Guardians of the Night (A Gideon and Sirius novel)

Michael Gideon and his partner Sirius, a German shepherd, are the entire staff of the LAPD Special Cases Unit, handling bizarre and hard to categorise crimes. That's why they get the call when a homeless man reports the murder of an angel by persons unknown in a silent, black car.

So, I'm going to be honest here, I was misled by the blurb into thinking this would be an occult mystery, and I think I may not have appreciated it as a crime/conspiracy novel as much as I might have done had I not been waiting for the other shoe to levitate. As it is, whatever the truth of the initial crime - and by the end of the novel it still isn't clear - this isn't a book about an angel being murdered, but about shady business practices and the corrupt rich.

It's an odd sort of detective novel. The original crime may not even exist and a second crime goes unsolved and may not have been a crime, while the denouement features the resolution of a murder not committed until the book is almost over. There is also an arc plot from the first book, which I haven't read; my bad.

It's not a bad book, although I suspect a doggier reader would get more from it than me.

Two Months of Kindle Unlimited

I have now pretty much concluded my time with Kindle Unlimited. It's not a bad concept - access to a collection of titles for £7.99 a month, including several with unabridged audio accompaniment - but although I am primarily a Kindle-based reader now, I've opted not to continue for several reasons.

1) Cost: At present, I can get by on £7.99 a month or less on books. In particular, I can get books, ebooks and audiobooks from the library.

2) Choice: The range is limited and I already have most of the really good stuff in paper format. I've read some right old tosh as part of my subscription.

3) Alternatives: In addition to the library option, as a Prime subscriber it turns out I already get one free book a month from a selection of pre-publication titles. That should keep me in random interest for a while at least.

4) It's Christmas: I'll probably have at least some books for Christmas, so an ebook sub will be wasted.

5) Flexibility: I can always pick it up again for a month or so if I fancy working through something specific.

Nostrum and Emaculum

Wrapping up my Kindle Unlimited experiment, I conclude Roberto Calas' Scourge trilogy with Nostrum and Emaculum, in text rather than audiobook format.

Nostrum picks up two days after the end of The Scourge, as Sir Edward Dallingridge decides that faith and prayer and patience aren't working to heal his plagued wife and sets off in search of the alchemist who is rumoured to have found a cure. Reunited with Tristan and joined by the sassy nun Beliscensia, he seeks out the island fortress where the alchemist works, hunts a dragon, is captured several times and continues to be menaced by his nemesis Sir Gerald and to experience greatly varied success in the employment of hand cannons.

Emaculum sees Sir Edward, cure in hand, struggling to return to St Edmund's Bury through the increasingly splintered jurisdictions of the many mad kings of the new England (one of whom is the actual mad king of England.) With the cure in hand he has a chance to save Elizabeth, but the Virgin Mary and St Giles have trials yet in store for their apparent favourite, now sworn to be the champion of the plagued, defender of those who can yet be cured of their malady.

As in The Scourge, Calas merges his zombie horror with a loving recreation of the approximate history of the period as it might have played out given the rise of a zombie plague in the wake of the Black Death. He keeps the source of the plague (god, the devil, ground up saints' bones) uncertain, and likewise the means of repelling them (holy relics, lichens and lepers) are never explored in anachronistic terms. The focus is on Sir Edward and his increasingly obsessive quest to save his wife or to die with her.

Sir Edward is brutal and Sir Tristan, his closest ally, seems almost inordinately pleased each time he manages to spike an enemy with the plague tincture. On the other hand it was a violent age, and their enemies are almost monstrous, which kind of makes them seem okay by comparison.

The Scourge trilogy is a decent historical zombie romp. It's more or less my first - at least in written form - although I'm sure the kindle store is full of the bloody things by now. It is thus my benchmark for the subgenre moving forward.

The Scourge

In the wake of the Black Death and the Peasant's Revolt, 14th Century England falls under a new shadow. The Scourge is a pestilence that transforms its victims into shambling revenants, hungry for flesh and highly contagious. Sir Edward of Bodiam sets out across the plague-infested land with two companions, the impious Sir Tristan and the devout Sir Morgan, in defiance of the bishops and in search of his wife, stranded in St Edmund's Bury.

The Scourge is a mediaeval zombie road movie, a bit like Mad Max on horses, as Sir Edward and his party make their way north, encountering rogues, profiteers and the petty fiefdoms or renegade lords along the way. It is by turns darkly humourous and desperately tragic (Sir Morgan's attempt to save a village with the guaranteed blood of the Virgin Mary is heartrending in its irony,) and Calas makes excellent use of repetition (as Narrator, Sir Edward harks back to certain phrases: the moment of realisation, in times of madness only madness can save) in what was originally a serial novel released through Amazon in installments.

The audiobook narration is a little unsteady in places, but thanks to Kindle Unlimited I didn't pay for it and it is mostly well done.

Calas obviously has some fun with his history as he weaves a zombie apocalypse into the general bleakness and horror of 14th Century life. It's a little short on decent female characters (most are in need of rescue and, as seen through Edward's eyes, idealised figures of virtue, and the one that isn't is a veritable monster,) but is otherwise an engaging adventure yarn.

Enchantress

The Empire exists in a state of balance. The Emperor and the Houses each have their own magical Lore, and the Order is the only source of the Essence which powers that Lore. But this is an unstable equilibrium, and when the Lexicons which are the source of each Lore begin to be stolen, and Houses to fall under a unifying banner, the peace of the Empire is set to be replaced with tyranny. Luckily Ella and her brother Miro, being orphans and thus prodigally talented beyond advanced students of their chosen fields of study (the Lore of enchantment and stabbing people a lot respectively) are there to take a stand.

Enchantress has a pretty good set up, and a number of impressive features. I like the fact that the Federal Republic of One Hat States is shown to be an artificial construct created by the hoarding of what was meant to be shared, and that the omnipresence of magic has stifled technological growth, from medicine to archery science and the use of horses.

Unfortunately, it is let down by its characters, especially stock mysterious orphans who rise through the ranks and turn out to be the children of someone significant after all. The fact that pretty much everyone but them seems to be well aware of their heritage from the get-go is especially egregious. And as to their love lives...

Ella assiduously avoids romantic entanglements until she falls completely under the spell of a man with especially dreamy eyes, who betrays her but ultimately is redeemed by love for her, after like a dozen people have died messily because of their actions. Still, he's a gentleman, and so she ends the book not only a heroine in spite of her many screw ups, but also a virgin, because how could she not. Miro on the other hand has shagged his way across a continent, but blows off the woman he truly loves (and who loves him) rather than interfere with her arranged marriage, because that way he can have angst to go with his peculiar absence of venereal diseases.

Enchantress has interesting ideas and an epic story, but the characters feel in dire need of a collective slap.

The Dystopia Chronicles

In his sequel to The Atopia Chronicles, Matthew Mather gets apocalyptic.

The artificial island state of Atopia is rapidly securing a place at the centre of the US-led Alliance, and pushing for war against its corporate and ideological enemies. Those enemies believe that there is something more than merely human in this malice, that an ancient enemy is reaching out from prehistory to snuff out civilisation. Caught in the middle, Bob and his friends struggle to restore order to a world seemingly gone mad.

The Dystopia Chronicles is a relatively decent techno-apocalyptic thriller, but I was disappointed that Mather abandoned the multiple narrative structure which was one of the main strengths of The Atopia Chronicles. Given the conspiracy-driven nature of the plot (the specific technological aspects are far less important than in the first book) the presence of an omniscient narrator is much less effective than a collective of unreliable voices would have been, not least because the book's final twist was so perfectly placed to provide a meta-fictional justification for that model.

