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.

Virtual Westercon 74

042, Convention Report

There’s not much I can say about this convention, partly because Kevin chaired it, and partly because I didn’t attend in person. However, there are a few things worth talking about.

The first is that travelling conventions are not doing well. In the UK, FantasyCon was cancelled because the original organisers were looking at a £24,000 loss. Then it was relaunched as a 2-day event with no dealers’ room (and possibly no art show). Hopefully it will go OK, but there’s a real sense that, despite all of the “great to be back to normal” sentiment we saw at Eastercon, people are still nervous of going to conventions.

Westercon is a convention that travels up and down the west coast of the USA. It has been on hiatus due to the pandemic, and this was the first year back. Due, in part, to a lack of quality bidders from major cities, this year’s event was to take place in Tonopah, Nevada. The town is interesting, being a former silver mining centre, and therefore having a wild west feel to it. The con ran with that theme, billing itself as a “Wild, Wild Westercon”. Also the convention center is small, friendly and entirely non-rapacious in its pricing, which is highly unusual for convention locations.

On the downside, Tonopah is 200 miles from the nearest airports (Reno and Las Vegas). And the USA is very much in the throes of an aggressive wave of infections. A whole lot of Westercon regulars apparently decided that because this wasn’t a traditional event the convention should be cancelled forever. And BayCon, the Bay Area’s annual convention, appears to have decided that Westercon is already dead, and have moved their traditional dates from Memorial Day weekend to 4th July weekend, therefore competing with Westercon.

As it turns out, people have come forward to offer to run Westercon for the next two years. The next one will be in Anaheim, which is very much a major venue. So maybe it isn’t dead after all. But I got the impression that the attendance at Tonopah had a very high average age. I hope next year’s committee manages to appeal to a younger crowd.

(It is also possible, knowing Bay Area fan politics, that BayCon will move back to Memorial Day next year because the Westercon is being run by other people.)

Knowing that it would be difficult to attract people to Tonopah, Kevin and I decided from the get-go that we needed to do some online programming. The programming team that Kevin recruited (led by Arlene Busby and Michelle Weisblat-Dane) was on board and wanted to do hybrid as well. So I got the job of putting together a small stream of virtual programming featuring guests from outside North America.

We didn’t get a huge number of online attendees, but I think we did a decent job. I’m particularly pleased that we had a bunch of non-white, non-Anglo programme participants. One of the highlights was a panel on Arabic SF&F featuring speakers from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Palestine. I know that Michelle recorded the panels, and hopefully some of them will be available online soon.

Of course we were not immune from last-minute panics. I’d like to give special thanks to the following:

  • To J Dianne Dotson for being an Emergency Holographic Gareth Powell when Gareth went down with COVID at the start of the con;
  • To Gareth for turning up and doing a panel two days later despite being still very sick;
  • To Lauren Beukes for finding me a stand-in when she had to drop out at the last minute; and
  • To Wole Talabi for being absolutely brilliant in that stand-in role.

The point is that adding a virtual track to an existing convention is not hard. There aren’t a lot of resources required. And having one means that even a fairly small event can have high profile programme participants (we had Mike Carey and Ken MacLeod) and a much more diverse selection of panelists than would otherwise be the case.

We gave all of our supporting members access to the virtual programme. For any convention that has supporting members, this is a great way to add value to that membership type.

And, of course, virtual programming makes the convention accessible to people who, for a variety of reasons, are unable to travel.

Every convention should be doing it.

Ms Marvel

042, TV Review

Well that was absolutely delightful.

Of course a whole lot of people are going to be complaining that Marvel has “gone woke”, but actually much about Ms Marvel is very traditional. I shall try to explain.

The obvious thing is that Kamala Khan is neither white nor male. She is a Pakistani-American Muslim teenager from New Jersey. Like many teenagers in the MCU, she is obsessed with superheroes (see also Kate Bishop), and in particular she is obsessed with Carol Danvers. Naturally her parents don’t approve, but this being the 21st Century they are not the sort of parents that teenage superheroes had when I was a teenager. Kamala’s mother, Muneeba, is still a massive Bon Jovi fan, and one of my favourite parts of the series was seeing a photo of Muneeba as a teenager in the 1980s. Very reminiscent of Allanah Currie.

So this is a show about Muslim life in America. Kamala and her family attend the local mosque. The Iman gets one of the best lines in the show: “Good is not something you are, Kamala, it is something you do.” Kamala’s best friend, Nakia, wears a hijab and runs for the mosque council to stand up for women’s rights. It is also about Pakistan. Several episodes take place in Karachi, and the Partition of India is central to the plot.

But it is also a very Marvel show about a high school superhero. In addition to Kamala and Nakia we have Bruno, a geeky boy who has a crush on Kamala. We have Zoe, the most popular girl in school who is a well known social media star. So it is updated for today, but in some ways reminds us very much of another teenage superhero.

Like Spiderman, Ms Marvel has to learn to use her powers. And like Spiderman she is heavily embedded in her local community. They just happen to be a mostly Muslim community. A key moment in the series shows the community stand up for her against government agents. It was somewhat weird that the NYPD stood with the local community, rather than shooting them, but there are limits to how rebellious Marvel scriptwriters can be.

Ms Marvel is, of course, a heavily female-driven show. Kamala’s relationships with her mother, her grandmother, the Aunties in the local community, and with Nakia and Zoe, are all key to the story. There is a love triangle of sorts, but it is a show about teenagers so that’s fairly inevitable.

What really makes the show, however, is Iman Vellani. She’s bubbling with personality and does a superb job in the role. I’d say she’s only 20, but then Xochitl Gomez is only 16 and does a similarly impressive job as America Chavez. The Young Avengers team is going to be seriously impressive.

Anyway, I love it. I very much want to see more. Apparently I’ll have to wait for next year and the new Carol Danvers movie. Thankfully there’s a whole lot more Marvel content to come before then.

A Mirror Mended

042, Alix E Harrow, Book Review

Alix Harrow’s A Spindle Splintered was one of the stand-out novellas of last year. The new book follows the same lead character, Zinna Gray, and tries to wring something else out of the idea. There are, after all, issues to be addressed. Key amongst them is the problem of “happy ever after”. As Zinnia herself points out at the start of the book, this is actually a contraction. The original traditional ending of fairy stories was that everyone was “happy in the ever after”, i.e. in Heaven. Real happy ever after doesn’t happen in the mortal world, because life happens.

The other major issue concerns fairy tale villains. In a fairy tale you can’t have a damsel in distress without a wicked witch or stepmother (probably both in the same person) causing that distress. Why is it that young, pretty girls are the heroines, and older women are the villains? Why is it so rare for the wicked older woman to even have a name, let alone a backstory explaining why she is the way she is?

These, then, are the questions that Harrow addresses in A Mirror Mended. For the most part I thing she succeeds, but it also feels a bit like an academic exercise.

This can sometimes be a problem with speculative fiction. A great idea can carry a book. But once you have worked through the idea, trying to set more stories in the same world can be hard. A wise writer aiming at writing a series will not reveal everything in the first book. You keep some mysteries back for the later volumes. I don’t know whether Harrow planned to write this book, but get the sense that it is more of an afterthought.

This doesn’t make A Mirror Mended a bad book. I very much enjoyed reading it. But it doesn’t have the wow factor of A Spindle Splintered. I’m finding myself struggling to find anything to say about it. That, of course, is the difference between adventure stories and real life.

Towards the end, Zinnia has this thought:

Maybe because it never occurred me to that it could be enough to just live, as happily as you can, for as long as you have.

Which, from the perspective of my sixty-plus years on this planet, I can see is very wise advice. But it isn’t the way younger people tend to think. When we are young we want to be the heroes of our own stories. In practice, few of us ever get to be heroes. Those that do often find that celebrity turns to dust in their mouths.

So yeah, maybe us older women are the villains in adventure stories because we know that few people ever get to change the world, but also that living happily does not depend on getting the perfect life that you dream about. If that makes me a wicked witch, well, so be it. Harrow, I think, would agree.

book cover
Title: A Mirror Mended
By: Alix E Harrow
Publisher: St Martin's Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Finncon 2022

042, Convention Report

It has been a long time in coming, but Finncon is back in person again. The last in-person event was 2019 in Jyväskylä (where I was a Guest of Honour). We’ve all missed it. So how is the convention shaping up to the post-lockdown era?

The most notable thing about Finncon 2022 is that it had a new venue. Previously Finncon has rotated between the major cities of Helsinki, Tampere, Turku and Jyväskylä. This year it was in Espoo. ‘Where is Espoo?’ I hear you ask. Well it is right next door to Helsinki. Espoo is to Helsinki kind of like Reading is to London, or San José is to San Francisco. That is, it is a large city, next door to a much more famous one, and noted for being a technological powerhouse. Espoo is home to Nokia, to Fortum, the Finnish national energy company, and to Rovio, the Angry Birds people.

In addition, Espoo is home to Aalto University. They too are proud of their leadership in technology. The campus is home to the Technical Research Centre of Finland and to various start-ups. Unlike the University of Helsinki, whose campus is embedded in the city much like London’s colleges, Aalto has a brand new campus and excellent public transit connections. There is a Metro station at the campus, and a brand new light rail line is being built to connect there too.

(Note to rail geeks, especially those whose have been to Helsinki. I used the term “light rail” deliberately. This is not an extension to the Helsinki tram system, it is a new system with longer and heavier vehicles.)

University campuses work well for Finncon because they are available at a reasonable price and all of their rooms have good tech. So a well-connected and affordable site with well-equipped rooms should be a good choice. The con was run by some of the same people who usually run Helsinki Finncons and I suspect that the Espoo location works better for them. Mostly it did work.

The layout was a little confusing, but the signage was good and I soon found my way around. The building they were using had plenty of open space in addition to the lecture rooms, and this was usefully filled with many dealer tables. One of the main rooms had a tech failure part way through the con, but we hadn’t booked them all and we were able to switch to a different, similarly-sized, room.

If I have a complaint, it was about the acoustics. Although everyone got a microphone, if people didn’t use it properly (i.e. almost eating it) then people at the back of the lecture theatres could not hear well. I ended up sitting right down the front. This is odd, because the university is named after, and the campus designed by, Alvar Aalto, Finland’s most famous architect. He is also responsible for the Finlandia concert hall in Helsinki, so he ought to know about acoustics. Then again, that building is once again under renovation because the white marble that Aalto insisted on using to face it cannot stand up to the Finnish winter.

This being a university campus, there is plenty of cheap food nearby. That includes an instance of a chain of all-you-can-eat sushi buffet restaurants. I would have quite happily have eaten there every day. There is also a very good place called Fat Lizard which does burgers and pizzas, and has excellent beer, much of which they make themselves. Sadly they were way too busy, and we ended up eating at a place called Old Jerusalem, a restaurant specialising in Levantine cuisines, and which also does great pizza.

When I say “we” I primarily mean Otto, Paula and Irma, though for the sushi place we were joined by a whole bunch of other people, including Regina Wang who has finally managed to escape lockdown in Shanghai and is now back at university in Oslo where she’s doing a PhD.

The overseas guest this year was Malka Older, whom I’ll talk about more in my review of Infomocracy. She’s a very interesting person and I really enjoyed the panels she did. I was on two panels. One was about the “Kill your gays” trope in fiction, and what is happing with queer SF&F today. It was very well attended, and seemed to go well. My thanks to Sara Norja, Xan van Rooyen who are always great to work with. The other was “Should I travel abroad to conventions?” where I was joined by Marianna Leikomaa, Tero Ykspetäjä and Carolina Gomez Lagerlöf. I think you can guess how this went. In particular we recommended next year’s Eurocon in Uppsala, Sweden, and the 2024 Worldcon which everyone expects will be in Glasgow.

Talking of Uppsala, it is really easy to get to, and one of the Guests of Honour is Martha Wells of Murderbot fame. Gotta be worth looking into, right? I’ll be there.

Another of the GoH choices for Uppsala is Merja Polvinen who has done a fantastic job steering the Finfar academic network. There was also an excellent academic track at Finncon. I didn’t get to see much of it because I was busy elsewhere, but I did catch a few panels. I’m keen to get hold of a copy of the anthology of stories by Chinese women writers that Regina has edited (it is called The Way Spring Arrives). I was also pleased to catch up with Paul Graham Raven who is currently working at a university in Sweden.

Still with GoHs, the Fan Guest of Honour at Finncon this year was Marianna ‘Kisu’ Leikomaa. Given the amount of work she has done for Finncon over the years, this was very well deserved. One of many things she does is help run masquerades, and I was happy to be asked to help judge again this year. Kisu is also usually responsible for writing the filks in honour of the GoHs that traditionally get performed at the Saturday night party. Clearly she couldn’t do that this year. I gather that at least three people wrote something just in case it was needed. Sadly we only got to hear one.

Finncon 2023 will be in Tampere. There are no dates or GoHs as yet, but that will doubtless follow once the Finns are all back from their summer break. I plan to be there.

And I have one final comment about Espoo. In keeping with the city’s image as the tech capital of Finland, it is home to a company that provides robot pizza deliverators. Well not quite, Hiro Protagonist isn’t out of a job yet, because Starship Technologies doesn’t trust their robots to deliver cooked meals on time. The poor little things are very nervous around traffic. But they do deliver groceries and they are very cute. The company is apparently Estonian. Good luck to them.

