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.

Editorial – August 2023

053, Editorial

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

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

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

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

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

Issue #52

Issues

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cover: Sailing Over Glasgow

052, Art, Iain J Clark

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

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

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


The Glasgow committee noted:

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

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

Menewood

052, Book Review, History, Nicola Griffith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dragonfall

052, Book Review, L R Lam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Omens – Season 2

052, TV Review

As you probably all know, Gaiman and Pratchett had plans for a follow-up to Good Omens, but their careers took off so fast that neither of them had the time to make it happen. When the TV series was a success, Gaiman used those plans as the basis for a second series. Exactly what was in those plans is unknown, and doubtless fans will argue endlessly over it, but the important question is whether the resulting series lived up to the standards set by the first. Well reader, I was delighted with it.

Of course, the chemistry between David Tennant and Michael Sheen is so good that things could hardly go wrong. They continue to be absolutely amazing. But there is a plot. The set-up is that the Archangel Gabriel turns up at Aziraphale’s shop one day, stark naked, and carrying a cardboard box. It appears that the Supreme Commander of the Heavenly Host has lost his memory, and his powers.

In Heaven, Gabriel’s absence is a problem to be urgently solved. Michael and Uriel are on the case, though they are also vying with each other for the role of Supreme Commander. Word of problems in Heaven also reaches Hell, and Beelzebub is keen to know what’s up. Inevitably suspicion falls on Aziraphale and Crowley.

This process introduces two new characters. Miranda Richardson has an absolute whale of a time playing the ambitious demon, Shax, who has taken over Crowley’s role on Earth now that he’s in disgrace. Heaven sends a very junior and naïve angel called Muriel, beautifully played by Quelin Sepulveda.

Maggie Service and Nina Sosanya, who played chattering nuns in the first series, get new roles as shopkeepers in Whickber Street. Maggie runs a record shop that is kept afloat by Aziraphale because no one else buys vinyl (this, I suspect, is a survival from the original Gaiman/Pratchett plan, because that’s a ludicrous idea these days). Nina runs a busy coffee shop and is plagued by a controlling girlfriend. Part of the plot requires Crowley and Aziraphale to get them to fall in love. This is an opportunity for farce.

The early episodes involve our heroes trying to find out what has happened to Gabriel. Some of this involves flashbacks to past times when they have worked together. These are the serious bits of plot, which are used to illustrate the complexity of moral judgement (and the cavalier attitude of Heaven towards humans). There’s a definite Sandman feel to them.

Things start to come a head in episode 5, in which Aziraphale turns a street shopkeepers’ association meeting into a Jane Austen style ball as a ruse to get Maggie and Nina to fall in love, while Shax is given permission to recruit an army of demons to storm the bookshop and seize Gabriel.

Then comes episode 6, in which revelations follow each other at rollercoaster pace. You really do not want to be spoilered for this, because Gaiman heads off in totally unexpected directions. I sat there in front of the TV with my jaw on the floor. You will probably do the same. Enjoy!

And yes, it looks like there will be a series 3. Or rather, there had bloody better be.

Nimona

052, Movie Review

When I said that I did not expect to see a better film than Across the Spider-Verse this year, I really was not expecting to see another brilliant animated film just a couple of weeks later.

Nate Stevenson is, of course, already responsible for the brilliant She-Ra and the Princesses of Power TV series. Nimona is based on his critically acclaimed graphic novel of the same name. I understand that the film deviates from the original in some significant ways, but I’ve not read the latter and I didn’t notice anything amiss so the translation to screen clearly worked.

The setting of Nimona is a fantasy kingdom that, hundreds of years ago, walled itself off from the world to keep itself safe from monsters. Nowadays knights carry laser swords and ride flying bikes dressed up as horses, but the culture remains. Inside the wall is safe, outside is scary.

The corps of knights was formed in honour of Gloreh, the warrior who slew the first Monster and helped create the wall. Up until now, knighthood had been the preserve of the upper classes, but the current Queen is determined to democratise the kingdom and Ballister Boldheart is about to become the first low-born lad to be knighted. Sadly, things will go disastrously wrong, and Ballister will end up in hiding, hunted by his fellow knights, including his lover, Ambrosius Goldenloin.

