Reading roundup - July 2016

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is the debut novel from Becky Chambers, and one of the first novels to be part-funded by Kickstarter. It's essentially a road story, as the crew of the 'tunneling ship' Wayfarer make their way slowly across the galaxy in order to undertake an ambitious contract to create a new sublayer tunnel to link the territory of a formerly xenophobic race at the galactic core to the heart of civilised space. The ship and her crew of (mostly) likable weirdos meander from planet to planet, exploring philosophical issues and species distinctions, being assaulted by pirates, visiting markets, getting arrested and attending the occasional fancy party en route to their destination.

It has just enough technical crunch to feel satisfyingly real, but the real story is about the characters and their journey, so much so that hands down the weakest part of the novel is when the viewpoint temporarily leaves the crew of the wanderer to expand a little on the xenophobic race and their internal politics. While strongly informing the denouement, this interlude feels decidedly strange in comparison to the main narrative, and I don't think that the denouement would have suffered from the actions of the race being largely unexplained, the snippets of prior information enough for the reader to interpolate. Despite this, however, the novel as a whole is excellent, and a rare example of an epic quest with no great cause at stake; just a crew with a job to do.

Chambers is definitely an author to watch for. Audible reader Patricia Rodriguez brings a great range of performance to the characters, and captures the heart of the story.

The Adventures of Tom Stranger, Interplanetary Insurance Agent is basically the furthest from The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet it is possible to get while still operating within the same vague genre, medium and language. Written by Larry Correia and performed by Adam Baldwin (both of whom are also characters within the story,) it's either a scathing satire of the kind of two-fisted, macho, tech-porn action adventure that is almost impossible to distinguish from its own parodies, or the genuine article. I suspect the latter. It's a diverting listen at a mere two hours long, and Baldwin performs it with genuine gusto, but it doesn't really inspire me to seek out Correia's longer fiction. I can't escape the feeling that it would just be exhausting, and that I would just be increasingly desperate for some kind of satire to kick in and relieve the monotony.

Snakewood is another debut, this time from Barry-born games writer Adrian Selby. A fantasy offering in the subgenre I call 'White Company' (which is to say, definitely not the Black Company, guv,) it tells the story of the golden years and decline of the mercenary company known as Kailen's Twenty, and the assassination of its members a decade later. Recounted through a series of journals, letters and confessions recorded by the son of one of the last survivors of the company, the narrative begins at the end, and gradually unfolds the names and nature of the company's hunters, and the manner of the aging soldiers' deaths. It's big twist is a little too telegraphed by simple logic, although there is a second part to it that is harder to see coming.

The strength of the novel is its unique world, in which the flash of wizardly magic is replaced by a form of herbal alchemy. A class of warrior-brewers called the druda provide fightbrews which transform mere men into superhuman engines of battle, poisons in pastes for their blades and aerosolised form to be released from their arrow, and antidotes to be soaked into their armour or applied to their wounds, radically transforming war from a purely military contest to a clash of skill between their druda. The base elements of these concoctions - known collectively as 'plant' - are worth more than gold, and the recipe books of the druda are carefully guarded secrets. Interestingly, some reviewers have contested the right of a novel with 'no magic' to be considered fantasy, but not only is Snakewood clearly set in a secondary world, but to suggest that the druda craft is not magical is frankly ludicrous. If there were any doubt, Selby himself describes it as the world's magic system on his blog.

Where the reader's mileage may vary is in the characters. Well-drawn and convincing, they are nonetheless appalling bastards, pretty much to a man (or woman,) and anyone who prefers to have a side to root for may be in for a frustrating read. The best of the characters are violent junkies, and perhaps the only biting distinction is that only one side is explicitly involved in rape. Do not expect to like these characters, and if listening to the audiobook, try not to be lulled by the reassuring accent, reminiscent of Sean Bean at his most sincere, which marks Joe Jameson's interpretation of Kailen.

In the Darkness That's Where I'll Know You began life as a four-volume serial novel called 'The Black Room'. It tells the story of Charlie Wilkes, an easy going chap who does some dodgy ket at a mate's flat and wakes up inside the head of a neurotic ex-web designer named Minnie Cooper. As he struggles to convince her that he is not just the roaring spectre of mental collapse, he slowly realises that Minnie lives in a different world; not his reality, but a parallel one.