As with the first, I listened to this book in audiobook form, thanks to Kindle Unlimited. The performance was good, but I missed the multi-voice recording of Atopia.

Not a bad book then, but ultimately not as good as I had hoped.

The Nameless One

I was in the library with my daughter when I spotted The Nameless One. A new Edge Chronicle? Count me in!

In the Third Age of Flight, Cade Quarter is a refugee from Great Glade, one of the three major cities of the Edge. The nephew of Nate Quarter - and thus similarly a descendant of the sorry bastard sons of destiny who shaped the Edge in the First and Second Ages (Quint, Twig and Rook) - he is hunted for his father's heresy in seeking to learn what lies below the Edge. His flight takes him aboard a mighty skytavern, and thus to the heart of the Deepwoods, where he struggles to find a place amid the beauty and peril of the wild Edge.

In terms of the books that have gone before it, The Nameless One is oddly sedate, reading more like a fantasy version of Little House on the Prairie (or more accurately, I suppose, Little House in the Big Woods) than the swashbuckling adventures of the other Edge Chronicles. That being said, change is not automatically a bad thing, and Cade Quarter's travails are no less gripping for his enemy being the unwitting hostility of nature rather than a guild of corrupt merchants or a dodgy skyship quartermaster.

As ever, the real star of the show is the Edge itself, with its fantastical flora and fauna and array of strange people. Strangest of all is the titular Nameless One; a 'half-formed' giant from the dark lands around Riverise, this powerful, yet pitiful creature is the emotional core of the novel. More than any other installment, The Nameless One feels like the introduction to a story, incomplete in itself, and I am definitely intrigued to see where it will go next.

The Atopia Chronicles

Kindle Unlimited is slowing me down by offering free audiobook readings. I like audiobooks, but they go slower than reading a book myself. On the other hand, I'll probably drop Unlimited in a few days when the free trial expires, and it's been a nice interlude.

The most recent 'read' from my list is Matthew Mathers' The Atopia Chronicles, a complex novel of interweaving narratives set largely on the artificial floating island state of Atopia at the dawn of an era of synthetic reality. A fusion of AI and VR, synthetic reality is intended to save the world by giving everyone everything they could want at a fraction of the material cost of real-world equivalents. While adults struggle to adjust to the new technology - skins which overlay and filter reality, a proxxi alter ego to control your body while you explore the metaverse, and even the ability to distribute your consciousness into dozens of subjective viewpoints simultaneously - the first generation to have had access from birth are reaching maturity on Atopia.

The Atopia Chronicles begins as a series of interweaving narratives, each exploring aspects of the PSSI (poly-synthetic sensory interface) technology against the backdrop of a world on the brink of ecological collapse. An advertising executive filters out everyone who annoys her and ends up virtually isolated from humanity in a story reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode. Atopia's security chief and his wife adopt simulated children to try to save their ailing marriage; one of the pssi kids struggles with his relationship with his brothers while another misplaces his corporeal body; a millionaire fights for his life at the heart of a web of predicted future deaths; and the commercial launch of the system becomes intertwined with a plot to destroy Atopia.

The first two-thirds of the novel are the most successful, with the increased presence of the arc plot and the emergence of an almost cartoonish villain diminishing the core strengths as a speculative technological SF story. In a lot of ways, the distributed narrative is strong enough not to need the arc, and certainly not to need a villain, and there is a curious parallel with the fictional universe, with the more interesting technique ultimately being subjugated by conventional narrative devices even as Atopia's ideals are subjugated by a self-made monster.

The Wretched of Muirwood

Lia is a Wretched in the service of Muirwood Abbey, one of the great centres of learning and craftsmanship where the privileged and gifted come to learn the ways of the Medium, the guiding principle of the universe. When an injured man, Colvin, is brought into the kitchen where Lia works, her decision to hide him pitches Lia into an adventure filled with loss and heartache, but one which will unlock her true potential and reveal her heritage.

The Wretched of Muirwood is the first in a fantasy series that has some good ideas and some gaping flaws.

The Medium is a bit like the Force, but more overtly magical rather than psychic. It is inherited in families, and family is everything; if you don't know who your family is, you are a Wretched, one of the worker caste, forbidden to learn to read and engrave (words being too precious to this culture to consign to mere paper) or to train in the use of the Medium, even if the Wretched in question is self-evidently a magical powerhouse.

Lia is, naturally, a magical powerhouse, being as she is a superspecialsnowflakegirl. Despite this, and despite secretly knowing her identity and caring deeply about her and having the wherewithal to create a false identity - given that the Abbeys are apparently the repositories of genealogy as well as general scholarship and wizard school - the Aldermaston refuses to let her learn 'for her own safety'. The Aldermaston, the caring Dumbledore figure, is a dick, which would annoy me less if Lia were less of an insufferable brat.

The art of using the Medium is to let yourself flow with it, like the Force. Attempting to control the Medium leads to suffering, tainting the body and soul and either creating or calling the Myriad, demons of the psyche who feed on pain and suffering and especially fear. The enemies of working with the medium are fear, envy and pride. One of the reasons that Lia is so strong in the medium is that she is not envious or prideful, we are told, although in fact she spends half her time bemoaning the fact that she can't read or learn, hiding her tears from people or acting as if she knows better than everyone else. One of the more powerful Medium users in the book is a sneering jerkass who constantly berates Colvin for being a prideful peasant and points out repeatedly that he could totally kick his ass. Colvin himself isn't much better, being a scary Puritan with a heart of gold, who basically terrifies and infuriates Lia by turns. Naturally, she falls in love with him, and probably vice versa.

The book is interesting in parts, but basically something of a mess in its execution. Its merging of fantasy and real-world elements - Jedi and mediaeval abbeys, non-deistic mystery religions and maypoles on Whitsun - is only partially successful, and it suffers from a fundamental misapprehension of what pride and envy look like.

The Maze Runner

Having watched and reviewed the film adaptation of James Dashner's The Maze Runner a few weeks back, and the first book being available through Kindle Unlimited, I decided to give it a go.

Thomas wakes in a steel box going up and emerges into the Glade, a contained, pastoral subsistence community peopled by amnesiac young men like himself. The Glade is a sanctuary at the heart of the Maze, a vast and shifting complex patrolled by deadly, biomechanical Grievers, but Thomas brings change to this community, and the arrival of a girl, Theresa, triggers the start of an endgame; a deadly new phase of their trials.

The Maze Runner is a book that is not without problems, in particular that the characters are all to one degree or another annoying. On the other hand, they are almost all teenage boys, and in fairness their annoying traits are mostly justified by this. They are moody, aggressive, impatient, awkwardly horny and occasionally very dim. They are also incapable of giving a straight answer to a question or explaining anything in advance of the most dramatic moment, which is a bit less excusable. Dashner's prose is not helpful, being at times repetitive (see below) but the pace is good and the book is a quick and flowing read. The Glader slang is a little forced at first, but feels more natural and fluid later in the book, which is perhaps as it should be.

