Cheryl Morgan's Fanzine
This month’s cover is “Fantasy Motorcycle” by Stefan Keller from Pixabay.
I don’t think there is any AI involvement in this. Keller has a lot of work up on Pixabay, much of which probably dates from before when the AI tools became available. But I would like to know how you tell.
As is often the case, the image I have used is a slide out of a much bigger picture. The whole thing is shown below.
There is an internet made of giant tortoises.
And the text is haunted by the voices of the dead.
Well, perhaps not. You see, the bulk of the story is told as a play in The Inverted Theatre, which exists only as a reflection in water. The interjections by the dead may simply be comments from members of the chorus chosen briefly to represent one or another deceased character. Then again, as The Inverted Theatre is very much a supernatural location, maybe all the players are actually ghosts playing themselves.
If this sounds like no fantasy novel you have ever read before, then I will agree with you.
The Spear Cuts Through Water is told to a young man whose family has fled the Old Country for a new land overseas, where strange things like cars and televisions exist. He is our focus because he is the one member of the family who is captivated by the tales that his grandmother tells of the Old Country. Simon Jimenez uses the word “lola” for “grandmother. It is a Philippine term, which perhaps tells us a little bit about the culture from which this story comes, though it is clear from the map that the Old Country is nothing like the real-world Philippines.
The Old Country is ruled by an Emperor who styles himself as the Sun. His wife, the Empress, is actually the Moon. She has been wife to seven Emperors before him, since she was captured and dragged down to serve the whims of an ambitious warlord. The Spear Cuts Through Water is the story of her escape, her revenge, and the disaster this brings upon the country her husbands ruled.
This book is not as political as The Vanished Birds, but it does have a few things to say about the immigrant experience, and of course quite a bit about the horrors of mediaeval societies ruled by the fantastically wealthy. But mainly I think this is a book about men. It is a book about the desire of men to continue their line through sons, about the cruelty that men inflict through Patriarchy, and about the way in which expectations of macho behavior affect both those born into power, and those who have no chance of achieving it.
Interestingly it is not a book about men being violent in war. One of the few roles for women in the book is as a warrior, as capable with a sword or spear as any man.
It is also a book about the love that men can have for each other, and how it is expressed, which is something I very much do not understand. It is a good love story though, and I’m now pointing my gay male friends at this book because the publishers sure aren’t going to.
When I reviewed The Vanished Birds I said that, in Jimenez, we had a new male author to get excited about. That didn’t happen. The book was shortlisted for a few things, but won no awards. I suspect that if Jimenez had been white the story would have been very different. Although of course a white man would not have written such a good book about colonialism. Anyway, here’s another Jimenez book that I think you should be getting excited about. Why not give it a try?
It has a fabulous map.
How do you make a novella feel like a much bigger book? If you’d like to know, take a look at what Kate Elliott has done with The Keeper’s Six, because it is beautifully executed.
The starting point is the worldbuilding. It is something that lots of writers love, but not all do well. Less experienced writers will pour everything they have in their notebooks onto the page. Clever ones, like Elliott, will tell you only as much as you need to follow the story, and that only sparingly, but they will do so in such a way as to make it seem like there is a lot more out there waiting to be told. (Which there may or may not be, it doesn’t matter much.)
The other key element is the plot. You hear a lot of advice about starting the story in media res, and generally the reason for doing so is to get the reader hooked quickly. However, by making it clear that there is a lot of backstory affecting your characters, you are giving the reader a sense of a much bigger book than the one they are actually reading.
Characters help too. You can’t spent a lot of time with each one, and you certainly can’t afford multiple points of view. However, if the backstory you keep hinting at involves conflicts between the characters, that adds to the sense of something much bigger.
So what do we have in the book? The world of The Keeper’s Six includes present-day Earth. It also includes a whole universe of other sentient races. But, this being fantasy, travel between worlds takes place via magic and a dangerous, monster-filled wilderness called the Beyond.
Travel through the Beyond is safest in a group of six people known as a Hex. They all have complimentary and necessary skills. The Gate opens the way in and out. The Ghost, being insubstantial in the Beyond, can act as a scout. The Voice is a diplomat, the Shotgun a fighter. The Lantern provides light in the often pitch-black Beyond. And the Keeper anchors the team to their home world. Together they form an adventuring party. And yes, you could write a role-playing game set in this world.
Here also be dragons. They are the most powerful of the sentient races, and being dragons they have a lot of knowledge and power that they don’t like to reveal.
Our heroine is Esther Green, now a grandmother and getting a bit old for adventuring. Besides – backstory – she and her Hex have had their license to travel revoked by something called the Concilium which is some sort of regulatory body for the universe. It was all her fault. Her relationship with the rest of the Hex is fraught as a result. But now she needs their help because her son, Daniel, who is also the Hex’s Keeper, has been kidnapped. By a dragon. And somehow this involves Daniel’s spouse, a non-human person called Kai.
Insert adventure through the Beyond here. Add in drip-fed bits of backstory that will help resolve the plot. Plus a whole bunch of Easter Eggs for people who love literature. And a bit of a love story too.
It is all expertly crafted, and a fabulous read. I do hope that Elliott writes more stories in this world, because it is too vibrant to set aside.
By the way, the dragons refer to Esther as “Star of Evening”. The name Esther, means “star” in Hebrew. It is the Hebrew version of the name Ishtar, the Mesopotamian goddess whose planetary aspect is Venus. The Biblical Esther was originally named Hadassah (“myrtle”), but her name was changed when she married the Persian king, Xerxes I. The evening star aspect was more associated with Ishtar’s warrior personality, while the morning star is associated with her sexual aspect. I’m sure that there is a lot more detail in the book that I have missed.
This book is a classic example of the conflict between publisher and author. When I first saw publicity for Queens of the Wild I shook my head sadly. Surely Ronald Hutton knew better than that. And of course he does. Professor Hutton is a leading expert on paganism in the British Isles. He’s well aware of the difficulty of saying anything certain about such things. The first thing you find in the book is a preface in which Hutton describes his difficulties with the publisher over the matter of the title. Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe – An Investigation, is the least bad that he could get them to agree to. He regards the “an investigation” bit as key, and it is.
While the popular media (and, it seems, the publishing industry) is still wedded to Margaret Murray’s ideas of an underground, surviving paganism that holds true to Celtic beliefs throughout the Middle Ages, academia has long since moved on. Back in the 1990s, Hutton himself suggested making a distinction between “Surviving Paganism” – that is an actual surviving religion – and “Pagan Survivals” – that is elements of pagan belief that have survived the advent of Christianity. These days the academic consensus has apparently shifted so far in the other direction that even that sensible distinction is liable to be met with derisive laughter. Nevertheless, Hutton persists, and this book is his latest contribution to the debate.
One problem with the whole Surviving Paganism thing is that we have no clear idea of what “Celtic Religion” looked like. We have a bunch of god-names, often from single Romano-British temples. We have a bunch of myths written down centuries after the Romans left by Christian monks. And while Caesar and Tacitus might assure us that Druidism was key to ancient British beliefs, there’s no guarantee than Anglesey was some sort of Celtic Vatican. Indeed, anyone who studies ancient religion will tell you that worship is very localized. While various Celtic people might have a horse goddess, she might be seen very differently in Ulster, in Yorkshire, in Wiltshire, and in various parts of France.
A corollary of this is that arguments tend to be based on anecdata. The god Nodens, for example, who might be the same person as Nudd in Wales, and Nuada in Ireland, is known only from two Romano-British temples. He is equated to Mars, but only in his healing aspect, and to the woodland god, Silvanus. That’s not enough data to draw firm conclusions from.
Probably no one knows more about pagan religion in Europe than Hutton, and what he does in this book is to focus on four goddess types for which significant amounts of can be found in folk tales from all over Europe. There is also a section on one god, and I suspect that the book originally focused on all five equally, but the publishers wanted to highlight the goddesses.
First in Hutton’s sights is the concept of the Great Mother, or Mother Earth. Gaia was a very minor figure in Greek mythology, but Cybele, who was also a goddess of wild places, was hugely important in Rome. The concept of Natura had some currency in the Mediaeval world, but Mother Earth is more of a modern invention. Hutton points of that she is mainly a creation of intellectuals. There is little in folk tales about her. He has got me interested in reading some DH Lawrence, which is something I never thought possible.
Goddess number 2 is a British specialty, the Fairy Queen. She is largely a creation of the Elizabethan period (for obvious reasons), though she is based on folk tales about fairies which are common throughout these isles. The character of Oberon was invented in the early 16th Century, and the addition of Titania as his wife is down to that Shakespeare fellow. Belief in Fairies was clearly widespread at the time, as evidenced by court cases in which fraudsters have pretended to be Fairies in order to swindle the gullible out of their money. Hutton even mentions several plays which have this as a plot, though he misses my favourite. In Amyntas by Thomas Randolph the fraudsters trick a rich man out of his money by claiming that Oberon will turn him into a woman and marry him.
Next we come to the Lady of the Night. The Northern parts of Central Europe all have stories about a woman who rides around at night doing mischief. She is often known as Diana, but weirdly also as Herodias, the wife of King Herod from the New Testament. She and her wicked crew usually ride horses, but elements of her belief may have informed the Wakpurgisnacht tradition of witches riding forth on broomsticks. In actual pagan terms she may have a connection to Epona, the Celtic horse goddess who became popular with Roman cavalry units. Or she might be inspired by the Valkyrie of Norse mythology. What is clear is that she is an actual folk tradition and well inclined towards the poor if they treat her well. I’m wondering about connections to British protest movements characterized by men dressed as women such as the Rebecca Rioters of Wales or the Lady Skimmingtons of England.
Finally in the goddesses we have one who was largely new to me. This is the Cailleach, a hag figure common to Irish and Scottish folklore. This is not Herself, as the Cailleach has no war goddess aspect. Indeed she may not be a goddess at all in that early sources tend to refer to A Cailleach, not The Cailleach. Once again, these things evolve over the centuries.
The final section is devoted to The Green Man, and I’m sorry to inform Juliet McKenna fans that there is no evidence that the famous foliate faces in churches are evidence of a Pagan Survival. The whole theory was invented by Julia Somerset, Lady Raglan, in an essay for the journal of the Folklore Society in 1939. Foliate heads did not become fashionable in mediaeval art (manuscripts and church carvings) until the 10th Century. Nevertheless there are interesting things to be said about the concept of the Wild Man, and Hutton says them.
Queens of the Wild is an incredibly erudite book, and one that ought to be read by anyone interested in the subject because it is a masterclass in showing what can and can’t be done with the evidence.
Ultimately, however, we need to remember the basic tenet of neo-paganism, which is that religion is created by believers. It doesn’t matter whether you are following a genuine survival from ancient times, or something made up, as long as it works for you. Indeed, the whole idea that there is an authentic tradition, and that someone can be the guardian of that tradition, is antithetical to the anarchist tradition of neo-paganism.
While I am very impressed with the way that Strange New Worlds replicates the feel of classic Trek, I think that Lower Decks may well be the best Trek because it does two things brilliantly.
Firstly it mercilessly takes the piss out of Trek. The best example of that from Season 3 is “Crisis Point II: Paradoxus” which is set in a holodeck scenario scripted by Boimler. The rest of our heroes have their own opinions about Boimler’s scripting ability (especially Mariner), and this leads to discussion of the merits of various well-known Trek episode tropes.
On the other hand, the show is still very much in love with the concept of Starfleet, and its young heroes are just as much committed to boldly going and doing good as they were at the start of season one. That’s despite the fact that some of them are sorely tested.
Those of you who were expecting more of a story arc in this season, after the cliffhanger at the end of Season 2, will be disappointed. The affair of Captain Freeman and the bombing of the Pakled capital is wrapped up very quickly in one episode. Thankfully there are many fun episodes to come.
One of my favourites is “Hear All, Trust Nothing”, in which the Cerritos is sent to Deep Space 9 on a diplomatic mission. The episode guest-stars the inimitable Kira Nerys (Bajorans are clearly Welsh if they have names like that) and, of course, Quark. The episode shows us a side of Tendi we’ve never seen before.
Rutherford also gets a chance to shine in the episode, “Reflections”. Here we learn that he was once a young tearaway who spent his early years in Starfleet building and racing single-seater starships. Meanwhile Mariner makes the acquaintance of Petra Aberdeen, a former Starfleet officer turned “independent archaeologist”. Both of these storylines will come back later in the season.
