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.

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

052, Movie Review

I watched this film on the flight from Zurich to Toronto. Airline entertainment systems are in no way a good choice for viewing movies (other than being free and you are trapped in your seat), but I don’t think that matters here because this movie has no pretensions.

As the title suggests, Honor Among Thieves is a spin-off from the Dungeons & Dragons franchise. The various characters are all easily identifiable as D&D character types, as are many of the monsters. The storyline is intended to have something of the feel of a D&D game, including a visit to a monster-filled underground location to retrieve a magical artefact. Much of the time the script is played for laughs, and there’s no attempt at making a serious point beyond the ideas that loving your children is good, and sacrificing huge numbers of people to gain magical power is bad.

In terms of cast, Chris Pine, as Edgin the Bard, is far better used than he was as Jim Kirk or as Steve Trevor. Regé-Jean Page is superb as the snooty and annoying paladin, Xenk. And Hugh Grant steals the show as the slimy and villainous con-man, Forge (even if he is channeling Jeff Goldblum’s Grandmaster from Thor: Ragnarok).

I don’t have a lot to say about this film because there isn’t a lot to it. But if you are looking for a couple of hours of fun, mostly harmless and vacuous entertainment, this delivers very well.

As to whether this will do the job of selling copies of D&D for Hasbro is another matter, but clearly the creation movies like this is something that Hasbro can do, but Wizards of the Coast could probably never aspire to as an independent company.

Editorial – July 2023

052, Editorial

Well that was a month. I made it to Canada, but only just. My flight from London to Toronto was diverted to start from Zurich, and I was up at 2:30am, London time, to get to Heathrow for a flight out to Switzerland. My flight from Toronto to Winnipeg was heavily delayed, meaning that I didn’t get to my hotel until almost midnight. Thankfully I had a night in Toronto along the way, otherwise I would have been travelling for almost 28 hours.

The flights back worked better, but it was clear from what was going on in airports that Air Canada is seriously overstretched for both equipment at manpower. It reminded me of the time that Kevin and I booked to go to the Colorado Springs SMOFCon on Reno Air. We got there and back, but didn’t use any Reno Air aircraft in the process. The airline went bust shortly afterwards. I don’t suppose that the Canadian government will let Air Canada go bust, but something has to give. I may have to fly BA next time I go to Canada.

It didn’t help my mood that I caught a bad cold on the way back. That was presumably either at Pearson or Heathrow, both of which were absolutely rammed with people. I tested negative for both COVID and flu, which was a relief, but I lost a couple of days to feeling awful and I’m still not 100%.

Talking of awful, my Twitter presence is likely to be very minimal from now on. I am on BlueSky, but the iPad app is so bad that I don’t use it very much. I’m on Mastodon, and Wizard’s Tower has an account there as well. I tend to treat Zuck with as much suspicion as I treat Musk, so you won’t find me on Threads.

Later this month I will be heading to Glasgow to give a talk at the university. I hope to have time to visit the Worldcon site and take a few pictures, in which case I will report back next issue.

August is supposed to be one of my off-months in the schedule because of Worldcon. Of course there is no Worldcon in August this year, so I’m not sure what will happen. You may get another bonus issue.

Issue #51

Issues

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


  • Cover: Fantasy Forest: This issue's cover is by Karen Nadine. Does it show a priestess of Freyja? That would be very appropriate.

  • Furious Heaven: Volume two of Kate Elliott's gender-swapped Alexander the Great space opera has landed. It does not disappoint.

  • Translation State: Did you think that the Presger were scary, reader? Pah, that's nothing, you should try being a baby Presger. Ann Leckie returns to the world of the Imperial Radch.

  • Salt on the Midnight Fire: Liz Williams produces a triumphant final volume to the Fallow Sisters series.

  • Across the Spider-Verse: The animated Spider-Man movie gets a sequel, and an awful lot more Spider-People. Cheryl is entranced, and not just by the hints the Gwen Stacy is trans.

  • Witch King: Martha Wells returns to fantasy in a fascinating new setting.

  • The Unraveling: How will family life change when people live for hundreds of years, and can have multiple bodies? Much will change, but family drama remains the same, in this fascinated book by Ben Rosenbaum.

  • Hild: With Menewood close to publication, Cheryl looks back on the first part of Nicola Griffith's historical fiction series

  • Eurocon 2023: This year's Eurocon was in Sweden. Cheryl went along and had a great time.

  • Vikings at Uppsala: When in Sweden, do some research on Viking archaeology. Cheryl is off down a research rabbit hole.

  • Heilung – LIFA: Where there are Vikings, there must be songs invoking Odin and the rest of the gods? Is that Freyja's voice that I hear above the drums?

  • Editorial – June 2023: There is so much good stuff, both written and on film, coming out these days. How does one keep up?

Furious Heaven

051, Book Review, Kate Elliott

You can tell when I am fascinated by a book (or series), because, in addition to buying them in hardcover, I buy the ebooks because they are searchable, which makes it easier to check up on the various clever things the author has done.

As you probably know, the Sun Chronicles are a gender-swapped space opera version of the life of Alexander the Great. I am, inevitably, suckered. Having now read two books, I think I have a handle on the shape of the series. Unconquerable Sun introduced us to Sun, her world and the people around her. This book, Furious Heaven, tells of her conquest of the book-world version of the Persian Empire. Book three will presumably tell of her death. More of that later.

If you know anything about Alexander then you will know that, sooner or later, Sun’s mother, Queen-Marshall Eirene, will be assassinated. Once that happens, all hell breaks loose, because Alexander’s attack on the Persians is the original Blitzkrieg.

In addition to the assassination, Furious Heaven gives us the Battle of Issus, where Alexander captures Darius’s family. There’s a sort of equivalent to the sieges of Tyre and Gaza in that Sun conquers a mercantile empire, and then we are on to Egypt where Alexander gets proclaimed Pharaoh and goes into the wilderness to learn ancient wisdom. Finally we get the Battle of Gaugamela where Darius is once more routed, leaving Alexander free to take Babylon.

Of course all of these things have to be adapted for the book world. I was particularly interested by the mercantile empire which is based on Argosies – giant space ships with hyperspace bubble drives that are able to tow chains of smaller ships behind them. An argosy, as the term is used in Shakespeare, is a fleet of merchant ships all sailing under the same flag.

Another interesting deviation is that the book world version of the Persians, the Phene, do not have a king. They are ruled by a Council of Riders who are strange beings able to communicate with each other over vast distances, and who have a second face and personality on the backs of their heads. The Riders give the Phene a significant military advantage thanks to their communication ability. This they signally fail to use, because like the Persians they spend way too much time arguing amongst themselves, and arrogantly assume that an upstart like Sun doesn’t stand a chance against them.

While I admire the way that Kate Elliott has translated Alexander’s story to space opera, I’m actually more interested in the deviations because that leaves her room to change things. As I noted above, book three should end with Sun dying, but it doesn’t have to. There are things in the books that were very much not relevant to Alexander or his times.

Most significantly, the world of the books is somehow descended from the Celestial Empire, which was originally based on Earth. At some point in the very distant past, humankind fled into space in giant arks. There was a planet called Landfall. And then more settlement. There were the kunnu drives, used by the Argosies. Then the more modern beacon drives (wormhole gateways). And then a civilizational collapse in which many of the beacons were destroyed and the secrets of their manufacture lost.

One of the plot lines driving the series is the desire of Sun, and more specifically Persephone, to rediscover the secrets of the beacons. That sounds like something that can’t happen if Sun dies and her Companions wage civil war against each other, as ought to happen if we are following history.

Talking of beacons, I have also been intrigued by the way that Elliott manages war in space. It is way better than the silliness we get in Star Trek where fleets of ships face off against each other as if they were armies of Napoleonic infantry firing volleys at each other. It is perhaps a little off on the tactical side because it is too much like Second World War naval engagements. Space battles happen way faster, and at vastly greater distances. But the strategic side of only being able to go where beacons (or kunnu drives) let you go, is spot on.

One of the effects of this is that battles take much longer. You have to move between beacons under torch drives (impulse engines). In Alexander’s time battles were over in a day, but the greater time in the book gives Elliott plenty of opportunity to develop the plot while the battle is raging.

The other major element that isn’t drawn from history is the existence of Riders. That plot too will need to be resolved, and if you have been paying attention you’ll know that it is all bound up with Persephone and the beacons. There’s a reason why Elliott has named Perse after a goddess of the underworld.

I said in my review of Unconquerable Sun that I was keen to see the book equivalent of Bagoas. That role appears to have been given to Jin-Na, the dancer from Idol Faire. She does have a girlfriend, but she’s not exactly an iconically queer character. On the other hand, we have Bartholomew, whom I confidently predict will marry Sun early in the next book.

For the next book, I want to know what happens to Petal.

I think I have been rambling, because there is just way too much to think about in these books. I love them.

book cover
Title: Furious Heaven
By: Kate Elliott
Publisher: Head of Zeus
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Translation State

051, Ann Leckie, Book Review

A return to the world of the Imperial Radch has been warmly welcomed by Ann Leckie fans everywhere. Personally I am particularly pleased that the new book, Translation State, focuses on the Presger, who are delightfully alien aliens.

The Presger are so violent and dangerous that direct communication with other intelligent species is beyond them. They don’t believe in talking when they can be eating instead. But, in order to avoid galactic war (which they would probably win, though at great cost), they have created a type of being called a Translator. These are humanoid, made with some human DNA, but evolved from Presger. In Translation State we get to see how Translators are raised and trained. Reader, it is not pretty. Life for young Presger is eat or be eaten.

Why do we get to know this? Well reader, there is a story, stretching back a couple of generations to before the Radchaai civil war. At this time, a Translator in Saeniss Polity, a non-Radchaai territory, escaped Presger supervision and vanished. Up until now, this renegade Translator was merely missing, presumed dead. But now, thanks to the civil war, there is a conclave going on to decide whether AIs such as Breq should be granted recognition as Significant Species and become signatories to the treaty with the Presger. Any small issue might be leveraged for diplomatic benefit, and therefore the Saeniss Office of Diplomacy has to make a show of trying to resolve the open case of the missing Translator.

Not that anyone expects the matter to be resolved, especially after so much time. The job is given to a young person called Enae Athtur, primarily because hir wealthy legal guardian wants sie out of the way. As it turns out, Enae is smart, and has a deep sense of responsibility when it comes to getting the job done. Sie is also very calm in a crisis, especially when faced by unreasonable behavior from powerful individuals, which is just what you need where Radchaai and Presger diplomats are involved.

It turns out (and this is hardly a spoiler as it becomes obvious very quickly) that the missing Translator managed to reproduce itself before dying, and that young being ended up ruling over a small ethnic group called the Hikipi. They have since been conquered by the Phen. The Translator reproduced again. The resulting child escaped the Phenish conquest and ended up being adopted and raised as a member of the Zeosen people. This person, known to us as Reet Hluid, will be our second main character.

Meanwhile among the Presger, a young potential Translator called Qven is on their way to adulthood. Among the Presger, that means merging with an existing adult. Whereas Anaander Miannaai, the Radchaai Emperor, has cloned herself to achieve longer life, the Presger Translators do something similar by merging with juveniles. Translators can thus have multiple bodies, each of which is a different person, but all of which have the same identity and share mental functions. Thanks to a childhood trauma, Qven has a deep-seated horror of merging.

Unfortunately, because of the way that Presger biology works, if a juvenile does not merge, it will die. You can probably see where this is going.

There is, therefore, a whole complicated diplomatic thing going on in which the Presger Translators want everything resolved quietly and conservatively, because if the actual Presger take notice all hell could break lose. Meanwhile the Radchaai don’t want their starships being granted personhood, and every other species is keen to see the Radchaai taken down a peg.

This is not what the book is about. It is just the plot. What the book is actually about is family. Enae has been rejected by hir family, who are deeply horrible people. Reet has loving and supportive foster parents, but he’s not remotely the same species as them. Family as such doesn’t really exist for the Presger, but they raise young all the same and are even more cruel to them than human families. There was a major trap here for Leckie, in that for a long time it seemed possible that the plot would deprive Reet and Qven of any choice as to their futures. I’m pleased to say that she managed to avoid this.

Where Leckie may run into trouble is her portrayal of the Hikipi. There are very few of them left, and many of those that remain are deeply nationalist to the point of enacting terrorist violence. The Phen react to this in a way that would make Cruella Braverman very proud. But the Hikipi don’t come out of this well either. They are caught up in a conspiracy theory which holds that the Presger don’t exist, but have been invented by the Phen as an excuse for colonialist tyranny. The irony being that the Hikipi were actually ruled over by a descendant of a Presger Translator. I think this is supposed to be poking fun at other people prone to conspiracy theories, but the determination of the Hikipi to hold on to their culture is going to cause people from marginalized groups to identify with them, and read into the narrative things that Leckie probably didn’t intend.

Fans of Leckie’s previous work may be disappointed that Breq does not appear in this book. However, there is a supporting cast role for Sphene, the ship that Breq found behind the Ghost Gate in Ancillary Mercy.

There is a fair amount about gender in the book. The Presger Translators do not have gender, but Reet thinks he’s a human male. The Radchaai continue to use she/her pronouns for everyone, whether they are Radchaai or not. This leads to some characters keeping trying to correct them, which is quite amusing.

The other fun part of the book is that Reet is addicted to a video drama called Pirate Exiles of the Death Moons. This seems to be a friendly nod to the Murderbot books. I didn’t get a chance to ask Martha Wells about it when I was in Sweden, but I suspect she’s amused.

I very much enjoyed this book, and the insights it provides to Presger society. I also note that it develops the plot lines left hanging at the end of Ancillary Mercy. Thanks to Reet, Sphene and her cousins may end up being officially recognized as a Significant Species. This would have disastrous consequences for the Imperial Radch, so there must be more stories to be told.

book cover
Title: Translation State
By: Ann Leckie
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Salt on the Midnight Fire

051, Book Review, Liz Williams

This is the fourth and final book in the Fallow Sisters series by Liz Williams. At one time Williams was muttering about there possibly being five books, but she has managed to wrap the series up in four and I think most fans will be pleased.