In comparison to the film, Theresa is a stronger character, at least once she wakes up and stops being the comatose subject of Thomas's obsessive adoration (and when the Gladers aren't calling dibs or otherwise being creepy little dweebs); I could have done with at least one fewer passages mewling over her perfect white skin and vivid blue eyes. She is an active participant in the escape plan and the one who cracks the maze code, and her telepathic bond with Thomas gives her a larger role in a narrative which focuses entirely on Thomas's POV. The boys, on the other hand, are probably weaker. I don't know if it's a flaw, per se; they're probably more realistic, whereas the film versions were more iconic.

The ending is, alas, no more satisfying than that of the film, and still leaves one wondering what can be gained by the bullshit experiments and what is just needless cruelty.

The answer is in books that I would still have to pay for, so watch this space.

World War Z

I deliberately chose a cover without
Brad Pitt on it.

World War Z is subtitled 'An oral history of the zombie wars', and it does exactly what it says on the tin. In a series of semi-overlapping narratives, it describes the rise of the zombie plague, a pathogen originating in China and spread by ambulatory corpses and infected refugees (and via the illegal trade in rapidly harvested organs) through the first hand accounts of more than forty characters interviewed by a UN investigator after the end of the Zombie War.

The book uses its multiple viewpoints to explore the war from as many angles as possible: civilians, survivalists, military personnel of several nations and politicians of varying persuasions. Its focus is American - justified both by the nationality of the investigator and the narratives of other post-war nations, in particular the 'Holy Russian Empire', an expansionist theocratic state - but its scope is global, with the account of the commander of the ISS throughout the crisis one of the most powerful.

By its nature, World War Z is prime material for an audiobook adaptation, and it has had several. The one attached to my kindle edition is pretty damned good, although I am now greatly tempted by the super-plus all-star version with this cast.

I'm incredulous that in adapting this book for the screen anyone didn't think that the best idea was just to cherry pick a couple of these stories and film it as a mockumentary, spliced with 'archive footage' from the zombie wars. How did they not do that? Instead we got a crappy action movie which tried to jam poor Brad Pitt back into the action hunk mould that kept him from achieving his true potential as a talented character actor for so long.

World War Z is a satirical novel, using the zombie war as a lens to examine the nature of human reaction to disaster, both singly and corporately. It takes an unusually even-handed approach, with American isolationism and capitalism taking as many knocks as Soviet collectivism, and paints a vivid picture of a world at and after a war for which it was utterly unprepared. It tells tales of heroism and folly, of great heart and towering cynicism. Governmental incompetence, corporate malfeasance and models of morale are all covered, from the brutal tactics of the Russian leadership to largely uninfected Cuba's switch from faltering Communist casualty to the great boom economy of the war.

It's not a perfect book, and certainly there were a couple of points in the English section where I felt that Brooks had gone awry a little, but it's a satire more than a political assessment and some inaccuracy can be allowed. I can't speak for the effectiveness of the Russian and Chinese sections in particular, but it certainly lacks the triumphal pro-Americanism of, say, the movie. In particular the segregation of 'Unified Palestine' by the Israeli and Palestinian authorities is plagued by violent resistance from both Jewish and Muslim extremists, but isn't overrun with the living dead as soon as an American points out that they're fucked.

Shadows Over Innsmouth - To See the Sea, Dagon's Bell, Only the End of the World Again

And so to the last of the short stories in Stephen Jones' collection.

'To See the Sea', by Michael Marshall Smith, is a melancholy entry in which a man takes his wife to visit the coastal town near which her mother nearly drowned, in an attempt to cure her of her thalassophobia. The village, on the English coast, is as dreary and dismal as Innsmouth, and houses its own shadow; a shadow which calls to the wife.

'Dagon's Bell' is a classic piece of Brian Lumley mythos fiction, in which the cosmic horror of the opening gives way to action and it's shotguns ahoy in the bowels of the Earth to destroy with dynamite a vast and terrible bell the mere sound of which... well, gives people the heebie jeebies, but is disappointingly poor at actually shattering anyone's sanity, even at close range.

The final story, 'Only the End of the World Again', is Neil Gaiman's offering, in which a werewolf detective faces off against the Deep Ones in an oddly populous Innsmouth. It's not a bad story, but for my money it's not great mythos, as the monstrous protagonist lacks the necessary sense of alienation in the face of indescribable cosmic malevolence.

So there we have it. There are two more collections, but I'll leave those for another time. I'm a bit Mythossed out for the time being; I'm going to read about zombies instead.

Shadows Over Innsmouth - The Innsmouth Heritage, The Homecoming and Deepnet

In 'The Innsmouth Heritage', by Brian Stableford, a geneticist sets out to map the genomic cause of the Innsmouth look, but finds that the true curse of the town is something less visible and definable than scaly skin or genetic markers. This is also something of an Innsmouth love story, as the narrator's love interest draws away from him over the course of his project due to her eponymous heritage. In a manner true to Lovecraft the central theme of the story is the futility of human endeavour, but in this case the endeavours that come to nothing are cerebral and romantic.

Nicholas Royle's 'The Homecoming' takes the imagery of Innsmouth and makes it an allegory for Romania under the Ceausescu regime. The dismal atmosphere of Lovecraft's port town is not a poor analogue to the grey and fear-drenched streets of Communist Bucharest, but the allegory is forced in places (Ceausescu's palace as Devil's Reef and the Securitate as the Deep Ones) and ultimately I don't think it works.

'Deepnet', by David Langford, is another partially successful allegory, in which forced mutation via VDU radiation replaces inbreeding and Deepnet Communications of Innsmouth (an East Coast analogue of Microsoft) spreads its insidious tentacles via the medium of commercial software. The snippets of Deepnet advertising are a little too broadly parodic for this to work entirely, and it ends for some reason with the narrator expressing lust for his mutated and apparently mentally handicapped ten year old daughter, so on a great many levels this story can just fuck off for that.

Shadows Over Innsmouth - Down to the Boots, The Church in High Street, Innsmouth Gold, Daoine Domhain, A Quarter to Three and The Tomb of Priscus

Same collection, different cover.

Another set of short stories from Stephen Jones' Shadows Over Innsmouth, and this time we begin with 'Down to the Boots', a short short by D. F. Lewis. High on mood, short on action, this is the tale of an Innsmouth woman whose husbands are forever going to the dogfish, whether transformationally or digestively is not completely apparent.

Ramsey Campbell's 'The Church in High Street' once more brings the action, such as it is, to England, for a tale of dank cellars, hidden catacombs and dungeon dimensions. Cambell is one of the seminal modern Mythos authors (contributing the Great Old One Gla'aki to the canon, such as it is) and as might be expected manages the creeping horror aspects of the story with aplomb. Overall, however, this entry suffers from a certain familiarity (protagonist searches for a friend, is warned off the same thing the friend was warned off, goes anyway and encounters mind-shattering evil), and in context from a total lack of connection to Innsmouth.

That criticism at least can not be leveled against 'Innsmouth Gold' by David A Sutton, in which a fortune hunter ventures into the blighted and abandoned wreck of the town in search of a horde of Deep One treasure supposedly buried and lost by the federal agents who raided it in the 20s. This is a pretty good opening pitch, although sadly the story ends up in the same wild flight from a gibbering mob as so many other Innsmouth interpretations.

'Daoine Domhain' by Peter Tremayne takes us to Ireland, and an entirely different Deep One-haunted community. It's a fair effort as far as it goes, although the use of a naval officer as the primary narrator-protagonist makes the fatalism common to Mythos narratives a little odd. One might expect a military man to express more preparedness to fight when anticipating the arrival of a (lone) abductor than the fatalism shown here, even if such efforts were proven futile. In addition, there is little of actual horror in the story, neither in fact or in implication, leaving the impression that the narrator is more likely delusional than demon-hounded.