Oh, and we get to hear more about the villainous little droid, Peanut Hamper.
All in all, this is a fine season, especially if you happen to be a Californian and not a Texan. Warmly recommended. I understand that Season 4 is in the can and I’m very much looking forward to it.
This book is a sequel to Witness for the Dead, which I very much enjoyed. It would appear that Katherine Addison is now planning a series featuring Thara Celehar, the aforementioned Witness. That makes a lot of sense. These are crime novels. It isn’t hard to imagine a series of books in which Celehar solves different crimes. There will, however, be a story arc. The end of this book sets up the next one and makes major changes in Celehar’s life. This is all good. I’ll keep buying the subsequent books in the series.
For the setting, I might as well direct you to my review of Witness for the Dead. That describes who Celehar is, and how he solves crimes. What is new in this book is the subject. Whereas the earlier book was primarily about racism, The Grief of Stones is primarily about orphanages, and how unscrupulous people seek to make money by exploiting their unfortunate charges.
It is not lost on me that I am writing this review on a day on which newspaper reports have revealed that the UK’s Home Office is turning a blind eye to refugee children being kidnapped by criminal gangs, presumably because that means there are fewer refugees for them to house. Sadly it would not surprise me in the slightest if Suella Braverman was getting a payoff from this, because there’s no level of depravity to which our current government will not sink. But there is no Thara Celehar here to bring them to justice.
Something else that appears to be a feature of these books is that, towards the end, Celehar is suddenly plunged into very serious danger from supernatural forces. That reminds me a bit of Juliet McKenna’s Green Man books, though Celehar is a very different character to Dan Mackmain. Addison deals with this very well.
Those of you who are amused by comedy academics will enjoy this book. And those of you loved the character of Pel-Thenhior, the opera impresario, from the previous book will be pleased that he features heavily again in this one. It seems to be that he has a thing for Celehar, and that Celehar is too dense to see it. Doubtless this will unfold in future books.
I can’t say much more without giving away too much of the plot, but basically these are lovely books that are easy to read, and which address serious social issues through a fantasy lens. Well worth a read.
Everything is better with Michelle Yeoh, which is just as well because without her this Witcher spin-off would have been even more of a disaster. Blood Origin is set in the deep past of the Witcher universe. It tells of how the monoliths came to be, of the events that caused the Conjunction of the Spheres, of the arrival of humans and other monsters into the world, and of the creation of the first Witcher.
That’s a lot to pack in, especially in four hour-long episodes. Apparently it was originally intended to be six, which may help explain the poor plotting, but I’m sure they could have done better with the time they had if they hadn’t felt the need to fill it with sex and gore to keep the dudebro audience happy.
Alongside the aforementioned plot points, the story also includes King Alvatir of Xin’trea (Cintra as we know it) trying to bring peace to the war-torn Continent. He gets deposed by his sister, Éile, backed by the commander of the armies and the chief druid. The latter is named Balor, which is odd because he has two eyes, and he’s the main villain. We keep getting told that he’s upset because the Xin’trean nobility look down on him as a commoner, but the only evidence of this is people saying it. Eredin, the general, is gay, and apparently this is looked down on too. The message of the series appears to be that Alvatir was a decent guy who wanted peace, but really he was as bad as the villains because he was a king.
There are things called Clans that many of the heroes belong to, and which are very important to their motivations, but it is never explained what they are all about. I’m assuming that people who have read the Witcher books will know. Of course Witcher fans are complaining bitterly that the series deviates too far from the books, but then they always do that.
Into this mess comes a rag-tag group of heroes (where have I heard that before?). One of them is Scían, played by Michelle Yeoh, who is a sort of elf version of the swordmistress character from Irish mythology (Scáthach and her sister, Aife). She has blue contact lenses, which is a bit weird, but otherwise she does what Michelle Yeoh does.
There are seven heroes in our adventuring group, several of who exist only to fill roles in the plot. The only other one who is worth your attention is Meldof, a dwarf woman who has a warhammer named after her dead wife, Gwen. I want to see Francesca Mills in more TV and movies, because she’s excellent.
I’d advise you not to bother with this series, even if you are a fan of the main timeline, except that it is not entirely stand-alone. To begin with, there is a framing story in which Jaskier, who spends most of his appearances in the story stumbling around a blood-strewn battlefield, gets told the events of the plot and is encouraged to write a song about it. I’m sure he will do a better job than the scriptwriters. Given that the monoliths were a key part of Season 2, the fact that Jaskier now knows how they came to be may well be important to Season 3. Also, right at the end, there is a short scene connecting the events of Blood Origin to Ciri.
Netflix, you can do better than this.
This was a very pleasant surprise. Dragon Age: Absolution is an animated series. It was recommended on Mastodon by Aliette de Bodard, who in turn got it from Liz Bourke. I know nothing about Dragon Age, the game, so I went into this with no preconceptions.
A key issue is whether you can follow the plot without knowing anything about the game, and my answer is an emphatic “yes”. It is clear that there is a lot of backstory. There is something called the Inquisition, which some characters appear to have been involved with, but this has little impact on the plot. Most of the action takes place in the city of Tevinter and the key points about it are that it is home to powerful mages, and that elves are enslaved there.
The story begins is fairly classic RPG style in that a character called Fairbanks recruits a rag-tag bunch of adventurers to steal a magical artefact from Tevinter. Said group includes Roland, a human fighter, Hira, a human mage, Lacklon, a dwarf fighter, Qwydion, a mage from a people called Qunari, whom I guess are unique to the game, and most importantly Miriam, an elf of many talents.
It is clear from the start that Miriam has a long history with Tevinter, and very much does not want to go back there, but her knowledge of the city is essential to the heist. Also Miriam and Hira used to be a couple, and they are still very much attracted to each other, but politics has come between them.
Meanwhile, in Tevinter, we meet Rezaren, a powerful and arrogant young Tevinter mage seeking to unlock the power of the artefact that is the target of the heist. He has a relationship with Tassia, the commander of the city’s military, who is much more adult and very focused on her duty to keep the city safe.
As the plot unfolds over six half-hour episodes we learn a lot more about the backstories of Miriam, Hira and Rezaren. There’s a lot of good material about the evils of slavery. I wasn’t much fond of the dwarf character who, very stereotypically, was endlessly grumpy and deeply suspicious of elves, but he was mainly there because they needed another blade. Qwydion is the Qunari equivalent of a ditzy blonde and is in the story to provide comedy moments, which she does well.
Rezaren, by the way, is a fine portrayal of a privileged and somewhat talented rich kid who is convinced that the world revolves around him, and that he is destined for greatness. Tassia does her best to try to talk him down, but he is completely oblivious to her sensible advice.
There’s not a lot more to say except that you should give it a watch if you have Netflix. It is very well plotted, which is more then you can say for many TV series with bigger budgets these days.
Because I read The Lord of the Rings some time around 1968, and deemed myself over children’s books after that, I missed out on a lot of classic children’s fantasy. The books I am most sad to have missed are the ones that form The Dark is Rising Sequence. That’s partly because I saw Susan Cooper give the Tolkien Memorial Lecture in Oxford a few years back and was very impressed, and partly because of the enthusiasm that so many of my friends have for the books. The BBC serialization that was produced this winter reminded me of this, so I decided to read the books, one per month.
Consequently I started with Over Sea, Under Stone, which is something of an anomaly. It was published in 1965, and was not followed by The Dark is Rising until 1973. I’m assuming that Cooper developed a lot as an author in the intervening years.
Over Sea, Under Stone reminds me a lot of the Enid Blyton books I read when I was Very Young. In it a group of children, all siblings, go on holiday to Cornwall with their parents. There they, and their dog, have jolly exciting adventures and foil the jolly dastardly plots of some jolly wicked fellows. In the process they manage to say lots of horribly racist things because they have grown up on horribly racist stories about the glories of Empire.
The book does not feature Will Stanton, and Merriman Lyon is referred to as Great Uncle Merry (or Gumerry) throughout.
I think the book would have been more of a disappointment had it not been set in a seaside holiday in Cornwall, which is something I am very familiar with. The location is on the south coast, which I do not know well, but the basic ideas are very much the same. I’m pretty sure that Cooper will have spent time in Cornish villages before writing it.
In view of the review of Queens of the Wild elsewhere in this issue, it is also worth noting that the books were written at a time when belief in Pagan Survivalism was commonplace.
I have a suspicion that Mr. Hastings, the main villain of the story, was based on Aleister Crowley.
Overall, however, this is a children’s book and very much of its era. I suspect that I will find that I did not need to read it in order to enjoy the rest of the series.
And this month’s Worldcon drama is…
That Chengdu has moved dates and will now take place in October. There is good and bad to this.
Apparently some people have been shocked, Shocked! that a Worldcon could do this. Fannish memories are very short. When did DisCon 3 take place again?
On the plus side, the additional two months will give the convention committee, which is clearly struggling, more time to get their act together. Some things do need to be done at the traditional times, and thankfully they have managed to get a means of buying memberships up on their website. By the time you get to read this it will probably be too late to buy a WSFS Membership and get nominating rights to the Hugos, but you folks will all be well up on that, I expect. Here’s hoping the ballot opens on time.
The extra time will also give people more time to get visas, though whether it will be possible to get one at all remains to be seen.
Hopefully no one lost out over hotel bookings. Kevin had one, but with the uncertainty over visas he made sure it was cancellable. I’m expecting other people did the same. And there’s no point booking a non-refundable flight until you have a visa.
On the downside, things are clearly a bit chaotic. The convention website doesn’t seem to have the date-change announcement on it anywhere. The announcement went out on Twitter and Facebook.
The most interesting thing about the whole affair is the number of Chinese fans who expressed surprise and disappointment. Clearly they were as much taken aback by the whole thing as Western people were. Naturally several of them assumed that WSFS had control over what was going on, and might be able to exert influence over the Chengdu committee. Some even asked why WSFS had allowed this. Ha! The WSFS Board, being non-existent, was unavailable for comment.
There are clearly translation issues with understanding why the Chinese fans were so upset, but they do seem to have more inside knowledge of what is going on in Chengdu. In particular there is concern about whether the proposed new venue will be finished on time. The whole situation is terribly opaque. I’m rather glad that I have no plans to attend in person.
I tend to find January a bit of a dead month in the Northern Hemisphere. There’s the tail end of the midwinter festivities, everyone is broke, and the weather awful so no one wants to go out. There are no conventions. It is all a bit dull, which is just as well because I have LGBT History Month to prepare for.
I also have a house to work on. Progress is being made. Most importantly I now have a proper bed, not just a mattress on the floor. It is very comfortable, and that means I tend not to want to get out of it in the morning. That’s especially the case on mornings when the sun streams through the bedroom window. As is well known, us cats can be imprisoned by sunbeams.
I have bookcases. With the help of Roz, Jo and Chris I have erected a Billy corner unit. I now have three more Billys on order. Once they are up I should be able to get all of the books shelved.
Meanwhile life in Wales is proving very pleasant. I’ve found a good butcher who stocks venison. I’ve got an amazing new hairdresser. I’ve found a lovely little cafe that makes their own donuts. And while it is early days yet I think that the service I get out of NHS Wales is going to be immeasurably better than I had in England.
Of course it is Six Nations season soon, so the entire country is consumed with Rugby Drama. Fortunately for you, I’m not going to bore you with that.
This is the December 2022 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.
Cover: Generation Nemesis: This issue's cover is Ben Baldwin's art for the new Sean McMullen novel.
Fault Tolerance: In which Eva Innocente finally gets to save the universe. More fun space opera from Valerie Valdes.
Bloodmarked: The second volume of Tracy Deonn's imaginative re-working of Arthurian myth has finally arrived.
SMOFCon #38: Cheryl takes a holiday in Montréal and finds out what is going on in the world of Worldcon.
The Red Scholar’s Wake: Lesbian pirates, in Spaaaaaace! Aliette de Bodard's latest.
Inventing Memory: In memory of Anne Harris, a book review from Emerald City #105
Beyond the Northlands: What can the Norse Sagas tells us about actual Norse history. According to Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough, quite a lot.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: The maddest of Arthurian tales gets the graphic novel treatment
Ogres: A very clever novella from Adrian Adrian Tchaikovsky 
On Social Media: Twitter is dying. What are the alternatives?