Into Ballister’s life comes Nimona, a red-haired teenage girl with attitude. She offers to help him, and it soon becomes clear that she has an agenda of her own, one that strikes at the very heart of the culture of the kingdom.

Much of the talk around the film is about it being a trans allegory, and it sort of it. Nimona is a Monster because she’s a shape-changer. Also Stevenson is a trans guy, and he has filled his cast with queer folks, including Indya Moore and RuPaul. However, I think it is more accurate to say that the film is a critique of White Feminism. The idea that (white) women have an urgent and overwhelming need to “feel safe” from the imagined threat of trans people is a core of the current anti-trans movement, but that tactic has also been wielded against other queer folks, and against people of colour. The fact that Stevenson has chosen a male lead actor, Riz Ahmed, who is known as a Muslim rights activist is, I think, a testament to his commitment to intersectionality.

Nimona herself is played by Chloë Grace Moretz who I’m now familiar with from The Peripheral. She’s brilliant in this too, and probably had a lot of fun doing it.

We are somewhat lucky to have the film at all. It was originally commissioned by a subsidiary of 21st Century Fox. When Disney bought that company they canned Nimona due to the queer content. Stevenson had to hustle hard to get it picked up by someone else. So thanks are due to Annapurna Pictures, and to Netflix for providing distribution. I’m now very much hoping for a Blu Ray release before the film disappears from streaming.

Promises Stronger Than Darkness

052, Book Review, Charlie Jane Anders

Let us recap. The Unstoppable series by Charlie Jane Anders is space opera, but it is not your father’s space opera. Iain Banks would never have called a starship, Undisputed Training Bra Disaster. Nor, after successfully blowing an enemy starship to atoms, would a group of Culture heroes engage in a lengthy debate as to whether their actions were morally justified, and who should be held responsible for this war crime. Queer YA space opera is, in some ways, a very different beast.

In others it is the same. Tina Mains and her gang of teenage misfits are on a mission to save the galaxy from an evil mechanism called The Bereavement which is in the process of eating every star, thereby ending all life.

Elza, the Brazilian Travesti who is Tina’s girlfriend, has finally achieved her ambition to become a Princess, only to see the evil Marrant depose the Queen and banish Elza from the Princess Corps. Marrant seems to become more and more like Elon Musk with every appearance. He’s horribly sulky, and doesn’t care what happens to the rest of the galaxy as long as he stays in charge of the remains, and he gets to carry out his racist pogrom of all non-humanoid people.

Oh, and Tina is dead. That is, her body has been taken over by the spirit of Thaoh Argentian, the Makvarian starship captain of whom she is a clone. Of course this is space opera, so telling you that Tina is only temporarily dead is no spoiler.

With Tina thus inconvenienced, it will fall to the introverted artist, Rachel Townsend, to provide leadership, and to help Elza over her imposter syndrome. Delightfully, Rachel creates a Tactical Ballgown for Elza, which is kind of like an Iron Man suit but pink and for a Princess.

Thanks to Marrant’s obsession with racial purity, our Earth-born heroes are going to have to spend this book leaning to become good allies to non-humanoid races. Anders does a good job of this, giving a staring role to the beetle-like Wyndgonk. There’s also a major plot point that revolves around the complexity of translation.

Eventually everything has to come to a climax. Promises Stronger than Darkness is, after all, the final volume of the Unstoppable trilogy. Anders orchestrates this magnificently. I suspect that if I were to map it all out on a gaming table the timelines would not work, but that doesn’t matter in a book. The ending also has something of the air of a Star Trek episode in which Scotty tells Kirk that they only have 5 minutes before the engines blow, but Jim and Spock spend 15 minutes of screen time fixing them. This is space opera, it is the way it should be.

Also, this being queer YA space opera, the denouement is partly dependent on an army of musical monkey robots.