'A Quarter to Three' is the second Kim Newman offering, under his own name. It is a very short short, and primarily - by the author's own admission - exists as an excuse for a bad play on the words of an old Sinatra number. So it goes.

Finally this time, 'The Tomb of Priscus' by Brian Mooney takes us into the territory of the muscular Mythos, name-dropping Brian Lumley's god-punching Titus Crowe and featuring an honest to Cthulhu cavalry moment. Prior to that it's a pretty good offering, with a secret tomb and dark offerings (although again, as a follow-up to 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' it takes rather too many liberties with the nature of the Deep Ones and their hybrids.)

Six more stories. The last is the Gaiman, but I'm getting less tolerant with each passing tale*; let's see how we go along.

* Whatever else, I am not planning to go straight on to Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth.

Shadows Over Innsmouth - The Big Fish, Return to Innsmouth and The Crossing

It looks like the original and the Copper stories are the longest in Shadows Over Innsmouth, so we should rattle through them at a good pace now.

Jack 'Kim Newman' Yeovil's 'The Big Fish' is a Lovecraftian weird tale filtered through the lens of a wartime noir detective thriller, and yet feels as if gets 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' better than Copper's self-consciously cosmic effort. This is not to say that it is perfect Lovecraftiana, but more that it makes no attempt to be and yet catches the actual menace of the original; infiltration and weird religion more than miscegenation. A minor guest role for recurring vampire Genevieve is a bit of distraction, but most people who know me know that I'm a sucker for noirised retellings, so... yeah; I liked this one.

I've also read it before in a different collection.

'The Return to Innsmouth' by Guy N. Smith is very short, and mostly consists of a narrator replaying the events of the middle section of the original story as he tries to exorcise his nightmares about the town he has never visited. The attempt on his life may in fact be all in his mind, and the shortness of the tale and the high level of repetition from the original detract from the horror of madness which is the primary potential of the offering.

Finally, for this time, Adrian Cole's 'The Crossing' extends the grip of Innsmouth to the Devon coast, as a man learns that his estranged trawlerman father may not only have been trawling for fish. This one is a better length to capture and hold a mood and a tension, although it lacks the pervasive air of revulsion that makes the original so effective. In addition, there is something less horrifying about the Deep Ones if their business is merely sacrifice.

Shadows Over Innsmouth - The Shadow Over Innsmouth and Beyond the Reef

Shadows Over Innsmouth is a collection of short stories by various authors, edited by Stephen Jones. All but the first story in the collection are inspired by H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' (the first story is 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth').

'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' was not one of Lovecraft's favourite stories, although it is widely rated as one of his best, and certainly best known works today. It holds a core place in the wider body of weird fiction known as the Cthulhu Mythos for its combination of elements from the earlier short stories 'Dagon' and 'The Call of Cthulhu', and for the introduction of the amphibious fish-frog-men known as the Deep Ones. It is the story of the narrator, who visits the eerie and decrepit New England town of Innsmouth, intending merely to pass through and look at the architecture, but finds himself exposed to and then threatened by the repulsive secret history of the town and its strangely degenerate inhabitants.

Lovecraft's writing style is circuitous and self-consciously vague, the author having realised early on that hinting at indescribable horror was by definition more effective than describing it. The horror is thus primarily in the mental effect of the events and terrors of the tale on the narrator. In many cases, the bulk of a Lovecraft story is taken up not with current events but with the uncovering of the unsettling truth of past events, and so it is here. It's not everyone's cup of tea, and it is far more effective in the quiet seclusion of a teenager's bedroom than on a crowded train, but 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth' is a good example of the form.

The first of the following tales is 'Beyond the Reef' by Basil Copper, a writer with a long history not with Lovecraft himself but with his (possibly self-styled) literary executor, August Derleth. It is a direct sequel to 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', set a few years after the raid on the town and the torpedoing of Devil's Reef reported in the original. The action is moved to nearby Arkham, where an academic, a pathologist, a detective and a surveyor walk into a bar... I mean, encounter a plot by Innsmouth ancient, aquatic patrons to extend their influence to the university city.

'Beyond the Reef'... is really bad. It's bad as a sequel, and it's also bad as a short story in its own right.

As a sequel it fails to adhere even to the hinted facts about the Deep Ones in the original. My friend James often criticises what he calls the collector tendency in many Lovecraft fans, which he explains as the urge to codify and catalogue the creatures and events in the stories to produce a coherent universe and bestiary. For myself, I don't see this as a bad thing necessarily, but it is certainly not an approach supported directly by the text (rather like trying to create a definitive chronology of classic Doctor Who). It was primarily Derleth who coined the phrase 'Cthuhu Mythos' and imposed a kind of order on it.

That being said, a sequel ought to take note of the original text, but 'Beyond the Reef' replaces fish-frog-men who interbreed with humans to produce hybrid offspring who eventually transform and join their immortal parents in the oceans with amorphous beasts capable of transforming humans into their own degenerate kind, and the locally powerful Esoteric Order of Dagon and its allies with an inhuman psychic force which appears to be practically all-knowing and all-encompassing. Instead of infiltrating by stealth, inbreeding and the offering of monetary gain and good fishing, the faceless antagonists now burrow beneath Arkham, and are basically unrecognisable as the Deep Ones of the original short story.

It also refers to an earlier period of civic expansion in the city most famously described (in 'The Dreams in the Witch House') as "changeless, legend-haunted Arkham", which just isn't trying.

I would take less issue with all of this, I suspect, were the story itself better. It opens with a monologue from a character preparing to give his statement to a group of men including the Chief of Detectives and the local ME, but then cuts into a third person narrative most of which the original speaker could not possibly know and much of which concerns only the Chief of Detectives and the ME. It also makes a point of describing the speaker in embarrassingly glowing terms. The style of the writing is stilted and somewhat repetitive, and the evocation of cosmic horror nowhere near as effective as Lovcecraft's, despite the more insidious and overtly horrific threat.

After the strong opening provided by 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth', 'Beyond the Reef' is a real disappointment (although a lot of Amazon reviewers seem to have loved it.) Still, there are fifteen more stories in here, including two by Kim Newman and one by Neil Gaiman; although admittedly there's also a Brain Lumley, and having read either two or three of the Necroscope novels (I seriously have no idea if it was two or three, that's the impression that they made) I'm not looking forward to that so much.

The Legend of Drizzt (audiobook)

They're not lying about the cast.

So, this takes me way, way back into my early teenage years, when R.A. Salvatore's adventures of Drizzt Do'urden were a staple of my reading alongside the Davids Eddings and Gemmell and whatever other authors of heroic fantasy fiction (many now sadly deceased) received the honour of representation in the Fleet public library. Drizzt was one of my formative experiences of the Forgotten Realms setting for Dungeons & Dragons, and one of the only D&D spin-off series I ever gave much time to (the other was the Dragonlance series; please don't judge me.)

I'd not given the books much thought in recent years, but then a friend pointed out on G+ that a ten hour collection of Drizzt short stories was available in audiobook format, for free*, read by the likes of Tom Felton, Felicia Day and Ice-T; if indeed those can be be said to be alike. Ice-T reads D&D? For nothing? Sign me up!