The main plot of Salt on the Midnight Fire is of a dispute amongst otherworldy beings. The Wild Hunt, currently led by Aiken Drum, hunts human souls. But they are not the only people who do this. Out at sea is a pirate ship that does the same. It is captained by a chap called the Morlader, and he has ambitions. Currently he is reliant on smugglers and wreckers to bring him souls. He wants the right to hunt on land. That requires him to challenge Drum for the leadership of the Wild Hunt. As part of that, both opponents will need a champion.

Regular readers of the series will remember that the sisters’ mother, Alys Fallow, has taken to riding with Aiken Drum, and appears to be one of his senior lieutenants.

Very cleverly, Ian Whates arranged for this book to be published on the Summer Solstice (at least for us Northern Hemisphere folks). The book starts in the run-up to the Solstice. Luna’s baby is due, and Serena’s partner, Ward Garner, is due to star in a new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which will have a special preview performance in Glastonbury on Midsummer’s Day. It is all very nicely timed.

However, the majority of the action has to take place in Cornwall because that is the Morlader’s stronghold. ‘Morlader’ is simply the Cornish word for a pirate. The name literally means ‘sea thief’. Some of you may wonder about the setting, but Williams has clearly made up some of the geography.

The only largish town west of Penzance is St Buryan. You don’t need to go through Mousehole to get there. I have a sneaking suspicion that the large house on the coast that the Fallow Sisters rent for their vacation is based on the one owned by John le Carré (and where Nick Harkaway grew up).

Mount St. Michael plays a starring role in the story and the lady of the castle, Azenor, is straight out of Cornish folklore. She’s the Mermaid of Zennor, and the town is supposed to be named after her. Originally she was a Breton princess who was falsely accused of adultery by her husband and set adrift in a barrel, whereby she found her way to Cornwall. She is also known as Saint Senara.

I was slightly surprised that there was no mention of the Minack Theatre because I’m sure Ward would love it, but you can’t have everything. As far as I know, there is no Coastival festival in Cornwall (there is one in Scarborough), but if it is an invention it is entirely appropriate.

The other major thread of the book involves one Elizabeth Tudor, sometime Queen of England. The books already have a connection to her. Mooncote, the Fallow family home in Somerset, dates back to Elizabethan times, and Bee’s partner, Ned Dark, is the ghost of a man who sailed with Drake. Stella met Elizabeth briefly in a previous volume. To find out what role she has in the story, you will need to read the book. Suffice it to say that everything gets tied up remarkably neatly in the space of a very few pages. That sort of thing takes skill.

I should note that there are parts of this book that might class as horror. Certainly they would if they were filmed. I find books considerably less scary.

Oh, and I’m perversely happy to have Aiken Drum feature in another fantasy series. In Julian May’s Saga of the Exiles he’s a lot of fun. And the book named after him, The Nonborn King, is the one in which Felice Landry opens the Straits of Gibraltar and creates the Mediterranean, which is an amazing scene.

Anyway, I’m delighted that Williams, and NewCon Press, have had such success with these books. It just goes to show that a good writer can stay a good writer for life, despite what mainstream publishing might think.

book cover
Title: Salt on the Midnight Fire
By: Liz Williams
Publisher: NewCon Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Across the Spider-Verse

051, Movie Review

I very much enjoyed the first Miles Morales Spider-Man film, and was keen the see the new one in a cinema because I was expecting top notch animation. I was not disappointed. I don’t expect to see a better film this year.

There are two basic themes to the Spider-Verse films. The first is that they are set in a multiverse in which multiple different versions of Spider-Man exist, each in their own world. The other is that the films are animated, which allows them to be much more comic-like.

Obviously we’ve had many animated versions of comic book stories before, but I can’t think of many like the Spider-Verse films. These films have more in common with Looney Tunes cartoons, because anything can happen in them. Strange things can happen with colour and perspective. Text boxes can pop up at random. Anything you can draw, you can animate. Realism be damned.

The main villain from Across the Spider-Verse, Spot, is perfect for this type of movie. His super power is that he can make holes in reality and move through them. All sorts of visual jokes are possible, and the film uses many of them.

In the previous film we were introduced to characters such as Spider-Ham (a pig Spider-Man) and Spider-Man Noir from a black and white universe. In this one we get Pavitr Prabhakar, an Indian Spider-Man, and Spider-Punk, a Black British Spider-Man. We also get a brief guest appearance from the Peter Parker of the Lego universe (complete with Lego J Jonah Jameson). Not content with that, there is a whole cross-multiverse organization of Spider-People headed up by Miguel O’Hara (Oscar Isaac), a.k.a. Spider-Man 2099.

Fun as it may be (and I laughed a lot), this film also has a serious edge. To start with, it is a film about teenagers with family issues. Both Miles and Gwen Stacy have difficulty keeping their spider-identities secret from their families. In Gwen’s universe her father, a police officer, believes that Spider-Woman is responsible for the murder of Gwen’s best friend, Peter Parker.

Layered onto this is the whole question of Miles’ right to be Spider-Man. In the film this is represented by the fact that the spider who bit him was an interloper from another universe. However, it is clear that the real issue here is that dudebro fans don’t believe that a Black kid has the right to be Spider-Man. A major plot point in the film is that there are specific events in the life of each Spider-Man that must take place, or their world will unravel. These are called ‘Canon Events’.

Who cares about the Canon, right?

And on that subject, the film introduces one more element that is bound to enrage the dudebros. It suggests that Gwen Stacy is a trans girl. Clearly she is at least an ally, because a trans flag bearing the slogan, “protect trans kids”, is seen in her bedroom. But there is an argument that she could be trans herself. For more detail, see here.

Now you may wonder how a trans girl with a gruff, authoritarian police captain for a father could possibly have transitioned. But this is the multiverse. There’s no reason why universes cannot exist in which trans kids are treated with love and respect by their families, even if many bad things also happen there.

Somewhere out in the multiverse, there is a universe in which Peter Parker is a trans boy. Somewhere out there is a universe in which the Green Goblin is furious about the lack of rights that trans folks have. Somewhere out there is a universe in which I was assigned female at birth, discovered that I had mutant telepathy powers, and was invited to enroll in Professor Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.

Go you, Spider-Gwen. I wish you had existed when I was a kid.



There will be a third film. Given the complexity of the animation, it will be a few years away. I can wait. It will be worth it.

Witch King

051, Book Review, Martha Wells

A new novel from Martha Wells is always interesting. A new novel in an entirely new setting is very exciting, because Wells creates such interesting worlds.

The world of Witch King is not as off-the-wall as that of the Raksura, but it does have a lot to offer the fantasy connoisseur. It is set on a continent that has recently suffered an invasion by a foreign power. The Hierarchs arrived with large armies, and with very superior (magical) technology, and swept all before them. However, thanks to a small group of heroes, and people being willing to follow them, the Hierarchs were finally defeated and sent packing.

At some point the dudebros are going to notice that all of the heroes have brown skin, whereas the Hierarchs and their soldiers are pale-skinned. When they do there will be much snowflake melting on Twitter. But Wells has the Hierarchs come from the South which will doubtless confuse a lot of the shouty ones.

First amongst our heroes is Bashasa Calis, Prince-heir of the city of Benais-arik. His primary superpower is as a politician. When he talks, people listen, and agree to follow him. Being mortal, he is long-since dead in the primary timeline.

Then there is Tahren Stargard, a member of a small but very powerful group of magical warriors called the Immortal Blessed. They chose to ally themselves with the Hierarchs, all save Tahren who is known as The Fallen as a consequence.

Next up there is Ziede Daiyahan, a Witch, known as a great teacher amongst her people, but in wartime better known for her command of air elementals. Tahren is now her wife.

And finally. Kaiistereon, Prince of the Fourth House of the Underearth, a demon, known as the Witch King, and as Kai to his friends. Kai’s real body is in the demon realm, but demons have the power to possess the bodies of mortals and thereby play a part in mortal affairs.

Our story begins thoroughly in media res. Kai wakes up in the body of a young human. Nearby are a terrified girl, a sorcerer, and the sorcerer’s minions. Also nearby is a coffin containing Kai’s previous body. A demon’s one weakness is water. It appears that someone managed to knock Kai unconscious, put his body in a coffin, and submerge that coffin in water. Luckily for Kai, an idiot sorcerer decided he could enslave the weakened demon and drained the water. Said sorcerer and his minions are quickly dispatched, but now Kai wants to know what happened to him, and why.

It turns out that Ziede is imprisoned nearby. Kai frees her, but Tahren is nowhere to be found. Another mystery, and one that Ziede is anxious to resolve. Someone must have betrayed them, and that someone presumably has Tahren as a prisoner.

For our heroes, that is enough, but we readers know nothing. The book therefore has a secondary plotline which takes place some 60 or so years before and tells of the arrival of the Hierarchs, and how they were defeated. This information is essential to understanding the political machinations that have resulted in the current predicament for our heroes.

So much for the epic fantasy angle, but the book also has more general themes. The first is the nature of magic. Ziede’s Witch magic is essentially a negotiation with spirits, but Hierarch magic is based on death. They can do all sorts of spells, but the power that makes those spells work comes from human life force. The more people they kill, the more powerful they become. Kai has learned to use this magic, and can kill his enemies with ease. But he refuses to go around with a baggage train of prisoners to sacrifice when he needs them. He has discovered that he can use his own pain to power spells.

There is also a found family aspect to the story. As noted, Ziede and Tahren are a couple in the present day, though that was not always the case. Kai, despite being a demon, is someone that they love and trust, having been through the fires of war at his side. Our heroes are from very different backgrounds and cultures, and all three are alone for different reasons, but find strength in each other.

A third theme is gender. Kai can inhabit any human body, and spends most of the backstory as a young woman. In the backstory he has not been living among mortals for long and has a lot to learn about their ways. Here he is examining a group of soldiers from a group of Bashasa’s people who have been forced to serve the Hierarchs as soldiers:

All those Kai could see were dressed as men in tied split skirts. Kai had figured out by now that Arike soldiers were traditionally women, and Arike women wore pants; had the Hierarchs killed the whole garrison and conscripted men to replace them, or made the captured soldiers change their gender? Another reason they didn’t took happy to be here.

I was on a train when I read that, so I couldn’t laugh as loudly as I wanted to.

Anyway, I very much enjoyed this book, and there is plenty in the world that hasn’t yet been explored. I am hopeful for sequels. If I had the time (which I don’t), I’d be thinking about a role-playing setting inspired by some of the ideas in the book.

The Unraveling

051, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Book Review

I started this book a while back but put it down because it is rather slow to start. I got back into it because I was on a panel about the future of the family at Eurocon, and this is a book that definitely has thoughts in that direction.

The world of The Unraveling is set far in the future when resources are relatively plentiful, life expectancy is far longer than today, and biological adaptation is readily available. If you want working reproductive anatomy (of any sex) you can have it. Being allowed to have children is another matter.

The thing about living for hundreds of years is that you have to worry about population control, otherwise you’d run out of space for all of the new people you kept breeding. The society of The Unraveling gets around this by a) having far more than 2 parents in a family; b) extending adolescence by decades; and c) being very strict about which families are allowed to breed.

Our lead character, Fift, has been born to a family whose case for being allowed a child was marginal. Zir parents are very concerned about doing a good job. But this is a world in which pretty much everything is under constant public surveillance. The slightest mistake can lead to outrage on social media and the local equivalent of Social Services being called in to take the child away and break up the family.

Unfortunately Fift has a few problems with somatic integration. This is a world in which most people have at least three bodies. The extras are added soon after birth, and a psychic link established between them. If the child cannot successfully integrate the bodies into a single self, they may ‘unravel’, which would definitely be seen as a result of bad parenting.

That, however, is not the only meaning of the title. A society with strict social controls, which this one very much has, is always vulnerable to the vagaries of human nature. While a majority might be willing to fit in, there will always be those who chafe against the rules and want to live differently. There will also be malcontents, those who have been found wanting by society, and who resent the punishment this brings with it. If enough discontent builds up, society itself can being to unravel, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Fift, inevitably, will get caught up in just this sort of social collapse.

You may be wondering, with body modification easily available, who gets to be a mother and who a father. The answer is that anyone who births a child becomes a mother, and everyone else is a father. However, this has nothing to do with gender. The world of The Unraveling has two genders. Gender is assigned at birth by a powerful political group called The Midwives, and is rigidly enforced.

First we have Vails. They are loud, excitable, emotional, and very much outgoing. They favour bright colours and outrageous fashions. In contrast, Staids are quiet, contemplative, logical, and prone to staying at home for years on end. Staids only ever wear simple white clothes. Families will generally be made up of a mixture of Vails and Staids. Once your gender has been assigned, it is rigidly enforced. Any deviation will reflect badly upon your parents.

As you can see, The Unraveling is very much a book about social structures. Strict social norms of various sorts are being critiqued. I should note at this point that Ben Rosenbaum is Jewish, and there are probably things in the book that are derived from Jewish culture of which I am entirely ignorant. But I think people from all cultures can relate to oppressive social expectations.

This is a very complex book, and Rosenbaum is one of the smartest people I know. It is, I think, more in the mould of a thought experiment than an adventure or a character study. However, it is a very important thought experiment. It was published in 2021, which means that Rosenbaum would have written it before the pandemic, and before the collapse we have seen in social media. But he clearly saw something coming. Some of the malcontents in the book are very reminiscent of incels and neo-Nazis. We are much further into our own unraveling now.