It gradually becomes clear that there in every world there is a Charlie and a Minnie, and that more often than not, they end up together. The Minnie in this Charlie's world turns out to have died tragically of a suspected overdose, and so despite his own growing feelings for the Minnie whose head he enters, he agrees to be her invisible wingman on a date with her world's Charlie, whom he calls Chuck. Which is the point at which a fairly fluffy sci-fi romance turns into a horror story, as Chuck reveals a terrifying dark secret that threatens Charlie, Minnie and countless other versions of their predestined happiness.

Luke Smitherd reads his own novel, and as with Jeremy Smith's performance in The Ables, it's clear that he's not done this much, with his delivery becoming markedly more assured and fluid in the later parts of the novel. By turns weird, sweet and appalling, In the Darkness That's Where I'll Know You is a unique and intriguing novel, and in a crowded marketplace, that's not nothing.

Of course, I came to Lev Grossman's The Magicians through the current TV adaptation. Like the series, the novel focuses on the progress of Quentin Coldwater, a disaffected youth who is unexpectedly admitted to a secret magical university. Unlike the series, the book casts Quentin as an undergraduate and follows him through years of study before things really start happening. It also casts his former best friend Julia into the wilderness for most of the novel, her story running concurrently, but in the follow-up novel, The Magician King.

The Magicians is basically about Quentin and his inability to ever be happy. He learns that he can do magic, finds a beautiful girlfriend with whom he connects on a deep, emotional level, has the freedom to do whatever he wants and ultimately finds a way to travel to Filory, the magical land of the books he has obsessed over since childhood (a sort of Narnia with the serial numbers filed off,) and still isn't happy, and I'm going to be honest, I wanted to slap book-Quentin even more than I wanted to slap series-Quentin. This is because, far more so than the series, the book is about the modern inability to embrace happiness, the obsession with the something else that will make your life make sense and be perfect, rather than about magicians having adventures. A common rallying cry for fans of the series is Hogwarts + Sex = Brakebills, but the equation is a lot more complex. Hogwarts + Sex - Cosmic Validation + Cosmic Horror - High Jinx + Alcohol + Bitterness - Neat Resolution = Brakebills. Mark Bramhall even reads the audiobook as if it were a particularly grim life story of Charles Foster Kane.

Just One Damned Thing After Another is the first novel in the Chronicles of St Mary's, by Jodi Taylor (not the porn star, thanks Google.) The titular St Mary's is a historical research institute with access to time travel, who shoot cunningly disguised portacabins back through history to observe and record, before returning to manufacture convincing supporting 'research' for delivery to the equally fictional Thirsk University. Like The Doomsday Book, this is a time travel novel with a female protagonist, although Dr Madeline 'Max' Maxwell is a far cry from Kivrin. She's a hard-drinking gal with some serious problems with authority, but the prospect of actual time travel is enough to convince her to apply herself to the grueling training regime and to put up with her less appealing colleagues.

There's a lot to like in this novel, although it's not without its problems. It's not hugely long, but a lot happens and there isn't really one dominant plot thread. The book feels like it ends a couple of times, before getting up and going on. In fact, it feels most of all like a series of linked short stories, rather than a single narrative, and character attitudes and motivations sometimes seem to spin on a dime. It is also one of the first books I've read in a while to feature the once-ubiquitous uncomfortably graphic sex scene apparently thrown in for its own sake.

Zara Ramm works hard to bring the broad cast of characters to life, but overall this is a fun jaunt rather than a life-changing grand tour.

Finally, The Scorch Trials is the second volume in the Maze Runner series, and follows Thomas and the Gladers after their escape from the Maze, as they are tasked with crossing a punishing desert called the Scorch to reach a Safe Zone. WICKED, the group responsible for these tests, subject the group to a series of horrific encounters, and also put them up against 'Group B', a number of female survivors from another maze. The psychological aspect of the trials is ramped up, with each survivor being assigned a role and environmental messages then undermining those roles. Thomas also begins to remember his past, before the Maze, and that he might be responsible for some of what they are going through.

I got this one from the library, because I've not been sufficiently impressed by the franchise to want to sink money into it, and this volume did not change my mind. An awful lot of it feels like the weirdness of the trials is weird for the sake of being weird, rather than having a serious purpose. I guess the Flare is a brain infection, so maybe inducing multiple emotional traumas serves a purpose, but it still feels arbitary, and as of the end of this installment the absolute control WICKED imposes on everything makes the story of our plucky rebels feel more than a little bit futile. Also, Theresa - the female lead of the first book - does not get a good showing here, basically being set up to betray Thomas, either by choice or because she is coerced by WICKED.