This Year’s Hugo Nonsense

042, Awards

A provisional agenda for this year’s WSFS Business Meeting has been released. You can find it here. There are a lot of new Hugo-related proposals, many of them coming from something called The Hugo Awards Study Committee.

There has already been much outrage on social media, and the inevitable suspicion that this committee is part of the They who run WSFS. I’m not going to go into all of it, but I do want to try to explain what is going on.

When it comes to Hugo disputes, the sides can often be characterized as follows. One side is made up of people who think that Hugos are wonderful things, and that therefore as many people as possible should get one. This group contains a lot of people who are creatives and who might hope to one day win a Hugo. The other side is made up of people who think that Hugos are wonderful things, and that therefore as few people as possible should be allowed to win one, otherwise they will cease to be special. This group is made up mainly of people who are unlikely to ever win a Hugo.

The problem is that the “give as many Hugos as possible” group mainly have lives and are busy being creative. They don’t have time to serve on WSFS committees. The “give as few Hugos as possible” group is made up mostly of people for whom Fandom is a Way of Life. Therefore, when the Business Meeting asks for people to sit on a committee, it is mainly people from the “give as few Hugos as possible” group who volunteer, and it is their views that then dominate the resulting report.

The ”give as few Hugos as possible” crowd also tend to be the sort of people who are wedded to the idea that anyone who makes even one measly cent from their activity in the field is a “filthy pro” who must forever be excluded from fan categories. This never ends well, if only because the voters want to vote for their favourite creators regardless, so to enforce such a rule would require Hugo Administrators to be much more active in excluding people than they like to be.

From a political point of view, the problem is that WSFS committees are not democratically elected, and are not responsible to anyone other than themselves. Their members doubtless all think that they are doing their best for WSFS, but ultimately they will end up pushing their own views of how WSFS should be run. This is not a good way to decide on award rules.

The Business Meeting isn’t a good way to decide award rules either, but at least it gives more people a chance to have a say.

I certainly can’t have a stay, because attendance at the Business Meeting is reserved for in-person attendees only. There are very good reasons for that, but again this is not a good way to run an international organization. And until we come up withy a better one we will keep on having these embarrassing crises, year after year.

Editorial – July 2022

042, Editorial

Summer is a busy time for conventions. I have three con reports in this issue, though two of those are for the same convention. Big thanks are due to John Hertz for covering Westercon 74, which I could not attend in person.

There’s also a lot of Marvel content. I know, I’m a hopeless fangirl.

There will be no issue in August as I’ll be busy with Worldcon. Hopefully that will give me a chance to read some of the big novels I have on my TBR pile. I have some programme assignments for Worldcon, though things are not set in stone yet so that might change.

The other thing I’ll be busy with in August is the next Green Man book from Juliet McKenna. With FantasyCon not having a dealers’ room, we are discussing what to do about a launch. We’ll make an announcement on social media in due course.

This issue is dedicated to the memory of Nichelle Nichols who died on the day it went live. We owe her so much. We haven’t reached the end of Strange New Worlds in the UK yet, but I am very much enjoying it. Review next issue.

Issue #41

Issues

This is the June 2022 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


All the Seas of the World

041, Book Review, Guy Gavriel Kay

There are not many authors for whom I can say, “anything they write I will buy and read immediately.” Some authors that I am a huge fan of don’t always produce the sort of books I want to read. That’s because they have a fairly wide range of authorly interests. Other authors are much more predictable. That’s definitely the case with Guy Gavriel Kay. I know what sort of book I will get from him, and I know I will love it.

If you are a Kay fan, you too will know what to expect. If you are new to his writing, then you should probably start with Children of Earth and Sky as this book is the third in a loose series, or perhaps even with one of Kay’s earlier books such as Tigana. I’ll spend the rest of this review talking about plot rather than style. For simplicity I will mostly stick with Kay-world names for things and people rather than try to explain how they map onto our world.

Interestingly, Kay has chosen to set this book after A Brightness Long Ago, but mostly before the events of Children of Earth and Sky. There is a fair amount of overlap of cast between the books, though as far as main characters go it is only the inimitable Folco Cino d’Acorsi who is key to both books. That is, of course, exactly how things should be. The one-eyed condottiero was a star of the previous book and I’m delighted to have him back.

The book also includes a supporting role for Guidanio Cerra, the narrator of A Brightness Long Ago. While most of the new book is written in the third person, Kay allows Danio to narrate some of this book too. We also get to meet Lenia Serrana, the sister of Carlo Serrana, the champion jockey from the legendary horse race at Bischio which is so pivotal to the previous book.

Lenia is one of the two lead characters of the book. The other is Rafel Ben Natan, a Kindath merchant. Between them, Rafel and Lenia own the Silver Wake, a ship which mostly carries trade goods but, because this is the Mediterranean in Renaissance times, is occasionally hired for more clandestine purposes.

Thus the opening of the book, in which Rafel and Lenia are hired to smuggle an assassin into the city of Abaneven. That city is on the south coast of the sea, and therefore under Asharite control. The target of the assassin is the Khalif of the city, but he has been hired, not by the Jaddites, but by rival Asharite warlords. Specifically, the ibn Tiphon brothers who are lords of the city of Tarouz, and also notorious corsairs.

A quick break into our world here. This is a book about the Barbary Corsairs. The ibn Tiphon brothers are based on the Reis brothers, the most famous of whom, Oruç, was nicknamed Baba Oruç (Father Oruç), which Europeans mutated into Barbarossa. Ben Natan is loosely based on Samuel Pallache, a Jewish merchant and sometime pirate.

In typical Kay fashion, the assassination is only the first domino in a trail of events that will topple as history unfolds. Rafel and Lenia will be deeply involved, as will Folco. The importance of the events are magnified by the fact that Gurçu the Destroyer has conquered the great Jaddite city of Sarantium and brought it into the Asharite world. The current High Patriarch, Scarsone Sardi, knows that he doesn’t have much chance of organizing a Crusade as happened in days of old, but he is none the less desperate for some sort of impressive public victory over the Asharites.

In great affairs of state such as this, people like Rafel and Lenia are of little import. He is Kindath, she is a woman, but they have a friend and protector in Folco. They are also rather good at what they do.

Fans of traditional fantasy narratives will doubtless be frustrated by the fact that the lead characters have relatively little agency and don’t really drive the plot, except at pivotal moments. They will probably wonder why the book isn’t about Folco. But this is what Kay does. His central characters are ordinary people mixed up in world-shattering affairs, not fantasy heroes. I continue to be impressed at Kay’s ability to plot his novels so that his characters are in just the right place to quietly tip the scales of history.

I should note that the book contains a number of same-sex relationships. The characters involved on the male side don’t come out of thigs very well. The female side of things is rather happier. Kay is not producing a queer-centered novel here, he is noting that queer relationships were common in the past, but that the lives queer people lived were often difficult and dangerous. One of the most obviously heterosexual characters doesn’t come out of things well either.

If you love Kay’s writing, which I do, then you will love this book. If you are new to Kay then this probably isn’t the best place to start. But I do hope that more people will start reading him, because he is so good at what he does.

book cover
Title: All the Seas of the World
By: Guy Gavriel Kay
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Wrath Goddess Sing

041, Book Review, Maya Deane

There are some writers who are so good at what they do that I would give an awful lot to be able to write like them. (Guy Kay is one of them. Cat Valente, obviously, is another.) But I wouldn’t necessarily write the sort of books that they write. Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane is the sort of book that I wish I could have written, and would have written if I had been good enough and brave enough.

Fairly obviously, if you are familiar with my fiction, it is a mythology re-telling. Specifically it is Homeric fanfic. You will see a lot of upset people around the Internet complaining that Deane has “got it wrong”. Reader, she has not. The trouble is that Homeric fanfic is not a new thing. Euripides wrote a lot of Homeric fanfic. So did Vergil. As far as the ancients were concerned, the tale of the Trojan War and its aftermath were ripe for reinterpretation, and the whole thing was out of copyright.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, Western European writers tried to make sense of the resulting mess. They wanted to define a canon. Reader, the Iliad contradicts itself in places. It has less in the way of stable canon than Doctor Who. In particular, there is no mention of the wooden horse in the Iliad. There is brief mention of it in the Odyssey, but the version we know comes mainly from the Aeneid. Also Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigenia is not in the Iliad. Neither is Iphigenia. There is a girl called Iphianassa who might be the same person, but she’s alive through the whole thing.

So when you see people complaining that Deane has her Iliad wrong, you have my permission to laugh.

Of course she does change things deliberately, but that’s largely for the better. To start with she makes a determined effort to situate the entire story in the Bronze Age. That means that Troy must be a Hittite city, or at least would have been part of the Hittite Empire. The city at Hissarlik, which Heinrich Schliemann identified as Troy, was once allied to the great Hittite King, Suppiluliuma I, who was a contemporary of Akhenaten. It was known as Wilusa (Ilusa, Ilium), and at one point it had a famous king called Alaksandu. In the Iliad, Paris is sometimes named Alexandros.

Oh, and the Achaean warriors wear proper, Bronze Age armour, including boar tusk helmets. They do not wear the sort of hoplite armour that you see in pictures of Classical era Greeks. There is also discussion of the relative merits of the 3-man Hittite heavy chariot as opposed to the lighter and more maneuverable 2-man, Egyptian style chariots favoured by the Achaeans.

The Bronze Age was a period of substantial international trade. Egypt, obviously, was key to that. The main political rivalry was between the Hittites and the Egyptians. This came to a head at the battle of Kadesh between an Egyptian army under Ramses II, and a Hittite army under Muwatalli II. We have a copy of a treaty between Muwatalli and Alaksandu of Wilusa. It seems likely that Wilusan soldiers formed part of the Hittite army at Kadesh. Deane has Myrmidon mercenaries under Patroclus fight for the Egyptians, and uses this as an excuse to give Patroclus an Egyptian wife.

Why was Patroclus leading the Myrmidons? Because of something else that is not in the Iliad, but which Deane chooses to use. The story is that Achilles’ mother, Thetis, knowing that her boy is fated to die young, raises him as a girl and sends her to live on the island of Skyros. There she is known as Pyrrha, the red-haired girl. The usual story is that Achilles has a strong male gender identity, and is keen to run off to war as soon as Agamemnon and Odysseus offer the possibility. Many years ago I wrote some fanfic about this incident.

Deane chooses to reimagine Achilles as a trans girl who has run away to Skyros where she can live in a community of people similar to the galli of ancient Rome. We know that such people existed in Classical Greece, and there is good reason to believe that such traditions stretched all the way back to Sumer. This Achilles is not keen on going to war, but Athena offers her an irresistible choice: fight for me, and I will make you a cisgender woman.

Naturally, this changes everything. In particular Deanne re-writes the whole Agamemnon and Briseis story and makes it make much more sense.

I should mention the gods as well. Back in the 19th and early 20th centuries there was a habit amongst Classicists to propose an evolution of middle-eastern religion down the centuries, ending with the perfection of the Graeco-Roman world. This narrative has long since been abandoned, and in reaction to it academics have tended to decry any parallels drawn between the gods of different cultures in the ancient world. That’s something of an over-reaction.

Clearly ancient cultures did influence each other. They also grew and changed during their periods of dominance. The religion of the Bronze Age Greeks was probably significantly different from that of the Greek people when the works attributed to Homer were written. That again was different from the religion of Classical Greeks. The Romans collected gods from all over their Empire and worshipped the lot of them, muddling them together with gay abandon.

In Wrath Goddess Sing the gods are predators, and mortals are their prey. Demigods such as Achilles can easily fall into the same sort of behaviour. Guess who else is a demigod? Helen. (She was born from an egg after Zeus had sex with Leda while in the form of a swan.)

There is a wonderful contrast in the novel between Achilles, the epitome of military skill, and Helen, the epitome of female sexuality.

“Me,” Helen whispered. “Everyone wants me. So let the strongest have me. The world will be my dowry.”

Those of you who have read Roz Kaveney’s Rhapsody of Blood series may see some parallels in the way in which Deane constructs wars between gods, but it is absolutely not the same thing. Deane does many of her own things, some of which are absolutely outrageous. I am now very much looking forward to the next book, which I understand will be set in Ahkenaten’s Egypt.

I should note that Achilles is not a nice person. How can she be? She is a warrior demigod destined to slaughter most of the Trojan’s best fighters. Another reason that you may dislike the book is that it is dripping in scholarship, from linguistics to mythology to history. I’m probably way too close to the erudition on display here to know whether this is a bad thing for others, but I love it.

Balanced again this is my favourite character from the book, Meryapi. She’s the Egyptian princess that Patroclus has married, and she is absolutely delightful. She’s a linguistics nerd and a wannabe sorceress. She also represents ordinary womanhood, in contrast to the demigod archetypes of Achilles and Helen.

My other favourite character is Odysseus, obviously. Deane somehow made me fall in love with the old rogue all over again, even though I know what a terrible person he is.

“Next time,” Odysseus said mildly, “remember me. I’m good at idiotic plans; you’re good at killing things. Together we could work much mischief.”

Of course one of the joys of fanfic is that you get to read new stories about beloved characters all over again.

Oh, and remember, nothing good ever came of learning the language of dolphins. They are terrible, terrible people.

book cover
Title: Wrath Goddess Sing
By: Maya Deane
Publisher: William Morrow
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances

041, Aliette de Bodard, Book Review

I was talking elsewhere about authors whose books I buy and read as soon as they came out. Aliette de Bodard has made her way into those ranks. With a full time job, and raising two kids on her own, she’s mostly producing short fiction these days, but it is glorious stuff.

Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances is one of her follow-up stories set in the world of the Dominion of the Fallen series. It is a companion to Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders in that is features literatures most unlikely gay couple: Asmodeus and Thuan. He is a powerful fallen angel who never met anything he didn’t want to stab, if only briefly. And he is a dragon prince from a community of shape-shifters who live under the Seine and who is never happier then when he has a book in his hand.

As with the previous book, this is a murder mystery. Thuan is asked to babysit some children from his dragon family, and needs to find something for them to do before Asmodeus teaches them to hide knives in their clothing and stab people by surprise. They head out into the kelp forest, and find an ancient shrine. There they find a ghost of a child, and the recently dead body of an imperial bureaucrat. It seems like the ghost may know something about the murder. But it is clear that the murderer does not want to be found out, even if that means killing Prince Thuan and his dangerous foreign husband, not to mention two small children. The process of finding out who the murderer is involves seeking help from one of Thaun’s ex-girlfriends, which is rather awkward for him.

The thing I love about these books is that both Asmodeus and Thuan are such intense, vibrant characters. Here is a typical Asmodeus moment.

Asmodeus hated poison. He thought it was too unpredictable, cowardly, and pointless – what was the point of not seeing one’s enemies get stabbed? But that also meant that he’d extensively studied how not to get poisoned.

And here is Thuan.

Thuan tried not to worry. Unfortunately, ‘worry’ was his default state of being.

Everyone else is aware of this, especially Thuan’s family.

“You know we’d never harm children. Or allow them to be harmed.”

“I do,” Hong Chi said. “I’m worried about what you’ll do to people who try to harm them.”

That was… not inaccurate. Asmodeus had very strong ideas about protecting the people in his charge, and he applied these double or triple to children. Thuan was less stab-happy, but no way was he going to let someone hurt children on his watch. “We didn’t kill anyone.”

He could see the “yet” forming on Hong Chi’s lips.

So yes, this is a charming story, and of course also infused with East Asian mythologies. Great entertainment.

book cover
Title: Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances
By: Aliette de Bodard
Publisher: JABberwocky Literary Agency
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

On Reviewing and Taxonomies

041, Lit Crit

Back in February, Paul Kincaid published an essay on his blog. It is titled, “A Taxonomy of Reviewing”. The central issue he is addressing is laid out in the opening paragraph:

“… we have no clear language with which to talk about reviewing. What’s the difference between a review and criticism? Where do you draw the line between review, review essay, and critical essay? Is criticism, by definition, negative? Is a bad review the same as a negative review? We have no generally agreed upon way of answering any of these questions, and any general writing about reviewing is liable to get hijacked by trying to define terms.”

The essay was very well received, including by me. Paul is a smart guy with many years of experience of writing reviews and literary criticism. In the essay he provides an exhaustive list of types of writing about writing, and he provides definitions for each one. The idea, which we know from the use of the term ‘taxonomy’ in the title, is to classify each of these types of writing and show how they are different from each other. That way, when we encounter a new piece of writing, we know which box to put it in.

However, impressed as I was by Paul’s erudition, something was nagging at my brain.

Taxonomies are classic tools of science, particularly in biology. At school we are all taught that living things are divided into plants and animals, and that these groups are further subdivided into smaller groups. So mammals are a group within animals; primates are a group within mammals; simia (monkeys and apes) are a group within mammals; and so on. This is known as the Linnaean system, after Carl Linnaeus who came up with the idea in 1735.

Taxonomies have been hugely useful in helping us understand the world around us, primarily because they give us a framework for discussion. As Paul says at the end of the essay, “…if we can’t be precise in our language, if we can’t disentangle words so that their meaning is clear to a lay audience, is it possible to write about criticism at all?” And yet, Linnaeus’s elegant system, though very long-lived, is not perfect.

When creating a taxonomy it is necessary to find a way to distinguish between the various groups. For example, does an animal lay eggs, or incubate its young? Does it have fur, scales or feathers? Unfortunately these tests aren’t perfect, because sooner or later you are going to run across a platypus. Or you discover that the hyrax, which looks and behaves a bit like a groundhog, is actually very closely related to the elephant and not a rodent. Or that evolution has invented the crab entirely separately on several separate occasions.

It was thinking about this sort of thing that led me to think that perhaps Paul was barking up the wrong (evolutionary) tree.

In computer science we have, to a large extent, given up on taxonomies. Having a single classification field for an object, which defines where it fits within a taxonomy, simply doesn’t work in many applications. A common alternative is to use a tag system, whereby we define a number of features, and an individual object can be associated with one or many features. For example, our platypus can be tagged as having fur (like mammals), laying eggs (like birds and reptiles) and having a beak (like birds and squid).

An even more radical approach is necessary in the trans awareness training that I do. The people in the classes are often very keen to get precise definitions of what various labels trans people use when talking about themselves mean. How is genderqueer different from gender fluid and from non-binary. Are non-binary people trans or not? There are no right answers to these questions.

Indeed, the whole idea that people must fit precisely into gendered boxes, and never leave them, is central to the philosophy of the anti-trans lobby. That’s why they keep demanding that people define what they mean by “woman”. There are many different ways of doing that. You can categorise people by their chromosomes, or by their reproductive organs, or by their secondary sex characteristics, or several other methods. None of these definitions result in Venn diagrams that perfectly overlap, and all of them will result in excluding some people who believe that they are women.

And yet people keep insisting on a taxonomy, and if you can wean them off a strict binary they tend to immediately fall back on the idea of a spectrum. Which means that everyone has to fall somewhere between the binary poles. There are two problems with this. The first is that there are many different ways in which gender can be defined, and in each case someone’s position on a spectrum might be different. Also, the idea of a spectrum requires that in order to be more masculine you have to be less feminine, and vice versa. That very much restricts the ways in which people can express gender, and as people don’t like being restricted the system breaks down.

What we suggest as an alternative is a system of axes. We can thinks of each axis as a tag. Examples might be your internal sense of femininity, your feminine gender expression, and your attraction towards masculine-coded people. Each axis also has a value denoting how far along you are on it. So for example you might see yourself as very feminine, be a bit meh about fashion, and not be attracted to men at all. Note that attraction to female-coded people would be a separate tag, and that could be at zero too. Or both could be quite high.

I haven’t had time to go through Paul’s elegant taxonomy and construct a new system using one of these classification techniques, but I do think that avoiding trying to stick things in boxes is a good approach to life. (That includes cats – just leave them alone and they will happily get into boxes all by themselves.) All binaries are false, all classifications are imperfect, and if we insist on trying to fit everything we see into boxes we will either end up chasing our tails in a vain attempt to make the system work, or we will end up chopping bits off our subjects until they fit. Neither of these outcomes is desirable.

The Matrix Resurrections

041, Movie Review

The fourth Matrix film was apparently a disaster at the box office, and received a thorough panning from many critics. As a result it took me a while to get around to watching it, but I’m glad I did because there’s a lot to think about.

To start with there’s the question of Lana Wachowski’s motive for making the film. Her official position is that she changed her mind after her parents died. The Matrix Resurrections is a love story about two somewhat elderly people, so I think we have to take her at her word there.

Also it is true that Warner Bros. were keen to get a sequel, and indeed had hired someone else to write a screenplay. So Lana took it upon herself to give them one, and in way they probably didn’t want.

Those of you who have seen it will know that the first half of the film is an extended meta joke about the fact that the film is a Matrix sequel. Neo and Trinity are back in the Matrix. Neo is once again Thomas Anderson, who is now a successful game developer. His top-selling trilogy of Matrix video games has made a lot of money for him and his company, Deus Machina (the god machine, a.k.a. The Matrix, obviously). His business partner, and CEO of the company, is Agent Smith. This kind of makes them Woz and Jobs, which is a very Bay Area joke.

The plot gets underway when Smith reveals to Anderson that their parent company, Warner Bros., has demanded that they make a fourth Matrix game. This is followed by a whole lot of poking fun at the corporate art production process. Christina Ricci provides an absolutely brilliant cameo as a corporate marketing executive. Lana also has the creative team debate what the original trilogy was “really” about, because of course nothing she does is only about one thing.

Meanwhile, in the real world, many decades have passed. Zion is no more, but a new enclave called Io, ruled over by the elderly Niobe, has arisen. Many of the inhabitants are fans of Neo and Trinity. One particular group of them, led by Bugs (another white rabbit reference) discovers clues in The Matrix that lead them to Anderson, and they decide to mount a rescue. Jessica Henwick is brilliant as Bugs, and it is lovely to see Brian J Smith and Max Riemelt playing characters from Io.

Most of the rest of the movie is the sort of relentless action you expect from a Matrix movie, with plenty of kung fu and associated fighting styles. Once Neo is rescued they need to rescue Trinity too, and then everyone can live happily ever after.

I’m not in the least bit surprised that the dudebros who wanted another Matrix movie are not happy with something that essentially makes fun of people who wanted another Matrix movie. I don’t suppose that Warner Bros. are happy either, but maybe they will have learned their lesson. I think it is also inevitable that the new movie is not as revolutionary in its look and special effects as the first one. But this is a Matrix movie, just not the one people thought they were getting.

To start with there are plenty of callbacks to the original trilogy. Wachowski and her writing team (which includes David Mitchell) have clearly thought about how the world of the movies would have developed. One particular thing I really liked is that Tiffany’s husband in The Matrix is played by the guy who was Keanu Reeves’ stunt double in the original trilogy. So he is, in a sense, a fake Neo.

Other things are different, most importantly an emphasis on deconstructing binaries. Machines and humans live alongside each other in Io. Software constructs such as Morpheus have a means of manifesting in the real world. Anderson is working on a new computer game called Binary, which he seems unable to finish. Agent Smith and Neo are allies at times. All of this is trans-related, because the acceptance of non-binary people is the one thing that has changed dramatically since the original trilogy.

Another significant change is the main bad guy. In the original trilogy we had the Architect who built the Matrix. The new Matrix is built by someone called The Analyst (brilliantly played by Neil Patrick Harris). Obviously an analyst is a term for someone who works in software, but we first meet The Analyst in his role as Anderson’s therapist. He is a psychoanalyst. And the new Matrix he has built is based around programming human emotions.

In particular, the new Matrix works by filling the inhabitants with a sense of wanting things they can’t get. The key to this is that Neo and Trinity are in pods very close to each other, but they can never be together. This is the emotional core of the Matrix, and of the film. When Neo and Trinity are re-united in the real world, the Analyst’s Matrix falls apart. The way to destroy The Matrix is for us to care about each other and get together.

This is fairly obviously a comment on consumer society, which works by continually encouraging people to want things they do not have. Including, of course, a new Matrix movie. It may also be about politics, which these days is very much about crafting emotional narratives rather than about explaining policy.

The other major change in the films between this trilogy and this one is the way it is made, which you will only know if you have watched the extras on the disc. When they did the original trilogy, Lana and Lily were control freaks. Everything was planned down to the smallest detail. Almost nothing was shot outside of the studio, because you could never know what the sun was likely to do.

Lana’s approach to the new movie was very much seat-of-the-pants. There was no storyboarding, no pre-vis. Lana would direct as she went along, often looking over the cameraman’s shoulder to tell him what to do. The cast, if disc extras can be believed, enjoyed this, because the continual cut and re-do in search of a shot that perfectly reproduces what was planned is annoying and tiring. Also many key shots make glorious use of the sun, which is lovely.

That the film achieved the final, climactic sequences in this way is really quite remarkable. There were actual helicopter gunships flying through San Francisco, and actual cars blowing up in the streets below, all being shot in a single take. The final shot of Neo and Trinity jumping off a 43-storey sky scraper is exactly that. There’s no green screen, no stunt people, just Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss jumping off a stupidly high building. In a harness, obviously, but still real.

There could be many reasons why Lana Wachowski’s film-making style has changed so radically. Maybe she is just massively more experienced. Maybe she’s just older and richer and doesn’t have to care about what others say. But I also wonder whether it has something to do with the fact that she and Lily made the original series while they were still closeted, and now they are free to be themselves. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know I used to be a massive control freak prior to transition, and I’m much more relaxed about life now.

To wrap up I want to talk briefly about Trinity’s role in the movie. Mostly it looks like she’s there to be rescued. But specifically she’s being rescued from life as a traditional wife and mother. Also Neo says that he never believed that he was The One. He succeeded in what he did because Trinity believed in him. And now it is his turn to believe in her.

When the pair of the them jump of the sky scraper, it is Trinity who first gains the ability to fly. She has the last word in the film. Perhaps now she is The One. Or maybe we all are. All we need to gain power over The Matrix is to be loved.

Doctor Who Redacted

041, Audio Review

I’m not a big fan of audio drama. I tend to have difficulty in following what is going on. I’m also not a huge fan of Doctor Who. In particular I found the Moffat era unwatchable. But my Twitter feed has been full of excitement over a Doctor Who audio drama with a lot of queer content, so I figured I should give it is a try. Folks, it is very good. It is also guaranteed to get up the noses of the Dudebros. This is excellent.