'The First Notch'

Read by Felicia Day

We open with a tale of rugged young dwarfs and snarling giants, read by elfin, soft-voiced celebrity nerd Day, which is a left-field choice if ever I saw one; like casting Tom Cruise as a 6'6" ex-military policeman or Denzel Washington as a stocky, white Englishman. In another unexpected jack move, the first story in the Collected short stories of the Legend of Drizzt doesn't have Drizzt in it; in fact, he's not even mentioned. Instead, the story concerns the young Bruenor Battlehammer, future dwarf king and friend of the eponymous elf, and how his battleaxe got its first notch.

'The First Notch' really sets the scene for the collection, not least in priming the listener for the fact that more than half of the stories don't include Drizzt at all, and several don't even mention him. It's not high art, but I have to admit it's better than I remember finding Salvatore's work in what I shall call my 'snobby, post-high fantasy' period, and for all that she is not the obvious dwarf-voicer, Day puts in a game effort with the bizarre dwarf accent (described as a brogue, I think it's meant to be kind of Scots-y Irish - Scoirish? - but here comes out more Cockney, which seems to work), and makes a fine squeaky goblin. The action scene is one of the better ones in the set, managing to find a rare variation where other become repetitive (there are, in fairness, only so many ways to rephrase arm, torso, sword or eviscerate without becoming dangerously florid).

'Dark Mirror' 

Read by Dan Harmon

Drizzt makes his first appearance in a story of racial hatred and slavery, narrated by Community creator Harmon. Again, not an obvious choice. Travelling to visit an elven city for the first time, Drizzt is delayed helping a group of villagers rescue their captive kin from orc raiders, and stumbles on something that greatly complicates his view of the world.

The first half of the story is a pretty by-the-numbers hostage rescue, with Drizzt and his allies managing a win in spite of the Leeroy Jenkins tendencies of a local hero unwilling to be outdone. It's the second half that is more interesting, as Drizzt retrieves an escaped goblin 'for trial', only to learn that he is actually a slave, and that his intellect and nature cast doubts on Drizzt's certainties regarding the irredeemable evil of goblins. It's interesting not least because it is so at odds with the game's original setting, and because the goblin Nojheim makes the point that Drizzt is accepted as an exception because he is considered sexy, while a goblin isn't, which is almost a criticism of the very sensibilities that made Drizzt such a popular character.

Harmon's reading is good, and he works particularly well in portraying the tragic stoicism of Nojheim.

'The Third Level'

Read by Greg Grunberg

Once more banishing Drizzt from his own book, 'The Third Level' is an origin piece for the Drow's long-time nemesis-turned-antivillain, Artemis Entreri, read by Greg Grunberg of Heroes fame. As a boy, Artemis embarks on the beginning of his career as a thief and assassin, and makes his first steps into the thieves' guilds of Calimport.

I think the most interesting thing here is the depiction of the thieves guilds not as the monolithic organisation common in heroic fantasy, but as a number of rival gangs with no particular code of honour between them. The rules are the rules because a bigger thief will kick your teeth in if you break them. It's also a bizarrely gritty prelude to a big ol' fantasy saga set in the magic-heavy Forgotten Realms.

Grunberg approaches the story as the straightforward tale of gang violence that it is.

'Guenhwyvar'
Read by Tom Felton

Another origin story, this time for Drizzt's constant companion, the magical panther who lives in a statuette, Guenhwyvar (whose name is explained as the high elven for 'shadow', although it is actually taken from the Welsh version of Guinevere, which means 'white ghost'.) The reader is Tom 'Draco Malfoy' Felton.

This story is mostly a curiosity, existing to explain a discrepancy in early descriptions of Guenhwyvar. The official line was that a) figurines of wondrous power transformed into the animals that they represent, and b) magical items don't have gender (although after being pressed to refer to her as 'it', editorial meddling at one point led to Guenhwyvar being referred to as 'he' instead of 'she' in some of the early books). This story is a long-winded account of how Guenhwyvar came to be separate from the statue with her sex intact.

Felton does well with a lot of arcane description and a significant fight scene, and manages to keep a straight face through the wizard-ranger's showboating, which is impressive.

'That Curious Sword' read by Danny Pudi and 'Wickless in the Nether' read by Sean Astin

A couple of adventures for Artemis Entreri, this time focusing on his doomed bromance with sardonic Drow mage Jarlaxle. The first is read by Community's resident chameleon Danny Pudi, the second by noted hobbit Sean Astin.

The stories are solid adventure fare and the readings are top notch, although having only read the earlier books as a boy it is odd to see the degree to which Entreri has been de-villained.

'The Dowery' 
Read by Melissa Rauch

This one does have Drizzt in, on an adventure with his love interest Catti Brie, who as read by The Big Bang Theory's Melissa Rauch sounds kind of like the goblins in 'The First Notch'.

For me, this is the weakest story of the bunch. Its most remarkable features are the utter pointlessness of the adventure itself - Catti Brie basically suggests busting a pirate crew to kill some time - and the utter inability of the absurdly powerful pair to kill even one of their opponents in the protracted fight scene which makes up the core of the book. This bizarre attack of uselessness is not merely baffling, it actually makes it obvious that the enemy are not what they seem, giving away the twist to anyone remotely genre savvy.

'Comrades at Odds'
Read by Ice-T

Yes, Ice-T. You weren't imagining it earlier, and I wasn't bullshitting you.

This is a Drizzt story, and one filled with a great deal of intospection. Set around the formation of an orc kingdom, it again questions the stock fantasy assumption that orcs and goblins are mere monsters, without hope of redemption or evolution. It offers no simple answers, and being pretty out of the loop on Forgotten Realms I wonder to what degree these thoughts were ever taken up in the broader canon.

And it's read by Ice-T.

'If Ever They Happened Upon My Lair'
Read by Wil Wheaton

This is a prequel story which is removed enough from the main action of the Drizzt tale that you actually need to have some pretty advanced knowledge to see how it fits in at all. It's basically a dragon hunt tale, and not a bad one, but don't get attached to the hunters.

Wil Wheaton is an excellent reader.

'Bones and Stones'
Read by Al Yankovic

Talking about those left-handed casting choices again, this is an introspective tale of loss and mourning, read by 'Weird' Al Yankovic. He does a good job.

'Iruladoon'
Read by Michael Chiklis

And for this tale of mystery and ephemeral magic, the gravel tones of Michael Chiklis; why not?

'To Legend He Goes' 
Read by David Duchovny

We finish then with the death song of the barbarian Wulfgar, as fitting a tribute to Conan as to anything Forgotten Realms-y, as the aged chief throws off his shackles for one last battle to save a band of his hunters from angry yeti. David Duchovny is surprisingly good.

Overall, this is an excellent selection and kept me entertained for more than 10 hours. I'm not sure I'd have paid full whack for it, since I'm way out of the loop on all things Drizzt, but for the most part it stands on its own. If you're a fan of fantasy adventure in the Forgotten Realms style, its well worth a go just for the quality of the reading.

* To avoid disappointment, this was a limited offer and you'd have to pay for it now.

Ark Royal

When first contact becomes a shooting match, the divided forces of humanity's many national space navies are hastily united to face the alien aggressor. After the first full-scale engagement turns out a slaughter, Earth's only hope may be a handful of ageing and outdated vessels, led by the Royal Navy's oldest carrier, the Ark Royal.

Ark Royal is the first book in a series by Christopher G Nuttall, of which three are now published. It's a nuts and bolts interstellar war story, with a conveniently predictable means of FTL travel and insanely fast intra-system transit to get around the problem of depicting a defensive fight in space. There are some nice conceits, especially those used to centre the action around the oldest ship in the fleet, and in fact those conceits are the best part of the book.

