Author: Cheryl Morgan

Cheryl Morgan is the editor of Salon Futura and owner of its publisher, Wizard's Tower Press. She is also non-fiction editor for Clarkesworld Magazine. Cheryl has won three Hugo Awards: Best Fanzine in 2004 for Emerald City, Best Fan Writer in 2009 and Best Semiprozine for Clarkesworld in 2010. She is a director of San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions and of Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation. She lives near Bath in the UK.

Issue #48

Issues

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


Cover: Golden Angel

048, Art

This issue’s cover is Golden Angel by Stefan Kellar from Pixabay. More information is available here.

As is often the case, I have had to crop the image to use it as a cover. The full, and unadorned, version is available below.


Space Crone

048, Book Review, Ursula K Le Guin

Here’s a book that I absolutely could not resist. Space Crone is a collection of writings on feminism and gender by none other than Ursula K Le Guin. See what I mean? It has “buy me” written all over it. There’s a lot, obviously. I’m going to feature some of my favourite pieces.

“Is Gender Necessary? (Redux)” is probably the most famous piece in the collection. Le Guin spent a lot of time thinking about The Left Hand of Darkness after she had written it. And she kept learning from the reactions that readers had to the book. I think the most important lesson from this piece is that smart people should learn, grow, and sometimes change their minds, about things. That’s in direct contrast to the “gotcha” culture on social media whereby, if someone can be shown to have said something bad years ago, they are defined by that thing forever.

Reading the essay also reminded me of something that people get wrong about Gethen. The prevailing view is that the Gethians are all asexual individuals, except when they are in kemmer. That’s not true. Gethenians who become male in kemmer revert back to being asexual after mating. But Gethenians who become female must remain so until the child is weaned. That’s probably going to take over a year in total. So at any time there will be a substantial number of female Gethenians around, but hardly any males.

“On Genetic Determinism” was written as an attack on the ideas of the sociobiologist, EO Wilson. It is, however, equally useful as a devastating critique of the anti-trans movement which relies heavily on gender essentialism for its arguments. Le Guin is having none of it. She doesn’t want to be defined as someone inescapably second class and incompetent by dint of her chromosomes. Neither should anyone else who calls themself a feminist.

“The Sound of your Writing” is one of the best pieces of writing advice I have ever read. I think we all know by now that reading your work aloud helps you find problems and make it better. Le Guin builds a whole lesson out of this, complete with examples and a couple of exercises. This is paired in the book with a talk about Le Guin’s poem, “Loud cows”, which is an extended feminist rant built on the pun that “aloud” and “allowed” sound the same in speech and women should not be forced to be silent.

Finally I want to mention “What it was like”, a short speech that Le Guin wrote when she was asked to give a talk to the Oregon branch of NARAL, an organization that campaigns for reproductive rights. The topic for the talk was what it was like to be a woman in America before Roe v Wade, and abortion was illegal. Le Guin had one, illegally, when she was still a student, so she has very firm views on the subject.

The point Le Guin makes is that had she not had an abortion, she would have not finished her studies, would not have won a Fulbright scholarship, would not have met her husband on the Queen Mary on the way to Europe, and ultimately would not have had three very wonderful children. She would instead have become an unmarried and unmarriageable young mother, dependent on her parents for support.

Of course Roe v Wade has now been overturned and anti-abortion laws are cropping up in state legislatures around the USA. Goodness only knows what Le Guin would think if she could see what has become of us.

book cover
Title: Space Crone
By: Ursula K Le Guin
Publisher: Silver Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Mimicking of Known Successes

048, Book Review, Malka Older

A good novella can be read and enjoyed in a single sitting. That’s certainly true of this new book by Malka Older. But just because a book is short it doesn’t mean that it can’t have depth. Nicola Griffith did amazing thing with the plot in Spear. Older has done something different but equally impressive with The Mimicking of Known Successes.

Plot-wise, the book is relatively simple. On the one hand it is a murder mystery which must be solved by the two protagonists. On the other it is a lesbian romance between two people who were once a couple, and must become so again by the end of the book. In short, it is the sort of thing that Aliette de Bodard might write.

This story, however, is not set in the Xuya universe that de Bodard has spent many stories carefully establishing. It is set in an entirely different future that is both fascinating and beautifully realised.

The Mimicking of Known Successes takes place on Jupiter, or Giant as the planet is known to its inhabitants. Earth has been devastated by humanity’s carelessness, and is now uninhabitable. Jupiter is a last refuge for the small remnant of the human species, and those few other living things that they managed to rescue.

Of course there is no surface of Jupiter on which to build a civilisation. Humans have, with a great deal of care and effort, built platforms in the upper atmosphere on which to live, and have built farms, towns and even a city on those platforms. The whole thing is linked together by a railway network.

Ever alert to political nuance, Older notes that train travel is free on Jupiter, for the same reason that governments build roads on Earth. Commerce must flow, and if railways are the only sensible means of transport they must be made available.

Armed with this knowledge, you can now understand the mystery side of the plot. A stranger arrives at the station in a remote town. He’s seen by the locals as he pops briefly into the bar by the station. Then he leaves, and vanishes. He’s not in the town. No trains passed through the station before he disappeared. The only conclusion is that he left the platform in another way, either by jumping, or because he was pushed. Hence the investigation.

Mossa, our detective, needs to know more about the missing-presumed-dead stranger. She has established that he was an academic. There is only one university. Mossa once studied there. Someone she knew from her student days still works there, and could be a useful source of information. The trouble is, that person is Pleiti, her ex-girlfriend.

Mossa is rather Holmes-like, obsessive over detail and relentless is pursuit of answers. Pleiti is much more relaxed, friendly and open. It is perhaps not a surprise that their relationship failed. And yet there must have been a spark there once. Older, slowly and carefully, re-kindles it.

Meanwhile Pleiti is important for other reasons. She knew the missing man. Indeed, he was something of an academic rival. And that leads us to the discipline in which they both worked: Classics.

No, dear reader, that does not mean the study of ancient Greece and Rome. On Giant, academic disciplines are divided into Classics and Modern. Modern means studying the world as it is now. Classics looks back to life on Earth.

Both Pleiti and Bolien Trewl, the vanished stranger, work in a discipline that studies Earth ecology in preparation for the day when the many species stored (either alive or as DNA) at the Preservation Institute can be returned to their rightful home. Pleiti is currently working on a rare and important surviving text. She is studying Watership Down in the hope that it can give her key insights into the way rabbits lived on Earth. Thank goodness she is reading Richard Adams and not Beatrix Potter.

I’ll leave it there, because saying any more might give you clues to the denouement of the story. What I will say is that I understand that there will be more stories featuring Mossa and Pleiti. The world that Older has created is too fascinating, and to vibrant, for just one novella.

book cover
Title: The Mimicking of Known Successes
By: Malka Older
Publisher: St Martin's Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Meru

048, Book Review, S B Divya

I’ve heard a lot of good things about Machinehood, but haven’t got around to reading it, so when I saw a new SB Divya novel available I figured I should dive in straight away. I’m pleased I did, because Meru has given me a lot to think about.