Doctor Who: Redacted is a an official BBC production (and therefore presumably canon, whatever that means as far as the show is concerned these days considering that much of it has been ripped up of late). The lead writer is Juno Dawson (a trans woman), and the star is Charlie Craggs (a trans woman) who plays Cleo Proctor (a trans woman). The director and main supporting cast are all queer women. If I had to design a show that would be the queerest thing ever, I don’t think I could do much better than this.

The show comes as ten episodes of varying lengths from 20 to 30 minutes, making up a full story arc, with suitably cliff hanger endings. There are guest appearances by well known Doctor Who characters, including The Doctor herself, Kate Stewart, Petronella Osgood, Rani Chandra and, of course, Madame Vastra, plus a few minor characters from the specific shows the series riffs off. Not all of these characters are played by the same people that played them in the TV series, but Jodie Whittaker does play The Doctor.

I can’t say too much about the plot because that would spoil the mystery of it, but I can say that it centers around a podcast. Cleo and her young friends, Abby McPhail and Shawna Thompson, host a series called The Blue Box Files. Their show focuses on conspiracy theories associated with the mysterious appearance (and disappearance) of an old-fashioned blue police call box and a person known as The Doctor. As a result of their researches, the three girls probably know more about The Doctor than anyone outside of UNIT.

Meanwhile, something strange is happening on Earth. Anything and anyone associated with The Doctor is disappearing. Computer files get corrupted. Artefacts go missing. People lose their memories of events. Sometimes actual people vanish, and no one can remember them.

Alongside the adventure plot we have personal issues. Cleo’s mother has been unable to come to terms with her gender transition and threw her out after Cleo’s father disappeared in mysterious circumstances. Cleo now lives with her brother, Jordan. Shawna is madly in love with Abby, but won’t admit to it, though she does spend a lot of time being rude about Abby’s boyfriend, Craig. Mostly Craig deserves it.

That’s plenty of plot to drive a 10-episode series. Slowly but surely the girls will discover that the Blue Box is real, that some scary military people are also interested in it, and that aliens are more real and more scary than they ever thought possible. The key to the mystery, and to saving the Earth, will lie in something Juno Dawson has picked up on in an old TV episode, and maybe also because The Doctor and Cleo can bond over their gender history.

Across the Green Grass Fields

041, Book Review, Seanan McGuire

Another piece of Hugo reading done. This is the one novella from this year’s ballot that I hadn’t read. It is, of course, another book in Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series. This one is not set in Eleanor West’s school, and it works pretty well as a stand-alone.

Across the Green Grass Fields features a horse-mad girl called Regan Lewis who runs away from home and ends up in a place called The Hooflands. I was a little nervous at first because the thing that causes Regan to flee is discovering that she is intersex, and foolishly blurting that fact out at school. However, this is not a book about being intersex. It has very different concerns.

The Hooflands are inhabited by all manner of hoofed beasts from mythology. There are unicorns, of course, but also centaurs, fauns, kelpies, kirin, hippogriffs and perytons. The latter are winged stags, which had me confused for a while. Apparently they were invented by Borges for his Book of Imaginary Beings. Good choice, Seanan!

Regan falls in with a small herd of centaurs who herd unicorns. Some hoofed beings, it seems, are intelligent, while others are just animals. She makes friends with the only foal in the centaur family, a girl called Chicory. This gives her the opportunity to grow up free of school bullies and foolish parents. However, it is clear from the start that she has a Destiny.

Humans are not a natural part of the Hooflands. How could they be, they have no hooves? But every so often one appears. When one does, this is a signal that the land is in great danger. The human will be a hero and save everyone, and then disappear back to their own world.

Well, that’s the theory. The reality is a little more complicated than that. This is where we discover that the book is actually about what it means to be a hero and a saviour. I suspect that most white readers, especially white women readers, will miss the point, but it is there nevertheless.

For those who are oblivious to the politics, this is a fun and easy read. It also has some beautiful Rovina Cai illustrations. Probably not a winner, though.

book cover
Title: Across the Green Grass Fields
By: Seanan McGuire
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Mab

041, Bethan Gwanas, Book Review, Eloise Williams, Matt Brown, Translators

Most of you will probably have heard of The Mabinogion. For those who haven’t, it is a compilation of mythological tales written in Middle Welsh. Some of the stories feature King Arthur. Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain series is loosely based on some of the tales in The Mabinogion.

So what is The Mab? To start with, it is a version of The Mabinogion for children. There’s no age recommendation on the book, but I’m guessing Middle Grade or younger. This means that the stories featured have been shortened, have had certain things omitted, and have had jokes added.

For example, the book opens with a re-telling of the First Branch, the tale of Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed. While it does tell the story of how Pwyll meets Rhiannon and they get married, it does not mention that she is fleeing an arranged marriage. It also has an ongoing joke about trousers which is not in the original.

For a kids’ book, this is all good stuff. The editors, Matt Brown and Eloise Williams, know what they are doing with children’s literature. Indeed, Williams was the first ever Welsh Children’s Laureate. I’m assuming that the other writers have good track records too. And the book contains some beautiful illustrations from Max Low.

So if you have kids and would like an introduction to Welsh mythology for them, The Mab is a good start. But it is more than that, because all of the stories are presented in two versions: one in English, and one translated into Welsh by Bethan Gwanas. Modern Welsh, not Middle Welsh, which is considerably less understandable. This makes the book perfect for schools in Wales, but also for anyone learning Welsh. Because the stories are short and use simple language, they are relatively easy reading for learners.

The book was crowdfunded on Unbound, and you will find my name in the Supporters list at the back.

Oh, and there is an introduction by Michael Sheen, which you are allowed to imagine being read to you by Aziraphale, because why wouldn’t you?

book cover
Title: The Mab
By: Matt Brown (ed) & Eloise Williams (ed)
Translator: Bethan Gwanas
Publisher: Unbound
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Moon Knight

041, TV Review

I was hoping to have some expert Egyptological input before writing this, but I can’t wait too long or I will have forgotten what I saw, so here goes with the weird guy in mummy bandages.

Moon Knight is an attempt by Marvel to colonize Egyptian mythology in addition to Norse and Greek. However, rather than have gods as main characters, they have opted for something more complex. Kudos to Doug Moench who came up with the original comic character, I guess.

The first thing know about Moon Knight is that he is more than one person. The superhero is Marc Spector, an American mercenary soldier. But Marc shares a body with Steven Grant, a mild-mannered museum worker and ancient history geek from London. These appear to be multiple personalities rather than separate souls in one body, and the show hints at a third personality. I’m not going to get into spoiler territory by discussing this, but it is very weird.

The other thing about Moon Knight is that he is an avatar of the god, Khonsu (or Khonshu as it is spelled in the comics.) Given thousands of years of history, there’s not a lot of consistency in Egyptian religion. He is definitely a moon god, but his role in disciplining sinners is less well attested and seems to have come mainly from the Pyramid Texts. He does have a falcon head though. Yes, just like Horus. Egyptian religion is confusing.

The basic plot is that of a war between Khonsu and the crocodile-headed Ammit. She is most definitely a nasty piece of work. She is the demon to whom souls were fed if they failed the judgement of the dead when their heart was weighed against the feather of Maat. The story is that Ammit has decided that almost all humans are guilty and should be killed immediately. Khonsu wants us to still have a chance to be judged.

This war takes place in our world as a conflict between Moon Knight and the avatar of Ammit, a cult leader known as Arthur Harrow (superbly played by Ethan Hawke). Except that Steven Grant keeps taking over the body from Marc Spector at inopportune moments.

I’m assuming that Oscar Isaac was attracted to the role by the opportunity to play two very different characters. Mostly he does a fine job, but his attempts at London slang are embarrassing. No one in London says “laters gators”, even in a joking comment to a crocodile goddess. Isaac has apparently said he got help from British members of the film crew. I think they were winding him up.

Inexplicably, the show also mixes up its London geography. Steven’s place of work is pretty obviously the British Museum. Nowhere else would have that sort of collection of ancient artefacts. But the exterior shots are all of the National Gallery on the north side of Trafalgar Square, which contains only paintings in the like. In one scene Steven’s boss has a National Gallery logo on his sweater. I guess the museum also has multiple personalities.

Much to my relief, the show does much better with the episodes set in Egypt. It doubtless helps a lot that four of the eight episodes were direct by Mohamed Diab, who is Egyptian. Earlier this month I attended an Assyriology conference in Helsinki and got to meet a young Arab scholar who had grown up in Egypt, though she now lives in France. She assured me that the show had gone down very well in Egypt.

It probably helped a lot that the show was actually shot in Cairo, not in a studio lot in Atlanta, or a town in Queensland pretending to be Cairo. Diab also got a lot of Egyptian and Arab music used in the show. Apparently this included some controversial Egyptian rap music. More on that here.

Finally we have the female lead on the show. Marc’s Egyptian wife is played by May Calamawy who was born in Bahrain of Egyptian and Palestinian parents. Towards the end of the season she gets to become the avatar of the hippo goddess, Taweret, as the superhero, Scarlet Scarab.

As is so often the case with the MCU, this is a choice with deep comics history, as this article explains. The original Scarlet Scarab appeared in Roy Thomas’s Invaders comic in 1977. This series revived characters from WWII. The Scarlet Scarab fights Nazis alongside Prince Namor and the original Human Torch.

Layla El-Faouly in Moon Knight is the third member of the family to inhabit the Scarab costume. The connection to Taweret is new, however. The scene in which she takes part in a fight in a Cairo street and a bystander asks if she is an Egyptian superhero is genius, and I was pleased to be told that it meant as much to people in Egypt as I had hoped.

Wonderful though Layla is in her Scarlet Scarab costume, the star of the series is undoubtedly Antonia Salib as the hippo-headed Taweret. In mythology Taweret is mainly a goddess of fertility and a protector of women in childbirth, but the Book of the Dead also mentions that she guards the path to the mountains of the west that leads to the underworld. It is this role that she plays in Moon Knight. It is hard not to be memorable when you are a giant, hippo-headed god, but Taweret is also a fabulous character and I will watch future Moon Knight series just for her.

Editorial – June 2022

041, Editorial

This issue seems to have something of a trans theme. We’ve got a book by a trans woman about a trans warrior warrior. We’ve got a movie directed by one of the world’s most famous trans women. And we have a Doctor Who audio drama that involves several trans people. Well it is Pride Month after all.

I’ve not been rushing around the world much this month, but I will be back in Finland soon for this year’s Finncon. Before that I’ll be online to Tonopah, Nevada for this year’s Westercon. Currently I have no convention plans for August, but that’s only because Worldcon is in early September this year.

Meanwhile things are happening at Wizard’s Tower. There will be a new Chaz Brenchley Outremer novel available soon, Juliet is working hard on the next Green Man book, and there will be an annoucement soon about a new signing.

– Cheryl

Issue #40

Issues

This is the May 2022 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: Astronaut City: This issue’s cover is again from Pixabay. The name of the artist is not given. The full version of the art is below.

  • Kingfisher: Patricia McKillip may have left us, but she has also left many fabulous books, including this one.

  • Aspects: John M Ford's final, unfinished, novel has been released at last. Was it worth the wait?

  • Plutoshine: Another fine debut from a female author, and this time it is hard SF

  • Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak: Cheryl reads the latest book in Charlie Jane Anders' Unstoppable series.

  • Kundo Wakes Up: Huzzah! A new installment in Saad Z Hossain's series set in a djinn-infested, near-future cyberpunk South Asia

  • Åcon XI: Nordic fandom returns to the beautiful Åland islands, and Cheryl went too

  • Star Trek: Prodigy: Not content with Lower Decks, Paramount has given us a new animated Star Trek series, this one featuring a group of alien teenagers

  • Picard – Season 2: Jean Luc and his crew deliver more quality fan service

  • Editorial – May 2022: Live from Helsinki!

Kingfisher

040, Book Review, Patricia McKillip

As many of you know, Patricia McKillip died recently. My little corner of the internet has been full of tributes to her, including a wonderful episode of The Coode Street Podcast featuring Ellen Kushner and E Lily Yu. This may be a surprise to younger readers as McKillip hasn’t been that active of late. As far as I’m aware, her last novel came out in 2016, though she may have produced short stories since then. Her first novel appeared in 1973, so she’s been around a long time.

In terms of awards, McKillip’s career includes two World Fantasy wins, and a World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. But she’s only been a Hugo finalist once, and a Nebula finalist twice. She has, however, won four Mythopoeic Awards, and has been a finalist another 11 times, which tells you a lot about the sort of fiction she wrote.

While McKillip largely eschewed series after her initial, and very successful, Riddle Master of Hed trilogy, her publishers made her works instantly recognizable because each one came with a magnificent Kinuko Craft cover. The book I’m reviewing here did not, perhaps because it was her last, and perhaps because it does not address the same fairy-tale themes as those Craft-covered books.

Kingfisher is Arthuriana. Indeed, it is the same piece of Arthuriana that Nicola Griffith mined for Spear, but it has a very different take on the legend of Percival. To start with, it is set in a modern society with cars and cell phones. While the actual location is not of this world, it seems to me very clearly based on the west coast of the USA. The small, seaside towns, with their seafood restaurants, specializing in crab dishes, remind me a lot of places like Fort Bragg. McKillip was born in Oregon, and lived there for much of her life.

Welcome, then, to the land of Wyvernhold, still ruled over by King Arden, though the 9th of that name. The world has moved on a lot since it was necessary for bold knights to hunt mythical creatures. While jousting and swordplay are still popular, these days knights prefer black leather to full plate, and they get around on motorbikes, unless they are very rich like Gareth May (Gawain) or Leith Duresse (Lancelot) and have a chauffeur-driven limousine.