I’m less convinced about the multi-body thing. I think the story could have been told without it. But it does add a very powerful additional tool to SF storytelling.

book cover
Title: The Unraveling
By: Benjamin Rosenbaum
Publisher: Erewhon
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Hild

051, Book Review, Nicola Griffith

I can’t believe that I haven’t reviewed this book. I’ve certainly talked about it enough. I’ve even interviewed Nicola Griffith about it for an LGBT+ History Month event. But there’s no actual review. I haven’t had time to re-read the book, but with Menewood due very soon now, here are some thoughts on its precursor.

Hild is based on the life of St. Hild of Whitby. She was a real historical person, and is best known to us for having played a major role in the Synod of Whitby, at which the Christian church in Britain decided to ally itself with the church in Rome, and to eschew the teachings of the Celtic Church. This is a hugely important turning point in the history of these islands, and also of Christian belief.

None of this features in the original novel. That tells of Hild’s life from precocious teenager to young woman. The religious conflict in the book is between Paulinus, a Christian bishop and also a real person, and Coifi, a priest of Woden. It isn’t a major plot point, but it is there. Paulinus, having triumphed over the pagans, will doubtless continue to feature.

Not that this has much effect on the common people of Hild’s world. She becomes widely believed to have magic powers, primarily because she is smarter than the average Saxon. Hild, as portrayed by Griffith, is a keen observer of both human nature and the natural world. She understand the cycle of the seasons, she’s familiar with the behaviour of animals, and that of kings. Because of this she becomes invaluable to her uncle, King Edwin of Northumbria, who rules over a substantial part of what we now call Northern England (and bits of Southern Scotland).

One of the most impressive things about the book is the amount of research that Griffith has poured into it. Not only is she drawing on the very latest research about Early Mediaeval life in Britain, she also has to research all of the things about the world that Hild knows, and uses to her advantage.

The book also portrays Hild as unashamedly bisexual. If you study history, rather than get your knowledge from far-right rabble-rousers on social media, you will know that this is entirely reasonable.

Of course there is also Griffith’s luscious prose. This is a writer who has moved seamlessly from science fiction to detective novels to autobiography and now to historical fiction, and has won awards in all of these categories. Hild is not overtly fantastical, but Griffith’s most recent work, Spear, engages fully with the mythic, Arthurian version of the Early Mediaeval, and that has won awards too. However, Hild is fantasy in a Magic Realism sense, because pretty much everyone in the book (except maybe Hild herself) believes that magic is real. The book feels like fantasy, and the quality of the worldbuilding is outstanding.

So yes, this is an amazing book, and far more people than me have been eagerly awaiting the sequel. There isn’t long to wait now.

book cover
Title: Hild
By: Nicola Griffith
Publisher: Blackfriars
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Eurocon 2023

051, Convention Report

This year’s Eurocon took place in Uppsala, a small city in Sweden just north of Stockholm. Arlanda airport is roughly equidistant between the two cities so Uppsala is an easy destination for international travelers. This year there was a problem with the train service between Arlanda and Uppsala, but there is an express bus service that does the job almost as well and is much cheaper.

The convention recommended we use the Clarion Gillet Hotel, which seemed a bit odd because there were no convention functions scheduled in it and it was about 10 minutes walk from the venue. I later found out that SweCon often takes place in that hotel, which explains why the ConCom wanted to keep them happy. Anyway, it was a nice enough hotel, with an excellent breakfast.

The venue was Uppsala University, a venerable institution founded in 1477 and possessing a gorgeous main building. There were no obvious places to put a dealers’ room or art show, but the passageways were so generous that we could use those instead. All of the meeting rooms were well equipped with sound systems. My only real complaint was that the main hall was so huge and echoey that it made it hard for me to hear anything. I suspect other hearing aid users will have had similar issues. It was a splendid hall, though. You could have staged an opera in there and it would not have looked out of place.

I was scheduled for four panels, all of which went well. I also attended quite a few, which speaks well for the choice of program items. I gather that some panels went a bit off the rails, but none I saw did. I’d particularly like to commend Johan Anglemark who did a heroic job with a panel on “How do young people get into RPGs these days?”, for which he had been given a panel of three, two of which were older than him. As it turned out, they both started role-playing around the time I stopped, but we are still taking late 1980s.

As far as I was concerned, the most interesting event was the Guest of Honour talk by Merja Polvinen. She’s a lecturer in narratology at the University of Helsinki and the work she does on speculative fiction is fascinating. I will probably butcher the theory, but here’s a quick attempt at explaining what she does.

Many of you will be familiar with Samuel Delany’s idea that science fiction literalises metaphor. The best known example of this is, “then her world exploded”. That’s unlikely to happen in a story set in our world, but if you happen to be Princess Leia it takes on a whole new meaning. What Merja has been doing is taking that one step further and looking at how science fiction literalises narrative techniques.

What does that mean? Well, consider the concept of the novel with multiple point of view characters. If you are reading A Song of Ice and Fire you have one chapter telling you what Tyrion knows of the current political situation, and then a following chapter from Cersi’s point of view. Neither will have the full picture, but you, the reader, can see what both of them see. Now consider characters such as Breq or Anaander Miannaai from Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy. Both of them have multiple bodies that are in contact with each other. So both of them are literally multiple viewpoint characters in a single person.

If you are wondering why anyone would study this, one reason is that examination of narrative techniques is a very respectable part of academic literary studies, and this is a good way to get the older and stuffier academics to sit up and take notice.

Another highlight of the programme was the trip to the old Viking settlement of Old Uppsala. I’ll do a separate report on that.

Food is a key part of any convention for me, and Uppsala provided magnificently. One evening I went out with Farah Mendlesohn, Edward James and Vincent Docherty to a place called Domtrappkällaren. I had one of the best meals I have ever had in my life. I want to make particular mention of the pureed parsnips. There are things you expect to taste amazing. Parsnips are not generally high on the list. I have no idea how they got such concentrated flavour out of them.

Merja, who spent some time living in Uppsala just before the pandemic, recommended Hamberg’s Fisk. During the day they operate a pub-like restaurant in the garden of an old house that once belonged the a vice chancellor of the university. It is all fish, of course. I sat in the sun eating salmon salad and drinking white wine. It was lovely.

ESFS business duly happened. Awards were given out. I’m particularly pleased for my friends, Sara Bergmark Elfgren and John-Henri Holmberg. Sara won Best Written Fiction for her novel, Grim, which will be available in English by the time this issue hits the interwebs. John-Henri got the Grand Master award, which was entirely appropriate.

The 2024 Eurocon is already seated. It will take place in Rotterdam the weekend after the Glasgow Worldcon. That’s convenient for people travelling from far away, but these days there is a definite COVID risk. I’m not sure about booking to attend as I don’t want to have to cancel at the last minute. Jasper Fforde is the headline GoH.

There was only one bidder for the 2025 Eurocon, because no one was daft enough to bid against Archipaleacon 2. It will be wonderful. The GoHs are Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, Mats Strandberg and Emmi Itäranta. Mats, as well as being half of the most famous gay couple in Sweden, writes mostly horror. He has written a novel set on a ferry in the Baltic. I do not recommend reading it before you travel to Archipelacon. Wait until you are safely home.

Getting home was a nightmare of delayed aircraft and delayed trains, but I made it. I am once again very grateful to John & Judith Clute for their hospitality.

Vikings at Uppsala

051, History

The Eurocon programming included a number of guided tours of the city and its environs. The one I immediately signed up for was to Gamla Uppsala, the site of the original Viking-era settlement which is about 5 km from the modern city. I’m very glad that I did.

Prior to the Viking age (and for some time during it), the Scandinavian nations were not the single countries we know today. Much like in Britain, the social structure was a patchwork of local kingships. The two most powerful kingdoms, as far as I’m aware, were based at Birka and Uppsala. The folks at Birka did particularly well for themselves, as they became a centre for the lucrative Baltic trade that extended down through the lands of the Rus to Constantinople and Baghdad. But Uppsala was also a very wealthy and important place.

The pagan Vikings wrote very little down, and the runestones that survive are largely memorials for people who had died on overseas adventures. Our written evidence for the site comes from Christian era writers such as Snorri Sturluson, Adam of Bremen and Saxo Grammaticus. Jonathan Olsson, our tour guide, told us that there is also a record from an Islamic traveler who visited a Danish city (and was deeply unimpressed).

What we do know is that there are many circular burial mounds, some of them impressively large. Snorri said that they included the graves of Odin, Thor and Freyr, but excavations have shown that they are burials for high status human individuals, including at least one woman. Archaeology has also turned up an impressively large hall, and what is probably a ceremonial centre. Our ancient sources claim that Odin, Thor and Freyr were worshipped there.

In the UK and USA our view of Norse religion comes primarily from Britain’s interaction with the Norwegians and Danes, whose allegiance seems to have been primarily to the Aesir. The Swedes, whose raiding activities focused on the east, seem to have paid more attention to the Vanir. In particular, Freyr is said to be the ancestor of the Swedes.

Much to my surprise, Jonathan told us that Thor’s hammer jewelry was associated almost exclusively with burials of women. Men favoured Odin and Freyr instead. Clearly Chris Hemsworth had a fan club even in those days.

The whole Aesir/Vanir thing is very confusing, and absent written sources we’ll probably never be able to make sense of it. However, one plausible explanation is that two rather different groups of gods belonging to different tribal groups have been melded together over time.

I am interested in this, primarily because Freyja is Vanir, and she’s a fertility goddess who goes around in a chariot drawn by cats. The parallels with Cybele should be obvious.

Saxo Grammaticus tells us that the priests of Freyr at Uppsala were effeminate. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they were like the galli and that Freyr is an equivalent of Attis. Freyr was a war god, and he is described as Freyja’s brother, not her consort. But there is clearly something interesting going on and it would be nice to have some more evidence to back up Saxo’s assertion.

We do know that effeminate men associated with the Vanir existed. Olaf Tryggvason, one of the first Norse kings to convert to Christianity, is said to have been attacked by a group of sorcerers, whom he defeated and put to death. The word “sorcerer” is here an English translation. The original text describes them as men who practiced “seidr”, a form of women’s magic specifically associated with Freyja.

One of the other clues we have about gender fluidity in ancient Norse religion comes from Tacitus. In his Germania he tells of a particularly sacred grove in what is now modern Poland which was attended by a cross-dressed priest and was dedicated to Castor & Pollux. While the pagan Germans clearly had a similar pantheon to the Norse, I knew of no parallel to this in Norse religion. Until I visited Uppsala, and there it was.

The museum at Uppsala contained a reference to images of twin gods dancing with weapons. One was found at the site (see the photo above), and one nearby. The description compares them to Castor and Pollux, and says that they were companions of Odin. The weapon dance reflects the Corybantes of the Cybele cult. There is a suggestion that one of the images on the helmet at Sutton Hoo also represents these twin gods (see below). And that in turn would suggest that there might have been an ergi priest at the court of King Raedwald, the probable occupant of the Sutton Hoo burial.

Cheryl, meet rabbit hole. There’s a lot of research to be done here. Hopefully it will turn up more evidence.

Heilung – LIFA

051, Music Review

So there I was chatting away with a friend online while watching Glastonbury. We were watching different stages, and I happened to mention that The Pretenders were playing “Hymn to Her”, because how can you not when you have a song like that and are at Glastonbury. Then Katie says, “Have you heard of Heilung?”

No, reader, I had not, because I am hopelessly out of the loop as regards modern music. I have become Old. But I do know how to Google, so I had a look on YouTube, and there was this bunch of people dressed as Nordic shamen playing instruments that looked like they had been dug up from an Iron Age village. Oh my. Folk music has come on a bit since Fairport Convention.

Heilung’s music is rooted in Germanic/Nordic mythology and the lyrics often consist of nothing but wailing, grunting and chanting the names of the gods. It is wonderfully atmospheric. Whether it has anything in common with music that was actually played by and ancient Norse and Germanic people is another matter, but it sounds like it ought to have. It is no surprise that some of their music was used in the Vikings TV series.

The album I’m reviewing here – Lifa – was recorded live on Lughnasadh at Castlefest in the Netherlands, which is apparently a popular venue for Neo-Mediaeval bands. If you are interested, you can watch the whole thing on YouTube. I think you’ll agree that they look the part.

In case you are worrying, ‘heilung’ means ‘healing’. The band has been featured in The Guardian, and I don’t think that would happen if they were Nazis, unless of course they also started going on about how they were only asking reasonable questions about women’s safety.

In addition to the Nordic stuff, the band has some songs inspired by Mesopotamian religion. I’m hoping that they will get together with my friend, Sophus Helle, and put the poems of Enheduanna to music. It seems an obvious thing to do.

Which reminds me, I have a copy of Sophus’s new book of translations of those poems, which I must review for you at some point.

Anyway, Heilung are interesting in part because of their dedication to exploring the sounds of the deep past, and partly because they create some really interesting soundscapes. There’s nothing electronic about Heilung’s work, but some of it is definitely a sort of trance music. Other songs are more reminiscent of a Māori Haka. If you fancy a bit of weird, neo-pagan music, you should check them out. I recommend headphones.

Editorial – June 2023

051, Editorial

I got a fair amount of reading done this month thanks to the travel to Eurocon. Hopefully I’ll be similarly productive this month as I will be off to Canada for the NASFiC.

Next issue should be a good one as I have some great stuff lined up for review. Most importantly, Nicola Griffith has kindly sent me an eARC of Menewood. In addition I have a whole 9 hours of audiobook to listen to. Normally I don’t do such things, but this is Vergil! A Mythological Musical, written by Maria Dahvana Headley and with an all-star cast including Will Young.

The TV is getting busy as well. I have started watching Secret Invasion and the new series of Strange New Worlds. Netflix has informed me that Titans season 4 and The Witcher season 3 are now available. And Good Omens 2 should begin soon. I need to retire so that I can read and watch stuff.

But I can’t. In case you missed it, Wizard’s Tower will be publishing a lesbian space opera trilogy from the wonderful Lyda Morehouse. The press release is here. That’s work I shall be delighted to do.

Issue #50

Issues

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


  • Cover: Draw Down the Stars: This issue's cover is "Draw Down the Stars" by Iain J Clark.