The starting point is that this book is actually science fiction. What I mean by that is that it isn’t just a fantasy story set in a futuristic world. It is a book whose author has thought hard about some scientific and philosophical issues, has put some of those thoughts into the book, and has spun the plot around them. I don’t see that sort of thing too often these days, so I’m pleased when I find it.

Also the world that Divya has created for these books (I understand that there will be sequels) is very interesting. It is set in a fairly far future in which some humans have evolved to literally live amongst the stars. We are not talking sentient spaceships here, we are talking people who have evolved to become spaceships. They are known as “alloys”, and are part machine, part flesh.

Standard humans still exist. However, they are in disgrace. They almost caused the destruction of Earth, and they made a complete mess of trying to terraform Mars. The alloys have determined that humans suffer from Aspiration and Avarice Disorder (AAD); that is, their ambition and greed cause them to spoil any resource they get their hands on. So humans must be managed, because they are naughty children and can’t be trusted to behave. One consequence of this is that they are not allowed to leave Earth.

Something else that is notable about the world of the book is that many of the characters appear to be of South Asian descent. The chapter headings are all in Sanskrit (with English translations). This is refreshingly different.

You may be wondering how the alloys manage to look after the humans if they are spaceships and the humans are all confined to Earth. However, alloys are able to create incarns, android avatars which can visit planetary surfaces. Most alloys can’t fly in atmospheres, but they build machines that can ferry their incarns up and down the gravity well.

Of course not all alloys have the same view of humans. Some are quite fond of the little rascals. And that brings us to our central character. Jayanthi is human, but she was designed and grown, and parented, by a couple of alloys who have chosen to live on Earth to do this. Their true bodies are parked in geosynchronous orbit and they inhabit their incarns full time.

Due to her unusual upbringing, Jaya is rather less cowed than most humans. Her parents can, if they wish, travel to the stars. They can also partake in serious scientific research. She would like to do the same. Everyone tells her that she has terrible AAD and she should be ashamed, because it will only lead to disaster.

At this point, enter Hamsa. He’s an alloy politician who advocates for civil rights for humans. Naturally he is friends with Jaya’s parents. Thanks to him, and to a quirk of her genetic makeup, Jaya is selected for an experiment. The planet Meru is almost Earth-like, and might be habitable. It has no life of its own, so there’s less for humans to wreck. Jaya’s unusual biology makes her better suited than most humans to try living there. She will have a year to prove that she can live safely on Meru, without destroying it in the process.

Naturally Jaya will need support. Most alloys don’t want anything to do with such a politically contentious project, but she enlists the aid of a young ship who has chronic lack of self-confidence and consequently very low scores in zir flying school exams. Vaha was designed by zir parent to be able to fly in atmosphere as well as in-system and between stars, but zie turned out to struggle with all of the various flight modes. Vaha’s parent (alloys only need one parent to design them) abandoned zie in disgust.

So we have two young beings, one human and one alloy, both of whom have had dysfunctional upbringings and have serious hangups as a result. We put them on a planet together, far from any other sentient being. What do we think will happen?

Yep, dead right, this is a book that does what I wish Aliette de Bodard had done with The Red Scholar’s Wake: it undertakes a serious examination of what it means for a human and a sentient spaceship to have a romantic and sexual relationship.

However, that’s not all there is to the book. The politics won’t go away. Hamsa has enemies, some of whom will stop at nothing to ensure that the mission to Meru is a failure, and that humans continue to be confined to Earth. The lives of Jaya and Vaha are of little consequence compared to the need to save the galaxy from humans.

As you can see, there are a whole bunch of deep issues being explored in this book. There are times when I think there’s rather too much explaining what characters feel, and where things happen because the plot needs them to. I could see most of the reveals well in advance. But Divya is clearly a writer with ambition and promise. I’m sure she’ll only get better from here, and I’m going to enjoy following her career.

book cover
Title: Meru
By: S B Divya
Publisher: 47 North
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Rhapsody of Blood: Revelations

048, Book Review, Roz Kaveney

It has been a long and very strange trip, but Roz Kaveney’s Rhapsody of Blood series has reached a conclusion. I reviewed the first book in the series, Rituals, back in 2012. Three more volumes followed, initially yearly, but then at increasing gaps. There was a pandemic. But at Eastercon there will be a launch event for Revelations, the fifth and final volume.

I say launch. As I understand it, the books are unlikely to make it over from the USA in time. There isn’t even a cover online yet, so I have used a favourite from the rest of the series. But there will be an event, and a celebration. I’m planning to be there.

The central theme of the series is that anyone can become a god, you just have to spill enough blood in getting there. There is a process called the Rituals of Blood that maps the path to godhood, and there is an ancient immortal called Mara the Huntress who has made it her job to seek out divine wannabes and kill them before they can complete the Rituals.

Key to the story are two young Oxford students, Emma and Caroline. At the start of the series, they attend a party given by Emma’s tutor. One of the other guests is a Tory MP who turns out to be a demon in a flesh suit. He eats Caroline. Mara turns up and rescues Emma.

Elsewhere in the story, and far back in time, we meet two young chancers called Star and Nameless. Together they cook up an outrageous scam that leads them to becoming god and anti-god for more than half of the human population. I think you can guess the names by which they are better known.

Sadly for these two likely lads, there is a being in this world who is even more greedy and ruthless than they are. It takes him time, but he is very patient. The series maps his rise to power, at the expense of every other god in the world. It also tells of the attempts of Mara, Emma and Caroline to stop him.

Along the way there are a lot of side trips. The character of Mara gives Kaveney the opportunity to visit all sorts of interesting times in human history and put an end to bad guys. We get to meet people such as Simon Magus, Torquemada, Robespierre and Stalin. Also Aleister Crowley, who is nowhere near as evil as he likes to think, but thoroughly untrustworthy.

Meanwhile Emma and Caroline do a passing imitation of a lesbian Randall & Hopkirk (deceased) and slowly pick up allies. We meet Sof, the Goddess of Wisdom, who was once Hypatia. There’s Morgan, who has been many people, including Hekkat, the Queen of Witches. There’s the 18th century London spy-mistress, Polly Wild, and Elodie, the former vampire turned movie star. They are an intriguing bunch, in a very queer and found family sort of way.

Oh, and there’s Josette, about whom I will say very little because I want you all to experience the reveal for yourselves.

By book 5 things have got pretty serious. It is called Revelations for a reason. John of Patmos’ vision of the apocalypse is pretty dull compared to Kaveney’s. By this time Emma is Queen of (former) Hell. Her allies include Apollo, Loki, and all of Loki’s brood. All of the people of Earth (alive and dead and undead) march under her banner. The Enemy’s army is made up entirely of cis straight white American men who claim to be Christians but are out to kill all gods except their master, and who all look the same because they are clones. It is not quite space opera, but it is about as close as fantasy gets.