In McKillip’s book, Perceval is not a young Welshman, he is a son of Lancelot. In fact Leith has two sons: Pierce and Val, but it is Pierce, the younger, who is our hero. I suspect that McKillip did this because she wanted to give Lancelot a shot at redemption, but I can’t ask her now and I doubt that she’d answer if I could.

More true to the tradition is that Pierce has grown up in obscurity, raised by his mother, the sorceress Heloise. She left court years ago, leaving Val in the care of Leith, because of Leith’s affair with Queen Genevra. But, as young proto-knights must, he chooses to leave her and seek his fortune, and his father, at court. And he does this just in time to partake in a great Quest for a mysterious object that might be a cup, a bowl, or a flowerpot. The knights can’t get much sense out of Sylvester Skelton, the king’s wizard.

That’s not Merlin, by the way. There’s a strange old man called Merle who lives in the seaside town of Chimera Bay, where the Kingfisher Inn is located. And when I say “strange”, I do mean that he has some very odd habits.

And then she saw her father, in the meadow under the soft touch of moonlight, changing into shape after shape in an intricate dance of power, or the constant folding and refolding of life in all its variations. Man became wolf became deer became hare became bear became cougar became porcupine became salmon leaping out of the water, became white heron became owl, soundless in the transfixed eye of the moon.

She, by the way, is Carrie, Merle’s daughter, who works as a cook at the Kingfisher. She has a key role in the plot.

Which brings us to cookery. Food is a major element of the story. Heloise has become a cook and runs a restaurant called Haricot in Desolation Point on far-north Cape Mistbegotten. Food is served at the Kingfisher Inn too. And then there is the mysterious Todd Stillwater, whose restaurant serves the most amazing concoctions that taste heavenly but always seen to leave diners more hungry than before.

There is much more in the book. Key to the story are the two great rivers, the Severen, and the Calluna, that intersect at Arden’s capital city of Severluna. They represent the sun god, Severen, and the moon goddess, Calluna. There is gender politics. There is some dispute as to which of these gods the thing that we must not call a Grail belongs to. And then there are the Knights of the Rising God, a group of knights who are exclusively devoted to Severen and are as thuggish and inconsiderate as any group of young, male religious fanatics.

This being a modern-day story, we have female knights, in particular Dame Scotia Malory, a descendant of the infamous writer who produced a, probably rather fanciful, biography of the original King Arden. If by now you have come to the conclusion that McKillip is just having fun writing Arthurian fanfic, you’d be dead right. But then all Arthuriana is fanfic of a sort.

There are echoes of The Tempest in the book too.

So there is love of the stories, there is gender politics, there is paganism, there is occasional comedy (often at the expense of Lancelot or Merlin), but above all there is enchantment.

Once our true realm ran from one horizon to the other, from day to night; you could move from one end to the other with a wish. A step. […] Now time gets in the way.

As our heroes will discover, there is such a thing as enchantment. You can be ensorcelled, and find that your mind is not your own. But sometimes there is worse. Sometimes you can be disenchanted.

To read a Patricia McKillip book is to be enchanted. Now that there will be no more, we are, in a way, disenchanted. Fortunately I have not read all of them. There is magic yet to come.

book cover
Title: Kingfisher
By: Patricia McKillip
Publisher: Ace
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Aspects

040, Book Review, John M Ford

Most of you will, I suspect, know that this book is unfinished. What I hadn’t quite twigged before starting it, is that it is not just an unfinished novel, it is an unfinished fantasy series. No one knows how many books John M Ford had planned before his untimely death in 2006, but it was clearly more than one.

So why should you read it? Well to start with the prose is glorious. Nothing much happens in the first few chapters. A duel is fought, and the victor turns out to be one of the major characters. There is some debate in Parliament. Our hero’s best friend (who turns out to be gay) tries to fix him up with a girlfriend, which is a complicated thing for middle-aged members of the nobility. And yet I was transfixed, because of the quality of the writing and worldbuilding.

Oh yes, this is a secondary world. It is kind of Victorian, in that there are steam trains and a telegraph system, and a world slowly moving out of feudalism into an industrial democracy. Our heroes are members of the House of Lords. There is a House of Commons where the nouveau riche sit, but is has little power yet. The King has abdicated.

There is also magic. The House of Lords has seats reserved for senior sorcerers, and a key law that is being debated concerns the legal liability that sorcerers have for acts of magic. There are clergymen in the Lords too; several of them as the local religion is somewhat polytheistic. There are four main goddesses. Each has a consort (not all of whom are male, it appears), and these days each is seen as an aspect of one great Goddess.

Which brings us to gender. There are women in Parliament. Inheritance amongst the nobility appears to be entirely gender-neutral. Some of the most powerful sorcerers are women. Another major female character in the book is the Inspector of Ironways, and therefore one of the most important people involved in the railway industry. Ford hasn’t created a world entirely free of patriarchy, but he has created one that is far more free of it than our own is, even now.

What his world is not free of is autocracy. Most of the major characters are members of the nobility in some way. Our hero, Varic, and his good friend Brook, are trying to establish a new way of running a country where there is a Constitution, and Laws, and noblemen cannot act as petty kings within their own fiefdom.

This is one of the themes that Ford was starting to explore in the book. He was doing do through one of Varic and Brook’s main problems in Parliament: Cable, the Chief Justiciar. Cable is the sort of man who believes utterly in the sanctity of the Law, but has no understanding whatsoever of justice. A Lord (Coron is the title in the world of the book) is likely to know his or her people, and on investigating the circumstances of a crime can rule upon it in a way that is just. Cable would have every judge strictly bound by a rule book from which they must never deviate, no matter how wrong the verdict might be.

We see this also in the debate over legal control of sorcery. Magic is a wild and unpredictable thing. At one point Ford quotes an old proverb to the effect that if a master sorcerer has not accidentally killed three close friends then he’s not really trying. If a sorcerer is asked to bring an end to a drought, but the ensuing heavy rains wash away a bridge and a child is drowned, is the sorcerer liable for the damage, or guilty of murder?

There has to be action as well, though the plot doesn’t get going until halfway through Aspects. There isn’t really enough in what we have to see the expected shape of the plot, though it would appear to involve hostile action, if not outright war, involving the neighbouring state of Ferangard. Early in the book, Varic and Brook attend a party to welcome the new Ferangarder Ambassador. It features a display of a new weapon — a machine gun whose rapid loading of bullets is achieved by sorcery.

The book, however, was not planned to be that simple. Ferangard may see weakness in the social issues facing our heroes. Ford is certainly aware of them. As in a traditional Victorian novel, the characters have servants. They are mostly well treated, but they are servants none-the-less. Some social mobility is possible. We see this in the character of Winterhill. He’s a former orphan and petty thief who was lucky enough to be rescued by a philanthropist and well educated. He now puts his talents to use as a private eye for hire, and occasional assassin. He mixes with the upper classes, but he will never be one of them.

Much of the novel takes place in and around a large country house owned by a man called Strange. At major holidays, such as solstices and equinoxes, Strange entertains guests, members of the great and good whom he feels should know each other. Varic is a regular guest. Brook is not, because he once brought a toy boy who disgraced himself. The aforementioned Inspector of Ironways, Edaire. is a guest, as is the newly-elected what passes for Archbishop. Strange wants good people running the country, and does his best to put them together. (The contrast with the group of thieves currently running the UK is stark.)

Anyway, Strange has a head coachman. She and her wife have a young son who dreams of working on the Ironways. Naturally he plies Edaire with questions. What training does one go through before one can drive a train? How much longer before one can drive an elite express? Then young Hazel asks a key question: at what point in his career as an ironwayman would he be eligible to be a Guest at Strange’s house. Ah, well…

One more thing before I stop. Many fantasy novels contain poetry. Much of it is dreadful. I even skip the poetry in Tolkien. Ford has poetry in Aspects. I read every single piece with admiration.

So yeah, Ford, Mike to his friends, was taken from us much too young. I met him on occasions, but never got to know him. That is a major regret in my life.

book cover
Title: Aspects
By: John M Ford
Publisher: Gateway
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Plutoshine

040, Book Review, Lucy Kissick

Last month I featured a review of a debut novel from a woman writer fresh out of university that I found very impressive. Now I have another one, equally impressive, but very different.

Julie Crisp sent me this book, because she knows I like to promote up-and-coming women writers. That’s a good agent at work. She was smart to take on Lucy Kissick too. A science fiction writer with a PhD from Oxford on the lakes of Mars. Yes, seriously, an actual areologist.

The book, however, is not about Mars. That much is obvious from the title. Plutoshine is, as it says on the tin, about terraforming Pluto. Our hero, Lucian, is part of a team sent to make that remote and forbidding world a little more pleasant for humans to live on. Specifically his job is to built the giant mirror that will catch and focus what little sunlight reaches that far-flung corner of the solar system.

By the way, there’s a certain amount of hat-tip naming in the book. The head of the terraforming mission is called Professor Halley. Lucian’s assistant is called Stan (short for Stanisław, not Stanley). I’m therefore going to assume that Lucian is named after Lucian of Samosata, the first writer to imagine a trip to the moon.

Meanwhile, back with the plot. The terraforming project is being carried out at the behest of one Clavius Harbour, a billionaire industrialist who founded the Pluto colony. However, when the team arrives, they find things have changed during their transit. Harbour is in a coma, and the colony is now being run by his son, Edmund. There was some sort of accident. Edmund is very tight-lipped about the whole thing, and his little sister, Nou, hasn’t spoken a word since it happened.

Also, terraforming is controversial. It hasn’t always gone well. Lucian’s home colony on Mercury suffered one of the disasters, which claimed the life of his father. Some people, like Lucian, vow to get it right in future. Others want it stopped. Often those people are xenobiologists, because primitive forms of life have been found elsewhere in the solar system. If life is found on Pluto, the whole project could be put on indefinite hold.

That gives us our plot. Firstly we have the mystery of what happened to Clavius Harbour. And secondly someone is trying to sabotage the terraforming project. Central to all this is little Nou. Lucian, soft-hearted to a fault, decides to take her under his wing and try teaching her sign language, wherein lies a whole heap of trouble.

It should go without saying that Kissick knows her stuff. However, for those of you who have insufficient faith, I note that the book has rave blurbs from Stephen Baxter, Al Reynolds and Paul McAuley, all of whom have solid reputations for hard SF. It also has one from Paul Cornell who knows a bit about big questions and small children.

One final recommendation from me. Many near-future SF stories have characters who are fond of 20th (or now early 21st) Century culture. I’m assuming this allows the authors to enthuse a bit about their favourite bands and the like. Kissick is having none of this. She has invented a favourite rock band for Lucian, and also a favourite series of children’s fantasy books for him to give to Nou to read (by an author who hasn’t turned out to have deeply questionable politics). Good for her.

If you happen to be involved with a US-based publisher and are looking for a hot new hard SF writer to publish, do get in touch with Julie, because Lucy Kissick is just what you are looking for.

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

Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak

040, Book Review, Charlie Jane Anders

I don’t read a lot of YA, but I’d be happy to bet that Charlie Jane Anders’ Unstoppable series is not typical. It is not just about teenagers. It is about mostly queer teenagers.

In the first book, Victories Greater than Death, we discovered that Earth girl, Tina Mains, is actually a clone of the famous starship captain, Thaoh Argentian. Aided by a bunch of misfit teenagers from Earth, they vanquish the bad guys and save the galaxy. Or at least they save the Queen and her Royal Fleet.

Except…

Well, you see, Marrant, the leader of the evil rebels, who call themselves The Compassion, is well known in Galactic Society. He’s a respectable chap with a silver tongue, not a bunch of rag tag kids from a no-name planet in the back of beyond. Also Marrant has an easy sell on certain planets. Multi-speciesism is not universally popular. Especially when some of those species don’t even have radial symmetry, but do have tentacles.

Meanwhile our heroes have problems of their own. Rachel lost her ability to make art during her battle with the bad guys at the end of the previous book. Tina is discovering that being Captain Argentian’s clone brings with it expectations, and those don’t include being a pacifist. Elza is discovering that enlisting in the Princess Corps is not simply done on merit, you have to a privileged snob from an important planet too. And so on.

It is not long, therefore, before our heroes are pitted against Marrant and his horde of speciesist followers. However, despite being a bunch of annoying, thuggish bigots, they are not the real enemy. They are simply taking advantage of a genuine existential crisis to make a bid for power. The real bad guys are a Vayt, a gloomy species that has no concept of art. They have unleashed a weapon so terrible that the galaxy has about a year to live.

Yes, this is a series about climate change, how did you guess?

But back to the book. In fine space opera tradition it has some silly names. I’m not a big fan of the names of the aliens, but The Compassion is spot on. Their flagship is called Unity at All Costs, and their soldiers are known as Mercy Killers. Elza ends up working with someone called Princess Constellation, whose gnomic utterances make Zen koans seem a model of clarity. And Rachel finds herself about a spaceship crewed by an anarchist art collective. The ship is called Training Bra Disaster.