Unfortunately, the technological conceits (which, by the by, are plain bad physics, so let's just accept that and move on) are surrounded by a story full of stock characters and poorly edited drama. No character transcends his or her TFC summary (he's a stubborn, recovering alcoholic navy captain struggling to retain his command; she's a plucky junior officer caught between duty and loyalty: they fight crime aliens.) The female characters are particularly egregious, consisting primarily of said plucky junior officer, a sexy young pilot, a marginally shrewish wife and a reporter whose sole defining characteristics are blondness, stupidity and an 'inhuman' thinness'.

It is, however, only when it comes to relationships the book really takes a nosedive. The sole sexual relationship of the book is between the CAG (Chief of Air Group, for those not either aux fait with military parlance or just following Battlestar Galactica, as Nuttall would appear to be doing) and a much younger squadron leader (said sexy hotshot pilot). It is not noticeably worse than any one of a hundred other literary sexual relationships, except that every encounter is prefaced or followed by the CAG musing that he shouldn't be cheating on his wife, and anyway the squadron leader is young enough to be his daughter/he is old enough to be her father.

Which brings me to the editing, and the fact that there isn't any. There aren't many spelling errors, but repetition is the book's greatest flaw; occasionally just within sentences, but also both repetition of information several times in a given passage, or repetition of the same phrasing every time a similar situation comes up. The squick-making reuse of 'old enough to be her father... almost' before every poorly-written sex scene* is one example, but also the aliens noses were so bloodied by the end of it it's a wonder they weren't all anaemic, and I think if one more ship had opted to 'rig for silent running' and 'lie doggo', I would have screamed.

The next book in the series will not be making an appearance on my Kindle; not unless I get desperate.

* If I genuinely held poorly written sex against an author, I'd never read anything past the 12-14 age bracket.

God Emperor of Didcot

I've actually not read the others, but cover shots are few
and far between.

For the Empire to thrive, the tea must flow. Tea, lifeblood of the British Space Empire, is almost exclusively grown on the planet Urn in the Didcot system. When an invasion threatens to cut off the tea and rob the troops of their vital moral fibre, the Empire sends in Space Captain Isambard Smith, the best man who happens to be in the area, to sort the problem out.

I read Space Captain Smith s few years back; I recall it being pretty decent, but having got around to the sequel, God Emperor of Didcot, I find myself underwhelmed. It's not that it's terrible, there's just very little to expand on the first book; only the same gumbo of SF references and dick jokes. It also lacks proper satirical bite. SF in which the good guys work for a fascist super-state tend to work by painting the super-state as terrible, and the enemy as worse (c.f. Warhammer 40K or Judge Dredd), but Frost's narrative basically buys into the glory of Empire with very little irony*, leaving the Ghasts and the Edenites almost pointlessly vile.

I wanted to like this too. I like steampunky space opera, at least in theory.

Oh well; onwards and upwards.

* I'm sure there is some element of parody, and it is conceivable that I have just been too tired to get it, but I wasn't feeling it.

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

This cover is shamelessly misleading;
the only suitcase in the book is much
larger.

"Things are what they are, and whatever will be will be."

Allan Karlsson is turning one-hundred, a minor cause celebre in the quiet town where he lives in the old people's home. Then Karlsson climbs out of the window, walks slowly to the bus stop, impulsively steals a suitcase and catches a bus for any-old-where. It seems an odd time of life to start adventuring, but as the reader learns in parallel to the centenarian Karlsson's Odyssey, it's hardly the first time that he has traveled.

Jonas Jonasson's debut novel*, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared is the story - or perhaps two stories - of one Swede's journeys, first across the world and later across his home country. The modern-day story is a comedy of errors, as Karsson and a growing band of friends find adventure, love, and even God through a series of misunderstandings and in defiance of dogged lawmen and criminals alike.

The story of how Karlsson came to be in the old people's home in the first place is more like a globe-trotting, intellectual Scandinavian Forrest Gump, but with much more vodka and dynamite, as Karlsson rubs shoulders with Franco, Oppenheimer, Truman, Stalin, Mao and Albert Einstein's affably dim half-brother Herbert - among others - accidentally gives the world nuclear weapons, acts as spy and counter-spy, inadvertently burns down a major city and twice blows up his own house. Karlsson's anarchic trail leads across continents in fair weather and foul, with and without proper transportation and official documentation, as if to demonstrate the damage and good that one free spirit can bring about armed only with a keen mind, a moral compass uninformed by the slightest political stirrings, and a lifetime's experience of vodka and dynamite.

The whole thing is recounted with a dry wit and a prescient narrative voice that reminds me a little of Anthony Trollope, although again with much more vodka and dynamite (and elephants). It is defiantly lighthearted in the face of danger and age, and presents the great and the good of the twentieth century as a mixture of good and bad clowns for whom deploying an aging Swedish explosives technician is as good a medium of action as any in response to international communism or the rampant running dogs of capitalism.

The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared is a real feelgood novel, and a wonderful palate cleanser after a few months of post-apocalyptic shenanigans and bloody murder (although not without a certain amount of murder itself).

* For completeness, the translation from Jonas Jonasson's original Swedish was by Rod Bradbury for my Kindle edition.

Super, Hero

What makes a hero into a superhero?

Okay, so there are basically four takes on this, with a fair bit of nuance in between:

1. A superhero has definitively superhuman traits, resulting from mutation, technological intervention, non-human origin or magic. There is a certain amount of debate as to how intrinsic the changes caused by a technological intervention have to be for the character to count as a super hero rather than a regular hero using tech.
2. A superhero is someone who wears a costume to fight evil/crime, usually including - if not exclusively - costumed supervillains.
3. A hero whose heroics are themselves 'super'; larger than life.
4. A comic book character published by DC or Marvel, the co-owners of the trademark 'Super Hero'.

The last is the easiest to deal with, because it's beautifully definite. A Super Hero is whatever DC and Marvel decide it is. Yay!

Logo for the 'super hero' trademark defence legal team.

What about the rest of us? For my money (and this really is just for my money), the thing to do is not to try to establish terms from the ground up, but to look at those who are clearly superheroes and see what they have in common. Perhaps we should start with the big three(s). DC and Marvel each have their heavy hitters, the 'big three' who stand head and shoulders above the rest in terms of image and exposure. Who exactly Marvel's big three are is open to question, however. 

As part of the drive towards inclusion, Thor will be replaced
by a female character, and Iron Man by Usain Bolt.

The canonical big three seem to be the core Avengers: Iron Man, Captain America and Thor (hence the bigness of the news that one of the big three, Thor, will be replaced by a new, female incarnation). On the other hand, fan opinion is that the big three are more accurately the characters with the longest record of exceptional popularity: Hulk, Spider-Man and the soon-to-be late Wolverine, who significantly outsell any of the formal three's solo titles, thanks in large part to highly-successful adaptations. Of course, the MCU has seen a significant resurgence for Iron Man, Cap and Thor in the larger world; after all, Hulk didn't get another solo film and the non-canon Spider-Man and X-Men titles are struggling, but in comic terms, the balance is unchanged.

Hulk, Spider-Man and Wolverine are of course the easier three to categorise, as all three are superheroes by every definition. They each have superhuman traits which have become completely intrinsic to their beings, and fight evil in a larger than life fashion. The one stumbler is Hulk, who doesn't have a uniform, but 2012's The Avengers clearly established that the Hulk form is Bruce Banner's 'suit', and that works for me.