  • Infinity Gate: Mike Carey starts a new duology on the biggest canvas possible, the multiverse

  • When Women Were Dragons: Are you a woman? Are you angry about men? Would you like to turn into a dragon and burn a few of them to a crisp? Well why not just do it?

  • Hel’s Eight: Stark Holborn returns to the moon, Factus, for some more desperate frontier adventure, Space Western style.

  • The Terraformers: Some classic political science fiction from Annalee Newitz

  • The Peripheral – Season 1: The TV version of The Peripheral deviates signifcantly from the book. Does it still work?

  • The Cleaving: In which Juliet McKenna takes on the Arthurian legend

  • Descendant Machine: The new novel from Gareth L Powell does exactly what it says on the tin.

  • HistFest 2023: Popular history writers have conventions too. Cheryl has been to one.

  • Celtic Wales: A small but expertly written book explores what we really know about the iron age inhabitants of Wales.

  • 2023 Tolkien Lecture: This year's Tolkien Lecture was given by Maria Dahvana Headley. Cheryl was there.

  • Swansea ComicCon 2023: Cheryl goes to her local ComicCon

  • Willow – the TV Series: Twenty-odd years on in fantasy time, and over thirty in our world, Willow finally has a sequel.

  • Editorial – May 2023: Cheryl has some thoughts on declining interest in conventions.

Cover: Draw Down the Stars

050, Art, Iain J Clark

This issue’s cover is one of a series I will be running over the coming year. They are all pieces of art created by Iain J Clark for the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon. My thanks to Iain and to the Glasgow committee for giving me permission to use the art.

“Draw Down the Stars” is a particular favourite of mine from Iain’s body of work. I’m delighted to get to use it for issue #50.

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/.

Infinity Gate

050, Book Review, Mike Carey

We have a new series from Mike Carey underway. Whereas the Rampart Trilogy was relatively near future, this one has strong space opera elements to it. The tag line on the cover of Infinity Gate reads, “The War for the Multiverse has Begun”. You can’t get a much bigger canvas than that.

The Pandominion will be a two-book series which tells the story of a war between organic beings (the Pandominion of the title) and the Machine Hegemony. That’s a classic space opera trope, but Carey makes it all his own, firstly by adding the multiverse element, and secondly with his characters. We begin at a relatively small scale.

In the near future of our own world, Hadiz Tambuwal is one of a few scientists gathered in Lagos to try to find a last-minute silver bullet to stop the runaway climate catastrophe and save mankind. What she discovers instead is a way to travel to parallel universes. It is too late for us, but now Tambuwal has a whole multiverse to explore.

In a close analog of our world she finds Essien Nkanika, a petty thief and sex worker who dreams of a heist that will make him rich. Essien is way too stupid to grasp that opportunity when it comes, but he’ll play a major role in our story nonetheless.

And then there is Paz. Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills to give her her full name. She’s a teenage girl and a citizen of the Pandominion, a vast empire that spans thousands of universes. Unlike Hadiz and Essien, she is not an ape. She is a rabbit.

And suddenly the whole multiverse opens up beneath our feet.

The classic view of the multiverse is that new universes are created when humans make choices. Carey’s multiverse is bigger, because he has a wider definition of life. It seems that inanimate objects cannot spawn universes, because Lagos exists in pretty much the same place on every version of Earth. Plate tectonics has no influence on universe splitting. But evolution has taken different courses on each world within the Pandominion, and that includes the basic morphology of the species that has come to be intelligent on each world. There are intelligent races that are feline, canine, mustelid, ursine, lagomorph and many others.

This, of course, brings a whole new dimension to racism, or more properly speciesism, because these people are radically different. And yet, within the Pandominion, each one is a Self, an intelligent being with citizen rights. It all works tolerably well, until the Pandominion encounters a world inhabited solely by machines. It is a Columbus moment for the Pandominion, and like him they get it badly wrong. Unlike him, they get it wrong with a civilization more than capable of going toe-to-toe with them in a war.

By the way, how do you fight a war when anyone can step into or out of a given universe at any time? Carey has thought about that.

The core of the books appears to be the question of what counts as an intelligent being. Us apes, obviously, but also people like Paz, or like Moon, the feline Pandominion soldier who plays a major role in the story. And what about machines? There is a fascinating passage in which a representative of the machine world tells Paz how et and et’s colleagues struggled to work out whether the organic lifeforms that invaded their world were actually intelligent beings, or just an infestation of vermin. At the end of the book, Carey throws a massive spanner into that debate.

Given the current furor over pattern-matching software that people claim is AI, these books are rather timely. But they are just as important for issues such as animal rights. There’s a certain amount of biological essentialism in the narrative, but I think that only helps highlight how silly it is to pretend that male and female humans are separate species.

Given that most of the action is set in various versions of Lagos in different universes, you may be wondering how Carey copes with that. I’ve never been to Lagos, so I am not well placed to comment. However, he does thank Tade Thompson in the acknowledgements. Having worked with Carey on the Rampart Trilogy, I know that he listens well to expert input, and Thompson seems very happy with the end result, so I think we can assume that aspect of the book has been done well. The book certainly reads like it was written by someone who knows the city.

Overall, this is exactly the sort of superb work we have come to expect from Carey. I’m looking forward to the second part.

book cover
Title: Infinity Gate
By: Mike Carey
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

When Women Were Dragons

050, Book Review, Kelly Barnhill

The basic premise of this book by Kelly Barnhill is very simple: when women get sufficiently angry about their lot in society, they turn into dragons. Sometimes they just fly away and have fun. Sometimes they eat their annoying husbands. And if said husbands have been sufficiently unpleasant, they probably incinerate them instead. That’s entirely reasonable, right?

I mean, it is a great idea. But how the heck do you make a story out of it, let alone a whole novel?

That’s what wannabe writers get wrong. It isn’t a question of, “where do you get your ideas from?” Most writers have loads of good ideas. The hard bit is wrestling those ideas into the shape of a story or novel. And when the idea is as off-the-wall as this one, well, the writer has her work cut out.

The book is dedicated to Christine Blasey Ford, but it isn’t specifically about Trump-era America. It is set in the 1950s when McCarthyism is running riot and men who have returned from the war are keen to put women back where they “belong”. There’s a good reason for this because America at the time was in the grip of a collective delusion. Barnhill needs a society in which it is vaguely believable that large numbers of women turn into dragons and society at large decides to simply not talk about it, as if those women never existed. It is the sort of social control that would be the envy of Cultural Revolution era China, and far more effective for being largely voluntary.

So we have a possible setting, now we need a story. Barnhill’s narrator, Alex Green, is a child when dragonings start to happen, or at least come to the attention of the public. She loses her aunt in the Mass Dragoning of 1955, forcing her parents to adopt her baby cousin, Beatrice. Her mother is determined not to dragon, and to prevent the girls from doing so.

That, however, is hardly enough story for a novella. To make a novel, Barnhill has bulked the book out with a collection of worldbuilding infodumps in the form of scientific reports from one Henry Gantz, one of the few people to take the dragoning at face value and try to study it.

That is enough to give us a fairly short novel which is essentially an angry, if entirely justified, feminist rant.

It makes a good book in part because we come to care about Alex and Beatrice and their struggles in the face of stupid, arrogant men, and women who are afraid to tell them the truth. There is also some interesting development of the dragoning concept as the book goes on, though Barnhill is always fighting an uphill battle to make it believable.

Younger readers, I suspect, will find it hard to believe how much, “we don’t talk about such things” went on back then. The idea that a family would suddenly cut one of its members off, refuse to talk about that person ever again, and indeed insist that said person never existed, seems a bit bizarre. But it happened. Heck, all a girl had to do was get pregnant outside of marriage and she’d find herself shipped off to an asylum and written out of her family history.

That sort of thing doesn’t happen so much these days, at least in social groupings that I am familiar with. But there is one group of people to whom it is still routinely done: trans folk. Heck, when I started my transition in the 1990s, trans people were expected to disappear themselves, not to wait for their family to cut them out.

So reading When Women Were Dragons was a strange experience, because part of it felt very familiar. It wasn’t specifically about how society treats trans people, and yet it was, very much so. That, of course, brings anxiety, because this is a book in which women are able to do a thing (turn into dragons) and men cannot. Was it going to go all biological essentialist on me? Well, here’s a little comment from Henry Gantz, who has been talking to dragons to find out what sort of women were likely to transform.

It has nothing to do with menstruation – 232 of the dragons I interviewed were post-menopausal, and 109 had already undergone radical hysterectomies, and an astonishing 74 were women by choice, and by the great yearnings of their hearts, and were not labelled as such at birth, and yet are women all the same.

Reader, I cried.

And yes, Dr. Gantz has a very odd writing style. The whole book isn’t like that.

Barnhill clearly knows what she is talking about. Later in the book, a family group is talking about a young girl who is showing signs of dragoning.

“It’s just,” Jeanne said. She paused and pulled out an embroidered handkerchief. “It’s just we love her so much. We were adults when we changed. We knew what we were getting into. What if she changes her mind and can’t return?” She blew her nose in a tremendous roar.

I shrugged. “If there is one thing that […] knows, it’s her own mind. Always has. And if she gets stuck, that’s her nature asserting itself. If she can go back and forth, well maybe some children can go back and forth. Hell, maybe some women can. No one knows anything because no one is willing to talk about anything, so no one bothers to ask these questions, much less answer them.”

And that, dear reader, is the “trans debate” in a nutshell. People assert things to be true because they want them to be true, not because they have made any attempt to find out the actual truth, or even bothered to talk to anyone with actual lived experience of the issue.

So thank you, Ms. Barnhill, that was wonderful.

If I have a reservation about the book, it is because there is a whole story thread in there that ended up not being resolved. Alex’s mother is a mathematician. Not being allowed to use her talents in a job, she spends a lot of time doing things like crochet, and making elaborately knotted bracelets from string. There is a suggestion that she was doing this because she believed that the knots could somehow prevent dragoning. Dr. Gantz manages to find historical evidence for this belief. And yet neither he nor Alex (who inherits her mother’s mathematical talents) ever investigate this further. It is odd, and I’m not sure what to make of it. I’d love to know why.

book cover
Title: When Women Were Dragons
By: Kelly Barnhill
Publisher: Hot Key
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Hel’s Eight

050, Book Review, Stark Holborn

Listen up varmints, the old lady got something to tell ya.

There are times in a reviewer’s life when she reads a book and all she can think of to say is, “dear goddess, I wish I’d written that.” But you know that you could not have done because you are nowhere near that good. Cat Valente does that to me most of the time, of course. I got the same feeling from the latest novel by Stark Holborn.

I should note that this book is unlikely to appeal to the people who came to my table at Eastercon asking for books that are hopeful and uplifting. Westerns, and that includes Space Westerns, are by their very nature gritty and hopeless. You know from the outset that lots of people are going to die, many of them senselessly. But maybe gaining some measure of success against hopeless odds is what the world really needs to be looking for right now.

Hel’s Eight is pretty much a direct sequel to Ten Low. Some years have passed, but little has changed on the outback moon called Factus. Low has spent most of the intervening time far out in the barrens. She’s still working as a medic when people are desperate enough to come find her, but mostly she is saving lives by staying away from other people. Death has a habit of following her.

Recently, however, the fragile balance of life on Factus has been upset my a massive influx of a resource that is in desperately short supply there: money. A wealthy businessman called Lutho Xoon has taken an interest in Factus and is prepared to pay whatever it takes to gain control of large parts of the moon. Naturally this is bad news for independent “business” people like Malady Falco. It isn’t easy being a notorious smuggler when some off-world jerk with deep pockets can just fly in any goods that people want, and give them away in return for obedience.

Thus it is that Gabi Ortiz, former child general and now Falco’s chief enforcer, turns up at Low’s residence looking for help. Help from whom, you may wonder? What can one old lady doctor possibly have that will turn the tide of affairs?

The thing is that everyone knows there is nothing on Factus that could possibly warrant the money that Xoon is pouring into it. The moon barely has enough resources to sustain the meagre population at subsistence levels. The only thing that Xoon could possibly want is them. The Ifs. The strange, inhuman creatures that inhabit the least hospitable parts of Factus, and who appear to feed off human suffering and death. The thing about the Ifs is that they are attracted by risk, by games of chance. They may, in some ineffable way, be able to see the branching timelines ahead of them and act to choose which will come to pass.

The ability to see, and influence, the future is a prospect that holds enormous fascination for the very wealthy. And the person on Factus who has most connection to them, who might even be able to persuade them to take a side is a war, is Ten Low.

It hasn’t always been that way. In the previous book, Low made contact with them via their servants, the Seekers, and via the old brothelkeeper, Ma Esterházy, who may have been the leader of said Seekers, a person known as Hel the Converter.

The main plot of the book is interspersed with Esterházy’s backstory: how she came to Factus, how she first encountered the Ifs, and why Xoon’s company is so interested in the moon.

We, as readers, know that Esterházy died in the previous book. What has happened since then is unclear. Has Low become the new Hel? Is Low somehow possessed by Esterházy’s ghost? Or, as Esterházy was fond of saying, are we all Hel? Whatever the truth is, the future of Factus probably depends on it.

Whilst I lay no claim to the sorts of powers wielded by the Ifs, I can occasionally see something of the future. I am confident that Holborn has plans for another book in the series. I for one am very heartened by that prospect. Holborn has gone all in on the Western style in these books, but she knew what she had in her hand, and she’s won big.

book cover
Title: Hel's Eight
By: Stark Holborn
Publisher: Titan
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Terraformers

050, Analee Newitz, Book Review

The important thing to know about Annalee Newitz’s fiction is that they are, first and foremost, a science writer. Thus what you get from them is old fashioned science fiction: speculative ideas explored for their potential, and spiced up for the reader by an adventure plot. We don’t see enough of that these days, so I’m glad that Newtiz is out there making books like this.