The large ensemble cast is a little difficult to control. In particular I felt that Damini, the Indian ace pilot, had lapsed into a trope. But that’s a very mild complaint. I will miss this charming if dysfunctional found family. Happily, Anders has left a thread from which to build a new series. I live in hope.

book cover
Title: Promises Stronger than Darkness
By: Charlie Jane Abders
Publisher: Titan
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Pemmi-Con

052, Convention Report

NASFics are strange beasts. It is sometimes said that running a NASFiC is rather like trying to run a Worldcon with half the money and half the attendees. I might also add half the volunteers to that. And, in the case of Pemmi-Con, “half” is probably a massive exaggeration on all counts.

In theory the NASFiC is a big convention that Americans can go to when Worldcon is not in North America. For a whole variety of reasons, very few people from the West are going to Chengdu. But Pemmi-Con is in Canada, that strange country that is technically part of North America but which fills Americans with almost as much existential dread as Europe. Add that to the fact that the dates of Pemmi-Con conflicted with the San Diego Comic-Con, and many SF&F writers are also in the comics business these days, and you get very low attendance.

Also Pemmi-Con was in Winnipeg, which meant a flight and hotel bill for the majority of Canadian fans.

The Sunday newsletter gave the warm body count as 509, with a further 340 supporting members. The convention was trying very hard to be hybrid but, as we should all know by now, hybrid is ferociously expensive in both money and people points.

Winnipeg turned out to be lovely. It does look like a bit of a concrete wasteland downtown, but that’s what happens when your winter temperatures regularly hit -35 C. Life happens inside, not outside. I would have loved to have more time to explore the city, but as it was all I had time for was a trip to Canada’s Human Right’s Museum.

The convention took place in the same venue that was used for the 1994 Worldcon. The Delta hotel has an air bridge attaching it to the convention center so it is all very convenient. Of course ConAdian had a membership of over 3500. The much smaller NASFiC felt like a child in adult clothing.

Talking of ConAdian, its chair, John Mansfield, was selected as the Fan Guest of Honour for Pemmi-Con. Sadly John died early this year, and missed having the honour in person, but he did get to know it would happen. His wife, Linda, was a co-chair of Pemmi-Con.

As I noted earlier, Pemmi-Con was seriously short on both money and volunteers. That made things rather challenging. We only got our program assignments about a week before the con started, and those were not final. I only discovered that I had a third program item when I was given my printed schedule on the Friday. (The con began on Wednesday night.)

Two of my assignments were standard panels which presented few challenges. The third was to give my Prehistory of Robotics talk, which required a room with a laptop, screen and projector. It was obvious on Thursday that the room I had been assigned did not have these things, so I had to pester program ops. That led to my being moved to a different room and time, though still the same day.

So far so good. I went to see the new room. It did have a screen and projector. The laptop was a Mac which did not have PowerPoint. Could I use my own laptop? Yes, but I’d need to log into Zoom using the email that I should have been sent but did not yet have.

Thankfully the Zoom links for Friday programming did get sent out at around 1:00pm. So we did manage to do hybrid. There were a bunch of tech issues, and I gather that the sound for people online was never good. But kudos to Richard the tech guy for trying his best. He’d only got the job a few days ago, and having to get a different laptop set up for hybrid in a 15 minute turnaround time between sessions was seriously stressful. The Eastercon system of allowing half an hour between panels when doing hybrid is seeming more and more sensible.

My Thursday panel had been about diversity in SF&F in “the past”, featuring GoH Nisi Shawl, and TAFF delegate Sandra Bond. I’d been quite keen on this because I’ve met so many young fans who are convinced that there was no diversity at all in SF&F before they got involved in the genre. However, the audience was at least as old as the panel, if not older. For that matter, I suspect I was in the lower 50% of attendees, age-wise, at the convention as a whole. The topic was rather wasted.

My other panel was on Sunday and was about AI. On the panel with me were Helen Umberger, who works for a company that tests AI systems and lobbies for their regulation, plus Shayla Elizabeth, local indigenous writer. I thought AI was bad when we started the panel, but listening to Helen gave me a whole new appreciation of its awfulness. No one really knows whether AI systems work properly, and even if they do when released there’s a strong likelihood that their performance will degrade with time.