When It Changed: An academic conference on the state of feminist science fiction
Jethro Tull at Bath Abbey: A little festival musical diversion, in a very lovely venue.
Editorial – December 2022: For once Cheryl has a lot to say, including apologsing for the missing November issue.
It is always interesting when I get a new author or series needing a cover. I’m rather enjoying the job of Art Director. And Ben Baldwin has never let me down. This is his cover for the Sean McMullen book, Generation Nemesis. You should be putting him on your Hugo ballot, people.
Here’s the unadorned version.
This book is the last in Valerie Valdes’ trilogy of stories about Captain Eva Innocente and her rag-tag crew of misfit found family. It is, as usual, a lot of fun. Valdes has made a point of filling the books with nerdy references, and the main characters are largely lovable despite their manifest faults. However, the books are space opera, and that brings with it expectations.
The thing about space opera is that everything must be done on a grand scale, and the treat has to keep ramping up. So in Chilling Effect we get to know our lovable bunch of semi-reluctant space pirates. In Prime Deceptions things get a bit more serious, and the crew gets involved in some galactic politics. For the finale, we can expect nothing less than the fate of the entire universe being at stake.
One of the features of the setting that Valdes has constructed is a collection of hyperspace gates that allow travel around the galaxy. No one knows how they work. They were apparently constructed by a mysterious race of aliens called the Proarkhe who disappeared millions of years ago. Can you say, “Chekov’s aliens”?
So in Fault Tolerance we learn that the reason the Proarkhe disappeared is that they were fighting a vicious civil war amongst themselves. One of the causes over which they fought was whether they should allow other forms of live to co-exist with them, or whether all inferior beings should be eliminated. The faction called the Artificers, who favour the elimination of all other forms of life, have gained the upper hand, and have decided to get on with the job.
The other faction is keen to mount some opposition, but they have little military power left. They need to activate some legendary super-weapons, and they need help to do it. Fortunately they have been monitoring the activities of other life forms, and they are convinced that the best allies they can get are the crew of La Sirena Negra. Hello Eva, want to help save the universe?
Of course this would not be an Eva Innocente book without some nerdy references. It turns out that the Proarkhe are Transformers. That is, they are giant, inorganic lifeforms that are able to modify their body shape at will. The super-weapons that Eva is sent to collect are more like the jaeger from Pacific Rim – they are giant, humanoid robots that need a pilot. But they too can transform, and do other things. Someone who knows their anime better than me would be able to explain the references.
Oh, and one other thing. The Proarkhe are pathologically afraid of cats, and Eva has a ship full of them.
Of course Eva’s family manage to get mixed up in things too, and make themselves difficult in their own particular ways. The Artificers, knowing they have to defeat Eva, hire her former boss, Tito Santiago, who really is a ruthless, bloodthirsty space pirate. And inevitably Miles Fucking Erck manages to insert himself into the action and explain how, as an Alpha Male, he should be the star of the story. “Well, actually…”
There is a lot of comedy in the book, but it has a serious side too. Eva already feels massively guilty about the dangers she has put her crew though. Now she is being asked to save the universe, and bring them along for the ride. Worse, her alien boyfriend, Vakar, has been called away by his superiors in the secret service unit that he works for. Eva should have her ship’s doctor, Pink, for a shoulder to cry on, but Pink has her own problems with the sudden re-appearance of an old flame who may, or may not, be secretly working for Tito.
One of the things I love about Valdes’ work is her ability to turn the plot on a sixpence. You’ll be happy going along with Eva as she sorts out her current problem, it is all going well, and then in the last paragraph or two of the chapter something wild happens and we are all deep in the mierda again. It is impressive to watch.
Mostly, however, I love the humour and the references. I mean, how can I not love a book in which the universe is saved by a [redacted]?
Volume 2 of one of my favorite modern Arthuriana series has dropped, and naturally I pounced upon it. Bloodmarked is a sequel to Legendborn, by Tracy Deonn. I really can’t talk about this book without referencing the events of the first book. If you haven’t read that book and don’t want to be spoiled, look away now.
*
So, at the end of Legendborn, our heroine, Bree Matthews, has been revealed as a true descendent of King Arthur. That’s because the secret cult that has been keeping Arthur’s legacy alive, known as the Legendborn Order, got involved in the colonization of America, and one of them couldn’t resist raping a slave woman.
Naturally most of the order is unhappy to discover that the current incarnation of Arthur is a black teenage girl. The majority of them are deep into white supremacy. They all thought that Arthur would be Nick Davis, who is the current male heir of the right family. But, thanks to complicated ancestry stuff, Nick is actually Lancelot, and therefore Bree’s boyfriend.
Except that Nick has been kidnapped by his father, who is determined to see his family’s grasp on power maintained. Bree is pretty much on her own against an entire secret cult of elderly white racists. Her only support comes from Selwyn (Merlin), whose behavior is distinctly odd and who once tried to kill Bree in Legendborn, and from William (Gawain), who turns out to be the most lovely lad whom I am sure I would have fallen for if I was 16.
With all of this going on in book 1, Deonn has work to do in order to make Bloodmarked more than just a follow-on with no mystery to it. She avoids that trap by bringing in other parts of the world. After all, if there is a secret magical society preserving the legacy of King Arthur, then surely other groups of people will have their own magical secrets. The Welsh can’t be the only people in the world who can do magic, can they?
Of course not. The African-American community has its own influences, and its modern incarnations of ancient powers. Deonn brings much of that into Bloodmarked. Being tolerably well-read in such things, I do know who it is that one is likely to meet at a place called the Crossroads Lounge. And I love that Deonn has chosen to portray him as a sort of teenage Loki.
Much happens, and there is a great deal of teenage angst, as there must be in such a book. There is also a great deal of hope, as most of the young people in the book are horrified by the racism and sexism espoused by their elders. But we all know where power rests, and teenage rebellion can only take you so far. Plus there are the dead to worry about. Because if their spirits have been hanging around for a couple of millennia then they are most definitely not really dead. Arthur’s legacy has been kept alive for a reason. The Order is quite happy to throw their guardianship away to preserve white supremacy, but the enemy sees that as a weakness to be exploited. Arthur isn’t too happy about it either.
And there we must leave them. There will doubtless be a climactic finale around this time next year. I’m very much looking forward to it, because Deonn is doing a marvelous job of combining a traditional YA storyline with Arthuriana and some heartfelt observations on racial politics.
Diolch, cariad. Rwyt ti’n dda iawn.
I have no particular desire to attend SMOFCon these days. Being a dealer means that I have no time for con-running. But I am interested in spending time with Kevin, and when SMOFCon is not in the USA that’s an opportunity. When it is in Montréal, with the additional promise of excellent food, it is a no-brainer. So I got to spend a week in the Montréal Sheraton, which was an interesting experience.
When SMOFCon #38 was scheduled for Montréal, everyone was anticipating a quiet weekend in Canada. Surely no one would arrange a major international conference in the same city at very short notice, would they? Well, as it happened…
COP15 is the 15th iteration of the UN’s biodiversity conference. It is separate from the sequence of climate change conferences such as COP27 which recently took place in Cairo. The biodiversity conferences take place once every 10 years, but COP15 was supposed to take place in China in 2020 and the Chinese government’s strict COVID policy made that impossible. Eventually the UN did a deal whereby Canada would host the event and China would still get to chair it.
As a result, hotel rooms in Montréal were suddenly at a premium, except that our little event had booked out a bunch of them at one of the city’s top hotels. To their credit, the Sheraton did not try to get rid of us. But we did have to put up with some of their other guests. The Montréal police appeared to be using the hotel as a command post, and when you got in an elevator there was a good chance you’d find you were sharing it with an armed police officer.
Quite what the forces of Law and Order made of the hotel notice board listing the rooms for the “Secret Master of Fandom Convention” (sic), we never found out.
I got stopped by the police once. Kevin and I were walking back from breakfast and a lady police officer came over to speak to me. It turned out she wanted to compliment me on my outfit. “You look very cute,” she said. I’m assuming she was a lesbian. As it happens, I did look very cute.
I didn’t attend much of SMOFCon, partly because I ended up working for much of the weekend, and partly because of attending When It Changed. However, I did have a membership. That allowed me to get free lunch in the consuite. Not normally free breakfast, because Kevin and I took every opportunity to visit Eggspectation who do the best breakfasts on the planet.
Having a membership also allowed me to attend the event that we are no longer allowed to call the Fannish Inquisition. I did, after all, want to see what was happening with the future of Worldcon. Thanks to Kevin’s hard work, all of the presentations in that session are available to view online via YouTube.
I won’t bother to repeat everything that was said as you can watch them yourselves if you are interested, but I can report on my personal view of the presentations and what I perceived to be the mood in the room.
None of the Chinese fans involved in running the Chengdu convention were at SMOFCon. We were told that this was a money issue. Their attendance at previous cons had been sponsored, and no one was willing to pay for them to go to SMOFCon. Instead the Chengdu convention was represented by Ben Yalow (co-chair), Dave McCarty (Hugos & Site Selection), Carolina Gómez Lagerlöf (Online program) and a bunch of other Western fans who seemed to be there to bulk out the panel.
There were two themes that I felt came through strongly in the Chengdu presentation. The first was “We cannot control the Chinese government”. This was said particularly with respect to visas and COVID restrictions, but also with regard to potential censorship. Chengdu is by no means alone in this problem. Formula 1 has recently cancelled the 2023 Chinese Grand Prix because the Chinese organisers were unable to reassure them that the teams, and the attendant media circus, would be able to get into the country for the race, and out again in time for the next race on the calendar. F1 is a far bigger thing than Worldcon, and if they can’t run an international event in China next year we should not be surprised if we can’t either.
Of particular concern to those in the room was the slide on how to get a visa. Tucked away at the bottom of the list of requirements was the need for a personal letter of recommendation. I happen to know a few Chinese fans who might be willing to help, but most people in the room had no idea how they’d get that. As it happens, I’m not planning to waste time and energy applying for a visa. Kevin says he will try, but he has no confidence that he will get one.
The other key theme was sponsorship. As in Finland, fannish conventions in China are traditionally free to attend, and rely on sponsorships of various sorts to supply the money needed to run the event. According to Ben and his colleagues, the Chengdu committee currently does not have all of the sponsorship it would like in place, and consequently they can’t guarantee what will be on offer at the convention. It is somewhat worrying that, less than a year out, the convention may be very short of money, and clearly this will impact their ability to stream any of the convention.
Incidentally, in line with this policy, the Chinese have made everyone who had a supporting membership by dint of voting in Site Selection a full attending member of the convention. Not that many of us will be able to attend in person, but attendance is free. You only pay for your WSFS membership, which is the money you paid to vote in Site Selection. I also understand that local Chinese fans will be allowed to attend for free. They will not have to buy WSFS memberships in order to do so. This is in stark contrast to Glasgow who are insisting that all attendees also be WSFS members. There is no constitutional requirement for that.
The assembled SMOFs were, of course, very interested in what would happen with the WSFS functions. Dave McCarty does have plenty of experience running the Hugos and Site Selection, so if he’s allowed to get on with the job I’m sure he’ll do fine. But these two things should also be open to Chinese fans, and that means having dual-language websites for voting. Site Selection will also require both Western and Chinese fans to be able to pay their WSFS memberships for 2025, and we’ve already seen what problems this caused for DC in 2021. I have no idea what will happen. The time for opening Hugo nominations is approaching fast.
The Business Meeting is another matter. Ben stated that the quorum for a meeting is 12 people, and he anticipated no problem meeting that requirement. We can therefore expect that the 2023 Business Meeting will be very small, and attended solely by Ben, those other few Western fans who managed to get visas, and maybe one or two curious Chinese. Ideally it will follow the example of Wellington and vote to pass all business on to the following year, then adjourn. However, Ben made no mention of this possibility. Thankfully, if we do end up with a rogue meeting, anything it does can be undone in Glasgow. However, this will be a huge waste of people’s time.