So yes, Dreams Bigger than Heartbreak is all very silly and charming, but it also makes some very important points along the way.

book cover
Title: Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak
By: Charlie Jane Anders
Publisher: Titan
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Kundo Wakes Up

040, Book Review, Saad Z. Hossain

Kundo Wakes Up is the latest in a series of books, mostly novellas, by Saad Z Hossain, who is fast becoming one of my favourite writers. They are essentially cyberpunk, but set in a near future South Asia which manages to be a much better setting for such tales than Seattle. They also have djinn. Everything is better with djinn, it seems.

The book begins with Kundo waking up, but the title has a double meaning because our hero has been in a profound depression for some time, and he’s just about to become active again. He’s also going to become much more aware of the way his world works, so perhaps it is a triple meaning.

Kundo used to be a famous artist. That was before the world started to fall apart. He lives in Chittagong on the Bay of Bengal. The ocean is gradually encroaching on the city, and the local version of Karma, the AI that controls the city, has more or less given up on humans. They still have utility. As we learned earlier in the series, humans are super factories for making nanotech. This is a far more sensible use for them than “batteries” or whatever nonsense there was in The Matrix. But, as Karma has discovered, humans can still do the job if they are being kept alive in old people’s homes. They don’t need to be up and about and causing trouble.

Kundo has enough Karma Points to live in luxury for the rest of his active life (and will doubtless be useful to Karma long after he has ceased to be active). But what is the point? There is no one to buy his art any more. No one cares. Even his wife has left him. One year and 237 days ago to be precise. At first Kundo tried to find her, or at least find out why she left, but every clue led to a dead end, and he sunk into depression. Quite why he has suddenly woken up is unclear, but for now he is back on the job.

Those of you who are familiar with Hossain’s work will expect that the plot will somehow involve video games, and you will be right. You will also expect that djinn will be involved, and you will be right again. But mostly it is an examination of the lives of two old men: the formerly famous artist, and Hafez the Tiger, once the most feared gangster in all Chittagong, and now barely able to walk unaided.

Along the way, Hossain asks what it means to get to live forever in paradise, and whether that is a goal worth chasing.

I don’t want to say much more, because this is only a novella, but it is a fun read and has serious points to make.

book cover
Title: kundo Wakes Up
By: Saad Z Hossain
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Åcon XI

040, Convention Report

It has been a long time. The last Åcon was in 2019. But finally Nordic fandom has been able to gather in Mariehamn once more, joined as usual by a few folks from further afield.

Some sympathy first for poor Tasha Shuri who had twice been lined up for a lovely trip to Åland as Guest of Honour, and was twice denied by the pandemic. This year the calendar did not work for her, so the con went without a GoH. Tasha’s Empire of Sand was made the Book of the Night.

Most of the usual crowd were there. Indeed, I understand that it was the best attended Åcon yet. Clearly everyone was keen to get back into con-going. Or at least back to Åland. As far as I know, there were no cases of COVID at the event. This is despite having to travel on a crowded ferry full of tourists to get there, and having to share the hotel bar with hordes of local ice hockey and football fans.

Little has changed in Åland since we were last there. There’s a lot of building going on. The hotel pool and sauna are now free, so I must remember to take a swimming costume next year. Mercedes is still making chocolate. Stallhagen are still making beer. The hotel still manages to run out of the more interesting of their beers very quickly. No one knows the answers to any of the questions in Jukka’s quiz.

Programming is, as usual, light. I had two panels, one fairly serious and one very much not so. The serious one was about juried awards, which is something Jukka and I can talk about for a long time unless people stop us. The other panel requires more explanation.

Suppose you wanted to get an AI to come up with panel titles for a convention. What would you train it on? Why, past Worldcon program books, of course. There’s plenty of material. Of course the results would be a bit weird, but with a good enough panel you could make them work, right?

We, the panel, were given a bunch of panel titles, and had around 5 minutes each to discuss the topics. We held forth on such important topics as, “Why are we still talking about Dune?”, “The Quantum Mixtapes of Venus”, “Ursula K Le Guin and the Other Woman of SF”, “Hugos or Cake?”, and “Worldbuilding with Rope.” We were, I think, very erudite, and did not make every panel about tentacle sex (though I tried hard). We also bravely resisted talking about John Norman’s Gor books for that final panel.

“PhDs discuss cake” was such a good panel title that we ran it for real. Congratulations to Dr Norja and Dr Fedyk for making a whole hour out of that, and for bravely eating cake so we didn’t have to.

Other than that, we may have done tourist stuff, gone out to dinner, drank beer, watched sportsball (or sportspuck) and just generally hung out enthusing about how nice it was to see old friends again. Also Finland won the World Ice Hockey Championships, so all is right with the world.

I hear a rumour that there will be a Eurocon bid for Mariehamn in 2025. Archipelacon 2 is a definite possibility. You should all come.

Star Trek: Prodigy

040, TV Review

We don’t yet have Paramount + here in the UK, and anyway I’m ambivalent about paying for a streaming service just to watch Star Trek. I can’t think of anything else they offer that I’d want to watch. So I’d kind of resigned myself to not seeing Prodigy. But then I discovered that it is on Nickleodeon, and I have that channel as part of my Sky subscription, so I promptly binged the first season.

Key points: firstly Prodigy is animated. And second it is very much aimed at kids. If you are OK with that, it is a lot of fun.

Far in the depths of space there is a lonely mining planet ruled over by a creepy guy called The Diviner and his robotic henchman, Drednok. The miners are all slaves, and they are of such a variety of species that they can’t even talk amongst themselves to plot rebellion. Nevertheless, some try.

Most notably there is the notorious terrorist known as Zero, whom Drednok has repeatedly failed to capture. Then there is Dal, who is neither a genius nor super-powerful, but is possessed of a boyish enthusiasm, an anti-authoritarian streak a mile wide, and a desperate desire to escape.

After another failed attempt at escape, Dal ends up in the deepest mines along with a young Brikar, a species of alien that owes their morphology to Ben Grimm. Rok-Tahk, it turns out, is an eight-year-old girl with a passion for anything cute and fluffy. How do we find that out? Well, Dal and Rok stumble across a starship hidden deep within the planet. It is still operational, and it has a universal translator system. It belongs to a group of people called The Federation.

Through various adventures, Dal and Rok manage to escape. Along with them they bring the notorious Zero, a troll Tellarite called Jankom Pog, and an amorphous blog of something creature called Murf. They also take along The Diviner’s daughter, Gwyn, as a hostage.

In order to escape the crew needs to work out how to fly this ship, which is called the Protostar. (Hint: never volunteer to fly a ship that is called proto-anything.) They discover that the ship has an on-board AI which manifests as a hologram of a humanoid called Kathryn Janeway. She mistakes our heroes for a bunch of Federation cadets and starts to teach them how to be a proper crew (which occasionally annoys our bunch of teenage runaways no end).

Of course The Diviner is none too pleased to have this great prize stolen from under his nose. He’s not overly happy about losing his daughter either, though that’s very much a secondary issue. Plot ensues, in which we start to learn a few things about the history of The Diviner and the Protostar.

The animated format allows the scriptwriters to do a few fun bits of fan service. That is not dead that cannot be animated. Consequently one episode involves a holodeck training simulation in which Dal gets to meet some famous Starfleet officers, including Mr. Spock and Montgomery Scott. Archive audio of Nimoy and Doohan is used, alongside similar footage of several still-living actors, to provide the voices.

While the crew might be a bunch of foolish, and occasionally annoying, kids, this is very much a Star Trek story, and one which I think will be enjoyed by many fans of the series. If you have access to Nickleodeon, or sign up for Paramount +, do check it out.

Picard – Season 2

040, TV Review

Jean Luc Picard has many, many loyal fans, and Paramount seems determined to milk them for all they are worth. This means re-visiting themes from the original Next Generation series. In the first season of Picard, that meant Data and related artificial beings. In this one it means mainly the Borg, whom we are supposed to have got rid of, and Q, whom sadly we haven’t.

I realise that this is not a commonly held view, but whenever I see anything Star Trek related that involves Q it is usually a signal for me to stop watching immediately. The fact that I sat through all of Picard: Season 2 suggests that I too have a fondness for Jean Luc that is easily exploited.

Having said that, Q is mercifully absent for most of the series. His role is largely to set up the plot, nudge an antagonist into action when one is needed, and then wrap things up at the end. In the meantime, things happen and…

Oh no, time travel! Multiverse! It seems like some sort of virus has infected Hollywood.

So, the Borg re-appear, and are just about to destroy an entire Federation fleet, when Picard and his pals are flung back in time to a world in which Earth has become a Fascist dictatorship. Romulan Legolas gets killed by the bad guys, and the rest of the team get sent further back in time to try to prevent the pivotal event that causes this new history to come into being. It is, you may have noticed, a Legends of Tomorrow plot.

Time travel stories are often an excuse to skimp on production costs by setting the story in the present day, or near as damnit. Here Michael Chabon and the script crew redeem themselves slightly with a sub-plot about a street clinic set up to help illegal immigrants. ICE are major villains for a couple of episodes.

But this series is all about nostalgia, and going back in time means a visit to the original 10 Forward bar where we get to meet a much younger Guinan, which in turn sets up a guest appearance by Whoopi Goldberg in the final episode.

The overriding impression I got from the series was of a deliberate change of course by senior management. The first series set Picard up with a brand new crew, of whom Seven of Nine was the only survivor of previous Trek. The new series sets out to jettison them in various ways. Romulan Legolas gets killed early on, though of course that may mean little as it happens in an alternate reality. Chris Rios gets left in the past (spoiler, sorry, but it becomes obvious very quickly that it will happen) and Agnes Jurati gets a whole new life where she’s not just an insecure genius whom everyone mostly ignores. I hear that in the next season several members of the old Next Gen crew will join the cast. So yeah, the idea of Picard leading a new crew has been abandoned, and nostalgia has become the order of the day.

What else? Brent Spiner gets to have fun playing Adam Soong (again). There is a whole backstory about Picard’s childhood trauma that does sort of have a role in the plot, but is mainly there to allow Patrick Stewart to show off his acting talent. And there is a guest appearance by, of all people, Wesley Crusher, who now works for the Time Variance Authority or some such.

If you sit and think about it for too long, it is all very silly. Thankfully there are some well-scripted episodes along the way, so if you don’t think too hard it is quite enjoyable.

Which should perhaps be all that needs to be said, except I want to stop and think a bit about the Point of Divergence that causes Earth to tip into a Fascist dictatorship. It turns out to be the success or failure of a manned space mission to Europa. I realise that this is Star Trek, and that therefore the entire rationale of the series is heavily bound up with the space programme, with looking outward from Earth, and boldly going. But arguing that without it we will inevitably sink into Fascism? Really? That seems an awfully big claim to be making.

Editorial – May 2022

040, Editorial

This issue comes to you live from Helsinki. I’m quite pleased that I have got an issue together with so much traveling, and distractions of various sorts. It isn’t quite as big as it might be. I still haven’t written the reviewing essay. I still haven’t watched the new Matrix movie, or the new Doctor Strange movie. I have watched Moon Knight, but I am waiting for the special episode of the History of Egypt Podcast we’ve been promised in which someone who knows far more about Egypt than I do will explain some of the nonsense. And two of the three conventions I attended this month have been hybrid. It is great that I was able to have some involvement in the Nebula Conference and in WisCon, but there was so much going on in meatspace that I didn’t manage to see enough of either to warrant a proper review.

I’ve also been reading books for possible publication. Announcements are likley to be forthcoming from Wizard’s Tower in due course.

First off the To Be Read pile for next month will be the new Guy Gavriel Kay novel, All the Seas of the World.

Cheryl

Issue #39

Issues

This is the April 2022 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


Cover: StarHenge

039, Art, Liam Sharp

This issue’s cover uses a piece of art that Liam Sharp has been using to promote his StarHenge comic. It shows a Mor-Dreadnaught of The Cast, who are the villains of the story. I cheekily asked Liam if he’d mind me using it, and he said yes. Huge thanks are appropriate. An undulterated version of the art is available below.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

039, Becky Chambers, Book Review

A Psalm for the Wild-BuiltIt is Hugo reading time, and that means catching up with Becky Chambers. It is easy to see why she is so popular. Her prose is effortlessly readable and deeply caring. But this can mask the amount of thought that she puts into her work.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built begins with mention of an entirely new religion. That’s an ambitious start for a novella. We don’t get detail about the six gods mentioned, but there’s enough to get a sense of what the people in the book will believe.

Our lead character, Sibling Dex, is a monk in the service of Allalae, the God of Small Comforts, represented by a bear. Immediately we have discovered that this is a society that recognises three genders, though how that works is not explored in this book. What we find instead is that Dex’s world is one in which the human (or human-analogue) inhabitants have stepped back from industrialisation and are trying to live in harmony with nature. So the book has an environmental message.

Dex is one of those people who are driven by a need to prove themselves. Although apparently good at what they do, Dex begins the book by resigning from their position in the city and taking up a new life as a travelling tea monk. This basically involves traveling from village to village in a self-propelled wagon acting as a combination tea shop and agony aunt. Skills in psychotherapy and tea-brewing are essential. It is an interesting vocation.

However, we don’t have much time to see Dex in action, because before long (in words rather than in time lived) they grow dissatisfied once more and head off into the wilderness to visit a long-abandoned monastery. Here we find the other important element of the book.

One of the reasons that Dex’s ancestors have abandoned industrialisation is that it abandoned them first. That is, the robots used in the society’s factories acquired sentience, went on strike, and decided to head off into the wilds and live apart from their former owners.