If I have a reservation about the series, it is that Roz is simply too smart. Most readers will not get anywhere close to all of the Easter Eggs that she spreads liberally through the books. But then I say that about Kim Newman too, and I recommend his books to you. Why not give Roz a try?

book cover
Title: Rhapsody of Blood: Revelations
By: Roz Kaveney
Publisher: Plus One
Purchase links:
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once

048, Movie Review

This is another film I would have loved to see in a movie theatre, but was too busy to see when it was first out. Given its success in the Oscars, it may be back in cinemas again, but I have no car right now so I had to watch it on the small screen. That may have been less than ideal.

Let’s start with the obvious stuff. It seems to me that it is a great movie about an East Asian couple trying to come to terms with life in America. I say “seems” because I’m not Asian-American and this is very clearly a film made by and for that community and it is not my place to judge the stories they tell about themselves.

Regardless, it is a great piece of movie-making. Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan totally deserved their Oscars. Stephanie Hsu deserved one too, but they gave it to the white lady with a trans kid because that was a political point that needed making too. Hopefully Hsu has a long and successful career ahead of her. The visuals were amazing too, which is why I think I missed out not seeing it on a big screen.

So far so good, but I have a concern. Ostensibly the film is set in a multiverse, which makes it, well, probably fantasy. But the more I saw of it, the more I wondered how much of that we were supposed to believe was real.

The film reminded me of that famous TV interview with JRR Tolkien in which he insists that he did not write allegory. Middle Earth might be a place that he made up, but it was a real place that he made up, not some imaginary place that only existed to make a point.

The problem I have with Everything, Everywhere, All at Once is that it reminds me of those Victorian morality tales where the bad person (in this case Evelyn) is transported to a fantasy world, learns the error of their ways, and then wakes up vowing to be a better person in future. As such, while it is a great film, I’m not sure it is a great SF&F film.

Possibly the distinction I’m making here makes no sense in the context of East Asian literature. If that’s so, someone please tell me. I’m happy to learn. I’d also be interested to know if the directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, have said anything about this.

I still expect it to win a Hugo though.

Venus & Aphrodite

048, Bettany Hughes, Book Review

Readers in the UK will doubtless be familiar with Bettany Hughes from her many, many TV shows about various aspects of ancient history. Those of you in the rest of the world may not know her at all, but please be assured that she’s popular here, and also knows what she is talking about.

Of course that’s not the only reason she is popular. Gentlemen of my acquaintance often seem fond of her in the same way they are fond of Nigella Lawson. I like both of them for a related reason in that, while both clearly class as celebrity women, neither has succumbed to the anti-trans virus that has run riot amongst the chattering classes here in the UK. Indeed, Hughes seems to have had some similar thoughts about the ancient world to those I have, especially with regard to Nero’s Empress Sabina. That, however, is another story. This is a book about a goddess.

The title of the book, Venus & Aphrodite, mentions two goddesses. While the Greek and Roman versions of our subject share very many similarities, they are not identical. Indeed even within the Greek and Roman worlds, each of the two shows variation through both time and space. That should not surprise us. After all, the Jesus who inspired people to submit to being thrown to the lions in Rome is not the same Jesus for whom the Pope is Vicar on Earth, or the same Jesus who is invoked by Republican senators in the USA.

However, they are not that different either. For Hughes, the Venus and Aphrodite of Rome and Greece are simply successful instances of the Goddess of Love on her long journey from Sumer to the present day. The book begins with Inanna and ends with Beyoncé, with many calling points in between.

This is not an academic book. There are a number of interesting questions I would have liked to ask about how this version of the goddess has changed on her journey. Why have her martial qualities been passed to Athena and Artemis? Why has her fondness for queers been passed to Cybele? But this is a book aimed at the general reader. Like Hughes more recent TV series, it eschews academic debate for easily accessible and simple ideas. But, having been written by someone who does understand the academic debate, it is well-rooted in deeper knowledge.

Pleasingly, the book is not entirely straight. After all, Cyprus, which Aphrodite calls her home, is also home to that most unusual of Graeco-Roman gods, Hermaphroditus. The ancient Cypriots seem to have had a particular interest in this dual-sexed being, perhaps stretching back to before the influence of Astarte reached the island.

Mostly, however, this is a book about the continuing interest of humankind in female divinity, of how that waxes and wanes with different cultures, and different levels of patriarchal control, and of the chaos that love, and lust, cause in human relations.

It is, I think, a very neo-pagan book.

book cover
Title: Venus & Aphrodite
By: Bettany Hughes
Publisher: Orion
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Greenwitch

048, Book Review, Susan Cooper

I’ve arrived at book three in my read through of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence. Somewhat to my surprise, Greenwitch sees the return of the Drew Children from Over Sea, Under Stone. The plot is basically the need to recover the item that was lost to the sea at the end of that book, but along the way Cooper delves deeply into folklore again.

The Greenwitch of the title is a sort of whicker man figure that is made by the women of Trewissick and sacrificed to the sea gods, presumably to guarantee safe return of their husbands from fishing expeditions, though she is made in spring so there’s doubtless a fertility element too. Jane Drew, being a) female and b) not exactly a ‘furriner’, gets invited to the making ceremony, and here we see Cooper doing what she does so well.

For she knew suddenly, out there in the cold dawn, that this silent image somehow held within it more power than she had ever sensed before in any creature or thing. Thunder and storms and earthquakes were there, and all the force of the earth and sea. It was outside time, boundless, ageless, beyond any line drawn between good and evil. Jane stared at it, horrified, and from its sightless head the Greenwitch stared back.

Jane is the most interesting character in this book. As a young girl with two brothers, she has clearly long got used to having to be the sensible one. When Great-Uncle Merry suggests a return to Cornwall for the Easter holiday, Simon and Barney are immediately enthusiastic. It is Jane who is left to point out that their previous adventure almost ended very badly for Barney.

There is also the matter of the other child that Merriman Lyon brings along, a young friend of his by the name of Will Stanton. Simon immediately bristles, seeing Will as a rival male. Barney, the artist, is somewhat more friendly. But it is Jane, forced to be part-adult herself, who sees the old man inside Will. Given the carboard nature of most of the female characters in The Dark is Rising, having Jane back was a pleasant surprise.

I don’t have a lot more to say about the book. Cooper is into her stride by now, and knows what she is doing with the series. I can definitely see why it has become such a firm favourite with readers. Hopefully I’ll have more to say as I get to the end and I can see the shape of the whole thing.

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

Editorial – March 2023

048, Editorial

This issue is a bit short. I’d like to have some complex excuse to offer, but I think the main issue is that it has been Six Nations season. Sorry.