The SMOFs, for whom catastrophizing is a favourite hobby, wanted to know what would happen if the Chengdu convention did not happen (for example the city might be in Lockdown at the time), or if it was unable to discharge WSFS functions. The answer appears to be that, as and when Chengdu admits that it cannot fulfill it’s obligations, responsibility passes to Glasgow, who may then call upon the Winnipeg NASFiC for help. But until Chengdu admits failure, nothing can be done. Because there is no “WSFS Board” that can take charge.
In comparison, Glasgow was the epitome of calm, organised efficiency. Frankly they could have announced that the SECC had been eaten by Nessie and they would have still come out of the day smelling of roses compared to Chengdu. The only major case for concern seemed to be whether their hotel offerings included a Hilton property, but I’m pretty sure I saw a Garden Inn on the list.
Future years seem locked in until 2026, and are somewhat hazy from then on. Seattle looks a shoe-in for 2025, and has a lovely-looking new convention centre. Los Angeles is probably equally certain for 2026. Much as I would love to go to Egypt, I suspect their bid will be tainted by the Saudi connection (same people bidding), and sunk by the usual American fear of leaving the country. There is a bid for Tel Aviv in 2027. I wish them all the luck, but with apologies to my pals in Israel, I am no more happy to visit your country than I am Saudi Arabia, especially after the recent elections.
2028 has two bids. One is for Brisbane, Australia, but it has not been very active and did not send anyone to SMOFCon. The other is from Kampala in Uganda. They did an impressive presentation via Zoom, and I’d love to see a Worldcon in Africa, but that’s another country where I would not feel safe. 2029 has a bid for Dublin. If I’m still fit enough to travel, that looks like the next Worldcon I will be able to attend after Glasgow.
The team running the Winnipeg NASFiC next year have a lot of Worldcon experience, and I’m pretty sure they will do a good job. My only worry is that they get overwhelmed with memberships because of the ongoing issues with Chengdu. I certainly plan to be there.
My only other observation from the event is that the people who attend SMOFCon seem to be increasingly people whose sole interest is in running a big convention. They don’t care much about WSFS, aside from being allowed to present the Hugos. That observation goes double for the people who end up in senior positions on Worldcon committees. Allegedly one of the co-chairs of the Seattle bid nurses a burning hatred for all things WSFS, so there may be some interesting fireworks come 2025.
It get the impression that a lot of the people at SMOFCon would be very happy if the WSFS Constitution were to fall into a convenient black hole, and that the right to call your convention “Worldcon”, and present whatever version of the Hugos you felt appropriate, should be decided at SMOFCon. I don’t think this would be an improvement on the current situation, but at least fandom at large would no longer believe in the “WSFS Board” and would blame the people actually responsible for anything that they were unhappy with.
The latest writer to get in on the lesbian space pirates gig is Aliette de Bodard. As you might expect, she has a very different take on the subject.
The Xuya universe has had its share of stories about sentient spaceships before. Previously, however, all of the stories in the series have been of a shorter length. The Red Scholar’s Wake is the first full-blown novel in the setting.
The eponymous Red Scholar is an actual space pirate, and she is a lesbian by dint of being married to her ship. There is, I think, a lot to be said about being a sentient spaceship that has a gender and a sexuality. In this book, however, De Bodard does not go there. I’d say that she has other fish to fry, but given that the ship’s name is The Rice Fish, Resting (Rice Fish for short), that might be indelicate.
As is obvious from the title of the book, the Red Scholar is not just a pirate, she is a very dead pirate. The circumstances of her death form the basis of the plot of the book. Rice Fish is convinced that her wife was betrayed, sold out to their enemy, Censor Trúc, by a rival pirate captain. However, proving that a pirate would betray one of their own to the government will not be an easy thing. Rice Fish needs expert help.
Into our story comes Xích Si, a humble data analyst who is among the captives brought in by the latest wave of attacks by ships of the Red Banner. She appears to have exactly the skills that Rice Fish needs. But Xích Si doesn’t think much of pirates. They have, after all, just killed lots of her friends and destroyed her ship. Also she thinks that killing people is wrong. More to the point, she is a nobody. She has no authority in the pirate community and won’t last the day without protection. So Rice Fish does the only thing that might work. She marries Xích Si.
It is, of course, a marriage of convenience. Everyone agrees on that. But then so was the marriage between Rice Fish and the Red Scholar. The ship has always regretted that. As for Xích Si, she despises pirates. But Rice Fish’s avatar is so extraordinarily beautiful…
Doubtless you can all see where this is going. And in standard romance plot fashion there will be a period in which Rice Fish and Xích Si hate each other before they get back together again. I’d be interested to see a romance expert’s take on the book, because it all seemed a bit formulaic to me. The rest of the book is De Bodard in fine form.
We have the Vietnamese setting, with its emphasis on family and honour, and the profusion of aunties. We have action sequences in which Xích Si races against time to save her beloved and her young son. We have intrigue. And no one is quite what they seem. Xích Si is not the mouse she appears on first meeting her. Rice Fish is not a bloodthirsty criminal. Even Censor Trúc is not the ruthless government agent we expect. Most of the main characters are women, and the one who is not suffers badly from his refusal to accept that women can be competent at anything.
This is a very enjoyable book that asks serious questions about what it means to be idealistic rebels fighting an oppressive government who have to turn to piracy in order to survive.
This review is re-printed from Emerald City #105 in memory of Anne Harris (1964-2022). Rest in Peace, my friend.
The latest novel by Anne Harris, Inventing Memory, is a meditation on the role of myth and religion in society. It takes place partly in modern day America and partly in the city of Erech in ancient Sumeria, during the reign of King Gilgamesh. The lead characters are Wendy Chrenko, an expert in Sumerian religion, and Shula, a slave girl who rises to become a priestess of Inanna.
We here at the First Church of Ishtar, Newly Revived, express our delight that Harris has chosen to highlight The Goddess and her stories in this way, even if she has chosen to use the old Sumerian name for the Queen of Heaven. We are particularly pleased at how many of the ancient tales have been used in the book. We do note that there are certain theological inexactitudes in Harris’s treatment that, in less enlightened times, would probably have resulted in her being convicted of heresy and sentenced to be torn apart by The Goddess’s pet lions, every day from now until eternity. But one of the advantages of being the Pope of your own church is that you can show magnanimity where necessary. Besides, Harris is a really nice person and I’d hate to have to order her sacrificed in such a potentially messy fashion. And, what is more, by the time we get to the end of the book, she says all of the right things.
But we have to start at the beginning, and that means the Garden of Eden. As with much of Genesis, this story has parallels in Sumerian myth, and wasn’t always as we know it. In particular there is the mysterious figure of Lilith, Adam’s supposed first wife. A garden with a tree, guarded by a dragon or snake, and inhabited by Lilith, appear in a Gilgamesh story. The meaning of that tale is not entirely clear, but I guess Lilith and the snake could have been up to all sorts of tricks.
And from these, in the fullness of time, came people. A new kind of creature that could write laws of its own. And the first law that people wrote was, “Death exists.”
“True enough,” said the snake, and Lili agreed, but before they knew it people were writing all kinds of other laws. Some of them were pretty good, like “Hanging out and talking is fun,” but others, like “Sex is evil” didn’t make any sense at all.
“Wait a minute,” said Lili. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
“Well it’s too late now,” said the snake. “They’ll just have to work it out for themselves.”
Harris’ heroine, Wendy Chrenko, is a devotee of what I tend to call “fluffy bunny feminism.” This is the idea that if women were in charge of the world all would be sweetness and light and there would be no nastiness, ever again. It is generally accompanied by a belief that in the dim and distant past there was a time when a matriarchal fluffy bunny society existed, The Goddess was worshipped, and all was right with the world. This Eden-like paradise was destroyed by the invention of patriarchy, and we have gone downhill ever since. You can see the attraction of the Eden and Lilith myths to people who believe this sort of thing.
Shula, on the other hand, lives in the reality of ancient Sumeria. Although Inanna is worshiped fervently (indeed she is the patron Goddess of Erech), there is already a King (Gilgamesh) and Inanna’s position in the divine hierarchy is by no means pre-eminent. Wendy and her feminist pagan friends have this daft idea that they can somehow search even further back and discover the fluffy bunny garden, thereby putting the world to rights. In the process of trying to do so, they learn some very different lessons, including that even fluffy bunnies have teeth and are liable to bite.
Shula tipped her head back to peer at Belili. “Will you be my guardian?” she asked.
“Yes, certainly, if you will remember that you were not always a slave.”
“But how can I? My life before I came to Erech is a murky pond, and I have no net or line to draw up what might be in there.”
“If you cannot remember, invent. Make up your own story.”
There are, I think, a few flaws in Inventing Memory. Some of the characterization is a little stereotyped, although I guess some of that can be forgiven because Harris is talking about myths so she wants stereotypes in the story. On the other hand her portrayal of the unpleasantness of school life is particularly good so I’m not going to complain much.
More importantly, she gets the philosophy right. There never was a fluffy bunny garden, nor can we create one. On the other hand, myths are simply ways in which we try to help order our lives. As Joseph Campbell explained [in Myths to Live By], we can create new ones. And the myths of the past contain many useful elements. Patriarchal religion is neither inevitable nor healthy, and we need to get rid of it. Taking the better ideas from times when goddesses were worshipped is a good start. Anne Harris’s book is, in its own way, a neo-pagan manifesto, and as such I highly recommend it.
(By the way, for information on how to become a Pope, search the Web for entries on Discordianism.)
I did promise you that I would be reviewing history books here. I need to get them read, and that means I might as well review them. This one is likely to appeal to a lot of you.
Most people who have got involved in fantasy, and especially those who have done role-playing, will have a passing familiarity with the Norse sagas. Failing all else, you will probably have followed the adventures of Ragnar Lodbrok on Netflix. But there is much more to the sagas than simple bloodfeuds and massacring English clergy.
In Beyond the Northlands, Eleanor Rosamund Barraclough seeks to tell the history of the Norse through the lens of the sagas. The end result is one part history, one part fantasy fiction, and one part soap opera. Well maybe two parts soap opera, because that’s what the sagas are closest to in literary form. There might be a part of geography in there too, because Barraclough has made a point of visiting many of the places that the sagas talk about.
Thematically the book in divided into four parts. Each one follows the adventures of the Norse as they travel away from their homeland in the four directions of the compass. There they will seek out new lands and new civilisations, and massacre anyone who gets in their way.
The North section takes us to Finnmark, along the northern coast of Norway. The people that the Norse call “Finnar” are not what we know as Finns, but rather the Sámi. They are, of course, all malevolent sorcerers, especially their women, who are also preternaturally beautiful. What is a poor Norse adventurer to do? Thankfully the Sámi are willing to trade. Being a nomadic people, they miss out on a lot of the benefits of animal husbandry, and are absolute suckers for butter and bacon.
The West takes us to Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland. It tells of how the terrible rogue, Erik the Red, became the original dishonest property developer. “Greenland, yes, lovely place. I’ve been there myself. Glorious weather.” It also tells of how some of his family travelled yet further west and found a land brimming with all of the benefits that nature could provide. Unfortunately that land was home to vicious warriors whom the Norse called Skraelings, who turned out to be too much to handle, even for Vikings.
The East means Russia, and the story of how a bunch of enterprising Swedes ended up becoming a people known as the Rus. It turns out that the name has nothing to do with red hair, and is actually derived from an old Swedish word meaning “a bunch of lads rowing a boat”. Here we learn of the adventurers of Harald Hardrada, who in his youth befriended the King of the Rus, became a captain in the Varangian Guard, and attracted the attention of the amorous Empress Zoë of Byzantium. We also learn how, after a few hundred years, the descendants of Harold Godwinson finally made their way back onto the English throne. Along the way, though Barraclough doesn’t make much of it, we can also see the seeds of the enmity between Russian and Ukraine.
Finally there is South, which means pilgrimage to Rome and the Holy Land. Our Norse heroes have become Christians. There is, perhaps, a certain amount of political expediency in that, because it turns out that if you go on a Crusade you can massacre the locals to your heart’s content and claim that you are doing God’s work.
Of course the sagas were not written down until around the 13th Century, long after even the latest events that they recount took place. Nevertheless, it does seem that they are based solidly on oral tradition, and if the occasional dragon, troll, uniped or dog-headed man makes an appearance, well, that just adds to the fun. You can still get a lot of history from them.