"First to punch the cameraman is in the 'big
three'!"

The other big three are more troublesome. Thor fits pretty much the whole package. Even on Asgard his power is exceptional, and on Earth clearly superhuman. He has an iconic costume and weapon, battles evil (his power is actually dependent on his virtue) and if a character who speaks in quasi-Shakespearean declamations isn't larger-than-life, I don't know who is. Captain America also has few questions; boosted beyond human limits by the supersoldier serum, he dresses in a flag and fights for right.

It's Iron Man who slows things down. His 'powers' are technical brilliance (prodigal and prodigious, but not beyond human levels) and a suit of armour. He has no intrinsic power that goes beyond human ability, although he does have an iconic uniform and battles villains in a super fashion. It could be said, however, that Iron Man is not a superhero.

The DC Big Three: If we go by powers,
that gives us Superman, Wonder
Woman, and Ambush Bug.

And yet, people speak of 'the big three' not because of Marvel, but because of DC, whose big three are pretty much beyond question: Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman. They are all costumed, all iconic and larger-than-life, all dedicated to the fight against crime and evil, but the odd man out is Batman. In Batman: the Brave and the Bold, Captain Atom describes Batman as a c-lister, pointing out that he has no powers at all, and yet Captain Atom doesn't come close to making the big three. 

Batman is the poster child for the 'super-normal', the characters whose superpower is that they are ludicrously good at a wide range of perfectly mundane things. Batman is a master martial artist, Olympic-level athlete, scientific and technical genius (even when he has help creating his gadgets, he is usually shown to possess excellent analytical and mechanical chops), and of course, the world's greatest detective. There is no one trait that is beyond human potential (although in practice he is usually shown to possess physical abilities on a par with more overtly powered characters), but the sheer range of his excellence could be characterised as superhuman.

It's depressing how hard it is to get a pic of these three in
which Wonder Woman isn't pushing her chest out.

More to the point, a definition of superhero that doesn't include Batman is almost intrinsically flawed. Batman is a critical part of the DC big three, and of the Justice League, one of the top-flight superhero teams. To say that Batman isn't a superhero borders on the disingenuous. If you ask the man or woman in the street to name five superheroes... well, they'd probably look at you funny, but if they gave you five names then they'd either name the Avengers (and include Iron Man, Black Widow and maybe even Hawkeye), or one of them would be Batman.

What does the man on the street know? Well, with a title like 'super hero', popular perception is important. Batman is a superhero, not because of any intrinsic ability, but simply because that is what the world calls him, and in a fictional character, that's really what counts.

This rules out actual super powers as a defining trait of the superhero, and leaves us with a combination of 2 and 3: A superhero wears a costume and fights evil/crime in a larger than life fashion.

The term I've been using for that fashion, iconic, is not mere happenstance. DC characters in particular are self-consciously iconic, and none more so than the trinity. Batman is vengeance and the night; iconically, he stands for 'justice', and the fact that in his world justice must be served by someone outside of a corrupt authority (see Watchmen for a hell of a lot of commentary on this). Wonder Woman is the Spirit of Truth, standing both for truth and for compassion. Superman is the big, blue boy scout; he stands above all else for an enduring hope in a better world.

He's a man with serious mental health issues who found the
last item of clothing from a doomed planet and gained the
power to teleport and recognise his own fictional nature.

Marvel is a lot less straightforward. To quote Alan Moore: "Stan Lee had this huge break through of two-dimensional characters."

Still and all, you can sum up most Marvel superheroes pretty quickly, and that's important. 

A superhero can be a complicated character, but never complex. Any apparent superhero who takes more than a paragraph to explain in their basic essence is probably a deconstruction.

Pure

Fifteen years ago, the Detonations ended the world as it was. What remains is ruin, and the Dome. Who remains are the wretches, scarred and starved, fused to whatever they were holding or touching when the end came, and the Pure, untouched, improved, watching over the wastes from safety. Pressia is a wretch, her fist wrapped in a doll's head. Partridge is a Pure, genetically modified for speed and strength. Yet they are connected.

Pure is the titular first volume of a trilogy by Julianna Baggott, establishing the world of the wretches and the Pure, who between them occupy the ruins of America; or perhaps I should say Gilead, as the descriptions of the old world and its 'return to civility' under the Red Revolution are not dissimilar to the neo-conservative state of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. The primary distinction is that reproduction in Pure is a right, not a duty, to be stripped from women deemed unfit, who can then safely be altered like the men.

Although in places derivative, the book's setting is interesting, but it falls down a little on its characters, especially in the first half. Pressia in particular is almost exclusively reactive in the first half of the book, making no attempt to control her world that is not in response to direct stimulus. Perhaps this is from a life lived in fear, but Baggott seems determined that we know that Pressia is strong and smart and able from the get-go, and as a result she doesn't really kick in as a character until halfway through the book.

A lot of things don't really kick in until the halfway mark, not least the secondary viewpoint characters El Capitan and Lyda, whose first inclusion is actually quite baffling - rather than mysterious - and remains so until their roles are expanded after a significant span. The latter part of the book does show significant promise, once the story puts its cards on the table. It is still done no favours by publicity comparing it to The Hunger Games, but on its own terms is an interesting piece of dystopian fiction.

Super, Hero: The background

About a month ago a friend, whom I shall refer to as Dragnet, posted on G+ on the subject of what makes a hero into a superhero.

Actually, to get the story in its entirety, Dragnet's post was: "What's the first thing to pop into your head when I say "female super hero"? Be honest! "

Some names were floated and the nature of the female superhero discussed, and then this happened:

The story you are about to hear 14 Aug 2014
High leg leotards and ridiculous proportions. :(

The first superheroes I think of are probably Spider-Girl, Elektra, Black Widow & Mockingbird - though actually I think the only one of those that's actually a super is Spider-Girl. +Only the names - you know Elektra better than me - does she count as one? I'm assuming she doesn't. 

This sparked a new debate, which brought up the following opinions:

Only the names 14 Aug 2014
+The story you are about to hear - I wouldn't call her a "super" hero, no; in the same way as Black Widow or Hawkeye, she's just well trained.

To protect the innocent 14 Aug 2014
+The story you are about to hear <Elektra> can psychically poses people and communicate telepathically. if she doesn't count as super, because they are learnt skills, then neither does Doctor Strange.

Only the names 14 Aug 2014
But [Iron Man's] arc reactor is technology he built - it's not the intervention of some magical, mystical* or alien force.
*or supernatural, mutation-based etc

Gangbusters Presents 14 Aug 2014
+The story you are about to hear So, technological intervention doesn't count, but alien does? How does Superman (a perfectly ordinary Kryptonian) compare then to, say, Rocket Raccoon (altered by alien technology)?
Does the "super" in "superhero" not refer to their heroics? The exaggerated nature of their actions?

This then proceeded to a more general debate on another thread, launched by another friend, whom we shall call Fargo:

"What changes a character from a hero to a superhero?"