The Terraformers is, as the title suggests, about the conversion of an inhospitable planet into one that can support a large population. But that isn’t really what the book is about. This is not a book like Plutoshine which worries about the ethics of doing any terraforming at all. If anything it has more in common with the song, “The Last Resort”, from the Eagles album, Hotel California. Because making a planet inhabitable is only the start. Someone has to pay for the terraforming, after all. And the people charged with making that money will be real estate developers.

The result is something more like a Cory Doctorow novel than anything else. But it is a political science fiction novel that is set so far in the future that the author can have a lot of fun with what is now possible. The cast of characters includes a flying moose who communicates by text message, a robot cow, a flying train, and a cat who works as an investigative journalist. Who counts as a person is a key issue in the book. And that, of course, all serves to shine a light on issues of racism and white supremacy, not to mention animal rights.

The book is divided into three main parts, each one illustrating a key episode in the life of the planet, Sask-E. The first section takes place in the early history of the planet. The environmentalists tasked with building an earthlike ecosystem discover that their employers, the Verdance corporation, will be selling parts of the planet off to human settlers. This brings them into conflict with some of the more ancient inhabitants of the planet. The book uses the term, “land use treaty”, which should tell you all you need to know about what is going on.

Part two takes us far into the future. A corporation called Emerald has purchased large tracts of Sask-E and is building cities. The environmental workers, some of whom are survivors from part one, are trying to design a sensible transit system for the planet. However, their boss at Verdance, and the corresponding executive at Emerald, are only interested in extracting money from the planet’s inhabitants.

Finally we get to part three, in which Emerald, having built many large cities, is now looking to increase their value as real estate by removing all of the undesirables currently living there, and selling only to pure-blood humans.

The villains of the book are primarily corporate executives: in particular Ronnie at Verdance, and Cylindra who starts with Verdance and ends up at Emerald. Newitz clearly has a lot of experience of dealing with people whose only interest in life is clawing their way up the corporate ladder by whatever means possible. In contrast the good guys are a wild mix of sexualities, genders, species, and chemical bases for life. Theirs is a world in which genetically modified members of different species can elect to become parents to an artificially intelligent train and be responsible for raising it to become a good citizen. Goodness only knows what the “god made men and women” crowd will make of it.

Overall, this is a highly entertaining book with a lot of interesting political messages. I warmly recommend it, and would not be surprised to see it on award ballots next year. I also suspect that we will see a lot of academic papers written about the book, because it is that full of interesting ideas.

book cover
Title: The Terraformers
By: Annalee Newitz
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Peripheral – Season 1

050, TV Review

It has taken a while, but I have finally got around to watching Amazon’s adaptation of William Gibson’s The Peripheral. Those folks who insist that a TV version should never deviate in any way from the original book are doubtless furious about it, but it makes very good TV.

The core of the setting remains the same. We still have folks in future London dragging Flynne Fisher into their time to inhabit a peripheral. The Jackpot is still a thing. The likes of Wilf Netherton, Conner Penske, Tommy Constantine, and Lev Zubov are still major characters. Janice has had her name changed to Billy Ann. But there’s a whole lot more.

If you have only seen the TV series, you may be surprised to learn that the Research Institute, Cherise Nuland, and the whole plot about the bacteria are not in the novel. So while the setting might be the same, the plot is very different.

Gibson, very wisely, seems to have just taken the money and left the TV folks to get on with whatever they wanted to do.

There are, I think, two reasons why the TV script writers have done this. The first is that, even with 8 episodes to play with, The Peripheral is just too complicated a novel to be adapted as is. They needed something simpler and more focused. The other is that they have plans for at least one more season. That’s not plans to adapt Agency, it is plans for a direct sequel to The Peripheral. That would not be so easy with the way the book ends. They needed loose threads.

Having said all that, this is a fine piece of television. Of course it is very easy to make pretty pictures when you have Chloë Grace Moretz to photograph, but the series is visually arresting, well-plotted, and makes good use of the setting of the novel to tell a very different story. The science fictional aspects of Netherton’s world are well visualized.

The casting is particularly good. All of the characters taken from the novel come across very well. I was particularly concerned about Inspector Lowbeer, partly because she’s a fairly eccentric character, and partly because she’s canonically trans in the novel. The TV crew picked Alexandra Billings, an experienced trans actress, and she does a magnificent job.

Incidentally, the character of Beatrice, Lowbeer’s robot assistant, is not in the book, but she’s a superb addition.

Talking of things in the book, I had entirely forgotten that Corbell Pickett owns a Tesla dealership. I’ll bet that Gibson is very proud of that particular piece of prescience.

I am slightly worried about Season 2, which I understand has now been greenlit. The TV crew have set up what seems to be a sensible sequel that is all about Flynne and Lowbeer versus the Klept. But these are the people responsible for Westworld. While I’ve not seen that series, I understand that each new season took the story in a radically different direction. Here’s hoping they don’t go off the rails.

The Cleaving

050, Book Review, Juliet E McKenna

Some books are more complicated to review than others. Regular readers will be well aware that The Cleaving is written by a very dear friend of mine, Juliet McKenna, many of whose books I publish. I am absolutely biased on the subject of her writing. Also I was born not far from Glastonbury, have read a lot of Arthuriana, and run a Pendragon campaign. The only reason that I haven’t written an Arthur book myself is that I’m not a good enough writer.

I’m going to start by saying that The Cleaving is not the sort of Arthur book that I would have written. That does not mean that it is a bad book. Indeed, I think it is a fresh and necessary approach to the legend. There are many different reasons why one might want to dip one’s toes into Arthuriana. What I want to do here is discuss some of the choices that McKenna has made. After all, my job as a reviewer is to help you make a decision as to whether to buy the book, and that will depend to a large extent on whether you like those choices.

I should start by saying that this is a very English version of Arthur. It is rooted firmly in the works of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas Malory, and while some of it also derives from Chrétien de Troyes, his patroness, Marie de France, Countess of Champagne, was the daughter is Eleanor of Aquitaine and therefore half-sister to Richard the Lionheart and King John. The book presents a view of Arthurian times that would be familiar to and approved by the likes of Edward III and Henry VIII, though neither of them would like McKenna’s portrayal of Arthur himself.

In particular the setting is one of mediaeval England. There are stone castles, and tournaments. There are places called Logres (England), Wales and Scotland. They are divided up into petty kingdoms, but they are presented as culturally distinct in a way that they would be in Malory’s time, but not in the aftermath of the Roman departure. Arthur is first and foremost an English king, though he aspires to be High King of the entire island. As far as any attempt at crafting an historical Arthur goes, this is all nonsense, but it is very true to the setting of the legends written by and for the English. It is also, of course, familiar territory to a writer of epic fantasy, which has been McKenna’s forte through most of her career.

One of the choices you have to make when writing Arthuriana is whether to use the setting, or to engage with the legend. McKenna has mainly done the latter, though there is no mention of the Grail Quest in her version. If you make use of the setting then all sorts of fantastic tales can be told in which bold knights and beautiful maidens take on supernatural foes. If you adhere more to the plot of the legend then you are inevitably drawn into a tale in which flawed people make bad decisions leading to disastrous consequences. In that case, which is what McKenna has done, the interesting questions revolve around how the main characters are flawed, and why they make those bad decisions.

There is magic in the book. Mostly it is wielded by the Fae, in particular by Merlin and Nimue as they are the ones who mostly involve themselves in human affairs. The politics of such meddling is key to much of the plot.

The main thrust of the story, however, centres on the women. Traditionally, Arthurian fiction either largely ignores female characters, or paints them as scheming villains, or puts them in a romance plot. McKenna does none of these things. Instead she focuses on what it means to be a high status woman in a mediaeval society when you are seen as property by the men in your life. And when those men are mostly arrogant thugs who spend much of their time bashing each other senseless over imagined slights to their honour.

The Cleaving doesn’t gender-swap Arthuriana, but it does gender-swap the importance of the characters. The men are mostly ciphers, distinguishable only by some of them having slightly more brains and sense of morals than others. Gawain is the most sympathetic of them, desperately wanting to do the right thing, but not having the wit to see what that is. Lancelot, having succeeded easily at everything in his life to date, has no idea what to do when he becomes embroiled in an affair with Guinevere. Arthur, having been made King thanks to Merlin’s magic, is horribly out of his depth when things get difficult. The women, in particular Morgana, have much more nuanced motivations, and think with their heads rather than with their dicks or their sword arms.

I can imagine a number of male readers being deeply upset by this. Those who are not may be mollified by some of the excellent fight scenes, because McKenna does know what she’s talking about when it comes to combat.

Other readers will find much more to enjoy and admire in this book. It does take much of the shine off the Round Table, but it does so in a very believable way. It also points a much-deserved spotlight on Ygraine, Morgana, Guinevere and Nimue.

book cover
Title: The Cleaving
By: Juliet E McKenna
Publisher: Angry Robot
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Descendant Machine

050, Book Review, Gareth L Powell

Reviewers often have a good laugh at the nonsense publishers put into book blurbs. As a publisher myself, I see the issue from both sides, so I know why blurbs are what they are. Even so, I still often roll my eyes and how the description in a blurb can often bear little resemblance to the actual book. On the back of Gareth L Powell’s Descendant Machine, the good folks at Titan describe it as: “a gripping, fast-paced and brilliantly imagined science fiction thrill ride.” Reader, I could not have put it better myself.

Descendant Machine is a stand-alone space opera novel. It is set in the same world as Stars & Bones but, aside from the background of that world, the two books are unconnected. You don’t need to have read the earlier book.

As with much space opera, this is a book about Big Dumb Objects. There are at least three. To start with there is the Confluence fleet, a collection of space arks which is ferrying the remains of humanity on a generations-long cruise through the galaxy so that Earth can recover from the depredations of those same humans (or at least their ancestors). Most of the characters in the book are from the Confluence, and more specifically from Vanguard, which is Powell’s version of The Culture’s Contact division (and some of them are probably Special Circumstances).

BDO two is the Gunmetal Ghost, a kilometers-long starship from the distant past, which our heroes must seek out in order to rescue an alien holy man, the Abelisk, from a faction amongst his people who want to do something very stupid and don’t want him to find out. Being their culture’s most respected religious leader, he might be able to stop them.

And what stupid thing do they want to do? Why, activate BDO three, the so-called Great Mechanism, which sounds suspiciously like a stargate surrounding a wormhole. The aliens, four-armed vaguely feline people called the Jzat, have got it into their collective heads that this thing was built by their ancestors and by opening it they can reclaim their glorious past. The campaign to do so is being led by an army general turned populist politician.

So yes, the subtext of the book is a parable about the foolishness of populations being led astray by the nationalist ravings of far-right politicians. I think we can all guess what Powell is talking about here.

We also all know what happens when you open a mysterious door that the Games Master has put there, all tempting-looking, in the hope that you will be daft enough to open it. Some things, readers, man was never meant to know.

However, as far as Nicola Mafalda and her ship, Frontier Chic, are concerned, the whole book is about getting to the Gunmetal Ghost, finding the Abelisk, and keeping him safe from General Aulco’s goons.

Meanwhile there is a separate thread in which a young human mathematical genius called Orlando Walden is recruited by the Jzat to solve the mysteries of the Great Mechanism so that they can re-start it. The kid starts off deeply annoying, but he does have a character arc. We swap every so often to his viewpoint so that Powell can remind us how short of time our heroes are, and how imminent the galactic apocalypse has become.

It all rips along at a tremendous pace. I read the book in about a day, finding it very hard to put down. Powell has got really good at pacing, about just when to drop one viewpoint and leave the reader hanging, and ramping up the tension as the book approaches its conclusion. There are some excellent plot twists as well. Like I said, it does exactly what it says on the tin.

The characters are fun too. Erudite-Harf, the Jazt scientist who is heading up the project to re-start the Great Mechanism is highly amusing. One of the Gunmetal Ghost’s avatars reminds me a lot of Stephen Fry as Fiddler’s Green in the Sandman TV series.

This book is effectively a stand-alone, so if you’ve not read any Gareth Powell before, this would be a very good place to start.

book cover
Title: Descendant Machine
By: Gareth L Powell
Publisher: Titan
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

HistFest 2023

050, Convention Report, History

This is a different sort of convention report. HistFest is a convention for fans of history books. It takes place in London, at the British Library no less, but is also available online through a streaming service. In addition to the event itself, HistFest, the organization, also offers online talks through the year, and I have presented a couple of those. Being part of the family, so to speak, I got a comped weekend pass to this year’s event.

I’m gong to start by detailing differences between HistFest and a traditional SF&F convention, because I suspect some of you will find that interesting. The most obvious difference is that, while you can buy a day pass or weekend pass, you can also buy access to individual talks. I believe that the Edinburgh convention, Cymera, works in the same way, as of course do most literary festivals. This does mean additional security, but as there was only one stream of programming that was fairly easy.

While HistFest has done panel-like events in the past, all of the talks at this year’s live event were interviews, with I think one solo talk. Each event was associated with a relatively new book, and the interviewer was chosen for their expertise in the subject of the book. Again that’s very much a literary festival model.

There was no dealers’ room as such, but there was a dealer. Blackwells were on hand to sell copies of every book being discussed, and in some cases other books by the author in question. Also if the interviewer was sufficiently high profile they might have their book too, and they had a book by HistFest’s Director, Rebecca Riddeal. They didn’t bring books by anyone who wasn’t on programme. Sales appeared to be very good, in that they sold out of almost everything and were regretting not having brought more books by some authors, in particular Bettany Hughes.

The programme structure was one-hour slots of roughly 45 minutes interview and 15 minutes audience questions. The author in question then moved to the signing table. A one-hour gap was scheduled between each slot, giving attendees a decent amount of time to buy a book and get it signed before the next event.

There was no other programming as such, but a couple of costumed musicians were on hand to entertain the signing line with mediaeval tunes.