I loved this book. Barraclough has a very easy style, and very much leans into the black humour that pervades much of the sagas. If you are thinking that the book has some overlap with Cat Jarman’s excellent River Kings, you would be dead right. What’s more you can hear Jarman interview Barraclough about the book on her podcast here. Enjoy!
Given the amount of publicity surrounding the film of The Green Knight, I am a little surprised that there have not been multiple other adaptations of the story. I know of only one: this graphic novel from John Reppion and Mark Penman. Perhaps there have been others and I have missed seeing them, or perhaps the sheer gonzo nature of the story has put people off. Certainly Reppion and Penman had some interesting choices to make. More of that later, but first the easy bit.
John Reppion has a fine career as a comics writer behind him, but he also has one advantage that he can call upon when the right project arrives. This is absolutely the right project. Reppion is Alan Moore’s son-in-law, and thus the book has an introduction from the legendary writer and self-professed magus. I suspect it was a very easy ask. It is also no surprise that Moore’s short essay is well worth reading if you are interested in the source material. Who else would describe Geoffrey of Monmouth as a “bibulous Christian mythologist”?
On then to the hard bits. Reppion could have distilled the story into simple, elegant prose. He chose not to do so. Instead he has attempted to preserve the feel of the original work by writing much of the story in rhyme. That was very brave of him. I read the book on the plane to Montréal, so I haven’t had the chance to read it out loud. I should do so. I’m sure that will enhance the experience.
Then there is the art. Penman could, I’m sure, have treated us to some gorgeously realistic images. He has chosen not to. Instead he has gone for a cartoonish look, and a stark colour palette of black, white, green and red. Red is the colour of Arthur’s court, but also of fire and blood. Green is the colour of Bertilak, but also of the wood and its mystical terrors. It is a very bold choice, both in the look of the book, and in trusting the reader to go with a heavily stylized approach. I think it works, though I have only seen it on an iPad and would like to see on paper.
My main complaint about the film was that it failed the explore the relationship between Gawain and Bertilak properly. The graphic novel does better, but relies heavily on Penman’s art to tell us what Gawain is thinking as Bertilak collects the kisses he is owed. I think it is better than the film, but the form inevitably leaves a lot to the imagination and I suspect that many readers will fail at that.
As to the story, it is as obscure as ever. Reppion is a little harsher on Gawain than the original poem, but he makes no attempt to explain all of the weirdness. That’s probably just as well.
Of course most of you know the story anyway. You won’t be picking this book up wondering what is going to happen. You’ll be far more interested in how the story has been adapted to the medium. On that count I would say that Reppion and Penman’s Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a bold and imaginative approach to the material that is far more interesting than a simple adaptation would have been.
I understand from social media that the flurry of releases from Adrian Tchaikovsky in 2022 is one of those publisher accident things where a bunch of different companies all manage to get their acts together at the same time. Nevertheless, that fact that so many companies want to publish Tchaikovsky’s work is testament to how respected he is becoming. I do plan to read all of this year’s releases eventually (even if that means having to read the whole of the spider book), but I have a lot of other books to get to so for now you are just getting a review of the novella.
Ogres begins as a simple fantasy tale. Our hero, Torquell, is the young son of the village headman. He lives in a mediaeval society where villages are beholden to local lords who are, apparently, Ogres. In the woods there is a group of outlaws who claim to resist the Ogres’ rule, but really they are mostly a bunch of ne’er-do-wells. In a “boys will be boys” sort of way, young Torquell manages to get himself into terrible trouble, and thus his adventures begin.
Before that happens, however, we witness the arrival of the local Ogre on his annual visit to the village. Two things are obvious. Firstly, the Ogres really are very large humanoids. Secondly, they are in possession of technology that suggests at least 21st Century sophistication. And suddenly we are in a science fiction story.
I won’t say a lot more, because Ogres is a short book and I don’t want to spoil it too much. I will say that it is a book that is very much about contemporary UK politics. It is also a book that examines the narrative of the Chosen One who gets to be a hero and a leader of his people. What sort of person is he? And how does he end up in that position?
The final twist will probably blow you away. I know I was completely caught by it. This is a short book. Read it and see if you get the same experience as I did.
As the online world knows by now, Elon Musk is doing a very effective job of destroying Twitter. Due to the significant uptick in troll and bot activity, and the fact that hatred of trans people was one of Musk’s primary motivations for buying the site in the first place, I have made my account private. This is annoying. While Twitter has been a hotbed of right-wing poison for some time now, I found it perfectly possible to have a mostly quiet life there if you were liberal in your use of the block button, and refrained from trying to argue with people who were clearly posting in bad faith. I had around 9,500 followers, which was useful when I had something I needed to say.
Cat Valente has already done a marvelous, extended rant about how the wonderful social media networks that we build up keep getting destroyed by the likes of Musk. I don’t have much to add to that except to note that, as Cat admits, it is to some extent inevitable. It is a problem of Capitalism.
It seems to me that a lot of people these days who claim to be anti-Capitalist are just anti- having to pay for anything. More of that when I get to discussing Mastodon. But Capitalism is a relatively modern invention. Historians tend to trace it back to the bankers of places like Renaissance Florence. Commerce, on the other hand, asking people to pay for things you have made, is as old as human civilization. So no, the problem with Capitalism is not having to buy things, it is that Capitalism depends on investment.
Investors are people with spare money (“capital”) which they loan out of business owners in the expectation of getting more money back (a return on their investment). This is great for a small, growing business that needs funds, but the bigger and more successful you get, the harder it becomes to keep making more and more profits, and giving your investors better and better returns. And if you don’t, then they will take their money away and invest it elsewhere.
With the IT industry, and the web in particular, the problem is exacerbated. With many web businesses, especially social media, it is by no means clear how they will ever make a profit. Even Amazon, which did at least exist to sell things, ran at a loss for a very long time (and may still be doing so). Therefore tech entrepreneurs rely on a special sort of investor: Venture Capitalists. These are people who are prepared to take a risk on a snazzy PowerPoint presentation and loan money on the promise that the business will somehow, magically, become profitable eventually. Of course, as they are taking greater risks, they expect greater returns.
Now a social media business is really cheap to set up, but as it grows it becomes ferociously expensive. You end up needing to lease space in massive server farms all over the world. You find yourself having to hire really expensive security experts to keep the hackers and foreign government agents at bay. You end up spending a huge amount of money on moderation because otherwise your service will become overrun with Fascists and bots and most of your regular users will leave. Regulatory compliance becomes a major headache. And still you can’t find any way of turning a decent profit except begging your users to “stop talking to each other and start buying things”. It never works, and your investors get more and more upset. The owners of Twitter found an exit strategy by selling the company to a narcissistic billionaire who was happy to take money from dubious places such as Saudi Arabia.
This is also why Farcebook is trying to re-invent itself as a virtual reality company. It has found a new type of snake oil to sell to the investors and that will keep it afloat for a few more years, until that bubble bursts too.
The slow death of Twitter is a major headache for a large number of independent creatives who relied upon it to help get their products to market. Those people are rightly very concerned, and are looking desperately for an alterative. Lots are springing up, but there is no obvious successor to Twitter. People got very excited about Hive (as long as they didn’t try to use the app), and then we found out that it was run by two rich kids with more access to money than sense and only one programmer. A lot of people are pinning their hopes on Post, but it is run by a wealthy techbro who, when he was young, served in the Israeli Special Forces. I don’t hold out much hope for it being a safe space for the likes of me.
Which brings us to Mastodon, because Mastodon is different. It is not owned by anyone. The code is open source. It avoids the huge expense by allowing anyone to set up a Mastodon server, so the load is distributed. But it retains the global nature through a system of “federation” whereby users on one server can follow people on other servers. Typically you will be offered three timelines: Home (people you follow); Local (anyone on the same server as you) and Federated (everyone). Not all Mastodon clients will use those names, but they will mostly use the same concepts.
A lot of people have been put off Mastodon because of the need to pick a server, and there are choices to be made. If you are only using the platform for one specific purpose – for example you are a science fiction writer wanting to connect with readers – then a specialist server is a good bet (in this case wandering.shop). I, on the other hand, picked a more general server because I have a range of interests besides SF&F (sport, history, trans activism, etc.).
Because anyone can set up a Mastodon server (and hosting companies are now starting to offer Mastodon installs to help you get up and running), you may be tempted to join a server run by someone you know. But while running a single server doesn’t require a multinational corporation, it does require money and time. Any individual running a server may get sick, lose their job, or just plain get bored of the effort. It is like running a fanzine. You have no certainty that it will still be there next year. So you should probably join a server run by someone (or someones) who seems serious about the project, and you should chuck them some cash every so often to help out.
Meanwhile Mastodon is suffering growing pains. It has been around a long time, and the early adopters very much shared its anarchist ethos. They also developed a whole lot of rules for behavior that were fine when they were a small clique who mostly thought the same, but don’t work well with a much bigger and diverse audience. Hence we are seeing people getting told that promoting their work is against the Mastodon ethos because asking for money for anything is Evil. We are getting people of colour complaining that Mastson is mainly white folks who refuse to see racism when it is right in front of their noses. Mention of “gatekeeping” is becoming common. It reminds me a lot of fandom in the 1990s when it was suffering growing pains too.
The platform has also become a target. I’m told that servers run by far-right activists are proliferating rapidly. Any sever operator can choose to block another server if it is deemed anti-social, but that’s a major decision and it can be hard to keep up with the rapidly developing environment. In the meantime it is probably best to never look at the Federated timeline.
You can also be sure that certain foreign governments have people working hard on trying to find ways to exploit Mastodon and disseminate misinformation and propaganda through the platform. Six months ago they probably didn’t know it existed, but now Mastodon has a target on its back.
There’s no point in trying to predict how this will go. Who would have predicted, a year ago, that the world’s richest man would choose to blow $44bn just to be able to “own the transes”? But it is going to be a rough ride, and my sympathy goes to anyone who depended on Twitter for their business, or for organizing social movements.
Because I’m a bit mad, I managed to attend two conventions in the same weekend. One was SMOFCon #38 in Montréal. The other was When It Changed, which was organized by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow, but took place online. This was an academic conference inspired by the 50th anniversary of the publication of Joanna Russ’s legendary short story, “When It Changed.” The folks at Glasgow took this as an opportunity to look at the current state of feminist science fiction and see whether, in fact, anything has changed.
I was fortunate enough to be asked to give one of the keynote addresses, and I am extremely grateful to the organisers for rescheduling my talk at the last minute to allow me to give it from my hotel room in Montréal without having to be up at 3:00am.
The other two keynotes were from Lisa Yasek, one of the best known chroniclers of women in science fiction and fantasy, and Joy Sanchez-Taylor who brought an important non-white perspective to the discussions. Both of their talks were great. Mine was, well, mine, but I note that I built heavily on my 2020 essay for Vector, and on the talks that Farah Mendlesohn gave at ICFA and Eastercon in 2022.
While I tried to listen to as many papers as I could, quite a few were too early in the morning, and I did have paid work to do, so I managed to miss rather a lot. I do remember particularly enjoying the two papers on the novel, Autonomous, by Analee Newitz.
I suppose it was inevitable, given the overturning of Row v Wade in the USA, and the subsequent growth of anti-abortion movements elsewhere in the Western world, that there would be a significant focus on reproductive biology at the conference. I am slightly worried that this will provide a breach whereby gender essentialism can infiltrate feminist SF scholarship. I hope not, but we do need to be vigilant.
There is an excellent overview of the convention, written by Emma French, on the Centre’s website. It includes links to all three keynotes if you are interested in hearing what Lisa, Joy and I said.
I have a couple of other minor points to make. The first is that avowedly intersectional cis women feminists still can’t always see transphobia when it is paraded in front of them. (It was only one paper, but even so…) The other is that I’m very serious about the danger that writing, especially of fiction, is becoming “women’s work” and is being devalued as a result.
My thanks again to all of the organisers. It was great to see so many smart and passionate young feminist scholars giving papers, and an absolute honour to be asked to give a keynote.
Way back in June I was wandering through Bath when I saw a poster on the Abbey fence. “Ian Anderson Christmas Concert” was the heading. I couldn’t quite believe it, and I assumed that tickets would cost a fortune. However, when I got home, I checked out the Visit Bath website. Lo and behold, Anderson was indeed playing a concert in Bath Abbey in December. Tickets were £35. And they were almost sold out. I snapped one up immediately.