This issue is going live on the international Trans Day of Visibility. These days, at least in the UK, trans people are heartily sick of being visible. There are attacks on us every day in the media, and much of the supposed support we get on days like this is purely performative (looking at you, Labour Party). I’ve had two requests for media comment today. I have ignored them both. Regardless of how supportive young programme-makers might want to be, their management will have other ideas and nothing good will come of their efforts.

However, despite the ridiculous claims on social media that trans people are a very new thing (allegedly I didn’t exist 8 years ago – who knew?), they keep turning up in history. Thanks to Neil Gaiman, John Clute and Roz Kaveney, I have been made aware of a quite remarkable story. Nicholas Stuart Grey was a successful actor, playwright and author of children’s fiction in the 1950s and 1960s. Many fantasy writers, including Neil, Garth Nix, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, and Kate Forsyth, have cited him as an inspiration. We now know that he was a trans man. The research (which inevitably lays out his life prior to transition) is available here.

I’m now wondering who has the rights to his literary estate.

It being that time of year, if you have the right to vote in the Hugos (and can make the voting website work for you), I should mention that this magazine is eligible for Best Fanzine, and I’m eligible for Best Fanwriter.

And finally I have had a request. the venerable fanzine, SF2 Concatenation (since 1987) has recently lost two of its regular reviewers. This has left them with an entirely male reviewing team. They are looking for new people (unpaid obviously) and would like to restore some diversity. If you are interested, see here.

Issue #47

Issues

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


Cover: A Dark Way to Glory

047, Art

The cover of this month issue is Ben Baldwin’s art for the latest volume in Chaz Brenchley’s Outremer series. A Dark Way to Glory is currently open for pre-orders and is due to be published on March 23rd.

I do a lot of the art direction for Wizard’s Tower, and I’m absolutely delighted with how Ben is interpreting my ideas for the Outremer covers.

The Ballad of Perilous Graves

047, Alex Jennings, Book Review

The Ballad of Perilous Graves is one of the books we picked for a finalist in the Crawford Award. It has been talked about by a lot of people and is on a few other award shortlists. Deservedly so, I think, though I have a few qualms about structure.

Most of the action takes place in Nola, which is a parallel reality version of New Orleans and home to the Perilous Graves of the title. Perry, as his friends and family call him, is a ordinary-ish school kid with a massive crush on his neighbour, Peaches. She appears to have some sort of super powers. Perry’s little sister, Brendy, is forever teasing him about his being in love.

The action begins when the haint (ghost) known as Doctor Professor makes a surprise appearance in the street. It is immediately obvious that Nola is not an ordinary city. Ghosts are real. Indeed, there’s a whole dead quarter of the city where they live. You can hire a ghost taxi and go visit them.

This being N’Awlins, the magic is fully bound up in the music of the city. My knowledge of jazz is painfully poor, but Doctor Professor seems to be based primarily on Professor Longhair, with a side helping of his most famous pupil, Dr. John.

The basic plot of the book is that someone has stolen a bunch of Doctor Professor’s songs, and they are now running around the city free in human form. And someone is trying to kill them.

But also…

In our world, Casey Ravel is back in New Orleans. In his youth, Casey and his cousin, Jaylon, had been hot shot street artists. Casey evacuated after Katrina, in part because he was scared at how lifelike their art had become. Characters that you paint are not supposed to get up off the wall and walk away. But, while you can take the boy out of New Orleans, you can’t take New Orleans out of the boy. Freshly back in town, Casey checks in on his cousin, and finds to his horror that Jaylon has not given up his art as he’d promised, he’s been perfecting it.

So we have a classic two-streamed story that will come together at the end and thereby explain a lot of what has been going on. That, at least, is the theory. Oh, and the bad guy with too many tentacles and not enough hands will get what is coming to him.

There’s so much that I loved about this book. N’Awlins is, after all, one of my favourite places on Earth. This book is infused with music and food, and a sense of New Orleans culture that could only have been written by a Black author. I also love the characters of Perry, Peaches and Brendy. I love that Casey is a trans man, and this has nothing to do with the plot.

But, with my editor hat on, I also think that Alex Jennings has just a little too much going on. I love being confused by a book, but I do expect to become less confused as it goes on. I’m not sure that I ever got a handle on all the various threads in this one. Maybe that was the point. Maybe neat endings are a foolish pre-occupation of white people. But if you love N’Awlins like I do, then this books is well worth your time, even if it does leave your head spinning at the end.

book cover
Title: The Ballad of Perilous Graves
By: Alex Jennings
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Hopeland

047, Book Review, Ian McDonald

Late in 2021, Ian McDonald asked me if I could do a sensitivity read on his next book, which had some gender themes to it. Naturally I leapt at the opportunity. The book was called Hopeland, and I’m very glad to have had a small part in the making of it. My report to Ian began:

“I loved the book. Also I cried lots. I’m very much looking forward to seeing it in print. Any book that references both William Blake and the KLF is fine by me.”

So yeah, it was good. But the wheels of publishing turn slowly. Also something awful happened in the read world that was scarily reminiscent of something that happens in the book. Because climate change is real, y’all, and Pacific islands are in the front line when it comes to unfolding sea level disasters.

However, the book is finally ready to meet the public. Obviously I can’t review it, but I do hope that you folks will read it, and enjoy it as much as I did. I hope that you will come to love characters such as Kimmie Pangaimotu and Princess Ta as much as I did, and I hope you’ll find much to think about in the book.

It is, as you will already have guessed, a book about climate change. It is also a book about found family. And it is a book about electromancers. There’s gender stuff in there as well. It needed fairly little feedback from me because Ian has been doing this sort of thing for a while now. The key point to remember is that gender isn’t simple, and no one has to fit into Western stereotypes, not even Western people, and definitely not Pacific islanders.

I look forward to seeing what the rest of you make of the book.

book cover
Title: Hopeland
By: Ian McDonald
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Dark is Rising

047, Book Review, Susan Cooper

As I expected, the long gap between Over Sea, Under Stone and The Dark is Rising saw a significant improvement in quality. Gone is the sub-Enid Blyton jolly tale of children on their summer holidays. In its place is a much darker, much more atmospheric and decidedly more adult tale rooted firmly in British folklore. I totally get why so many people love it.

The Dark is Rising is the first book to introduce the principle hero of the series, Will Stanton. He is a classic Chosen One. He’s the seventh son of a seventh son and has been marked out for greatness at birth. The bad guys fear him, and the good guys do their bit to protect him as he grows into his power.

Technically, Will is only 11 years old when his life changes. Practically he doesn’t stay that way for long. He is, after all, a reincarnated Old One. And once he has read the Book of Gramarye his head is full of arcane knowledge. It is a fascinating choice for what is ostensibly still a book for young readers to have an 11-year-old central character grow into someone who is functionally adult during the two-week course of the story.