The streaming was all arranged through the British Library’s tech system, which they also use for their own events. I gather that there were some teething troubles on the Saturday morning, but those did get sorted out. All of the events were recorded so if you had a virtual ticket you could watch at your leisure over the coming week.

A feature of the talks is that they were all accompanied by sign language interpreters. I can’t comment on the quality of the translation, but a key thing about sign language is that it can be very expressive. The interpreters had quite a lot of fun with some of the material, and though most of the audience could not follow the signing we took to watching them for the comedy value.

HistFest also supplied automated speech-to-text subtitles on the streaming, which we could see from the audience because there were screens with the streaming content next to the stage. These were hilarious for entirely different reasons.

Of the four talks on Saturday, I was most interested in Rupert Everett talking to my friend, Dan Vo, about Oscar Wilde. Given that the current UK government is threating to repeal existing trans rights, making it a crime for me to use a women’s toilet, Oscar’s tribulations were a very timely topic. Sadly I’m unlikely to be offered any accommodation as spacious as Wilde’s cell in Reading Gaol.

I wasn’t sure what to expect of Courting India, Nandini Das’s book about Thomas Roe, Queen Elizabeth I’s ambassador at the court of the Mughal Emperor, Jahangir. However, she and Sunny Singh turned out to be hugely entertaining. It sounded as if Roe was in a similar situation to the Brazilian king who spent a year at the court of Henry VIII: viewed as a minor amusement at best.

Sunday was rather more busy for me. It began with Pragya Agarwal interviewed by Elinor Cleghorn about her book, Hysterical! Exploding the Myths and History of Gendered Emotions. This was brilliant. Entirely unprompted by me, Agarwal started on about the need to explode the gender binary, because gender essentialist thinking is what leads to women being defined as inescapably inferior. I asked her a question about female-coded robots, and it turns out that the final chapter of the book is on that subject, citing Donna Haraway and Kate Devlin amongst others.

Caroline Dodds Pennock’s talk held no surprises for me as I had read and enjoyed On Savage Shores already (and reviewed it last month). However, it was interesting to hear her chat with Adam Rutherford who seems like a very sensible fellow. I bought his book on eugenics.

The person I most wanted to see was Bettany Hughes. I am happy to report that she is just as bubbly in person as she is on screen, and that despite her being fresh off a plane from Albania where she had been filming. Her chat with Jasmine Elmer about the Venus and Aphrodite book was hilarious, and frequently NSFW. I got to talk briefly to Hughes about Roman trans people, which made the whole trip worthwhile just by itself.

There was a small bar at event, but very little seating so none of the bar culture we are used to at SF&F conventions. However, there was an afterparty at a pub near St. Pancras. Not everyone turned up, but Lucy Worsley came. Sunny Singh and I had a long chat about the awfulness of the “Gender Critical” movement. And Kate Williams popped in to say hello despite not having been on programme. Historians are good people, and I very much enjoyed hanging out with them for a weekend.

Celtic Wales

050, Book Review, History, Miranda Aldhouse-Green, Ray Howell

Those of you who read books about the ancient history of British Isles are probably already familiar with the name, Miranda Green. These days she is Miranda Aldhouse-Green and Professor Emerita in Archaeology at Cardiff University. Ray Howell is less well known on the popular history circuit, but he is a retired professor of Welsh Antiquity at the University of Wales. These are, in other words, two academic heavy hitters.

So what, you might ask, are two retired senior academics doing writing a popular history book called Celtic Wales. It turns out that they felt compelled to say something on what is now known as the ‘Celtic Debate’. That in turn appears to be partly a result of attempts by right-wing English historians to re-frame the history of Prydain (Britain) as the history of the English, and to effectively erase Welsh, Scottish and Irish cultures. Things have got a lot worse since the book was originally published. The Prime Minister, Mr. Sunak, appears to believe that using Welsh names for places in Wales is “woke”, and therefore something up with which he will not put.

One of the reasons why we are in this mess is because ‘Celtic’ means many different things. Aldhouse-Green and Howell, having spent much of their academic lives on the issue, are well placed to explain the nuances. Here are some of the questions in play.

To start with there are ancient authors who refer to people they call Celtae (in Latin), or Keltoi (in Greek). These authors include Aristotle and Julius Caesar. So we can be reasonably sure that there were people that they called Celts. But given that they were writing hundreds of years apart, about people from opposite ends of Europe, we can’t be sure that they meant the same people. Significantly from our point of view, Caesar did not call the people of these isles Celts, he called them Britons.

Next up there is Celtic as an art form. Archaeological finds from across Northern Europe show a certain similarity of artistic style. These may hint at a common culture, but they don’t necessarily imply common ethnicity. After all, just because someone in Chicago reads manga and has a collection of Sailor Moon dolls, that doesn’t mean that she’s Japanese. Nor does it mean that someone from Mumbai who speaks English and is passionate about cricket is ethnically English. Culture travels much faster then populations.

The most significant piece of data is Celtic language. There are two main Celtic language groups, each of which contains several languages that are very similar. Brythonic languages include Welsh, Cornish and Breton. Goidelic languages include Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Manx. And the two groups seem to have evolved from a common core. However, these languages were mostly not written down until mediaeval times. We know that they are very ancient languages, but we can’t prove that they were ever widely spoken in Iron Age Europe.

Unfortunately we also have the clumsy speculation of early archaeologists, and the fabrications of the likes of Iolo Morganwg. Much of what popular culture sees as ‘Celtic’ is still derived from historical speculation that was at best sloppy, and at worst dishonest.

All of which has given rise to ‘Celtic’ culture in places like the USA and Australia where drinking green Guinness on St. Patrick’s Day seems to be regarded as an ancient ethnic tradition. This sort of thing makes academic archaeologists tear their hair out in despair.

So, beset by attempts to claim that ‘Celtic’ culture never existed, and that any claim to cultural distinctiveness outside of English Britishness is simply bad history, Aldhouse-Green and Howell have attempted to chart a middle course and explain what archaeologists actually know about the ancient history of Wales. The result is a short and remarkably informative book. It is well worth a read if you are interested in such issues. And it does touch on both religion and mythology, in case you were wondering.

Of course being somewhat familiar with the period in question, I do notice things that the casual reader would not. The attitudes that the authors have towards the gender and sexual diversity seem to be more rooted in the 19th and 20th centuries than modern scholarship. But you have to know what you are looking for to notice that so I’m not going to complain. And once I get a car again I will be looking forward to visiting museums and archaeological sites around the country to see some of the things this book talks about.

book cover
Title: Celtic Wales
By: Miranda Aldhouse-Green & Ray Howell
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

2023 Tolkien Lecture

050, Lecture, Video

Getting to Oxford from South Wales is nowhere near as easy as it was from Wiltshire, especially as the Didcot-Oxford train line is now closed indefinitely. However, attending the annual Tolkien Lecture at Pembroke College requires an overnight stay, so I just planned to spend much of the two days travelling.

Overnight stays in Oxford are relatively cheap because there are always college rooms available. This year I ended up in Wycliffe, which is a Church of England Theological College. It did not burst into flames when I crossed the threshold, and it turned out to be very pleasant. It is always nice to turn up somewhere new and find you have a personal connection to one of the staff.

Being in Oxford meant a trip to Blackwells. I escaped with only buying two books, which was a relief. There is also a Montezuma’s chocolate shop, where I also spent quite a bit of money.

The Ashmolean Museum had a special exhibition on the Minoans and I took the opportunity to visit. I was pleased to see Minos Kalokairinos getting due credit for his early work on the site before Sir Arthur Evans arrived. Much of what they have is, understandably, reproductions of the fabulous frescoes. I’d love to go to Crete and see the real things, but I can’t see that happening any time soon.

And so to the lecture, which this year was given by Maria Dahvana Headley. I hadn’t seen Maria and her partner, Will, since Maria did a Beowulf event at St. Johns back in the Before Times (and we spent ages trying to find somewhere quiet enough to record an interview). That of course meant I hadn’t seen little Grim at all. I’m pleased to report that he’s just as impish and charming in person as he seems in photographs, if not more so.

I don’t need to tell you what Maria talked about, because you can watch the lecture yourselves. Enjoy!

Swansea ComicCon 2023

050, Convention Report

There’s not a lot in the way of traditional SF&F conventions in Wales, but we do have a thriving and successful ComicCon in Swansea. It is currently housed in Swansea Arena, which also hosts pop concerts and the like. This year it overflowed into the sports hall of next-door LC2 (LC standing for Leisure Complex – LC2 also houses a swimming pool). As some people I know were exhibiting, I figured I should check it out. Roz, Jo and Chris came too.

As I kind of expect from these things, it took a while to get in. It was a lovely day, so this gave us an opportunity to admire the cosplay, of which there was much on display. As a con-runner, I was interested in why there was such a delay. I thought perhaps they were having to manage the crowds inside. As it turned out, the cause of the delay was actually because the security gates were processing people much more quickly than the ticket desks, and every so often they had to pause to allow the ticket desk lines to clear before letting more people in.

The Comics bit of the name is a bit of a misnomer. There were some small press comics on offer (including my friend Joe Glass), and a number of artists with signing desks, but most of the stalls were more what I’d call “popular culture” than strictly comics. There were jewelry stalls, stalls selling things like Funko Pop figures, some rather nice steampunk guns, which I restrained myself from buying, and a great deal of very kawaii merch for the many anime girls in attendance.

The gaming side was mostly hived off into LC2, which actually worked very well because they had a lot of space and were mostly unbothered by the merch-buying crowd. There were many tables set out for people to use, some of which were already covered with Warhammer figurines, others of which had people playing board games, and quite a few available for use. The stalls that ringed the hall sold mainly gaming products.

There were a lot of scheduled events as well. The cosplay stage was active throughout the weekend with various contests. There were panels, and talks about how to make comics. I have no idea who the Rocket League are, but they had a whole programme stream to themselves.

I didn’t spend a lot of time at the event. I had only gone to see friends, after all. But the £15 Saturday admission fee was a lot less than I would have paid for an equivalent SF convention so I’m not complaining. Given the enormous number of people who attended, I was wondering how much dealer tables cost, and how much interest there would be in actual books. Waterstones had a stand, but it was more than half games and other merch-type stuff. However, having found out the price of a table, I am rather less keen to book one for next year.

It was very crowded inside the Arena (but much less so in LC2). The only people I saw wearing masks were doing so as part of a costume, which is actually a cunning way of getting round the social issues. However, as far as I’m aware, there was no rash of COVID cases as a result of the event.

Willow – the TV Series

050, TV Review

Given that Disney announced they would purge this series from their streaming platform, I figured I should give it a watch while I could. I’m not entirely sure it was time well spent.

Willow, the TV series takes place 20+ years after the events of the movie. Sorsha and Madmartigan have been ruling Tir Asleen all this time. They have two children: a son, named Airk, obviously, and a daughter named Kit. Madmartigan has spent much of his time off adventuring, leaving Sorsha to run the kingdom and raise the kids. While she hasn’t quite turned into her mother, she has become a parent weighed down with responsibility. Meanwhile, Elora Danan, for her own protection, is being raised as a servant girl.

As the story begins, Sorsha has decided that Kit must be married to Graydon, the prince of a neighbouring kingdom. Kit, who takes after her mother, is deeply unhappy about this. Besides, she is in love with an orphan warrior woman called Jade. In the credits, Jade’s last name is given as Claymore, which should tell you who her father was. As the wedding feast begins, the forces of Evil kidnap Airk. Kit, Jade, Graydon and a chap called Boorman who might once have been Madmartigan’s squire, are sent off to rescue him. They are told to find a great sorcerer called Willow who can aid their quest.

So far so good, in that the TV series builds on the film in interesting ways. Warwick Davies and Joanne Whalley reprise their roles, and there’s also a guest appearance by Kevin Pollack as Rool the Brownie. Val Kilmer was unavailable because he’s dealing with throat cancer, but he appears in a few flashbacks from the movie and his son, Jack, provides his ghostly voice in couple of episodes.

If only the series had lived up to the promise. Like the film, it is shot in Wales, so the locations are beautiful. Little else is good. The sound is muddy, as is usual for modern TV drama. Much of the action is shot in low light, presumably as a cost saver. The costume selections are bizarre. The continuity is weird – I’d love to know how Elora managed to dye her hair red and acquire a new denim jacket while trekking through the wilderness. The plot is often cookie-cutter fantasy. And worst of all, it isn’t funny.

By the last couple of episodes (there are 8), the cast have finally settled in to their roles and their story arcs are starting to come to the fore. Also the bad guys have interesting tactics. It is clear from the ending that the writing team have some good ideas for Season 2. And we know that TV series often take a season or so to find their feet.

Unfortunately Disney seems to have decided against continuing it. One of the reasons is probably because of the lesbian relationship between Kit and Jade. In the “making of” documentary, Erin Kellyman, who plays Jade (and who you may remember as Karli Morgenthau in The Falcon and the Winter Solider), makes a big thing about being a lesbian actor playing a lesbian character. There’s also a cameo appearance by a lesbian couple who live in the forest, one of whom is played by Hannah Waddingham.

I won’t shed too many tears. After all, the original film was made in the days when people still thought it was a good idea to let George Lucas make movies. We know better now. But I do worry about what is happening with TV drama these days. It seems like the creative folks are working very hard on limited budgets, and with the ever-present threat of some senior executive ordering them to do something stupid, and then the inevitable sub-par product gets canned. It is no way to run a business, Hollywood.

Editorial – May 2023

050, Editorial

50 issues, eh? That’s a bit of a cheat because the first 9 were when this was a semiprozine, but I’m not going to renumber everything and 50 is what this one says on the cover. I have managed to add some extra content to celebrate.

I’m especially pleased that this issue has cover art from Iain J Clark, courtesy of Iain and the Glasgow 2024 Worldcon. In the coming year I’ll be featuring more of the art that Iain created for the convention, and also doing a bit of foreshadowing of the event. If all goes according to plan, I will be in Glasgow for a day in August and will be able to visit the site.