Fast forward six months and I still have the ticket, but am living in South Wales. Bath is a bit far to go for an evening, but I had a bunch of Hilton points in stock so I got myself a room for the night at the Bristol Doubletree. (Hotel rooms in Bath are generally more expensive, and Bristol is not that far away. Also I know that hotel well.)
So to Bath I go, still not quite knowing what to expect. Will this be a Jethro Tull concert, or will Anderson mostly be playing traditional carols? I mention why I am in town to Nick B at Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights. “I can’t imagine him playing ‘Aqualung’ in the Abbey” says Nick. I have to agree. Bath is a pretty stuffy place when it comes down to it. Too many wealthy residents.
On arriving at the concert, I discover something interesting. This is a benefit gig. Anderson is donating all of the receipts to the Diocese of Bath & Wells to help finance the upkeep of Bath Abbey and Wells Cathedral. The assembled clergy were very pleased about this. Apparently this is something that Anderson has been doing since 2006, with the help of his friend, Rev. George Pitcher, who is a fascinating character.
As to the band, I didn’t catch all of the names because I’m going deaf and my seat was right at the back, but I think David Goodier (bass), John O’Hara (keyboards) and Scott Hammond (drums) were all there. I’m assuming that the lead guitarist was Joe Parrish, in which case the band was indeed what passes for Jethro Tull these days (though Martin Barre may wish to disagree).
We started out very Christmassy. Tull has, after all, produced an actual Christmas Album. Songs from that made up around half the set. Of course the likes of “Ring Out Solstice Bells” are not exactly Christian, but they found their way into the set anyway. To balance this, Anderson involved the Abbey in the concert. The Abbey organ contributed to some of the songs, and the Abbey Choir was welcomed onstage to perform a fine version of Gaudete (made famous, of course, by Maddy Prior and Steeleye Span).
One of the issues facing aging rock stars is that your voice can’t hold up for an entire concert set. Anyone who saw Paul McCartney at Glastonbury will know what I mean. So Anderson wisely employs a guest vocalist to help out. For this concert he brought in someone he said was a good friend. You could have knocked me down with a feather when he brought in Marc Almond.
And yes, this does mean that “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” found its way into the set.
The second half of the concert moved much more into the traditional Tull repertoire. The final song of the main set was a long and creative arrangement of “Aqualung”. The encore was a thoroughly rocking rendition of “Locomotive Breath”. These are both songs I never expected to hear in a church.
Anyway, there was no doubt that we were in the presence of a well-polished modern rock band. The acoustics were great. And the Abbey provided a marvelous backdrop. It was an evening very well spent.
This issue is late. Very late. There was me thinking that most of the house move stuff was behind me. What I didn’t reckon with was the need to catch up on work. Nor did I expect to be offered a lucrative consultancy project. I did know that I was planning to travel to Montréal for a week’s vacation with Kevin, but I was expecting to have time to work on this issue en route, and while he was busy at SMOFCon. Instead I spent that time on paid work. Sorry, but getting paid comes first.
I still thought I could put an issue out when I got back, but the work and the house jobs kept coming, so I decided to abandon November. Surely I would have plenty of time over the holidays to get an issue done. Nope. I spent most of the holiday period working. The money will be welcome. I have, after all, needed to buy a lot of furniture.
So this is a combined November/December issue, and a little bigger as a result. I’m also thinking about putting out an issue in February to make up for the one I missed. I am normally quite busy with LGBT History Month, but it has also occurred to me that February is the very last month I should be missing, because people do their Hugo nominations in March.
Anyway, we’ll see. Having a home of my own for the first time in over 30 years is proving an interesting experience. There will always be another (expensive) project that needs to be done. I’m not complaining. I’d much rather be in control than have to rely on rental agencies and landlords, but I might not have as much free time as I used to.
Anyway, I had a fabulous time in Montréal, ate very well, and attended two conventions while I was there, neither of which was COP15. More about that in the SMOFCon report. And I have read a lot of stuff. Hopefully you will enjoy the issue now that you have finally got it.
While I’m here, I have a few things I need to talk about. Firstly there was the ongoing nonsense in which the folks at the Internet Science Fiction Database refused to accept Lee Mandelo’s change of name, in part because they worried that he might detransition and then they’d have to change it back. I wrote a thread on Mastodon about why getting your knickers in a twist about trans people changing their names, but accepting other name changes without question, is transphobic. Hopefully that’s sufficiently obvious that I don’t have to go into it again here.
However, the reason I bring this up is that not every trans person wants their name changed on old stuff. Billy Martin, for example, is apparently happy for his old books to continue to be listed as being by Poppy Z Brite. I run a bunch of websites. My policy is that I am happy to change things, but only on request from the person concerned. I won’t make a change because it is what I think the person wants, because I might be wrong. Nor will I change it because some concerned third party tells me I ought to. The request has to come from the only person who matters. And if it does, I am very happy to make the change.
Another issue that has blown up recently is that of AI-generated art. As far as I know, all of the covers I have used for Wizard’s Tower books are the work of the individual artists. Salon Futura, being a fanzine, doesn’t have an art budget. I get around this in many cases by using the covers for Wizard’s Tower books (Ben Baldwin has been very generous about this). But for a lot of issues I have used art that is freely available on the Internet. I’m now worried that much of this will be AI-generated. So I will be looking for an alternative solution. Thankfully I have a couple of months to sort that out.
Finally I have just been reading the new Locus, which is full of obituaries for Greg Bear. The few times I met Greg he was very lovely, and I enjoyed those books of his I have read. But I’d also like to mark the passing of Anne Harris, who was also very lovely, and produced some good books. For this issue I am re-printing my review of her Inventing Memory from Emerald City #105.
This is the October 2022 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.
Cover: The Witch’s House: This issue's cover is a Halloween special
Nona the Ninth: Oh goodness, what has Tamsyn Muir done now?
Into the Riverlands: Cleric Cheh returns for another beautifully written Nghi Vo novella
The Moonday Letters: Emmi Itäranta's latest novel connects a space-faring future to the deep past
Rings of Power – Season 1: Is Tolkien rolling in his grave, and if so why?
When Demons Die: Justina Robson returns to the world of the Quantum Gravity series
She-Hulk: Attorney at Law – Season 1: Is the latest TV series from the MCU off the wall, or off the rails?
BristolCon 2022: Still small but perfectly formed
Y Dydd Olaf: An electronic music album, based on a Welsh language science fiction novelEditorial – October 2022: Cheryl has moved home
It being Halloween, I needed a witchy cover. Once again Pixabay has come to my rescue. This image is by Anja-#pray for ukraine# #helping hands# stop the war from Pixabay. The full version is available below.
Well that was different, but then what did we expect? If anything characterizes Tamsyn Muir’s fiction to date, it is an absolute delight in pulling the rug out from under the reader.
Let’s recap. Gideon the Ninth was a locked room murder mystery featuring a group of punk teenagers mostly desperate to ascend to lyctorhood in what most people assumed was a fantasy universe but, if you looked carefully enough, was space opera set in our solar system. At its heart was the disaster lesbians relationship between Gideon and Harrowhark.
Book two, Harrow the Ninth, sees Harrow finally ascended (and therefore Gideon dead), and we get to meet the adults in the story. John Gaius, Emperor of the Solar System, Necrolord Prime, King of the Nine Renewals, Giver of Resurrection, His Celestial Kindness, King Undying and sometime reluctant political revolutionary, is losing control of his hand-picked team of immortal aides-de-camp. Harrow is not entirely sane. And Ianthe is being a bitch, as usual. We learn some of the terrible things that happened when John took over the world, and how angry ghosts can cause problems even for the most powerful necromancers. Gideon is not dead, then dead again, which I guess is what happens if you hang about with bone-fiddlers.
At the end of Harrow the Ninth the scene suddenly shifts. We are on another planet, and there is a teenage girl called Nona who has no memories. It is Nona who will become the central character of book three.
Wherever we are is also home to Blood of Eden, a revolutionary group opposed to the rule of John Gaius and his necromancers. Also on the planet we find Phyrra Dve, Camilla Hect, Judith Deuteros and Coronabeth Tridentarius. Each of them has a complex relationship with Blood of Eden (well, except Judith, who is busy failing to die). Each of them has a theory as to who Nona is, or may become. Nona is at school with a bunch of almost-ordinary kids, and a teacher who has a six-legged dog.
Camilla, I am sorry to say, does not get much of a chance to be Camilla. That’s partly because she is busy playing mother to Nona, and partly because she is not entirely herself, as I shall explain shortly.
However, the planet is under attack from one of the Resurrection Beasts, Varun the Eater, who appears to be the dead ghost of the planet Uranus. Mysteriously, Nona seems to know Varun well, and be able to communicate with him, though she doesn’t tell anyone else about this and doesn’t seem to find it in any way unusual.
Then Ianthe turns up and is a bitch, as usual.
Meanwhile our narrative in interspersed with some backstory about how John and his friends fought a losing battle against the greed of world governments bent on lining their own pockets at the expense of the long-term future of planet Earth. By accident they discover necromancy, and everything goes downhill from there. That includes exploding an atom bomb in Melbourne. Tamsyn, we are going to have words about this.
All of this is to help us better understand the world in which the story is set, and to get all the necessary pieces into the right place to open the Locked Tomb and unleash, well, that would be a spoiler.
Two things occurred me to while reading this book. The first is that I need to re-read the series from the start, back-to-back, with a lexicon for the series to hand, so that I can pick up on all the little clues that Muir litters throughout the narrative. The other is that I know of only one other work of science fiction to which that necessity applies: Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun.
There are similarities. Both Wolfe and Muir flit seamlessly between science fiction and fantasy. Both series are set in the ruins of the solar system. And in both series it is devilishly hard to know who is who because people have a habit of inhabiting other bodies and the author gives only the slightest clues that this is happening.
In particular, in Nona the Ninth, Phyrra is inhabiting the body of her dead cavalier, while Camilla is carrying the soul of Palmedes Sextus, who is nominally dead and obviously not a Lyctor because the inhabitation should take place the other way around. Goodness only knows who Nona might be.
So if you didn’t have a clue what was going on in Nona the Ninth, don’t worry, most people didn’t have a clue what was going on in The Book of the New Sun either. One day there will be a Lexicon Necromanticus.
There are a number of good reasons for pre-ordering books. One of them is the pleasant surprise you get when a book you had forgotten you had bought suddenly turns up on your Kindle. That happened to me last week when I was reminded that a new Nghi Vo novella was due out. I loved the previous two books in the Singing Hills series, and immediately dived into the new one.
In this book Cleric Cheh has wandered into the south of the Empire of Anh, to a region known as The Riverlands. Hence the title of the book. It is a fairly lawless area, prone to infestations of bandits. Years ago, the region was home to the infamous Hollow Hand Cult. Cheh, of course, is there to collect stories. And I’m pleased to report that the neixin bird, Almost Brilliant, is once again on hand to help her human remember all that is said, and to snark elegantly.
Thanks to a brawl in an inn, Cheh makes the acquaintance of two interesting pairs of people. One pair is composed of Wei Jintai, a martial arts master, and her companion, Mac Sang. Almost Brilliant recognizes Wei Jintai as an exponent of the famous and very rare Southern Monkey style of fighting. The other two are Lao Bingyi and Khanh, and elderly couple who live locally and seem surprisingly fit and sprightly.
If you are starting to think “this sounds like a Wuxia story”, then you would be dead right.
Together, five humans and a bird head off through the Riverlands to a town called Betony Docks where Lao Bingyi and Khanh live. Along the way, Cheh encourages their companions to tell stories of famous people of the past. Inevitably the journey turns out to be much more of an adventure than anyone had hoped. Some of the stories turn out to bear a close resemblance to the one about Chekov and his gun.
Into the Riverlands is about three things. It is about showing that Nghi Vo can write Wuxia. Of course she can. It is also about how real events turn into stories with the passage of time. And finally it is about what happens to the heroes of stories when the events in which they starred are far in the past.
Of course, if Nhgi Vo wrote a Singing Hills story in which Cheh writes a shopping list, goes to market to do the shopping, and then comes home and cooks a meal, I would love reading it and tell you it was a great story. Because it would be.