Being only 11, at least at the start, Will doesn’t have much agency at the start of the book. Agents of the Light keep having to rescue him and point him in the right direction when he does foolish small-boy things. However, towards the end he does start understanding when needs to be done, and taking charge of proceedings.

The only hold-over from the previous book is Merriman Lyon, who has become a much more stern and flawed figure. Much of the plot is about undoing a mistake that he has made centuries ago. I will be interested to see how his relationship with Will develops over the course of the series.

Something else that has gone from the first book is the sense of gender equality. The Dark is Rising is much more of a boy’s book. Will has a mother and some sisters who feature in the story, but they seem rather flighty and foolish, and they spend most of their time preparing food for the males of the household. That’s something else I will keep an eye on in future volumes.

The thing I liked most about the book is the way that it incorporated themes from British folklore. Wayland the Smith and Herne the Hunter both feature. Given that one is nominally Saxon and the other nominally Celtic, that’s a nicely mongrel mix entirely suitable for the melting pot that this the UK. The previous book, of course, featured the Holy Grail, and Arthur has been variously claimed by Celts and Normans. There are also those who connect the Wild Hunt more with Saxon mythology than Celtic. I note that one of the names of the Lords of the Dark that Susan Cooper has her characters invoke is Holda, which is a common name for the Lady of the Night who featured in Ronald Hutton’s Queens of the Wild, reviewed last issue.

All of which is to say that Cooper had spent some effort creating a mystical world that felt authentic, even if there’s no real historical basis for it.

Coming to this book as an ageing critic who has read far too much fantasy literature, I’m by no means as blown away by it as a younger person might be. But I can quite see that, had I read it when I was 11, I would have loved it as much as I loved The Lord of the Rings, if not more so.

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

The Fortunate Fall

047, Book Review, Cameron Reed

Back in 1999, someone then known as Raphael Carter won the Otherwise (then Tiptree) Award for a short story called “Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation”. Carter was one of the first people I had heard of who had a non-binary gender identity. Indeed, we were told that Carter had no gender.

Well, time moves on, and so sometimes do trans people. Recently I discovered that Carter is now Cameron Reed (she/they). She’s happy for people to keep referencing the Carter name, because that connects her to her previous work. But she’s also working on new fiction. This caused an outpouring of joy on my little corner of Mastodon. In addition to the Otherwise-winning story, Reed had also written an amazing novel called The Fortunate Fall. I’ve been wishing I could have more fiction from her for some time. And now, it seems, I will.

What’s more, Tor are apparently going to re-issue The Fortunate Fall in 2024 as part of their Tor Essentials series. So those of you who were not reading SF&F back in the 20th century will soon be able to enjoy it too.

Don’t take my word for it. The list of people excitedly welcoming Reed back to the author community included Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Bear, Charlie Stross, Jo Walton, Chaz Brenchley and Ruthanna Emrys.

And to get you excited too, here is my review of the book from Emerald City #58.


During the Ken MacLeod panel at Wiscon Tom Becker commented that another author with an interesting take on the inhumanity of uploaded minds was Raphael Carter. Roz Kaveney kindly found me the book in the dealers’ room and I read it on the flight back to California. Boy oh boy have I let you guys down here. This one is a cracker, and it has been about since 1996. I hang my head in shame.

Maya Tatyanichna Andreyeva is a Camera. That is, her brain has been wired with the necessary equipment for everything that she sees, smells and touches to be monitored, recorded and transmitted. It is called Telepresence, and as a sensory experience it is as far above television as that ancient technology is above the even more antiquated newspaper. The world is no longer watching, it is there, because Maya is there for it.

But Maya of course is not just a conduit for experience; she is a journalist. What the public experiences is not random, it is what she has prepared for them. The sights, smells and sensations are, to a large extent, as she chooses them. The view of the lake is obvious; the clammy feeling around the ankles is because Maya has walked into the ooze around its edge. And the sense of nausea that the audience feels on being told that the mud they are standing in is made from the ashes of thousands of human bodies is enhanced by Maya’s own emotions, held carefully in check by her screener back in the studio until she choose to announce the fact. Maya Adreyeva is a journalist, and she is investigating The Holocaust.

No, dear reader, not that Holocaust. Never underestimate the ability of mankind to surpass itself in cruelty. It all began with the Guardians. They came out of America with tanks, guns and Bibles. Their mission was to bring peace to the world. And so they did, because anyone who disagreed with them was either shot outright or placed in re-education camps. They were very effective, and quite ruthless. To wrest the world from their grip would take an effort of extreme bravery, or mindless stupidity. Naturally those with the power to do something chose the latter.

The Unanimous Army was caused by a virus of sorts. It got into people’s minds and encouraged them to slot a certain type of chip that enhanced its own effects. It also encouraged them to help convert others. And that was all the free will it left them. The Army grew rapidly, exponentially. Like a locust swarm it moved across the planet: implacable, hungry, and mindless. It marched.

No, to tell you any more would count as a spoiler. Suffice it to say that the world has recovered from the Army’s depravations, and that the domination of the Guardians has been broken. But there is a mystery here. Where did the Army virus come from? Who wrote it? Who designed its campaign? Maya wants to know, and hopes that when she finds the answer it will be sufficiently interesting for the notoriously fickle public to tune in to her broadcasts rather than those on another channel. What she finds is something else entirely. All unwitting, Maya has contrived for herself an interview with the last survivor of a terrible genocide.

So much for the plot. And if that were all there was to it, the book would be a very fine one indeed. But you can’t just write about subjects like that as if you were producing some Jeffrey Archer thriller. There are philosophical questions to be answered, specifically about the nature of evil. These are questions that can sometimes only be answered in myth. And you can’t just broadcast stuff like that through your own mind without being affected by it. There is, after all, this little problem called feedback.

And there is more, so much more. For Maya herself has secrets. She wears a suppressor chip that shuts off part of her mind. It is a punishment for a terrible crime that she committed years ago. Those who watch the world of information, who guard against a re-occurrence of The Unanimous Army, or something like it, dare not let human thought get out of control. The Weavers, as they are known, are largely uploaded minds, working at frantic speed in cyberspace. They have to be so to do their job properly. The only trouble is that in making themselves into ideal thought police they may have ceased to be human themselves. Indeed, they may no longer even understand what it is like to be human.

Had I known about this book when it was published I would probably have been clamouring for it to be nominated for a Hugo and the Mythopoeic Award. As it was, Carter got Campbell nominations in 1997 and 1998 which is good to know. Since then, all Carter has produced is a short story which won a Tiptree. Genius, I guess, is not on tap. But there is a very good book out there, and you should all go read it.

Hugo Recommendations

047, Awards

It is that time of year again. Thankfully the Chengdu committee seem to have managed to get voting open. They have also made the necessary step of establishing rules for word counts in Chinese. I very much hope to see some Chinese works on the ballot.