Elsewhere convention news is not good. In the past month two (yes, two) conventions in California announced that they would not be running. Silicon is an annual Bay Area convention that has given up the ghost. Also this year’s Westercon was supposed to be in Los Angeles, but they too have had to fold. Also next year there will be no WisCon — they are taking a year off to discuss the future of the event.

The why is complicated, but it seems that lack of volunteers to run events, and lack of people interested in attending them, are major issues. We’ve been talking about the greaying of fandom for a long time, and now it seems like the lack of new blood is having an effect. On the other hand, there were huge crowds at the ComicCon I attended in Swansea, so interest in geek culture is still very vibrant.

I’m not going to offer any solutions. But I will say that any proposed fix that is in the form of, “someone else should do something”, is not going to fly. Expecting other people to do the work is a large part of the problem. If your solution is in the form of, “I am going to do X, who is with me?” then I will listen.

Interesting times.

This coming month I am off to Sweden for the Eurocon. There should be a report in the next issue.

Issue #49

Issues

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


  • Cover: Full Moon: The issue's cover is "Full Moon" by Molly Rose Lee.

  • Beyond the Reach of Earth: The new Ken MacLeod triology reaches book two.

  • On Savage Shores: From the 15th century onwards, hundreds of native Americans crossed the Atlantic to Europe. Who were they, and what did they make of us? Caroline Dodds Pennock investigates.

  • His Dark Materials – Season 3: Having reach the end of the TV trilogy, Cheryl has thoughts about the philosophical message of the books.

  • Eastercon 2023: This year's Eastercon was a very mixed bag

  • The Roamers: Francesco Verso's new novel sets the next stage of human evolution in Rome

  • The Grey King: Book four of The Dark is Rising takes Will Stanton to North Wales

  • Picard – Season 3: The third and final season of Star Trek: Picard ramps up the fan service to parts of the dial where no show has gone before.

  • Editorial – April 2023: That was the month that wasn't. Also a Hugos reminder and the future of the Astounding Award.

Beyond the Reach of Earth

049, Book Review, Ken MacLeod

I really enjoyed Beyond the Hallowed Sky, so when the new book in the series arrived on my Kindle I dived straight in. Beyond the Reach of Earth kicks off immediately from the end of the previous book, with the existence of FTL travel having become public knowledge, not to mention the potential threat from the beings known as the Fermi. John Grant and his crew have just made themselves heroes, which is probably just as well given the likely political fallout of their having developed their own FTL ship outside of government control. Things seem liable to kick off in a big way.

And of course they do, so some extent. The three major world governments all express complete surprise at the existence of the Black Horizon conspiracy, even though two of them were supposedly partners in it. Politically, it is a mess. For the people on Apis, it may be a career-ending disaster. But for humanity in general, a whole universe of opportunity has just opened up. Or at least it would have done were it not for the Fermi.

Part of this book, then, is development of the existing plot. Various members of the cast, including the useful but inevitably treacherous android, Marcus Owen, go off to communicate with the Fermi. Or at least try to. Others are much busier trying to save their own skins.

The other part of the book is more for hard-core Ken MacLeod fans. Being who he is, MacLeod cannot resist unwrapping the political implications of the international incident that he has created. That involves government bureaucracy in the Alliance, swift military intervention in the Co-ord, and equally swift para-military intervention from the revolutionary cadres within the Union. It is the sort of thing that leaves you thinking that all forms of government are equally bad, which is perhaps what MacLeod intended in the first place.

Something that I think I noticed in this book, but may have imagined, is a slight shift in the way that AIs are portrayed. Owen is much the same, but it is clear that, despite his obvious success in passing for human, he’s very much a creature of his programming and will do seemingly crazy things when he gets orders to do so. It will be interesting to see how he develops in book 3 now that he’s on the run and therefore somewhat out of Alliance control.

We don’t see much of Smart-Alec, and We-Think is so far behind the software curve that it doesn’t seem part of the argument. Iskander, the Union’s AI, however, is still very much involved. And it seems to be operating independently of both the cadres and of the government. Given the current concern over supposed-AI software, it will be interesting to see where MacLeod goes with this.

And of course there are the Fermi. No spoilers, but there are major plot developments. Certainly I wasn’t expecting what happened. And now I’m very interested to know why there will be a book 3, and what will happen in it.

book cover
Title: Beyond the Reach of Earth
By: Ken MacLeod
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

On Savage Shores

049, Book Review, Caroline Dodds Pennock, History

Some dates remain etched in one’s mind from school history lessons. 1066 is probably the one that even history-hating British pupils remember, but close on its heels might be 1492. In that year, an ambitious Italian called Columbus set off across the Atlantic in search of a route to Asia. He bumped into the Americas along the way, and then claimed that he had discovered them. This being despite the fact that Leif Erickson and his crews got there around 500 years earlier, that Polynesian mariners had visited the west coast of the Americas before him, and that thousands of Native Americans of various types had been living there for millennia.

What changed with Columbus was not discovery, but an establishing of relationships. This included trade, diplomacy and warfare. Inevitably, as part of this, many Americans made their way across the Atlantic and “discovered” Europe. Some of these people were diplomats, even royalty. Some of them had married Europeans, or been born from such unions, and some of them were working as translators. A very large number of them were slaves. In many cases, probably the majority, what they found in Europe seemed to them as barbaric and uncivilized as our own ancestors found them.

For an historian, researching the stories of such people is fraught with difficulty. Very few of them left any personal records. What information we have tends to have been written by the colonisers, with an inevitable bias. That in turn is often in Spanish, French or Portuguese. References to American visitors to our shores are often fleeting. As an historian of trans lives, I’m used to the past speaking to me mainly through court records. The same is often true of other marginalised people.

The fact that Caroline Dodds Pennock has produced this book at all is impressive. That she has written it so well is a delight. And it is fascinating. Had I had spare copies at Eastercon, where I was reading it, I could have sold at least three copies on the strength of the cover alone. Hopefully this review will move a few more copies, because there is so much material for historical fiction/fantasy there. I’ll give you a few examples.

In the book we inevitably learn a lot about the colonisers. Columbus, it appears, was an even less pleasant person than we might have thought. On the other hand, not everyone in Spain was terrible. Queen Isabella was adamant that the inhabitants of the New World were her subjects and not to be treated as sub-human. The lot of the Americans diminished substantially when she died. Then there was Bartolomé de Las Casas, known in his lifetime as the ‘Defender of the Indians’, who campaigned tirelessly for native rights. There were lawyers who successfully fought for the freedom of their enslaved clients.

Interesting stories come from the ordinary men of the European invasion too. In 1519 Hernán Cortès, beginning his conquest of Central America, heard tell of two white men living among the Maya. Gonzalo Guerrero and Gerónimo de Aguilar had been shipwrecked off the Yucátan 8 years earlier. They had been captured by the local Maya, but had very different lives thereafter. De Aguilar had remained loyal to Spain, and was only too pleased to be able to help his fellow countrymen with their project of conquest. Guerrero, on the other hand, had taken to Maya culture. He had married a Maya woman and had children with her. Rejecting Cortès’s offer of ‘rescue’, he returned to the Maya and eventually died in 1536, fighting alongside his people against Spanish invaders.

Amongst the most successful of the native groups were the Tlaxcala, who were long-time enemies of the Aztec-Mexica. They were only too happy to ally with Cortès against Moctezuma II and his hated empire. As a result they were able to negotiate a significant level of self-rule from the Spanish crown. Tlaxcalan is still a small but fiercely independent state within Mexico, and their state flag bears the coat of arms granted to them by Spain in 1535.

Less successful in his dealing with Spain was a man known to us as don Juan Cortès, a lord of the K’iche’ Maya. In 1557 he travelled to Spain to negotiate rights for his people. Unfortunately his ship was attacked by French pirates and he lost all of the gifts he had for the Spanish crown, along with many important documents proving his right to speak for the Maya people. The fate of the K’iche’ could have been very different had he arrived in Madrid as splendidly as he had intended.

That’s only a brief selection of the many fascinating personal histories that you can find in On Savage Shores. There are tales of people from the Inka to the Inuit. There’s the weirdly fascinating story of Walter Ralegh, who managed to sell himself as a friend to the natives while seeking to colonise them. There are forgotten women whom we know of solely because Ferdinand and Isabella were presented with a chocolate drink, and by native custom that must have been freshly prepared for them by women. And there is John Dee’s scrying mirror, now in the British Museum, which has been shown to have come from the Americas.

Where to writers get their ideas from? From history, of course, and this book is chock full of amazing (if sometimes horrifying) stories.

book cover
Title: On Savage Shores
By: Caroline Dodds Pennock
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

His Dark Materials – Season 3

049, TV Review

And that’s a wrap. The BBC has reached the last episode of the final volume of His Dark Materials. Well, they did so a while back, but I have finally watched them all. What are we to make of it?

Echoing previous seasons, they have done a fine job of adapting the story to television. Ruth Wilson continues to be brilliant as Mrs. Coulter. James McAvoy is suitably monomaniacal as Lord Asriel. Dafne Keen and Amir Wilson have grown nicely into their parts as Lyra and Will. And Will Keen is delightfully creepy as Cardinal MacPhail. Some of the animation of the daemons is a bit dodgy at times, but overall it is very impressive television.

If I have a complaint, it is that the sound is even more muddy than usual for TV drama. Even with headphones on, I could not make out what the actors were saying when they were whispering. I understand that Amazon Prime is introducing a feature that helps make speech clearer in dramas. I do hope that other streaming platforms follow suit.

Having come to the end of the series, however, we need to look at the overall message, and whether anything has changed from the books.

One thing that appears to have been skipped is the idea that daemons will become fixed in form when their humans become adults. That’s not hugely important, except for the fact that a transition from childhood innocence to sexual maturity is a key part of the narrative.

There is also one big surprise change. In the original book, Mary Malone’s sexual awakening, which prompts her to renounce her religious vows, is with a man. In the TV series it is with a woman. Frankly, I’m a little surprised that Pullman allowed this, but well done to whoever’s idea it was. Yet another literary classic “ruined” for the cishets by “woke queer nonsense”. Huzzah!

When I first read the books, I was carried away with the beauty of the prose, and with the overarching idea of what I described as a version of Paradise Lost in which humanity wins. His Dark Materials is a three-book rant about the evils of the concept of Original Sin, and anyone who has it in for Augustine of Hippo is OK as far as I’m concerned.

However, in the time since the books were published, much has happened. In particular Philip Pullman has demonstrated that, while he might be opposed to the tyranny of the Christian Church, he’s perfectly happy with other forms of tyranny. And if you look, you can see that in the books too.

We discover, at the end of The Amber Spyglass (or season #3 if you prefer), that travel through the multiverse cannot be permitted. Apparently every gate between worlds cut by the Subtle Knife causes Dust to leak out of the worlds and be lost.

Why? Who says so? What is so wrong with contact between cultures, that means that each individual world can have no influence on any other? Is miscegenation bad?

We also learn that, as a corollary of this, no individual can survive for long in a world that is not their own. Their daemons, which are their souls, would not survive for long. Therefore, although they have saved the multiverse by falling in love (and having sex, if you have read the book), Lyra and Will must be punished for their sin by spending the rest of their lives apart. Hey, I thought the whole point was that falling in love (and having sex) wasn’t sinful. Instead it appears that it is only Original Sin that Pullman objects to. Children are therefore innocent, but once they become adults, and sexual beings, they become sinful.

These, apparently, are immutable rules of the multiverse. But who says so? Why does it have to be like that? Well, someone created those laws. Someone in Authority. Someone who is, an Author.

Maybe it is time for someone to organize a rebellion.

Eastercon 2023

049, Convention Report

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Rarely has Charles Dickens so perfectly summed up a convention.

Let’s start with the good stuff first, and in particular the venue because this will be of interest to anyone planning to attend World Fantasy there in 2025.

It is very easy to find. By road it would be ridiculously easy were it not for the fact that the M42 seems perpetually at a standstill for one reason or another. By train you may have to get from New Street to Birmingham International, but New Street is not the hellish dungeon it used to be. By air you may have to change at Heathrow or Amsterdam to get to Birmingham International, but once there you are almost on top of the venue.

The Birmingham Metropole is a little long in the tooth as far as Hilton properties go, though not as old as Brighton and therefore not possessed of a sprinkling of truly gorgeous old rooms. I like the guest rooms in the Doubletree in Bristol better, but the function space in Birmingham is excellent. It could have hosted a much bigger convention than the one we got. The layout and room-naming is a little confusing, and they wouldn’t let us put up signs, but it didn’t take long to get used to.

The National Exhibition Centre (NEC) is a short walk away. If you come by air or train you’ll end up going past it. There is a shopping mall, with a wide range of chain restaurants. Its not haute cuisine, but it can keep people fed. There are also various tourist attractions in the area. I was sad not to have time to visit the National Motorcycle Museum.

The hotel food, while being at hotel prices, was edible, and in some cases so plentiful that I couldn’t finish my meal. The convention also arranged for some food trucks to set up in the hotel car park. They weren’t there as often as originally promised, but the food was cheaper and seemed OK.

Were we not still in a pandemic, that would all be excellent. Unfortunately, well, I’ll come back to that.

The programming was also excellent. I enjoyed the panels I was on. There were several others that I would have loved to attend, or indeed be on, but I had books to sell and could not spare too much time away from the table.

It is still an Eastercon tradition to provide free drinks to panelists. Thankfully they seem to have gotten away from the idea that if you don’t order a pint of “real” ale you are somehow letting the side down.

This Eastercon made a determined effort to make hybrid programming work. Every programme room had a big screen where the audience could see the remote panelists. The moderator was provided with a small screen showing the same thing. The green room had one table per programme room, and this was used to allow remote panelists to check in with their in-person colleagues prior to their panels.

