early years of the life of Hild of Whitby, a sequel was pretty much inevitable. Of course, with the amount of research that Griffith puts into these books, it wasn’t going to come quickly. However, Menewood is officially due on October 3rd. Griffith kindly sent me an ARC to look at.

This is history, so some things about Hild’s life are way beyond the statue of limitations for spoilers. When we left her, she was riding high as a valued advisor to her uncle, King Edwin of Northumbria. Also she had just got married to her childhood friend, Cian, and the two of them had their own estates to run in Elmet (the area around modern day Leeds). However, anyone with access to Wikipedia will know that Edwin’s reign was cut short thanks to an attack by King Penda of Mercia, backed up by the vicious Cadwallon of Gwynedd. Hild must have survived, and Menewood sets out to tell the story of those turbulent years.

Just like Hild, Menewood is real. These days it is a suburb of Leeds, just to the east of Headingly, where Griffith grew up. (The modern name is spelled Meanwood, which is far less glamorous.) One of the things that shines through in the book is the sense of place. You get the impression that Griffith has walked the many locations featured in the novel, or at least surveyed them on Google Earth, and taken as keen an interest in their geography as her hero does.

The thing you have to do when your country is laid waste by foreign invaders is rebuild, pretty much from scratch. In early mediaeval England that means skills in farming and a whole bunch of associated crafts such as housebuilding, metalworking and brewing. Hild can’t do all of these things (she’s not a Heinlein hero), but Griffith gives her good people management skills. Building a village is much like building a company. You want the right people in the right jobs. In order to write this, Griffith has had to find out how all these things were done in Hild’s time. That’s a whole lot of research, which I’m sure will delight her readers. Nevertheless, the book never feels infodumpy.

Having rebuilt, the next step is to secure peace, by making sure that the enemy will never be able to invade you again. Penda, it seems, is not much of a problem. His strategy seems to be one of patience and caution. He keeps Mercia safe, not by conquering neighboring kingdoms, which might cause him to overstretch, but by attacking and destabilizing them, then moving on. Having done for Edwin, he’s turning his sights on the Angles, amongst whom Hild’s sister, Hereswith, is likely to become queen. That, I suspect, will be the focus of the next book in the series. (Edwin was an ally of Rædwald, the most likely occupant of the grave at Sutton Hoo.)

Cadwallon is another matter. He’s not interested in being a king. He’d much prefer to be a terrifying warlord who takes his men where he wants, kills who he wants, and takes their gold. Bede tells us that he was an awful person, and someone who Bede says is bad, even for the British, must be very bad indeed.

I used the word, ‘British’, there because many of the inhabitants of the ex-Roman province of Britannia still regard themselves as citizens of the country they called Prydain before the Romans arrived. They speak a language that is recognizably a precursor of modern Welsh, Cornish and Breton. Hild’s people call them Wealh (Welsh) – foreigners. The newcomers are from many parts of the Germanic world and do not yet call themselves Saxons, but the British call them Saes (Saesneg, Sassenach), which also means foreigners.

Hild is at pains to make her people tolerant of ethnic differences. She tells them that they are Elmetsæte first, regardless of what god they worship or language they speak. This sems entirely fitting, both for her later career as a diplomat, and for the fact that the author is a Yorkshire lass with the fine Welsh name of Gruffydd.

Having laid waste to modern Yorkshire, Cadwallon heads north to the Roman wall and beyond, murdering and plundering as he goes. Bede tells us that he met a sticky end in the north at the hands of one Oswald, a cousin of Hild whose family fell foul of Edwin and ended up hiding out in the Irish kingdom of Dál Riada in the West of Scotland. How this came to pass is a mystery, and one that Griffith sets out to explain.

A word of advice. If you are into wargaming, do not take on Griffith. She has an excellent eye for strategy and tactics, and will beat you hollow.

The final element of the book is Hild’s personal journey. She is not yet at the point of embracing Christianity and becoming a saint, and that part of her life may make a fascinating fourth volume. Currently she’s still happy to embrace any faith, be it worship of Woden, or any of the varieties of Christian worship vying for dominance, as long as it works for her. But she still has a lot to learn. To rebuild her community she needs to become a woman of the people, which is hard for someone raised as royalty. I’m pleased to see that she ends up treating her former body slave, Gwaldus, much better than she did in the first book.

By the way, Gwladus is a British woman from Somerset, so I have a soft spot for her. Griffith gives her own pronunciation guide in the book, but I’m here to tell you that Gladys is not a bad modern Welsh version of the name.

I should note that the book takes an entirely realistic attitude to early mediaeval sexuality. Many characters are enthusiastically bisexual, and no one fetishizes virginity. The small number of fanatical Christians probably disapprove, but no one pays them any mind. That will change, and I look forward to seeing how Hild reacts to it.

Hild also knows that she can’t be king. In a warrior society like hers, strong men always end up in charge, and a woman on the throne simply marks your kingdom out as a target for neighbouring kings. Besides, being king is an awful job. You have to keep killing people in order to stay on the throne, and Hild doesn’t want to do that. There are a number of characters who use more traditionally feminine paths to power, most notably Langwredd, the British princess whose lands lie north of the wall. Griffith, being who she is, has Hild do things very differently, and it is fascinating to observe.