Of course I can’t read any of the Chinese languages, so what I vote for will be entirely works in English. I won’t have a full ballot because I just don’t have the time to read as much as I used to. But there are books, and people, I’d like to recommend.

Novels

Going by what I have read thus far, these are the books that are currently most likely to be on my ballot.

  • The Spear Cuts through Water – Simon Jimenez
  • The Moonday Letters – Emmi Itäranta
  • A Half-Built Garden – Ruthanna Emrys
  • The Daughter of Doctor Moreau – Sylvia Moreno-Garcia
  • All the Seas of the World – Guy Gavriel Kay
  • Wrath Goddess Sing – Maya Deane

However, based on what others have said, these books from my TBR pile may make it onto the ballot if I get them read in time.

  • Beyond the Burn Line – Paul McAuley
  • When Women Were Dragons – Kelly Barnhill
  • The Embroidered Book – Kate Heartfield
  • Babel – RF Kuang
  • The Mountain in the Sea – Ray Nayler
  • The World We Make – NK Jemisin

Novellas

Some Hugo rules neepery is required here. Fond as I am of the lovely folks at Locus, I sometimes find their categorisations unhelpful. Locus takes a very literal view of word length rules. Thus, if a book has 40,001 words, they will insist that it is a novel, even if it feels like a novella to everyone else. The WSFS Constitution states:

“The Worldcon Committee may relocate a story into a more appropriate category if it feels that it is necessary, provided that the length of the story is within twenty percent (20%) of the new category limits.”

And the thing that is likely to prompt them to do this is you, the voters, indicating that you want it done on the basis of where you place your nominations.

This year both Spear and The Bruising of Qilwa have been catageorised as novels by Locus. I have an electronic copy of Spear and by my count it is well within the limits to be counted as a novella. Nicola confirmed that. Naseem Jamnia has been describing Qilwa as a novella in eligibility posts. Obviously it is up to you how you vote, but here’s what’s currently in with a chance of being on my ballot.

  • Ogres – Adrian Tchaikovsky
  • Spear – Nicola Griffith
  • The Bruising of Qilwa – Naseem Jamnia
  • Into the Riverlands – Nghi Vo
  • A Prayer for the Crown-Shy – Becky Chambers
  • Rosebud – Paul Cornell

Media

The processes whereby people converge on individual episodes of TV series to vote for in BDP: Short are a mystery to me. What I do know is that there has been some excellent TV this year, and movies have been a bit meh. So here’s a list of series that I would like to see rewarded in one way or another.

  • Dragon Age: Absolution
  • Sandman: Season 1
  • Star Trek Strange New Worlds: Season 1
  • Ms Marvel
  • Doctor Who: Redacted
  • Star Trek Lower Decks: Season 3

Other Categories

I’ve read very few comics in the past yearm but Liam Sharpe’s StarHenge will be on my ballot. I’ll also be nominating Liam for Professional Artist.

On the subject of art, I would love to see Ben Baldwin get some international recognition. The covers that he produces for me are superb.

I was delighted to see Cora Buhlert win a Hugo last year, but now it is time to spread the love. Alasdair Stuart and Paul Weimer are both overdue rockets.

My Eligibility

As usual, I am eligible in Fan Writer, and Salon Futura is eligibile in Fanzine.

The Cavalry Maiden

047, Book Review, History

When you think of trans autobiographies, you don’t often think of interesting history books. Even I don’t. I have, after all, read quite a few, and have mostly given up on the genre. There are a few, however, that were written centuries ago, and are much more interesting than the modern fare.

The Cavalry Maiden was written by Aleksandr Aleksandrov, a Ukrainian trans man who ran away from home and family to undergo social transition, and to join the fight against Napoleon. He served with honour for around 10 years, including fighting at the famous battle of Borodino. After Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo, he continued living as male until his death, by which time he had spent 60 of his 83 years as a man.

The book exists, in part, because Aleksandrov kept copious diaries during his time in the army, and in part because his younger brother Vasilii, an inveterate gambler perpetually in need of cash, suggested to the great Alexander Pushkin that the diaries might sell well. Pushkin agreed. It is clear that both he and Vasilii thought a tale of a young girl disguised as a man to fight Bonaparte would be a literary sensation. Neither of them thought much about the fact that Aleksandrov didn’t see what he had done as a disguise. As a result, the final book bears some similarity to the modern trans biography.

Some of the material was published in a magazine that Pushkin edited, but his untimely death in a duel put an end to immediate plans for a full volume. The final version saw Aleksandrov much more in control of the narrative. Thanks to this, the bulk of the book is not so much a tale of gender transgression as the memoir of a young cavalry officer.

Aleksandrov’s unusual nature became known to the higher echelons of the Russian army early on. Consequently he became acquainted with major figures of the time such as Tsar Aleksandr I (who awarded him a medal and granted him the right to use Aleksandrov as a patronymic) and Marshall Kutusov. But mostly these are minor characters.

For the military historian, the more interesting content is the coverage of the War of 1812 itself. Aleksandrov reports the frustration rife in the Russian army as their commanders order retreat after retreat in the face of the French. It isn’t until after Borodino, when Napoleon is holed up in Moscow with winter approaching, that the ordinary soldiers realize what a clever trap has been sprung.

Aleksandrov took a nasty leg wound at Borodino and was ordered home to recuperate by Kutusov, on whose staff he was then serving. When he was well enough to ride again, he set off in search of his regiment. We get a harrowing tale of his journey through Russia in the spring, when the snow is melting and the air is thick with the smell of rotting French corpses. We also learn that some of the French were so confident of victory that they had brought their families with them in the expectation of being granted large estates on which to live.

The book ends with the war, and for details of Aleksandrov’s life thereafter (for an LGBTQ+ History Month talk I gave) I am indebted to Dr Margarita Vaysman of the University of St. Andrews. She has managed to get hold of Aleksandrov’s military records, and letters between him, Vasilii and Pushkin, which she has translated for the likes of me to work with. Maybe that will become a book one day.

The one downside of The Cavalry Maiden as a book is that it was translated in 1988 and the translator clearly had no understanding of trans people. Indeed I don’t think she was capable of understanding why Aleksandrov lived as he did. I understand that there’s another translation, which I should read. But I have no reason to believe that Aleksandrov’s reports of wars in which he fought are anything other than genuine. If Napoleonic military history is your thing, you may find the book interesting.

book cover
Title: The Cavalry Maiden
By: Aleksandr Aleksandrov
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Wakanda Forever

047, Movie Review

It was, I think, inevitable that any sequel to Black Panther would fail to live up to the magic of the original movie. For it to try to do so without the magnetic presence of Chadwick Boseman was probably a recipe for disaster. Thankfully Wakanda Forever is not a bad movie, it is just not a great one.