Here Chambers brings in all the standard science fictional tropes of robots being an analogue for slaves, and of what it means to be intelligent. She does this in a way that is all her own.

In the wilderness, Dex makes the acquaintance of Splendid Speckled Mosscap (Mosscap for short), a robot who has volunteered to be the first of their kind in generations to make contact with humans. Being a robot, Mosscap has no gender, but again that isn’t explored. What Chambers examines instead is Dex’s embarrassment at meeting a member of a formerly-enslaved population and inability to know how to behave in such a situation. This is exacerbated by the fact that Mosscap is entirely at home in the wilderness, whereas Dex is ignorant and helpless.

Give that the book is a novella, there isn’t a huge amount more than that to the plot, though Chambers packs a lot of interesting conversation into the rest of the story, and provides character growth for both Dex and Mosscap. I understand that there will be more books in the series, and I’m going to be pre-ordering them because I want to see how things develop. I’ll probably still put Cat Valente at the top of my ballot because I’m me, but the quality of the novella finalists this year is astonishing, and I have no idea who will win.

book cover
Title: A Psalm for the Wild-Built
By: Becky Chambers
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Bluebird

039, Book Review, Ciel Pierlot

Did someone say, “lesbian space pirate”? I’m in.

Of course that’s not all that there is to Bluebird by Ciel Pierlot. There’s a lot of nifty worldbuilding for a start. Unlike rather too much space opera, Bluebird is not a tale of Evil Empire and Plucky Rebels. The politics are somewhat more subtle. The galaxy has three main factions. The folks from Pyrite are never happier than when they are in a lab up to their elbows in inventing something. The folks from Asectic dress in white and gold, thinking high minded thoughts while contemplating perfect works of art and drinking exquisite champagne. As for Ossuary, they tend to dress all in black and are probably never happier than when grimly contemplating a graveyard.

These, of course, are social ideals. Not everyone who lives under the control of a faction is stereotypical. Take Rig, for example. She was perfectly happy brilliantly inventing stuff until it occurred to her that there were moral issues involved in working for an arms manufacturer, and there are some weapons that should never find their way off the drawing board. Which is why she is now on the run working with a gang of smugglers who help people trying to escape from which ever faction they have got on the wrong side of.

Then there’s June, who is a head librarian on the Asectic homeworld. Her job is the preservation of all that is good and pure and vital to Asetic culture. That hasn’t stopped her from falling in love with a dashing, gun-slinging human disaster of a space pirate like Rig. Into every librarian’s life, a little chaos must fall.

The plot doesn’t really get going, however, until Rig’s life gets too chaotic, even for her. Firstly she meets Glinka, who is clearly also on the run, has combat skills that suggest she might secretly be Natasha Romanoff, and who is obviously very sick when she’s not doped up for action. Secondly, the Pyrite intelligence services, who very much want the weapon plans that Rig ran off with, have caught up with her. More specifically they have caught her sister, Daara, and are holding the poor girl to ransom.

If this reminds you of the plot of both Valerie Valdes novels, you would be dead right. The whole sibling in peril thing is getting a bit boring. However, I think Pierlot does it better. Which brings me to the cover blurb in which Tim Pratt describes Bluebird as, “stunningly assured.” He’s dead right. As far as I know, this is Pierlot’s first novel. Apparently she wrote it during lectures at university. If that’s what she can do now, I really want to see what she will come up with in five years’ time. I’ve seen better debuts, but they tend to be from people who have been working hard at their craft for years, if not decades, not people who are fresh out of college.

So there you have it. A fun, action-filled lesbian space romp. Did I need to write all of those words above? Probably not. That’s entirely sufficient recommendation.

book cover
Title: Bluebird
By: Ciel Pierlot
Publisher: Angry Robot
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

StarHenge

039, Comic Review, Liam Sharp

Sometimes in this business you meet someone and can see immediately that they have huge amounts of talent and are going to do very well for themselves. In my case one such person was Liam Sharp. I could see that he had a fine career as an artist in front of him, and I was right. He’s currently having a bumper year. He’s had a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign for an art book, and now he is starting that holy grail of all comics people, a creator-owned title.

Sharp’s art has gone from strength to strength over the past few years. He’s had a hugely successful collaboration with Grant Morrison on Green Lantern. He’s also done a The Brave and the Bold mini-series in which Batman and Wonder Woman team up to solve a murder in Tir Na Nog. He wrote the script for the latter as well as creating some of my favourite images of Diana.

Comics, unlike novels, are very much a team project. If you look at the credits on a standard superhero book, you’ll often see that one person does the pencils, another one inks them, a third adds the colour, someone else writes the script, and a fifth person just does the lettering. That can make doing a creator-owned title a little complicated. But not for Sharp. When he does a creator owned book, he does everything himself. Which is very impressive.

The book in question is called StarHenge, and it is Arthuriana. If you remember my review of Nicola Griffith’s Spear you will remember that it does Arthur on a very small stage. All of the action takes place in a small part of South Wales, and most of the familiar Arthurian saga is wrapped up in the space of a novella. StarHenge is exactly the opposite. It takes place on the biggest stage imaginable.

Part of the story takes place in the distant past, where the myth of Arthur has its origins, and where magic still works. Part of the story takes place in the distant future where humans fight a desperate war across the universe against a vicious alien species known as The Cast. The Ur-Queen sends her only son back in time to find the secret of magic, the only weapon that she thinks might be able to tip the war in humankind’s favour.

Meanwhile, in the present day, we meet a teenage girl from Brighton and her Black American boyfriend. Quite what role Amber and Daryn will play in the story is not yet clear. (I’ve only read issue #1 of the comic.) However, it is already clear that the story will take place on an epic scale and with the greatest possible odds at stake. I’m very much looking forward to what Sharp will do with the story. My guess is that it will read well with a heavy rock soundtrack.

In the meantime, you have art to feast your eyes upon. Sharp kindly let me use the image of one of the book’s villains, a Mor-Dreadnaught of The Cast, as the cover of this issue. There’s a lot more of that quality in the book. Issue #1 will be out in July (so yes, I got an ARC), so if you are into comics, or Arthuriana, why not give it a pre-order. Failing all else, how about giving Sharp a nod in the Best Professional Artist Hugo next year, because he absolutely deserves it.

Midnight Doorways

039, Book Review, Usman T Malik

Midnight DoorwaysWhile the level of diversity in mainstream publishing has improved quite a bit of late, it is still hard for writers of colour who do not live in the Anglosphere to get their work considered. Often what they have to do is publish locally and hope that their book gets some attention, and is then picked up by a bigger publisher. Examples of this are Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits, which will be re-published as The City Inside by Tot.com in June, and Lavanya Lakshminarayan’s Analog/Virtual, which will be republished as The Ten Percent Thief by Solaris next year. I am hoping that something similar will happen with Usman T Malik’s Midnight Doorways.

Malik is no stranger to the Anglosphere. Indeed, his fiction has already won both the Bram Stoker Award and the British Fantasy Award. He has twice been a finalist in the Nebulas, and once in the World Fantasy Awards. And yet his first collection was put out in 2021 by a small company called Kitab whom I think are based in Kathmandu, though the word means “book” so there could be many publishers of that name. Midnight Doorways has since been picked up by Hachette India (though with a terrible new cover) and there’s a kindle edition available from the Amazon India website. You can apparently get copies of the original edition via Malik’s website, though I guess they will go out of print soon.

Anyway, you should get a copy if you can.

My (electronic) copy came via the Crawford Award, as I’m one of the people whose opinions Gary Wolfe solicits when judging the award. The Crawford is for a first fantasy book, and is often won by collections. As you probably know, I’m not big on short fiction, and I’m not a great fan of horror, but other people involved with the Crawford were raving about this book so I asked for a copy. I immediately agreed that it should win. If a horror collection could win me over, it had to be really good.

I said that Midnight Doorways is horror, and Malik’s work is certainly marketed in that genre. However, this is not splatterpunk, or tentacled beings from beyond the stars, or even zombies. Malik’s stories are weird and creepy, and most definitely at least suggestive of the supernatural. In one story an ancient goddess eats rather a lot of people, but the story is being told to a police interrogator by an opium addict whose testimony may not be wholly reliable. A more common sort of horror is being a young girl in an orphanage coming to know that one day you will be too old and the staff will need to sell you to a husband in order to earn money to look after the next generation.

Malik makes no concessions to Anglo culture. His stories are set in Pakistan. The characters are mostly Muslim, with a scattering of Hindus and Christians. The issues that they face are very much the sort of issues that people living in places like Lahore face. And yet these people are entirely relatable. Malik is able to get us to understand them, to identify with them, and to feel for them. And some of them have very strange problems.

Despite the cover blurb, the book does not contain the British Fantasy Award winning novella, “The Pauper Prince and the Eucalyptus Jinn”. It does contain the Stoker-winning short story, “The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family”, and the Stoker-finalist story, “Dead Lovers on Each Blade, Hung”. It is well worth a look if you can get hold of it. And if not, look out for Malik’s short fiction in magazines.

book cover
Title: Midnight Doorways
By: Usman T Malik
Publisher: Kitab
Purchase links:
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The White Room

039, Book Review, Zoran Živković

The White RoomIf you want to know the things we see
Then step inside our skins
– “The White Room”, The KLF

Back in Emerald City days, when I was starting to get interested in SF&F in translation, I was contacted by a Serbian writer called Zoran Živković. It was probably Jeff VanderMeer’s fault. Lots of things were. Živković was already hugely respected in his native land, and on the European literary scene, but he wanted his work to come to the attention of the English-speaking SF&F market. He might have been accepted as a literary writer, and have a post teaching creative writing at the University of Belgrade, but he had done his PhD on Arthur C Clarke so there was an itch left unscratched.

In those days, breaking into the English-speaking market was very hard, even more so than it is today. Živković used to do his own translations of his work and have small print runs done that he could send out to drum up interest. For published versions, Tamar Yellin or Alice Copple-Tošić would add a little polish to the prose.

As time went by, and with support from a whole bunch of great people, Živković established a reputation. His work wasn’t going to appeal to the general SF&F audience, but it fitted in well with the New Weird thing that was going on at the time. When my colleagues at SFSFC and I were running World Fantasy in 2009, and got ordered by the World Fantasy to bring in another guest (apparently we had too many members), we went for Živković rather than another anglophone horror writer. I hope that Steve Jones was suitably annoyed.

In 2017 Živković was recognised as a European Grand Master by ESFS at the Eurocon in Dortmund. His bio now lists this as his crowning achievement. Since then, and after 22 novels, he announced his retirement. That’s fair enough. He’s in his 70s these days and retired from work. His entire catalogue is available in beautiful new editions from Cadmus Press, with stunning covers by Youchan Ito. He has other things to do with his life. Which is why I was surprised to get email from him asking if I would like a copy of his new novel. Naturally I jumped at the chance.

The White Room will doubtless be seen as somewhat self-indulgent by some readers. It is, after all, a book in which the main writer is an elderly professor of creative writing from Belgrade, a man by the name of Zoran Živković. It is also a book that is very much the sort of thing that Živković fans have come to know and love. And, as we shall see, in part concerned with very modern issues.

The plot of the book can be summed up in the first line: “Ivana had gone missing.” The Professor Živković of the book is twice-divorced and now lives with a somewhat younger, though very much middle-aged, woman who had been a student in his writing classes. Ivana and the Professor have that “fond of each other but each have our own lives and histories” relationship that people who meet well into their lives tend to do. Živković thinks nothing of it when Ivana goes out one day without telling him where she is going. It isn’t until the evening, when she doesn’t come back to dinner, that he realises something is wrong.

Naturally the Professor phones the police, and then has the embarrassing experience of explaining that he doesn’t know where his girlfriend went, and can’t even remember what she was wearing when she left. The lady police inspector that he talks to is unimpressed. Fortunately the Belgrade police have an excellent CCTV system with coverage of most of the city, and they are soon on the track of the missing Ivana.

Why, then, has Ivana gone missing? Has she been kidnapped? Have she and the professor had a fight that he isn’t telling us about because he in an unreliable narrator of his own life? Has he just not noticed a cooling in her affections?

Then the emails start arriving. Each one contains a clickable link that is less a URL and more the activation code for some sophisticated malware that brings up short video showing Ivana doing various things that Živković knows she would not, or even cannot, do. Eventually it becomes obvious that these videos are sophisticated deep fakes, and the Serbian government’s cyber war team takes an interest. What began as a case of a missing girlfriend soon ramps up into a situation that could lead to Professor Živković being disappeared by his government’s counter-espionage operatives.

That’s enough from me. You’ll need to read the book to find out where this goes. It is only a couple of hundred pages, so you’ll get through it quickly. Enjoy.

I’ll wait in this place where the sun never shines;
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves.
– “The White Room”, Cream

book cover
Title: The White Room
By: Zoran Živković
Translator: Randall A Major
Publisher: Cadmus
Purchase links:
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Rosebud

039, Book Review, Paul Cornell

RosebudThis is another book that I can’t give a proper review of, because I did a brief bit of consultancy work on it. My name is right there in the acknowledgements. But I did love the book when I first read it, and consequently want to tell you about it.

The Rosebud is a prospecting vessel mining the rings of Saturn for minerals. She belongs to the Company, as indeed does pretty much everything else. The crew of five are in indentured servitude and have had a degree of loyalty programmed into them, though not so much as it would interfere with their functioning as sentient minds.