Talking of powerful women those of you who follow the resurrected Time Team may know that they recently excavated an early mediaeval graveyard in East Anglia, and in particular the grave of a high status Christian woman. They don’t know who she is, or why she was buried there, but the dates would work for it being Hereswith. Some of the grave goods are from Frankia (the land of the Franks in modern-day France). Bede says that she entered a monastery there to live out her days, but the Abbey he says she went to wasn’t founded until after her death, and anyway he doesn’t explicitly say she died there. She may have come home when her son, Ealdwulf, became king of the Angles. I should note that the woman in the grave is very short and petite, which is very unlike the tall, imposing Hild, but Hild’s stature is a Griffith invention.

The book is long – over 700 pages in PDF – but very much worth your time, especially if you have any interest in early mediaeval Britain. I expect it to be hugely popular with historical fiction readers, and with a bunch of my historian friends. I note that Dr. Griffith was a guest speaker at the prestigious International Mediaeval Congress this year (which just happened to be in Leeds this year).

Menewood is not fantasy. It does include a brief appearance from someone who might have inspired a famous legend, but that’s hardly a key part of the story. It is much more important to note that Hild’s people, and her enemies, are all convinced that she can do magic because she is very smart and notices things that most people would miss. Griffith doesn’t write the book as magic realism, but she could easily have done so. Don’t let the lack of magic put you off reading it. It is a far better evocation of that period of British history than most fantasy novels I’ve read.

Of course you don’t need me to tell you this. In a few months time the mainstream media will be full of praise for Menewood. I’ll just pick up a hardcover to put next to my copy of Hild and wait patiently for book 3.

book cover
Title: Menewood
By: Nicola Griffith
Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Dragonfall

052, Book Review, L R Lam

Following an author’s career can tell you quite a bit about them as a person. Some writers who have achieved success seem content to keep pumping out what works each time, for less and less effort. Others are determined to stretch themselves with each new book and get better at their craft. L R Lam is definitely in the latter category.

Dragonfall is the first book in a fantasy trilogy that was snapped up by Hodder & Stoughton at auction in a six-figure deal, so the publishing industry clearly has faith in the series. Even though this wasn’t exactly my sort of book, I am inclined to agree that their confidence is well-placed.

To explain that, while the book is a fantasy story about dragons and wizards, in form it is mainly a heist caper and an enemies-to-lovers queer romance. Neither of those are exactly my favourite things, but when they are done well, and there is an interesting world unfolding at the same time, I’m happy.

The underlying plot of the book is that humans and dragons used to live in harmony, but a few hundred years ago humans managed to banish the dragons to another universe that is unpleasant and hostile to life. The longer-lived dragons have been plotting revenge ever since, whereas the humans have largely forgotten their history. Dragons are now worshipped as gods, and are therefore not actually real.

Our lead character is Everen, who is important to dragonkind because males are very rare. Prophecies suggest that only a male dragon can succeed in leading his people back to their home. Naturally Everen is weighed down by responsibility, and his overbearing mother, the dragon Queen, doesn’t help. But, at the start of the book, he succeeds in penetrating the veil between worlds where he adopts human form.

There he meets Arcady, a young wizard whose grandfather, a famous and talented court magician, was unjustly accused of causing a great plague. At least that’s how Arcady’s family tells the story. As a descendant of the infamous Plaguebringer, there is no way that Arcady can practice magic openly, so they have turned thief in order to earn enough money to enroll in the university under an assumed name. They hope to eventually learn enough to clear their grandfather’s name.

Inevitably, Everen and Arcady must bond in the manner of dragon and rider from ages past, but Arcady trusts no one, even someone as handsome as Everen. Worse still, Everen’s archivist sister, Cassia, tells him that the only way to fully open the veil is to bond with Arcady and then kill him. He’s only a human, after all.

So far so good. Where things get interesting is the additional background. While most humans don’t believe that dragons exist except as gods, there is a thriving black market trade in dragon relics. The most eager buyers are merchants from the far-off land of Jask. There is a clandestine group of human monks who seek to prevent this trade and secure all dragon relics for the church. Our third major character, Sorin, is an orphan assassin whose job is to track down and punish those involved in the trade.

All of this comes together when Arcady learns that a dragon claw is to be put up for auction. Stealing it, and then selling it to one of the rich bidders, would be the heist of a lifetime.

You may have noticed that I used ‘they’ for Arcady’s pronoun when introducing them, but ‘he’ when talking about them from Cassia’s point of view. That was deliberate. The book is told from Everen’s point of view, and he always uses ‘you’ when referring to Arcady. That’s Lam being very clever about structure. But it is pretty clear from descriptions of Arcady that they are quite effeminate. Also they indulge in occasional rants about how the people of Jask are terrible gender essentialists.

Dragons, because of the rarity of male births, are also rather gender-essentialist.

My expectation is that, over the course of the next two books, this is going to come to matter. And the love that Everen and Arcady have for each other is going to be key to resolving the plot.

Right now, this being a romance, they are back to hating each other again. But it won’t last, and we know that because the book has a prologue which promises a happy ever after. I’m not sure why Lam decided to do that, and maybe this narrative will be upended before the end. We shall see. But in the meantime I am looking forward to the next volume.

book cover
Title: Dragonfall
By: L R Lam
Publisher: Hodderscape
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura
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