What Ryan Coogler and his team have tried to do in this film is build on the anti-colonial theme of Black Panther by introducing Prince Namor the Submariner and linking him to the Maya civilization. That in itself is not a bad idea. Namor has always been known as a complicated character. He has a burning hatred of the surface world, but he’s also up for fighting alongside Marvel heroes when the planet needs saving. Traditionally his motivation has been rooted in the surface dwellers’ mis-use of the oceans, which makes him ideal for environment-themed stories. But giving him a connection to colonized people gives a sharper focus to his hate, and also provides an interesting foil for the Wakandans.

The point about Wakanda is that, while it has never itself been colonized, it is still African, and all other African people have been colonized. The Wakandans themselves didn’t really understand what being colonized was like until Killmonger came among them. Now they don’t know what their place is in the world. And without T’Challa to guide them, they have to look to the teenage Shuri for leadership.

Enter, then, Namor, who knows exactly what it is like to be colonized, and whose undersea kingdom rivals Wakanda in its technological superiority over the rest of the world. Should they join with him, or oppose him? And will the Americans give them no choice?

So what goes wrong? The first issue is that the Maya connection to Namor’s kingdom seems to be a bit like window dressing. I spotted a few comments on Twitter to the effect that the production crew could have engaged with the existing Maya community in Mexico, but failed to do so. If that’s the case, it is a real shame as the Maya deserve some time in the spotlight.

Problem two is that Shuri, for all that she’s a scientific genius, doesn’t have the gravitas to fill T’Challa’s shoes. The film is supposed to show her growing into the role, but it all seems a bit like painting by numbers. Angela Bassett was superb as always as Queen Ramonda. I think they should have let her take the lead instead.

Problem three is that the mega battle at the end between the Wakandans and the Talocans is just bad. And over-long. Also they do the Aquaman thing of assuming that you can travel from anywhere on land to anywhere in the oceans in no time. If Wakanda has access to the sea, it will be on the east coast of Africa. It takes time to get to the Atlantic.

The film did have some interesting elements. The introduction of Riri Williams was completely unnecessary from a plot point of view, but presumably a requirement of the MCU as a whole. Tenoch Huerta Mejía makes for a convincing Namor, and I am very much looking forward to him encountering the Fantastic Four. Okoye’s graduation from chief of the Dora Milaje to a superhero called Midnight Angel is very welcome indeed, as is the suggestion that she and her fellow Angel, Aneka, are a couple. And finally I would watch any film with M’Baku in it because the daft old ape is a lot of fun.

I haven’t had time to watch the “making of” documentary for Wakanda Forever yet, and the disc has only just come out so there may be other background material on that. I may have more to say later. But for now I’m pegging this one as a film that exists largely to move the plot of the MCU on and to deal with the tragic death of Boseman.

Gunbuster

047, TV Review

Spoilers ahead, but this show is at least 30 years old so I have no qualms.

Streaming services seem to be the in thing these days. The BBC has been muttering about becoming streaming-only in the not too distant future. Of course their iPlayer service has been around for a while now (the interface is still terrible), and is now much more than a catch-up service. The independent TV channels here in the UK have been offering catch-up for a while, but now ITV has launched a full-scale streaming service, ITVX. There is loads of material there, much of which I have no interest in. I suspect that if you want to binge-watch Coronation Street from the very early days then you can do so. But what about SF&F content?

Much to my astonishment and delight, I see that they are offering some Gerry Anderson shows. You can get Season 1 of Captain Scarlet, and even a selection of Fireball XL5 shows. There is also some anime, and the reason I know about ITVX at all is that someone on Twitter mentioned that they have Gunbuster.

I know very little about anime, but Kevin occasionally tries to educate me. Also I have Jonathan Clements and Helen McCarthy whom I can call upon if I need an expert opinion. Years ago Jonathan told me that I needed to watch Gunbuster because it was something of an ur-series as far as mecha stories are concerned. I’ve been looking for it ever since, and now, thanks to ITVX, I’ve been able to watch it.

Wikipedia, which is probably correct on this as there are too many anime fans out there eager to pounce on errors, tells me that the series was the directorial debut of Hideaki Anno, who went on to produce Neon Genesis Evangelion. The Japanese title of the show was Aim for the Top!, which was in part a nod to a tennis-based anime called Aim for the Ace!, and partly by the Tom Cruise movie, Top Gun, both of which were inspirations. The tennis thing explains a lot of the weirdness.

The basic plot is that Earth has encountered a race of space monsters (Uchuu Kaijuu) that is bent on wiping out all other forms of life. Earth’s defenses rely in part on space-ships in the form of giant robots piloted by teenagers. It doesn’t have to make sense.

The story begins with Noriko Takaya at high school learning to become a robot pilot. She’s useless at it, but because her father was an admiral in the space navy who died in the first contact with the aliens she gets to be one of the two girls from Japan selected to go into space. The other successful pupil is the beautiful, competent and talented Kazumi Amano. The decision as to which girls to send is made by their trainer, Koichiro Ohta, a survivor from the first contact battle, whom the girls all call “Coach” because this is a tennis-based TV show.

Much of the rest of the series is centered around Noriko learning to let go of her fear and embrace self-confidence. Once she does she will become a champion tennis player, er, robot pilot. Kazumi is mostly an ally, but she fears that Noriko’s lack of confidence will get people killed. There’s also a hot-shot Russian girl pilot with the somewhat ridiculous name of Jung Freud who is sometimes a friend and sometimes desperate to out-do the two Japanese girls. And there’s a boy pilot called Smith who gets fridged to give Noriko some motivation.

Much to my surprise, the show only has 6 episodes. The story is mostly wrapped up in the first five as Noriko evolves from frightened kid to savior of the solar system. Eventually she and Kazumi get to pilot the new, experimental mecha called Gunbuster which is two separate spaceships that can combine to form a giant robot. Billions of alien spaceships stand no chance against them.

Although the tennis anime and Top Gun are cited as influences, it is clear that the scriptwriters were SF fans. The Earth spaceships are armed with photon torpedoes, so someone had been watching Star Trek. They had probably also read The Forever War, because issues of relativistic time feature large towards the end of the series.

I’m assuming that the show influenced a lot of later anime shows, but you can see themes from it cropping up in modern SF too. The ending of the Valerie Valdes space opera trilogy I’ve been reviewing happily has a big nod to mecha stories. There may also be a plot point from Gunbuster in Charlie Jane Anders’ Unstoppable! space opera series.

If this is all there was to Gunbuster then I’d be telling you that it is kind of fun, probably important historically, and has a few unnecessary soft porn scenes, and ridiculous costumes for the female pilots. But there is also episode 6.

By this time the issues of relative passage of time have come to the fore. Noriko’s best friend from school, Kimiko, does not go into space. When our heroes return from saving the solar system, 10 years have passed on Earth and Kimiko has a young daughter. This sets the scene for the final episode.