It is hard not to be impressed by Emmi Itäranta. Few people are competent enough to write good novels. Far fewer can do that in two different languages. Itäranta writes initially in Finnish, then does her own translations into English. She’s also at home writing both science fiction and fantasy, or a mixture of the two. Her debut novel, The Memory of Water, which was a finalist for the Arthur C Clarke and Philip K Dick awards, has been made into a film. This novel won the Tähtivaeltaja Award from the Helsinki Science Fiction Society – an accolade that had previously eluded her. I could go on.
The downside of Itäranta’s production process is it takes time to write a book twice. The Moonday Letters was published in Finland by Teos last year. The English edition appeared from Titan in July. Of course if you happen to be thinking of Hugo eligibility then the book is newly eligible because the original was in Finnish. And awards that cater solely to books in English should also be OK.
But what about the book. Ah, well… As the title suggests, The Moonday Letters is an epistolary novel. The central character, Lumi, is hoping to catch up with her partner, Sol, but she’s been out on Europa and, by the time she gets back to Mars, Sol has been called way for work. She follows them, only to find that they appear to have been kidnapped by environmental terrorists. Lumi knows Sol well, and can spot clues that they have left for her as to their whereabouts. Clues that the police totally miss. And so she follows, writing letters at each stage of the journey so that Sol can read her adventures when the two of them are finally re-united.
Wait. Back up. Europa? Mars? The Earth, sadly, is a mess. Much of it is underwater. The surviving population struggles to feed itself. The poor dream of one day getting a visa to Mars and a life of opportunity, but few ever make it. Yes, there is an allegory for the American Green Card Lottery. Lumi is one of the lucky few. The circumstances of her escape from Earth are somewhat spoilery, but I can note that she proved to have a talent for healing. It is a spiritual calling as much as anything else, and one rooted in ancient traditions.
You may have spotted that Sol is non-binary. This does not phase Lumi. Indeed, she links it to her healing traditions.
Presenting gender outside the binary was sometimes seen as a sign of power and hidden abilities. Healers combined androgynous elements in their costumes, like a beard with a dress. They were believed to have greater insight into the world because they were not bound by one gender.
Clearly Itäranta has been reading the same sorts of anthropology textbooks as me. Sol, however, is not a healer. They are an ethnobotanist, which is a real job. Wikipedia describes their occupation as on who, “strives to document the local customs involving the practical uses of local flora for many aspects of life, such as plants as medicines, foods, intoxicants and clothing.” Making homes for humans in the disparate parts of the solar system has made Sol’s work much more valuable. But it also puts them at the cutting edge of political debate. Should humans live on space stations? Should they be allowed to modify planetary ecosystems in any way? There are debates to be had.
For too long humans have thought about themselves as separate from nature, above it. Exploitation of natural resources is seen as a right that doesn’t entail responsibilities. That’s why Earth is the way it is today. Only a complete reversal of thinking can bring a change.
That’s as true in 2022 as it will be in 2168.
I really don’t want to say anything more about the plot. Just read it, it is a great book.
There will, I am sure, be many erudite reviews written about the relationship between Rings of Power and Tolkien’s Legendarium. This is not one of those reviews. I leave that sort of thing to the likes of Dmitra Fimi. I’m just going to review the show from the point of view of someone who was bored rigid by The Silmarillion and has a love-hate relationship with Peter Jackson’s movies.
Mostly I did love the first three films, though the ending was way too long and there were some very silly things in it, such as the cavalry charge down a scree-covered slope. I have a similar relationship with Rings of Power. It does epic fantasy quite well. The final episode hit most of the right notes. And there are some very silly things in it too. (How did they fit all those men and horses into three tiny ships? And don’t get me started on the volcano nonsense.)
The big problem that the script writers had to face is that The Silmarillion is not a novel, it is a sketchy mythic history that has more in common with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle than with Beowulf. It is not peopled by real people with real motivations. A TV series needs those things.
This is why we get a bunch of new characters. Who were the people who lived in the Southlands before Sauron turned the region into Mordor? Why did the Númenóreans make the fatal choices that led to their destruction? What sort of person was Isildur, of whom we hear so much but know so little?
A classic example is the introduction of Eärien, Isildur’s sister. She’s there to provide a human focus for the Númenórean political debate. It is necessary to do proper story-telling. And mostly that has been done without being too heavy-handed about it.
Social media, of course, is full of right-wing idiots claiming that Tolkien would have been furious about the casting of actors of colour as elves and dwarves. This is all performative hot air and not worth spending any time on. If Tolkien is spinning in his grave it will be over something very different, and much closer to his heart: language. The naming of the Southlander characters is all over the place.
We have a woman called Bronwyn, who has a son called Theo. Really? Is there any linguistic consistency to that? Of course the script-writers will have had their reasons. Theo, pretty obviously, is going to grow up to found Rohan. Their future kings are all named after him. As for Bronwyn, well maybe they felt guilty. The elves are obviously upper-class English. The dwarves are Scottish and the harfoots are Irish. The humans are lower-class English. Where are the Welsh in all this?
Of course Morfydd Clark, who plays Galadriel, is Welsh. Never get in the way of a Welsh girl with a sword. It will not end well for you.
All-in-all I was fairly pleased with Season 1. It doesn’t have the narrative coherence and consistency of Sandman, because it is very far from being the brainchild of a single person. But for a series written by a committee that had to spend their entire time looking over their shoulders for the angry ghost of an aged, pipe-smoking professor, they did pretty well.
Justina Robson’s Quantum Gravity books are beginning to fade into the past. Obviously I remember the iconic images of Lila Black from the Gollancz covers. Zal and Teazle are starting to become a bit hazy. But one character remains vivid in my mind: Sorcha, Teazle’s pop diva sister. She’s like Beyoncé was an actual succubus, and being a demon she caused all sorts of mischief just for fun. Sadly she died in book two. Or did she?
When Demons Die is a new novella from Robson which recaps some of the events of Sorcha’s apparent death, and tells us what really happened to her. Spoiler: it isn’t glorious, and Sorcha is very much Not Happy about it. But you can’t keep a good diva down for long.
The book is, I think, partly a recap of events from Selling Out. My copy is in a box somewhere waiting for a bunch of removals guys to transport it to Wales. The rest of the book tells us what actually happened, and how Sorcha tries to get her life back on track.
It will come as no surprise to Robson fans that there is a fair amount of feminist ranting in the book. Shots are also fired at the rock business, the art business, and wealthy people in general.
Perhaps the most interesting part of the book, however, is Sorcha’s character. She is a demon. Demons do not think like humans. They despise weakness and boredom. They plot ceaselessly against each other. They are long-lived, but not immortal, and they would much rather die young, and gloriously, than fade into senescence and irrelevance. Robson has to make Sorcha believable, not just as wild and dangerous, but also as deeply concerned about her status in demon society. It is an interesting challenge, and one I think she rises to.
Also, of course, I’m very pleased to have more of Sorcha causing chaos for people who very much deserve a little chaos in their lives. I wonder if she’d be up for playing a concert in Westminster?
Well, that was different. She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is about as off-the-wall as the Marvel Cinematic Universe is likely to get. And yes, that does mean it is more weird than anything the various Asgardians or Deadpool have done.
Does that mean it is good? It depends who you ask. Greg Wheeler at The Review Geek says that she show “fails on almost every conceivable level.” Meanwhile at Tom’s Guide Henry T Casey says that the show is “shockingly good.” That’s a marmite show alright.
It doesn’t help that the show has been massively review-bombed by the sexist Dudebros. Apparently they hated it even more than they hated Ms Marvel, which is saying something. But that doesn’t account for everything.
Of course it doesn’t help either that the show is set in Los Angeles. All those weird, obsessive people? Yep, those are Angelenos. It is another world, really. Where all the stars that never were are parking cars and pumping gas.
Some of the more cogent reviews have come from Stewart Hotston at Sci Fi Bulletin. I think he’s reviewed each episode, so I won’t link to every one. The thing that stood out for me is that he pointed out how un-feminist the show was. Here we have a supposed hot shot lady lawyer who is also a superhero, and yet she’s portrayed as a neuroses-filled klutz.
She-Hulk is comedy. That’s fair enough. But it gets many of its laughs from the fact that Jennifer Walters is a complete idiot. Mallory Book is a much better lawyer. Heck, Nikki is probably a better lawyer. Many of the rest of the laughs come from Jen’s disaster of a love life. The show gets into almost Clan of the Cave Bear levels of “who will Jen shag next?” anticipation.
And yet, a bunch of smart women I know enjoyed the series. I enjoyed a lot of it. What gives?
It took me a while to figure it out, but during the season finale I think I finally twigged what the show was all about. If you’ve seen WandaVision you’ll know that people at Marvel have a bit of a thing for old TV shows. What I think She-Hulk was meant to be was a modern version of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I haven’t seen an episode in a very long time, but I do remember Moore’s character having a penchant for disaster.
Now that show was a beacon of feminist propaganda in a time when women had far fewer rights that we do now. It did that in part by showing Mary as the sort of klutz that men expected a working woman to be, and yet at the same time showing her as good-hearted, hard-working, badly-treated, and much smarter than she allows herself to be because she’s trying to fit into a social role that doesn’t allow her to succeed.
In other words, we enjoyed She-Hulk, not because Jen was a fantastically competent super-woman. We have Carol Danvers for that. We enjoyed She-Hulk because we see Jen Walters making all of the same stupid mistakes that we have made along the way, and still somehow having the chutzpah to come through in the end.
Also I’m a sucker for anything that takes a wrecking ball to the Fourth Wall and has a go at the banality of TV series plots.
Well that was fun! As I write this, BristolCon is just winding down. I have had a long day in the Dealers’ Room, not to mention a long day driving and wrangling books yesterday. I’m also very short of time for finishing this ‘zine so I have retired to my hotel room to write.
As always, BristolCon is nominally a one-day event. There is the traditional open mic on the Friday night, and a lot of people do spend both Friday and Saturday nights in the hotel, which extends the time somewhat. Despite this short duration, people come from all over the country because BristolCon is a small and friendly event that they love.
The Guests of Honour this year were Liz Williams and Stark Holborn. Liz and Ian Whates of NewCon Press did a launch event for Embertide, the latest Fallow Sisters novel. It has been out for a while, but the reduced-format FantasyCon was no not offering book launches so this was the first chance Ian had for that.
I had one panel, which was the first one up in the main progamme room. You may still be able to catch it on YouTube. The topic was “Pixies in Space”, or the use of folklore in science fiction. As far as I’m concerned, you can do anything in space opera, and I think we came up with some good examples of people doing just that.
I spent the rest of the day in the Dealers’ Room. I can’t comment on the rest of the panels, or any of the other programming, but I spoke to a few people who had been very happy with their panels. I can speak for dealers’ in that I sold a bunch of books and was well pleased with the day. The art show was a bit thin, but that’s because Andy Bigwood has been very ill and unable to do his usual fine job of recruiting artists. Hopefully he’ll be back on his feet next year.
Being in the same hotel each year has definite advantages in that you can build a relationship with the staff. Some of the hotel people have been at every BristolCon. The hotel bar doesn’t have the greatest selection of beer in the world, but it is hopping throughout the event. As far as I’m aware, BristolCon is the only SF&F convention that provides tea and coffee for free throughout the day.
The other great thing about BristolCon is that it generally offers attendees an extra hour of sleep on the Saturday night so we can recover from the exertions of the day. It is clock change weekend in the UK. I think I shall take advantage of that now.
Now that I’m resident in Wales and able to engage more with the local culture, you can expect me to be writing about that. Welsh people do write science fiction (Al Reynolds, Jo Walton and Jan Morris, for example). We also write about it. Thanks to Dave Langford, Welsh people may have more Hugos per head of population than any other country. Perhaps less well known is that science fiction gets written in Welsh.
That, however, is not quite what this review is about. Y Dydd Olaf (The Last Day) is the title of what is generally regarded as the finest Welsh language science fiction novel. It was written by Owain Owain, who was a key figure in the Welsh Language Society back in the 1960s. Owain was a nuclear scientist at Windscale so he was very much in the mould of SF writers of those days. The book is apparently about a robot rebellion. It is only available in Welsh, and my reading comprehension isn’t yet good enough to tackle it.