Mostly this worked well, though I did spot a couple of moderators who spent the panel looking at the in-person panelists and not at the monitor. I noticed a few people on Facebook complaining that they could not get access to streaming, and the one time I tried to access a panel remotely was a bust. But I think that was mainly due to the complex security procedure, and discussion afterwards suggested having some trial panels the day before the con that people could use to test out the procedure and make sure they could get access before the real programme started.

One other thing that went slightly wrong was the placement of loudspeakers. In one room in particular, these were located between the panel and the audience, and they were projecting forward. Consequently, anyone on the panel using hearing aids (of which there are quite a lot these days) could not hear anything said by the remote panelists, or people using the audience microphone. I’m sure this is a fixable issue.

The art show and dealer’s room had plenty of space. I can’t speak for everyone, but I found sales slow compared to last year. Also people seemed much less willing to stop and talk. I don’t know why.

What was very good is that I got to see a whole load of people whom I had not seen since before the pandemic started.

Unfortunately, the pandemic is still very much ongoing, and that’s where the bad stuff comes in.

Judging by reporting on social media, over 100 people caught COVID at Eastercon. That is, I believe, more than 10% of the attendees. It does not compare well to last year, or indeed to last year’s Worldcon which had 64 cases from around 4000 attendees.

Various theories have been expounded as to why this might be so. One is that the incubation period for the current strain of COVID is 2-3 days. That means that you can be infected before you leave for the con, and not know you are sick until you’ve arrived and started infecting others.

Another issue is that the UK had, at the time, given up on vaccination. A new round was offered after the con was over, but my most recent jab prior to the con had been in September 2022. That saw me through BristolCon and SMOFcon, but by Eastercon it had apparently worn off. If vaccinations are only given in the autumn, a convention in April is going to be a major risk.

Various people have complained about poor ventilation in the hotel, and about overcrowding in the bar and the breakfast room. Apparently the NEC was very crowded, thanks in part to a huge video games convention that it was hosting. If you went to any of the restaurants there, they too were very crowded.

The food trucks were great, but using them involved standing out in the cold for half an hour which was probably not ideal for avoiding infection. Apparently if your nose gets too cold then the bacteria in it that fight off viruses are much less effective.

All of these were contributory factors, but the thing that has got everyone talking was the convention’s seemingly lax COVID policy. Masking was very much optional, and indeed was forbidden if you were on panel (compare to last year, where panelists were provided with transparent masks). Hardly anyone wore a mask at the con, and that included the convention staff.

Word is that the con sampled opinion prior to the event, and found more people who said that they would not go if there was a strict masking policy than people who said they would not go if there was a strict masking requirement.

This is the key issue. There is a significant proportion of Eastercon attendees, possibly a majority of regulars, for whom the pandemic is “over”. What they mean by that is that current strains of the virus are no longer deadly. I’ve only heard of a couple of people who were seriously ill as a result of catching it. For most of us, me included, it was reminiscent of a bad dose of flu. For many people, that is an acceptable level of risk.

Unfortunately, for others it is not. People who are immuno-compromised, or who are carers for people who are, cannot risk getting the disease. As far as I’m concerned, I’m pleased to know that a dose of COVID is survivable, but I’m not happy that I lost two weeks recovering from it. I am particularly unhappy that I lost my Guest of Honour gig in Luxembourg as a result.

Of course I have a publishing business to promote, so the decision as to whether I attend future Eastercons is even more complicated for me. I need to talk to my authors. But my forward planning will certainly change. Any major event I attend will need to be followed by at least 2 weeks when I know I will be at home with no commitments other than work.

Conventions outside of the UK, and indeed other UK conventions, may continue to have stricter COVID policies. However, it appears that from now on, getting a dose of COVID is part of the price you need to be prepared to pay in order to attend an Eastercon.

The Roamers

049, Book Review, Francesco Verso

The Roamers is the latest novel by Italian author, publisher and all-round promotor of bookish stuff, Francesco Verso. Without giving too much away, it tells of a group of counter-culture people in Rome who end up evolving into a new type of human much better suited to living in harmony with nature. To that extent, it is a very hopeful novel. More of that later, but first the book.

Verso’s native language is, of course, Italian. He speaks very good English (and probably a whole bunch of other languages too), and I’m assuming he translated this book himself. Leastways, I can’t see any acknowledgement of a translator. The book is perfectly readable to an English-speaker. But it reads in places like a book that was written by someone whose first language is not English. Were I the publisher of this book, I would have wanted a native English speaker to give it a once over, as I did with the Aleksandar Žiljak book.

Verso is also a native Roman, and you can tell that too. The book is set in Rome, and lives and breathes with the city. I’m assuming that the book’s title is a pun. The people of Rome understand their home’s remarkable heritage. Having spent an evening in Rome in the company of Verso and his wife, including visiting a little restaurant run by one of his childhood friends, I can see his love of the city come through in the book, even if he sometimes despairs of where it is heading.

There is stuff about Italian family relationships in the book as well. I know less about that, but I suspect it may be equally heartfelt.

Style-wise, this is very much a science-fiction novel. Verso clearly wants to do good, character-driven prose too, but he’s less good at that. The sociological and biological aspects of the book take centre stage and are fascinating. There’s even a reading list at the back for people who want to follow up on some of the ideas discussed in the text. Whether this appeals to you or not is very much a question of taste. Persoanlly I’m happy to see some SF in this style. It is a rare thing these days.

And now, back to solarpunk. It isn’t a sub-genre that I’ve paid a lot of attention to. I totally understand the need that people have to have some faith in the future. Frankly, it is all too easy to come to the conclusion that human civilization won’t survive the next hundred years. The solution presented in The Roamers is a very attractive one. It is also, I suspect, one that requires a level of science that is way beyond what we are likely to develop in time, and one which bears significant risk of accident and mis-use. So while I admire Verso’s politics and ambition for humankind, I’m not sure that this is what I want from solarpunk. We need practical solutions, and we need them in a hurry.

book cover
Title: The Roamers
By: Franceso Verso
Publisher: Flame Tree Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Grey King

049, Book Review, Susan Cooper

Book four in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence focuses once more on Will Stanton. It is set in North Wales and the Grey King of the title is a malevolent spirit who inhabits Cader Idris. In Welsh legend the mountain is home to Gwyn ap Nudd and his hunting dogs, the Cŵn Annwn (the latter of whom also feature in Juliet McKenana’s The Green Man’s Gift). Will ends up staying on an hilltop farm, and a theme throughout the book is of sheep being attacked by dogs.

The name Brenin Llwyd (meaning Grey King in Welsh) is also found in folklore and associated with mountains and the Wild Hunt. Given the propensity of Welsh mountains to be shrouded in mist, the name is entirely appropriate. It was a pleasant coincidence that I got to read this book while staying on a farm up in Y Bannau Brycheiniog, surrounded by fields full of sheep. Jo Hall’s greyhound, Lyra, put in a guest appearance on behalf of spectral canines.

It isn’t only Welsh folklore than Cooper has mined for this book. She’s spent quite a bit of time studying the Welsh. In particular she has done a decent job with the way that Welsh people speak. If you spend much time here you will detect a particular and rather strange habit of sentence construction which makes much more sense when you realise that you are listening to English being spoken as if it were obeying the grammatical rules of Welsh. There are occasional bits of Welsh scattered through the text, mostly untranslated. I’ve not had time to check it, or indeed see if it is southern Welsh or northern Welsh, because the two are quite different in some respects.

The basic plot of the book is that Will has to retrieve an object of power – a golden harp – and use it to awaken some people who are sleeping under the mountain. If, at this point, you are thinking, “I know who is sleeping under a mountain,” you would be dead right.

Cooper weaves this storyline together with some interpersonal drama in the small farming community in which Will finds himself. It is deftly done, and adds some much needed actual drama to Will’s quest. As in past books, he is often without agency because he is the Chosen One and so things just happen to him. The surrounding cast make the story much more interesting.

The descriptions of the mountain (which is a genuinely deadly place) have an almost Lovecraftian air of menace to them. Will might be a mighty Old One, but the mountain is older, cunning and malevolent. The atmosphere towards the end of the book is seriously impressive. I think this might be my favourite book of the series thus far.

book cover
Title: The Grey King
By: Susan Cooper
Publisher: Puffin
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Picard – Season 3

049, TV Review

There are times when a piece of art can be utterly ridiculous, and yet so beautifully executed that it deserves heaps of praise. That is certainly true of season #3 of Picard. To say that it provides fan service is to massively understate the obvious. It is to fan service what the great pyramid of Khufu is to a balsawood coffin; or what Trantor is to a village of mud huts. It is fan service dialed up so far to the max that mathematicians are arguing over which size of infinity is required to put a number to it.

When I first heard that season #3 would be a “getting the gang back together” thing I was deeply dubious. How could they do that without it being horribly cheesy? And yet, despite this show being about a bunch of people as old as, or older than, me rushing about the galaxy and having adventures like they did when they were several decades younger, it manages to work. It does so sometimes in ridiculous ways, but when it does you simply nod and say, “of course, how could it be any other way?”

The most glaring example of this is that Geordi La Forge, whose day job is now running the Starfleet Museum, has been spending his spare time building a full-size working model of the Enterprise D, which is there ready to be used when it is needed (and without a crew to operate it).

There are, of course, fans who are not happy, because this is not 100% exactly how they remember Star Trek: TNG. Apparently there was never conflict between members of the crew on that series, because such things are un-Trek-like. Well quite right. Can you imagine Dr. McCoy ever disapproving of something that Jim Kirk did? Of course not.

Possibly more cogently, there are those who argue that a Starfleet crew would never put slavish devotion to the book, and their own lives, before saving the galaxy. Personally I prefer to believe that people who serve on a ship called Enterprise are a different breed to your run of the mill Starfleet crew.

That said, Captain Shaw is one of the weak points in the show. At times his character was great, but at others he had to be shoehorned into being someone different because the plot required it. He was the only character whose story arc felt forced to me. Which is a shame, because I really loved him treating Picard and Ryker as a couple of naughty geriatric schoolboys trying to have an Excellent Adventure.

The thing I loved most about the series, though, was the way in which the plot absolutely hinged on having the gang back together. Without Data, without Worf, without Beverly, without Geordi or without Deanna, all of whom contributed specialist skills, Picard would have failed. It is possible he’d have been OK without Riker, but then Riker’s specialist skills have always been loyalty, bravery, and an unfettered willingness to get into trouble to help his captain.

Oh, spoiler. Of course they find a way to resurrect Data. How could they not?

If I have complaints about the series, they mostly revolve around the fact that it seemed to completely jettison much of what had gone before. At the end of season #2, Jean-Luc was just starting to settle into a romantic relationship with his Romulan housekeeper, Laris. That all gets forgotten as soon as Beverly Crusher is back in his life. Also at the end of season #2, Agnes Jurati, now queen of a friendly, neighbourhood Borg collective that just wants to be nice, petitions to join the Federation. That goes completely out of the window. Season #3 acts as if Jurati had never existed. I don’t know, maybe Q has erased her from the timeline or something.

Talking of Q, Picard #2 promised us that he was dying. That too appears to have been forgotten. < endless screaming >.

I’m not even going to ask what has happened to Wesley Crusher. Surely with all of his new time-travelling superpowers he would have seen that his mum and half-brother were in big trouble? No?

Anyway, there will be no further seasons of Picard. Nothing about the TNG characters could possibly follow that. What there will be is a brand new Enterprise, the Enterprise G. It will be captained by Annika Hansen, or Cap’n Seven as I hope her crew refer to her. Sidney La Forge and Jack Crusher look likely to be part of the crew. And Raffi Musiker is the First Officer, so maybe the relationship between her and Seven, which began so promisingly in Picard #2, and was jettisoned like so much else in #3, will be back on again. I’m looking forward to it.

Editorial – April 2023

049, Editorial

Well, that’s a month I do not want to repeat, ever. Having my first case of COVID and crashing my car in the same week is not fun, especially as the former meant I had to miss out on a GoH gig at a convention in Luxembourg. Aaargh!

The COVID was a result of Eastercon, of which I’ll be saying a lot more in the con report. As for the car, all I’ll say is that I’m fine (my only injury was a broken nail) and that by taking one for the team I avoided getting t-boned by an idiot and thereby avoided a much more serious incident. But I now need a new car. Aaargh!

I’m not at all happy about missing Luxcon. That’s twice now that I’ve been hoping to go and not made it. I’m sure it went well without me.

I’ve been testing negative since Saturday (22nd), so hopefully I am clear now. I was able to attend some of the writing workshop that Jo & Roz had organised for that weekend, which was good. Amongst other things, we’ve been doing some plotting for a Sekrit Projekt that you will hear more of in due course.

This issue is online a bit early. That’s because I will be spending the coming weekend in London attending HistFest. As some of you may know, I have done some work with them in the past, giving online presentations about trans history. My friend, Dan Vo, is one of the speakers on Saturday. The people I’m hoping to get to see include Caroline Dodds Pennock (whose fabulous new book is reviewed in this issue), Sunny Singh and Bettany Hughes. I will report back next issue.

Being early, I have another opportunity to remind you that I, and this fanzine, are eligible for the Hugos. Rather more importantly, I would love you to consider the following:

  • In Best Series, the Green Man books by Juliet E McKenna (Wizard’s Tower)
  • In Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form, Doctor Who: Redacted, directed by Ella Watts (BBC)
  • In Best Professional Artist, Ben Baldwin who keeps turning in knock-out covers for Wizard’s Tower

Also there has been a bit of a panic behind the scenes over the Astounding Award. As you may recall, eligbility for that award has historically been based on works published through SFWA Qualifying Markets. However, SFWA have recently changed the criteria by which writers can qualify for membership, and SFWA Qualifying Markets no longer exist as such. Thankfully the good folks at Dell Magazines have taken it upon themselves to maintain their own definition of a Qualifying Market. The updated eligibility requirements for the Astounding can be found here.

Please note that this was nothing to do with WSFS. The Astounding is not a Hugo, and WSFS has no control over eligibility. All WSFS does is count the votes.

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