Which brought out opinions like these:

The events depicted 14 Aug 2014
Having capabilities that more normal people do not have.
Its why heroes are so much cooler ;)

Only the Names 14 Aug 2014
In my opinion, a "super" hero is one that has been somehow changed from the "normal" to give them extra capabilities. So, being a mutant, being bitten by a radioactive spider, super solider serum, that sort of thing.
...
Dr Strange is probably the weirdest one - I haven't really read him much, so I don't know if he really is just a normal human who has learnt magic (thus hero), or if something gave him that ability, like a pact or something (thus superhero)

Minnesota 1987 14 Aug 2014
Hero: ordinary person doing extraordinary things - fireman, policeman etc.
Superhero: protagonist appearing in the comic genre which is the primary output of Marvel & DC, commonly known as 'superhero comics'. There's no difference in my mind between Superman & Black Widow, as they both are protagonists in the same genre.

Request of the survivors 14 Aug 2014
A definition of "superhero" that excludes Batman, one of the five pillars of the form, must needs be inaccurate. Obviously, there isn't a completely accurate definition, but I think a superhero is an iconic, costumed character who fights evil (usually but not solely crime), usually but not always iconic, costumed crime.
...
it has nothing at all to do with the personal intention of the individual. A cop who goes above and beyond for a moment doesn't become a superhero. A superhero wears a costume or is otherwise visually iconic (like the Hulk, who is obviously recognisable even though he doesn't wear a costume) and usually fights some kind of equally iconic opponent. A superhero also typically possesses some kind of exceptional ability, even if that is explained in mundane terms (like Ted Kord Blue Beetle, who has a bunch of Bond-like gadgets).

Now, clearly a lot of people - not least my main man James 'Gonzo History' Holloway have said a great deal on the subject, but Dragnet did ask me to give my take when I was taking requests for an RPGaDAY topic on a day when I didn't have anything to say about the prompt. I said I'd look at that later, so here I go.

However, having set the scene with other people's thoughts, I'm going to go into this in detail in another post.

A Meme: Ten books that have affected me

A meme, picked up from Sally Brewer: Ten books that have affected me.

1. The Dark is Rising Sequence, by Susan Cooper
   This is one of the absolute best series I have ever read; I adore it, and despite my calling being to watch shitty movies, I have resisted ever seeing the movie of The Dark is Rising, because seriously, fuck that for a lark.
   The Dark is Rising is built around Arthurian mythology and its own cosmology involving the long war between the Light and the Dark. The servants of the Dark are manipulative, using humans to their own ends... and so do the Old Ones, servants of the Light. It was one of the first series I read in which magical power was not an unalloyed boon, and I think that was what I most took away from it. 
2. The Chronicles of Prydain, by Lloyd Alexander
   Another series with its roots in Welsh mythology, The Chronicles of Prydain is high fantasy, rather than the modern fantasy of The Dark is Rising, complete with a giant cat and an oracular pig. It was also made into a movie that I haven't seen, but I hear that one isn't all that bad. The stories involved several instances of sacrifice, and I think that's what I took away from it. 
3. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
   One of the big names of fantasy, and one of my early influences. It's basically the ur-text for heroic fantasy, and one of the notable things about The Chronicles of Prydain was that it wasn't a Rings clone. The influence of Rings built up slowly for me, in part as a result of reading around it. Like Prydain, it's very much about the end of an age and the birth of the time of the ordinary human. A lot of these books are pretty melancholy. 
4. The Northern Lights and The Subtle Knife, by Philip Pullman
   I don't include The Amber Spyglass here. I liked that one, but the first two were - to my mind - better. Given that Spyglass doesn't follow the pattern set out in the front of either of the earlier novels, I've always figured that Pullman made a lot of changes to the plan while he was writing, and my feeling is that it could have done with a little more polish. Nonetheless, I like Spyglass and I love the first two.
   What I take from these... Okay, mostly it's the panzerbjorn. Who doesn't love a bear in armour. 
5. Inkheart, by Cornelia Funke
   
   A number of these entries are relatively recent books, and most of them have more or less disappointing movie adaptations.
   Inkheart is a story about storytellers who can read characters to life out of books, and some of the less savoury characters who have escaped from the eponymous novel-within-a-novel as a result. It's weirdly meta, and extremely dark, where the film was... a little murky in places. 
6. Mortal Engines, by Philip Pullman
   This is a book that could make a great film, but is more likely to make a terribly disappointing one. It's another dark fantasy, this one couched in a post-apocalyptic tale of a mobile, predatory London. It's the imagery that got me with this one; the vast, hungry cities and the skeletal, tech-undead Stalkers. 
7. The Homeward Bounders, by Diana Wynne Jones
   I was a latecomer to DWJ, having read and not enjoyed one of her novels as a child (I know, right, but no-one is perfect and it was basically a musing on mortality and lost childhood, which didn't much suit me at 10 or whatever I was). Of the first batch that I read, The Homeward Bounders was the one that really caught at my mind. I think that what makes it stand out is the central idea that hope is a trap. So often, hope is held up as the last light in the darkness, but the Bounders are imprisoned by it, caught in a perpetual struggle and unable to escape because they believe that there is a way out. 
8. Wyrd Sisters, by Terry Pratchett
   Everyone has their own touchstone in the Pratchett canon, and mine is Wyrd Sisters. I love it; I love the Shakespearean references and the Marx Brothers bits, and the witches and Death at the absolute height of their powers. Love it. 
9. Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
   
   However, this for a long time my absolute favourite work by either Pratchett or Gaiman. I feel that it is the first great work by either of them, because Gaiman moderated Pratchett's early whimsy and Pratchett moderated Gaiman's early pretension, and that as a result they both emerged from the collaboration writing better books going forward. 
10. Whales on Stilts, by M.T. Anderson
    If you don't know why I love this book, I guarantee that you're assuming that the title is symbolic.
    It isn't. 

The Silkworm

The Silkworm is the second Cormoran Strike novel (following The Cuckoo's Calling) by Robert 'JK Rowling in a hat*' Galbraith.

The Silkworm is a tale of Jacobean revenge killing, set in the smiles-and-backstabbing world of literary publishing. It tell of Owen Quine, a somewhat mediocre author of sordid prose, whose last work appears to consist of searing symbolic indictments of everyone he has ever known or worked with, ending with the death of an author-insert protagonist in a particularly grisly manner. It is his last work because while the publishing world is awash with shock, horror and threats of legal action at the contents of the as-yet unpublished manuscript, Quine himself turns up dead, in the exact manner of his literary alter-ego.

With The Cuckoo's Calling, Galbraith/Rowling established a quite distinct literary persona, and The Silkworm continues in that vein, being if anything more profane and grotesque than its predecessor. Borrowing heavily from the same revenge tragedies as its subjects, much of the novel's impact relates to the bizarre and brutal ritual of the murder, and the progression of the plot on the almost torturous stubbornness of the characters.

It's less deft than the last novel; the killing more gruesome, the characters heightened almost to a kind of Jacobean magic realism. This is not entirely a criticism - I don't think magic realist Jacobean revenge detective fiction is either a bad thing in and of itself, or a genre which has yet found its defining voice, unless this be it - although it is to the novel's detriment in one particular, specifically that the Cormoran Strike of The Cuckoo's Calling was a more nuanced and interesting detective than the one on display here.

I also found I was distracted by wandering if, in the midst of this tale of literary revenge fiction, there wasn't a hint of life imitating art, and if any of the less-than-discrete literary types who fail to keep Bombyx Mori under wraps might be modeled after the person who let Rowling's identity out of the bag.

I enjoyed The Silkworm, if less so than The Cuckoo's Calling, and I remain optimistic for the series ahead, at least for a few more novels.

* Disappointingly, Rowling's publicity stills for the book don't feature a hat, although apparently she wore a suit and tie to appear at a crime writing festival, which is almost as good.