There is, however, a concept album. Gwenno Saunders, known professional just as Gwenno, is a leading member of the Welsh indie music scene. Although she was born in Cardiff and has a Welsh mother, her father is Cornish and writes poetry in that language. So Gwenno is someone who grew up steeped in Brittonic languages.
The album, Y Dydd Olaf, is mostly in Welsh, with one song in Cornish. It won Best Welsh Album at the National Eisteddfod in 2015. The lyrics probably won’t mean any more to you than the book, but that doesn’t matter because the music is wonderful.
Gwenno’s music is generally described as electropop. So if you like the music of Kraftwerk, or Gary Numan, or Ladytron, to name but a few, you are probably going to love Gwenno. The fact that the lyrics are in a language you can’t understand will be entirely irrelevant to your enjoyment of the music. And of course this is an ideal music genre for science fiction. Gwenno’s ethereal voice floating over the synthesizer tones combine beautifully to give an otherworldly feel to the sound.
Gwenno’s more recent output has been in Cornish (they need help more than we do to keep their language alive). Her third album, Tresor, was a Mercury Prize finalist this year. The lyrics are strongly feminist, and I note that she counts Monica Sjöö among the inspirations for it. I hope that Janelle Monáe knows.
This issue is a little lighter than I had hoped, because I have been busy moving house. I can’t say too much about the location, because the anti-trans lobby in the UK is not very well-behaved. However, it is in South Wales, and eventually I do hope to have a spare bedroom.
Much more importantly, I have space, both for Wizard’s Tower stock, and for my own stupidly large book collection.
Moving home is a horribly time-consuming and stressful process. I don’t recommend it unless you have to.
This is the September 2022 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.
Cover: The Green Man’s Gift: This issue's cover is The Green Man's Gift by Ben Baldwin
A Half-Built Garden: A Half-Built Garden by Ruthana Emrys is a novel with many different sources of interest
The Bruising of Qilwa: A novella that is both science fiction and fantasy from an exciting new talent
The Daughter of Doctor Moreau: Silvia Moreno-Garcia breathes new life into a classic concept
Chicon 8 – The 80th Worldcon: Another year, another Worldcon. Cheryl was (virtually) there.
Queering SF: A new collection of essays about queer SF&F
Night’s Master: A blast from the past
The Sandman – Season 1: At long last the Lord of Dreams comes to the screen
The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To French Science-Fiction: A guest article from Jean-Claude Dunyach on the state of French science fiction
Tech to the Future: What exciting new technologies are on the horizon? A short film investigates.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds – Season 1: In which Star Trek boldly goes where it actually has been before
FantasyCon 2022: The con that almost wasn't is amazingly successfulEditorial – September 2022: Cheryl is in Canada, but you still get a new 'zine
This issue’s cover features the art from the new Juliet McKenna Green Man novel, The Green Man’s Gift. As always, the artist is Ben Baldwin.
I love the background to this one. You’ll understand more about it when you have read the book. The hardback wraparound lets you see it in all its glory.
I bought this book because of an enthusiastic recommendation from Cory Doctorow on Twitter. I’ve been meaning to read Ruthanna Emrys’ Innsmouth Legacy series for some time because the books sound really interesting, but you know what my To Read pile is like. Then here was Cory and it is only one book. I had no idea…
The thing that Cory was interested in was the political set-up in the book. A Half-Built Garden is a near-future science fiction novel set in a world in which environmental campaigners have fought back against multi-national corporations and won. The corporates have retreated to a bunch of artificial islands where they continue to develop products they hope they can sell to the rest of the world. Nation states still exist, but they seem to have stepped back from the process of government. The task of healing the planet has been inherited by quasi-political organisations called Watersheds. There is one for each of the world’s major river basins.
Exactly how this works is not clear, but Judy Wallach-Stevens works as an environmental chemist monitoring water quality in the Chesapeake watershed in Virginia. One night she gets an emergency notification of some strange substances being released into the water. She and her wife, Carol, head out to investigate. There being no babysitting options available, they take baby Dori with them. That turns out to have been a momentous choice. When they reach the site of the contamination they discover that the cause is an alien spacecraft.
So yes, this is a First Contact novel. It is also an environmental SF novel because the aliens have come to rescue mankind from Earth. Their view is that planets are too small and too difficult to manage. Proper, civilized intelligent species spread out into the cosmos and live on habitats they have built by taking apart unwanted planets. Judy and Carol, on the other hand, love planetary habitats and want a chance to rebuild theirs. The resent the idea that they should be “rescued” for their own good.
So yes, this is a novel about Colonialism. The aliens view the people of Earth as, at best, part civilized, and likely to destroy themselves at any moment. This isn’t an idle view. Earth is the first planet with intelligent life that they have managed to find and get to before disaster overtakes it and the inhabitants are wiped out. Humanity, inevitably, is deeply divided about what to do. The Corporates are keen to get out there and exploit galactic markets. NASA cannot wait to get hold of the aliens’ space flight technology. And the Watersheds want a chance to prove that planets are worth saving.
Back now to politics. We know how nation states and corporations work. The Watersheds have a novel means of governance. They have created their own internet, free of government and corporate control. On it they conduct political discussion by way of what are essentially bulletin boards with sophisticated algorithms that help communities reach consensus decisions about important issues such as what to do about the aliens.
This, I suspect, is what Cory was excited about. I note also that Malka Older gets a big shout out in the acknowledgements. The intention is clearly to offer up a serious political proposition. As always with these things, I am deeply suspicious. Consensus politics sounds great in theory, but in practice provided a convenient exploit for far-left groups to take over organisations. Also any system that relies solely on mass voting on issues runs the risk of succumbing to the Tyranny of the Majority. Far right politicians in the UK are already saying that LGBT+ people should not be allowed to have civil rights if the majority of the population don’t want them to. There isn’t room in the novel for Emrys to explore these questions, but she does highlight the risk of algorithms being hacked.
This being a novel, she’s talking actual software, but we all know that the algorithms that social media companies use to police anti-social behaviour are riddled with simple exploits that far-right groups use to get their opponents banned. As I originally wrote this, Harry Turtledove had been banned from Twitter for the crime of saying “fuck off” to a troll who accused him of being anti-Semitic (Turtledove is Jewish). Harry is back now, but the incompetence of the Twitter algorithms is plain to see. There’s also the whole thing about Russian troll farms poisoning discourse on social media to destabilize Western governments.
So yes, this is a novel about modern political problems.
Where was I?
Oh yes, First Contact, aliens. It turns out that they are indeed alien. There are two separate species. Those called “plains-folk” are a sort of pangolin-centipede hybrid. In contrast the “tree-folk” are like large, ten-legged spiders. Both species think that humans have a suspicious lack of legs. The two species do have different attitudes, and that will become key later in the novel. The aliens too have internal politics to deal with.
Remember that I mentioned baby Dori back at the beginning? Well it turns out that the aliens see brining your children to a political negotiation as a sure sign of civilization and decency. After all, if you are prepared to put your kids at risk, you can hardly be planning a bloody double-cross (George Martin novels notwithstanding).
But, and it is a big but, the plains folks, one of whom commands the alien ship, are really quite obsessed with children, to the point of being rather biological-essentialist about life. This is a major problem for our heroes. Judy and Carol are part of a queer, polygamous household. Carol, the more feminine of the two, whom the alien captain assumes is Dori’s biological mother, is a trans woman.
So yes, this is a novel about gender, and not only in the way that you might think. The Watershed folks are very much a 21st Century queer community. For them, gender is all about how you feel inside. Your presentation, the role you play in society and so on are all open. Pronoun badges are a thing. So far so usual.
You might expect the Corporates to be very gender binary, but they are the absolute opposite. For them, gender is all about performance. No one except partners need ever know what your true gender is; indeed it is rude to ask. Gender changes depending on social circumstances, and on political games that you are playing within the corporation. Pronouns change with it. Everyone is expected to be able to tell what pronouns you are currently using from your presentation.
Given that the corporates are the closest that the book has to bad guys, I expect that some non-binary people will be very angry about this and will claim that the book is transphobic. I don’t see it that way. Everyone in the book has flaws, and I don’t think that Emrys is trying to make out that the way the Watersheds do gender is the only right way to do it.
As you can see, there is an awful lot in this book. It is about politics, the environment, gender, First Contact and families. I haven’t even mentioned how Judy & Carol’s religious faith becomes key to the unfolding of the plot. A Half-Built Garden is a book that is packed with ideas. It doesn’t really have space to explore them all in detail, but it will certainly leave you thinking. This is what science fiction is supposed to do.
There has been much fun had, and even more hot air wasted, on Twitter of late about the difference between science fiction and fantasy. It all started with a speech given by Ted Chiang, in which he somewhat foolishly ventured into that territory. Ted, bless him, is one of the last people who should be making pronouncements like that. The same view of the world that allows him to obsessively craft plot-perfect short stories can also make him prone to pronouncements that lack nuance because the real world is way more horribly messy than he would like.
Anyway, Ted’s words were mangled and regurgitated in ridiculous form by Joyce Carol Oates, who is apparently a respected novelist but these days seems to spend most of her time crafting troll bait on social media. Poor Ted quickly found that the internet had fallen on his head. Or at least he would have done if he used social media, which I very much doubt that he does.
Fan and author Twitter quickly followed up to pour scorn on Oates and provide amusing takes on the difference between science fiction and fantasy. The truth of the matter, though, is that your answer to that question depends very much on your starting point. The world does no fit neatly into analytical boxes.
Naturally the discussion mentioned the fact that by some definitions Star Wars is clearly science fiction (space battles, robots), and by others fantasy (Campbellian hero’s journey, The Force). It is usually held up as an example of something that looks like science fiction but is “really” (whatever that means) fantasy. The usual example of the opposite of this (looks like fantasy but is really SF) is Anne McCaffrey’s Pern series. But from now on (and you were wondering where I was going with this, weren’t you?) I will be quoting The Bruising of Qilwa instead.
The Bruising of Qilwa is a novella by Naseem Jamnia. It centers on they-Firuz, a refugee from the kingdom of Dilmun who has sought sanctuary in the free city-state of Qilwa. Firuz is a member of the Sassanian minority ethnic group in Dilmun who are currently facing persecution because some of their number are believed to practice blood magic. Of course, magical talent is something you are born with, not something that you choose, and Firuz has that talent.
There are three main schools of magic in the world of the book. Environmental magic works by balancing humours in a way that would be familiar to a Roman doctor. Structuralist magic uses a sophisticated system of runes that might have appealed to John Dee. But blood magic works by forging a connection between the mage and the subject, through the subject’s blood. As you can imagine, it can be put to terrible purposes, hence the pogrom, but it is also a very powerful tool for healing.
It so happens that Qilwa is currently suffering from a plague. Firuz has taken their family to the free city in the hope that they can get a job as a healer. They have studied Structuralism as a cover so that they look to be doing less controversial magic. It is a good plan. Firuz quickly gets a job with a clinic run by an irascible doctor called Kofi, and together they work on combatting the plague. Firuz becomes a trusted member of society, and the plague is slowly overcome.
However, Firuz begins to notice a new type of sickness afflicting the city. It is a sickness that appears to be being caused by an incompetent, untrained practitioner of blood magic. This could cause serious trouble for Firuz and their family.
This is where the science fiction comes in. As a doctor, Firuz has to spend quite a lot of effort studying this new disease. It is connected to the victim’s blood, perhaps spread by it. It involves extreme fatigue and the mysterious bruising of the title. Eventually Firuz works out that it is a disease of the body’s own defences. What we call the auto-immune system. To put it simply, the people of Qilwa are contracting AIDS.
The explanation might be “blood magic”, but the way in which Firuz tracks down the nature of the illness is pure science fiction. There are references to “physicking science” scattered through the book and at one point we get:
“But Firuz did believe in the science that was magic, and that would have to be enough.”
It is beautifully done. Even the explanation for the origin of the sickness works well as science fiction. And yet I guarantee that the book will be seen as fantasy.
Along the way, the prose is lovely, and there is some great gender content that I haven’t remarked upon because it is seamlessly worked into the worldbuilding as something entirely normal. Talking of the worldbuilding, there is enough in this book to fuel an entire trilogy of novels. I do hope we get more stories set in this world. Or indeed anything by Naseem Jamnia who is clearly a new talent to watch.