After episode 5, Kazumi goes back to Earth to marry Coach Ohta, who is dying of radiation sickness. Jung takes her place in the Gunbuster. Episode 6 is set 15 years later, after Ohta has died. Earth has turned Jupiter into a giant black hole bomb, with which they plan to destroy the aliens once and for all. Kazumi volunteers to pilot it. Inevitably Noriko and Kazumi end up risking their lives to ensure that the bomb goes off as planned. They are caught in the shock wave, and when they get back to Earth 2000 years have passed.

The entire episode is in black and white, as if to indicate that this is the serious, adult episode, and it thoroughly warrants that treatment (save for an entirely unnecessary flash of naked boob). The contrast with earlier episodes is stark, which makes the ending all the more effective. I was impressed.

Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

047, Movie Review

Unlike Wakanda Forever, which seems to have mostly been a disappointment, Quantumania is getting very mixed responses. Leaving aside the people who think any new superhero movie marks the end of civilization as we know it, I think there are genuine criticisms, but that’s because not every Marvel movie aims to do the same things.

Wakanda Forever, as I’ve noted elsewhere in this issue, attempts to continue the anti-colonial theme of Black Panther. It is supposed to be a serious movie. Quantumania, aside from a quip about ants being Socialists, is pure popcorn. As such, it succeeds rather well, but if you were expecting anything more profound from it you will be disappointed.

My main objection to previous Ant Man movies was that they made too litte use of Janet van Dyne. By extension that means they made too little use of Hank Pym too, but then we all know that Hank is an idiot. It is bad enough to miss out on using a great character such as Janet, but when you have Michelle Pfeiffer on hand and make almost no use of her, well that’s criminal.

I am happy to report that in Quantumania, both Janet and Hank have much bigger roles. Also Hank is still an idiot. What the ants see in him, I do not know.

Given the bigger role for Janet, there is inevitably less for Hope to do, though she does get one spectacular entrance. Her role is further minimized by the presence of Cassie Lang who is now old enough to have her own supersuit in preparation for an assumed place in the Young Avengers. If there is a moral centre to the film, it is that Scott is only interested in keeping his daughter safe, while Cassie is prepared to sacrifice herself for the good of the people of the Quantum Realm who have been conquered by Kang.

Oh yes, Kang, or at least one of him. This is a very different Kang to the one we saw at the End of Time in the Loki TV series. This Kang has been banished to the Quantum Realm by all of the other Kangs for being too much of an arsehole. Anyway, Jonathan Majors continues to be superb in the role. Which is good because he’s going to be around a lot in future movies.

There are, I guess, three reasons for going to see Quantumania. The first is if you want to spend two hours eating popcorn and enjoying some ridiculous movie fun. The second is if you are a completist like me and want to keep up with everything that is happening in the MCU. And finally, if you are a fan of Janet van Dyne, this is the movie where we finally get to see her strut her stuff. Old lady superheroes FTW!

Editorial – February 2023

047, Editorial

Well, I promised you a February issue, so here it is. It is a bit thin on the actual books read, though I have included a history book that I read for one of the LGBTQ+ History Month talks I gave. But I have seen a couple of movies and I have some other things to talk about.

Social media over the past month has been abuzz with the issue of supposed-AI software such as ChatGPT. I say “supposed” because these programs are not actually intelligent. They are just good at pattern matching and replication. If you feed them enough web pages with the text, “2 + 2 = 5” they will assert that as fact, even if, at the same time, they assert that 5 – 2 = 3. If producing academic material with citiations, they may make them up because they don’t understand the difference between a real paper and an imaginary one.

However, these tools are now good enough at both image and language processing to pose significant threats to the livelihoods of both artists and writers. I had a few things to say about the art issue last year. As for the written word, goodness knows where we will end up. Here are a few bits of data.

You have probably all heard about how Clarkesworld had to close submissions because their slush readers were overwhelmed with stories “written” by ChatGPT. Such material is generally easy to spot, but sifting through it takes time and energy. Because generating new stories is so quick and easy, bad actors can overwhelm the submissions process of any magazine and prevent its staff from getting on with their work. There are solutions, but they will necessarily involve pre-vetting who is allowed to submit, which is far from ideal.

One of my friends reported on Facebook that a fairly lucrative gig she had writing content for a website vanished overnight because the site owner claimed that he could get all of his content from ChatGPT now. I understand that major outlets such as CNET and Buzzfeed are now using ChatGPT to generate content, though both admit that its output has to be checked for errors.

The Kindle market is full of rapidly written books claiming to teach you how to make your fortune using ChatGPT. I gather than TikTok has a similar infestation. I suspect also that a significant proportion of the self-published books on Kindle will soon be “authored” by ChatGPT.

Of course not everyone sees these tools as a threat. The latest Kobo newsletter pointed me at this blog post about how to use these tools in a more constructive and responsible way.

The big question is where all this will end up. Given that the major publishers, just like every other large corporation these days, see themselves as being in the business of delivering value for shareholders, I am sure that their senior management is salivating over the prospect of being able to do away with writers altogether and produce endless streams of books “in the style of” whichever dead successful writer they have the rights to publish. I wonder if Asimov ever considered that his career would be continued long after his death by robots trained to immitate his writing.

Issue #46

Issues

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


Cover: Fantasy Motorcycle

046, Art

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.

The Spear Cuts Through Water

046, Book Review, Simon Jimenez

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.

book cover
Title: The Spear Cuts Through Water
By: Simon Jimenez
Publisher: Random House
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Keeper’s Six

046, Book Review, Kate Elliott

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.

book cover
Title: The Keeper's Six
By: Kate Elliott
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Queens of the Wild

046, Book Review, Ronald Hutton

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.

book cover
Title: Queens of the Wild
By: Ronald Hutton
Publisher: Yale University Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Star Trek: Lower Decks – Season 3

046, TV Review

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.

The Grief of Stones

046, Book Review, Katherine Addison

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.

book cover
Title: The Grief of Stones
By: Katherine Addison
Publisher: Solaris
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Witcher: Blood Origin

046, TV Review

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.

Dragon Age: Absolution

046, TV Review

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.

Over Sea, Under Stone

046, Book Review, Susan Cooper

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.

book cover
Title: Over Sea, Under Stone
By: Susan Cooper
Publisher: Puffin
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Chengdu Moves Dates

046, Con Running

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.

Editorial – January 2023

046, Editorial

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.

Issue #45

Issues

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.

Cover: Generation Nemesis

045, Art, Ben Baldwin

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.

Fault Tolerance

045, Book Review, Valerie Valdes

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]?

book cover
Title: Fault Tolerance
By: Valerie Valdes
Publisher: Voyager
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Bloodmarked

045, Book Review, Tracy Deonn

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.

book cover
Title: Bloodmarked
By: Tracy Deonn
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

SMOFCon #38

045, Convention Report

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 Red Scholar’s Wake

045, Aliette de Bodard, Book Review

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.

book cover
Title: The Red Scholar's Wake
By: Aliette de Bodard
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura
1 … 5 6 7 8 9 … 22