All that would be bad enough, but AIs also consume significant amounts of computing resources. That means energy consumption, and a rising demand for resources which, as Shalya pointed out, are often stolen from indigenous people.

One of the good things about Winnipeg is that you do get to meet indigenous folk. And I learned something new. I was familiar with First Nations people and the Inuit. I was not aware of Métis culture, which is important in Manitoba. There’s an explainer here.

I don’t normally attend opening and closing ceremonies because they can be quite dull. I did so here because Kevin had a role in them, and I’m glad I did because they featured an amazing First Nations woman who sang and performed on a tympanum-like drum. She was very good.

The Dealers’ Room was quite small and half fan tables. There was no major book dealer, just a bunch of Canadian small presses. The art show, in contrast, was quite good, though there was no point in my buying anything to try to take home.

I didn’t see a lot of the rest of the con. There seemed to be a lot of readings and kaffeklatches as compared to panels, which I guess makes creating the program easier. However, I did do to the masquerade as it was being run by my friend, Sandy Manning, who I had not seen in years. I’ll do a separate report on that.

Overall I was happy with Pemmi-Con. Then again, I wasn’t expecting a lot except to see a bunch of old friends, and make some new ones. Plus I finally got to see Winnipeg, a place that Kevin is very fond of. I do worry that the attendees seemed so old. I know people have been talking about the “greying of fandom” for decades, but I’m starting to really feel it.

Of course that wasn’t helped by one of the attendees dying at the con. Bill Laubenheimer is a well-known Bay Area fan. He had a heart attack while out to dinner on the Wednesday night, and passed away later in hospital. His wife, Carole Parker, was left dealing with the awful bureaucracy surrounding having to repatriate a dead body. Thankfully she had a lot of good friends at the con. Here’s hoping you are getting on top of it all now, Carole.

On a lighter note, the con raised around CA$1000 for the local pet rescue shelter.

The Pemmi-Con Masquerade

052, Convention Report, Costuming

Getting a quality masquerade from a convention with only just over 500 attendees is a challenging task, but somehow Sandy Manning managed it. There were a bunch of top quality costumers who came up from the USA and provided some master-level entries and judges, but it was particularly pleasing to have 4 young entrants, none of whom had ever been on stage before. Congratulations in particular to Turaga Vakama who used 3D printing to create what I assume was an anime costume.

It always helps to be topical. Derwin Mak dusted off a “Tour Guide Barbie” costume that last saw competition in 1999. Amazingly, it still fit. Here it is.



Pierre and Sandy Pettinger always go above and beyond the call of duty. Their entry was titled, “Beneath the bay of Innsmouth” and included this jellyfish prop that lit up when on stage.



You couldn’t see it from the audience, but the costumes the Pettingers wore were beautifully decorated with fish. They both had amazing headgear, which Sandy shows in the picture below. The lamprey teeth are apparently actual bits of shell that Pierre bought one day in case they might be useful.



It’s not often that you see the Pettingers upstaged, but the Best Master award went to Janine Wardale for “Exile”. It is a beautiful costume. Here are photos of the front and back.





However, the undisputed star of the show, winning Best in Show for both workmanship and presentation, was Snail Scott with this amazing rendition of the hut of Baba Yaga. The important thing to remember about this costume is that chicken legs bend backwards, not forwards (because the main leg joint that we see is the ankle, not the knee). That means that Snail had to do everything backwards, and in a large hut. A good masquerade team has a bunch of strong persons stationed at the edge of the stage just in case someone with poor vision is at risk of falling off, and in this case they did their job to perfection.



Here’s Snail without the hut on.



A good masquerade needs a half time show to keep the audience entertained while the judges do their work. Pemmi-Con provided a top quality filk group. One of the guitarists was, at best, partially sighted. Playing a guitar well is hard enough with good sight. I can’t imagine having to do it when you can’t see well, but he was superb.

The con newsletter didn’t have room for the full results, so I asked Sandy to send them to me. Here they are. Youo’ll note that the judges worked hard to something nice to say about each entry.