I say minds because the crew of the Rosebud is entirely digital. The ship is, after all, only about 1 mm across. It is, nevertheless, packed with technology, and five minds. Some of them may once have been human, but they now all exist in software only. They are as follows.

Haunt is the gothiest goth that ever gothed, and is currently manifesting as something like Ghost Rider but with a very big black horse instead of a motorbike. Huge if True is a friendly spherical fellow covered in masses of small hands. Bob is an arsehole, both personally and professionally, but he manifests as a red balloon. Diana is a scientist of sorts and appears as an elegant human woman. And Quin, their captain, is a swarm of insects.

All of them could, no doubt, appear in other forms, but these bodies are ones that they have picked for a reason, have gotten used to, and have honed over the past 300 years of service aboard the Rosebud. There’s not a lot else to do when you are not working, though of course that isn’t very often. Not a lot happens in the rings of Saturn. Until one day it does.

That something is a craft similar to their own. It is a little smaller, perfectly spherical, perfectly black, and suspiciously alien. This is the sort of encounter for which an independently intelligent crew exists. Decisions need to be made that are outside of the mission parameters. Correct decisions may result in plaudits from the Company. Incorrect decisions will certainly result in punishment. Not doing anything is also a decision.

On the cover Peter Watts describes Rosebud (the book, not the spaceship) as, “a scream disguised as a giggle.” He’s spot on. What Paul Cornell has done here is take all of his angst and frustration about the state of the world, fling it out into the solar system, and feed it back to us via a found family of ridiculous misfits with an impossible mission who need to succeed despite the trauma each has faced in their past life that has led them to their current state of employed imprisonment.

There’s a content warning at the start of the book, and I should note that it is not just trans people who have been appallingly treated in the world of the book. Nevertheless, this is a book with hope at the end of that dark tunnel of political despair, and I’m very pleased that Cornell has written it.

book cover
Title: Rosebud
By: Paul Cornell
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Eastercon 2022

039, Convention Report

As experiments go, this was one part encouraging and one part rather scary. Let’s start with the good stuff.

Reclamation (that being the name of this year’s Eastercon) wasn’t my first post-pandemic event; I have already done FantasyCon, BristolCon and World Fantasy. However, it was the first big one. FantasyCon and World Fantasy were both very small compared to their usual numbers, and BristolCon is never big. Eastercon was also relatively small in comparison to usual numbers, but it still attracted 659 people. Also it was in a busy Heathrow hotel, which made it feel busier than it actually was. It felt like a big convention, and thanks to the location I got to see a bunch of people from the USA and Europe that I haven’t seen in years.

The Radisson Hotel & Conference Centre, a.k.a. the Radisson Red, a.k.a. the Park Inn if you looked at some of the older signage, is a strange place. It is not as strange as the Radisson Non-Euclidian, but it is still odd as far as convention space goes. There are two main conference areas, which presumably can be let separately, and a corridor full of meeting rooms connecting them. We had the lot. Because this was Eastercon, and one of the three large spaces had to be dedicated to a real ale bar, the dealers ended up spread around various meeting rooms, including the aforementioned corridor. I ended up sharing a room with Dave Hutchinson’s wife, Bogna, who has a jewellery business.

A number of dealers were unhappy with this arrangement. They thought that footfall would have been much higher in a traditional dealers’ room. They may have been right, but I haven’t been to an Eastercon in ages and this was my first selling books. I was very pleased with the business I did. Not that I was going to recoup the cost of the hotel and travel, but I certainly made back the cost of the table and convention membership, which hasn’t been true of every con I have been to.

Thanks to Bogna and Dave offering to keep an eye on things for me, I was able to do a couple of panels. One was on publishing during the pandemic, and the other on reclaiming our bodies (and ourselves) as the pandemic drifts into a state of always having lived in existential fear. I moderated both, and both seemed to go very well. My thanks to my excellent panellists.

I didn’t get to attend any other panels, and I only briefly stuck my nose into the Art Show, so I can’t say much about the rest of the con. Other people seemed to have enjoyed it too. I did have someone come to my table and tell me that my business plan for Wizard’s Tower was terrible and I should publish him if I knew what was good for me, but that was more comedy than anything. Also I’m told that UK fandom’s lone anti-trans extremist turned up at a bid session to gripe about toilets, and was shouted down. As con issues go, those were very minor.

It is possible that the virtual membership had a less good time. I kept an eye on the Discord and saw regular complaints about people not getting the links they needed to watch panels, or streams not working. How much these were real issues and how much this was people still not used to the tech I do not know, but neither of my panels had any interaction from the online membership which was disappointing.

The highlight of the weekend was the British Science Fiction Association Awards. Juliet was up for the Best Novel award for the latest Green Man book. Neither she nor I were in the slightest bit surprised to see Adrian Tchaikovsky win for Shards of Earth. Despite being an award finalist, The Green Man’s Challenge didn’t sell in any great quantities. Frankly we were delighted with the recognition. Of the four books in the series, three have now been award finalists, which is an amazing achievement.

My other interest in the awards was in the Non-Fiction category where the latest Academia Lunare book was a finalist. Again I didn’t expect a win. There were people on the ballot far better known to the Eastercon community. But win we did. Francesca, bless her, was deliriously happy, as were her parents back in Italy whom I briefly met on a video call. She’s done amazing work with those books and absolutely deserves the success they have had. I’m very pleased to have been able to support the project with a few essays. This time the essay in question was the one about queer animals, which is a piece I’m rather fond of.

So all of that was very good. Everyone was wandering around saying how lovely it was to see old friends again. A couple of people reported testing positive for COVID during the con and promptly went into isolation. It seemed like things had gone well.

On Monday night I suddenly felt desperately tired and went to bed around 9:00pm. I didn’t sleep well and felt decidedly groggy in the morning. However, I tested negative and was well enough to load up the car and drive home, so I did. I tested negative again on Wednesday, though I still felt ill. Fortunately, my life is normally spent in isolation, and aside from two brief trips to Tesco and answering the door to the postperson I’ve had no human interaction since. Whatever was upsetting my body has since cleared up and I’m still testing negative. I have put it down to con crud.

Meanwhile reports of positive tests started to flood in on Discord. These included Jo & Roz, with whom I’d had breakfast on Monday, and Tej Turner, whom I’d chatted to on several occasions. The contact tracing channel on Discord counted a total of 74 positive cases. Some were only mildly affected, but some were seriously ill and at least one ended up in hospital.

I note that all these people had been vaccinated. We know this because the con required us to present evidence of vaccination at registration. This is an important lesson. Vaccination does not prevent you from catching COVID. It does (usually) prevent you from dying of it when you do.

People who are running other conventions will doubtless be viewing this with some degree of nervousness. Cons certainly have the potential to be super-spreader events. But I don’t think that the story is that simple.

To start with, this being the UK, a lot of people travelled to the con by train. And it being Easter those trains were probably packed full of maskless people. In addition, the hotel was full all weekend because lots of people were flying through Heathrow. While we might have been masked, other hotel guests, and a lot of the hotel staff, were not. These are risks that other cons may not face.

Where Eastercon may have fallen down was on traditional UK con culture. Having promised Kevin to be very careful, I stayed masked except when eating or in my hotel room. I did not socialise. Many of the con attendees spent the evening in the bar, where people would have been unmasked. I also saw a lot of people wandering around with a pint in one hand, which was apparently an excuse to go unmasked because you were drinking.

All this is worth bearing in mind as we slowly move back into convention culture. I think we are past the stage where a con can, on its own, keep attendees safe. There’s too much else going on, and too much of wider society has swallowed the political claim that the pandemic is “over”. We can, however, be aware of things that make us more or less safe, and act accordingly.

Next month I will be off to Finland for Åcon and an academic conference. I will be interested to see how different those experiences are.

Spiderman – No Way Home

039, Movie Review

Well that wasn’t as bad as I expected. I’d been all primed to absolutely hate this movie. Into the SpiderVerse is by far my favourite Spiderman movie, and I had heard that No Way Home steals much of the plot of that. To a certain extent it does, and of course it does it badly because all of the spiderpeople it brings in from across the multiverse are Peter Parker, which is very boring in comparison. However, there’s a reason why the new film is the way it is.

Unlike most of the MCU, Spiderman has a long history in the movies. Before Tom Holland there was Tobey Maguire, and before him there was Andrew Garfield. Crucially both sets of previous spidermovies were produced by Sony. An awful lot of backroom negotiating will have been required to bring Spidey into the MCU, and this film may have been part of that.

In the extras for No Way Home there is a lot of talk about it being the final Spiderman movie. I don’t think it will be, though the next one may have a new director and direction. I also expect Tom Holland to turn up in the next batch of Avengers movies, but this film does mark the end of an era, and it does it by looking back at the history of Spiderman movies in a very nostalgic way.

Spoilers Ahead (though not any that you won’t be able to guess from looking at the cast list).

The film begins with the ending of the previous film, in which Peter Parker’s secret identity is made known to the world by a delighted J Jonah Jameson. In desperation, Peter asks Doctor Strange to cast a spell that will cause everyone to forget this vital piece of knowledge, but the spell goes wrong and this leads to a rift in the space-time continuum. Sorry, wrong franchise. A breach in the multiverse, through which various people travel.

The clever bit is that the spell brings through a bunch of major villains, played by the same people who played them in the Sony movies. These are followed by Maguire and Garfield, two older and wiser Parkers, who have to help Tom Holland’s Peter defeat “their” opponents.

Jamie Foxx is good as Electro (and gets a much better costume). Alfred Molina is brilliant as always as Doc Ock. And both cheerfully admit to having been acted off the set by Willem Dafoe as the Green Goblin. Dafoe is right up there with Burgess Meredith’s Penguin as one of the finest super villains ever to grace the screen. He’s genuinely scary.

We have Zendaya as well, and any movie with Zendaya in it is a good movie by definition.

So yes, much better than expected, though still not a patch on Into the SpiderVerse. Apparently Miles is getting a second movie, but it won’t be out until next year because animation of that quality takes a very long time to make.

MCU fans will, of course, be aware that the multiverse is very much a thing right now, and Doctor Strange will be traveling it once more very soon. Also there will be Wanda, and America Chavez. I might actually have to go to a movie theatre.

Story Matrices

039, Book Review, Gillian Polack

Story MatricesThe full title of this book is Story Matrices: Cultural Encoding and Cultural Baggage in Science Fiction and Fantasy, because it is an academic work and therefore must have a colon somewhere. However, don’t let that put you off, because Gillian Polack tries hard to make her work accessible, and the book is published by Luna Press so it does not cost three years’ wages to buy.

The basic concept of the book is an extended metaphor about building novels with cultural bricks. That should be fairly obvious. With any story world that you build, you have a choice of cultural elements that you can include, or not. If that were all that the book was, it would be fairly trivial. But it isn’t.

Polack adds to her analytical tools by borrowing three terms from linguistics (idiolect, dialect and language). These she re-casts into idioculture, diaculture and culture. Broadly speaking these mean the writers own views, the writer’s relationships with others, and the writer’s broader relationship with their native culture. This is quite familiar to me because I use similar techniques to explain how people relate to gender.

Finally, Polack adds a layer of ethics, because not all uses of cultural brickwork are morally equivalent. For example, if your experience of colonisation is that of a person whose culture has been colonised, that is not the same as someone whose experience of colonisation is that of a coloniser, even though the diacultural relationship in question is the same.

All of this is useful from the points of view of both analysing and constructing a novel, and Polack’s book will therefore be of interest to both critics and writers. In particular it should help navigate contentious issues such as cultural appropriation. It may also help authors identify blind spots in their work. For example, I was disappointed, though not entirely surprised, to discover that most “mediaeval” fantasy does not contain any Jewish characters, or Jewish-analogue characters, even when the setting is clearly based on an historical milieu in which Jews played a significant role in society.

As for historical fiction, let’s just not mention Ivanhoe, please. That could go on for a long time.

While I found the book very interesting, I do have a few reservations. The first is mildly bizarre, in that Marion Zimmer Bradley’s name is mis-spelled in about half of the occasions it appears, including one instance where it is correct once and incorrect once in the same paragraph.

More seriously, some of Polack’s examples could have benefitted from more research. Her explanation of the issues that the LGBT+ community has with JK Rowling is a little muddled. She describes Karen Lord as a more literary writer than Nalo Hopkinson on the basis of The Best of All Possible Worlds being published by Penguin Random House. But Hopkinson comes from a literary family, is a teacher of creative writing, and had her first novel published by Warner Aspect, whereas Lord’s academic background is in science and sociology, and her first novel, Redemption in Indigo, was published by Small Beer Press. The distinction seems somewhat odd to me (and I adore both writers). Her analysis of Irish writers and their relation to Irish history does not include Ian McDonald whose novels Hearts, Hands and Voices, and Sacrifice of Fools, are both intimately connected to recent Northern Irish history.

Finally, while Polack’s style is succinct and conversational, there are times when it seemed to me that she expected us to know what she was writing about. Consequently, I would have liked a little more detailed explanation of her points, even if that made the book more academic in style.

Overall, however, this is definitely a book I valued reading, and whose insights I hope to use in my own work. I’m also very well disposed to any mediaeval historian who backs up my opinion that the world of Westeros is economically and politically unworkable. Sorry George.

book cover
Title: Story Matrices
By: Gillian Polack
Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura
1 … 7 8 9 10 11 … 22