Hat Kid – Young – Ian Tilley

  • Performance – Our hats off to you
  • Workmanship – Best recreation and use of corrugated cardboard.

Miss Frizzle Time Lord – Novice -Josee

  • Performance – Honorable Mention – School bus time lord
  • Workmanship – Best crochet – amazing stitches

Beneath the bay of Innsmouth – Master – Pettingers

  • Performance – Cthulu Jell
  • Workmanship – Best Use of Alternative materials

Irradiate Space – Novice – Turaga Vakama

  • Performance – Judge’s choice in Novice Class
  • Workmanship – Best Use of Modern Technology – 3D print, electronics, applique

Hut of Baba Yaga – Master – Snail Scott

  • Performance – Best in show
  • Workmanship – Best in Show

Mrs Aching – Novice – Marlys Schneider

  • Performance – Honorable Mention – Searching the Disc World
  • Workmanship – Honorable Mention – Historical Hat Recreation

Tour Guide Barbie – Journeyman – Derwin Mak

  • Performance – Throwback Barbie Award
  • Workmanship – Honorable mention – Historical Recreation

Tangible Artifact – Novice – Sue Burke

  • Performance – Honorable mention – Stage Memory
  • Workmanship – Most Tangible Artifact

Exile – Master Janine Wardale

  • Performance – Best Master
  • Workmanship – Best Use of Stash and recycle

Manticore Navy – Exhibition

Black Adam

052, Movie Review

This is another film that I watched on the plane on my way to Toronto. It being mostly superhero fight scenes, it doesn’t really warrant watching on a big screen, but it does have a lot more to the script than the Dungeons & Dragons film.

I should start by introducing the characters, because those of you who don’t follow comics closely may wonder who they are. The Justice Society of America are a DC superhero team from the 1940s and 50s. They were eventually superseded by the more familiar Justice League. Then they got brought back as a team from a different part of the multiverse. Then DC collapsed their multiverse and brought everyone back together and it is all very confusing.

Anyway, Hawkman and Doctor Fate are original JSA members. In the new timeline, they are recruiting new, young members such as Atom Smasher (ridiculous name) and Cyclone. Quite what has happened to Hawkman’s wife (still known as Hawkgirl despite presumably being a similar age to her husband) is unclear. Presumably someone at Warner Bros. decided that there were too many women in the film.

Now to the plot. The Middle Eastern, not-Egypt, country of Khandaq is currently ruled by an international criminal organisation called Intergang (an other ridiculous name). However, in the deep past, an evil king of Khandaq, Akh-Ton, created a powerful magical artefact called the Crown of Sabbac. To prevent him from gaining absolute power, a Council of Wizards created a superhero to fight him. Now an archaeologist, Adrianna Tomaz, is seeking to resurrect that hero to free her country. Inevitably, doing so also brings the Crown of Sabbac into play again.

When Adrianna resurrects her country’s champion, who will become known as Black Adam, the US government becomes aware of him, and sends the Justice Society to take him down. Can’t have foreign countries having their own superheroes, now, can we?

Arriving on site, the Justice Society find themselves conflicted. Clearly the Intergang are much worse people than Black Adam. Adrianna rightfully argues that her country has suffered under their rule for years, and no superhero ever came to rescue her people. Only now that the people of Khandaq are able to free themselves do the Americans take an interest.

Fair point, except that it turns out that Black Adam is not exactly a hero. He’s a man resurrected from thousands of years in the past and he has no qualms about killing his enemies. At which point the argument of the film appears to become that Middle Eastern countries shouldn’t free themselves from oppression because they’ll only end up ruled by a brutal dictator instead.

Of course, this being a superhero film, and Dwayne Johnson being in the starring role, Black Adam gets an opportunity to redeem himself. Now the message of the film becomes very confused. Should Khandaq have superheroes or not? And why are the Justice League not held responsible for the massive damage that they do to not-Cairo? It is all very murky.

Contrast this to the glorious moment at the end of the Moon Knight TV series in which the people of Cairo discover that they have an actual Egyptian superhero and are allowed to celebrate this fact.

Maybe I need to watch it again, but my overall impression is that Black Adam is a film that tried to say something interesting about American imperialism, but failed because the message got muddied in development. Sad.

The Western Kingdom

052, Book Review, History, John Fletcher

It might look like it from the cover, but this is not a fantasy novel. As the subtitle explains, The Western Kingdom is a history of the birth of the Kingdom of Cornwall, probably the oldest kingdom in the UK.

What?

Yes, it is true. England, Wales, Ulster and Scotland did not become unified kingdoms until part way through the early Mediaeval period. Cornwall, on the other hand, appears to have been a unified and politically distinct entity from the withdrawal of the Romans onwards.

This should not be surprising. Cornwall was a wealthy, tin-exporting polity before the Romans arrived. Having been busily trading with the Romans for some time, the Cornish didn’t worry too much about the invasion. They just kept on selling the Romans what they wanted. And the Romans were grateful not to have to bother conquering them. When the Romans left, Cornwall just carried on as before.

Of course it wasn’t called Cornwall back then. The post-Roman Cornwall was the Kingdom of Dumnonia, which stretched all the way up to the west bank of the River Parrett in Somerset. This is interesting to me, because it means that technically I’m Dumnonian by birth. However, Dunmonia was not entirely a united political unit. The folks living east of the River Tamar appear to have viewed themselves as distinct in some way, and with time Dumnonia shrank back to its modern boundary and became Kernow, or Cornwall.

The problem for Cornwall was their new neighbour, an aggressively expansionist Saxon kingdom called Wessex. While we are more familiar with Alfred the Great, and with Athelstan, whose diplomatic skills enabled him to unite all England under his rule, John Fletcher thinks we should also pay attention to Ecgberht. He grew up at the Frankish court, in exile while Offa of Mercia ruled Wessex though a puppet king. There he learned the political and military skills that allowed him to take Somerset and Devon from Dunmonia, and establish the strong kingdom that his grandson, Alfred, would inherit.

Mention of Alfred brings us to the Vikings. They don’t seen to have troubled the Cornish much. That’s partly because their favourite strategy was to sail up rivers to strike at wealthy, inland towns. Cornwall does not lend itself to that sort of thing. In addition, by the time the Vikings began settling in England in earnest, they had been trading with the Cornish for some time. This, of course, meant trading in slaves, because Dublin (a Viking city) was one of the biggest slave-trading ports in Europe at the time.

Back with the Saxons, it is worth noting that they did not refer to Dumnonia by it’s name. They called it West Wales, because the people there spoke more or less the same language as the people in the area we now call Wales. It is also worth noting that the Cornish were very much a sea-faring people (they have to be, have you ever tried to drive around the place?). We know that they had very close relations with the Bretons (whose language is also very similar to Welsh). It seems reasonable they would also have travelled back and fore across the Severn Estuary.

After the Vikings came William. Again this did not worry the Cornish too much as their Breton cousins had been dealing with the Normans for some time. Also the Cornish hated Harold Godwinson who had raided the south-west in his younger days when he was living in exile in Ireland.

By this time Cornwall had been more or less absorbed into England, having Norman nobles and bishops ruling over them. But in 1201 King John was persuaded to allow the creation of the Stannary Parliament, which was officially only for the tin industry but effectively made laws for Cornwall. It sat on and off until 1753.

I found this a fascinating book. Despite growing up in Dunmonia, I was taught almost none of this history. Alfred was the only local figure we knew of. Much of this is due to the perception that the early Mediaeval period was a ‘Dark Age’ when civilization was lost and little of note happened. The existence of Cornwall as a wealthy and independent kingdom for several hundred years after the departure of the Romans was ignored. I’m grateful to John Fletcher for shedding some light on the period.

I would imagine that Lucy Hounsom wishes she’d had this book when she was writing SisterSong. I also think it is time for someone to do for Dumnonia what Nicola Griffith has done for Northumbria.

book cover
Title: The Western Kingdom
By: John Fletcher
Publisher: The History Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

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
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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
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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:
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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:
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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
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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:
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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.

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