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| Full disclosure, it took me a long time to realise which two towers the title referred to. |
A double event this month, having missed last month.
The Two Towers continues my
revisiting of The Lord of the Rings,
and another interesting aspect of this is that I think this is my first reread
since seeing the movies, and so my first chance to really appreciate the way in
which Jackson’s aesthetic has infiltrated my visualisation of Middle Earth.
This time out, the big revelation was in the depiction of the orcs. Yes, they
are foul, and yes, they are degenerate, but overall they are shown in the novel
as soldiers. They bicker and fight
over spoils and glory, but they aren’t nearly as bestial as other
interpretations make them.
Of course, this is also the book with the Southrons
in, and all the… difficulties that they present. In and of themselves, they are
a really interesting concept; a race very like the men of the west, led by
descendants of Numenor, but in league with or thrall to the Dark Lord. Where it
falls down is that they happen to be the folk in the parts of Middle Earth
which map to Africa and the Middle East, and whether Tolkien loathed analogy or
not, you can’t just ignore that. I suspect that he legitimately meant nothing
by it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t meaningful or problematic.
Deep Roots is the second
novel in the Innsmouth Legacy series, Ruthanna Emrys’ pro-fish revision of the
Cthulhu Mythos, following the adventures of Aphra Marsh and her circle, as they
travel from the ruins of Innsmouth – itself faced with the spectre of
gentrification since they have begun its reoccupation – to New York, in search
of a potential long-lost cousin or two. Negotiating the interest of the
closeted Agent Spector’s extended family – a New York Jewish community who have
reached the level of nuptial desperation which leads respectable royal courts
to consider ‘shoeless beach waif’ a godsend – and their fraught relationship
with the FBI’s more decorated and action-oriented paranormal team. Finding one
of their kin caught up with a group of Mi-Go, Aphra and her Deep One kin must struggle
with their own prejudices to decide if the Mi-Go can be trusted, or whether
they need to go on the offensive while the FBI are seeking to establish diplomatic
ties. With this second volume, we see that the Aeonist perspective which does
not fear the Yith is yet repulsed by the inhuman cosmopolitanism of the Mi-Go,
which threatens the Deep Ones’ sense of physical identity with its focus on the
mind as the only relevant centre of being. Emrys also ensures that Aphra’s
choices have consequences, as her decision to conceal the actions of the Yith
from the FBI in Winter Tide comes
back to bite her.
Once again, this is a slow-burner; like, a really slow-burner, even
managing to be quite sedate during an honest-to-goodness commando raid. It’s nothing
like you would expect from a Cthulhu Mythos story, of course, continuing Emrys’
tour de force reimagining of the mythos from the viewpoint of the disadvantaged
outsiders who were Lovecraft’s villains.
Another revisiting this time, as for some reason – seriously, I can’t
remember what my impetus was on this – I reread Anno Dracula, the first volume of Kim Newman’s alternate historical
series of the same name, which takes as its premise the idea that Dracula
defeated his hunters in the narrative timeline of Dracula, married the widowed Victoria and took over England,
transforming it into a vampire utopia that is simultaneously decadent and
selectively puritanical, as well as being inhabited by a broad spectrum of historical
and fictional characters. Newman’s original characters, Renaissance vampire
Genevieve Dieudonne and gentleman-spy Charles Beauregard, find themselves at
the centre of the hunt for the serial killer Jack the Ripper, who murders
vampire prostitutes with silver knives, while Arthur, Lord Godalming plots to elevate
himself in society and the great and the good of the Gothic and the grand guignol
seek their own advantage in the chaos.
Honestly, a large part of the appeal in Newman’s writing, especially
the Anno Dracula series, lies in spotting the cameos, and I definitely get more
of them than I used to. I was surprised by the relative absence of Kate Reed, a
minor character from early drafts of Dracula
who appears in an unflattering role in Dracula
Unredacted, and does much more in later novels in this series (although
despite Newman’s apparent fondness for her, I’m not sure she is ever very
effectual. I guess I’ll see as I go through.) The story is okay, the setting
much more interesting, if only for its inclusion of every conceivable form of
fictional vampire – including the Chinese hopping variety – or fictional human.
It’s not deep, but it’s good fun.
After the whiplash change of pace from Deep Roots to Anno Dracula,
I did another reversal into Record of a
Spaceborn Few, the third novel in the Wayfarers series. Even more loosely
connected than the first two – one of the several viewpoint characters is the
sister of the captain in The Long Way to
a Small, Angry Planet – this novel follows a disparate group of characters
in one of the ships of the Exodus Fleet, the semi-nomadic collective of
self-sufficient vessels which carried the human race away from the dying Earth.
In the wake of a disaster which destroyed one of the homestead ships, the
others have accepted aid from various alien races to upgrade their dwellings, and
the narrative of Record of a Spaceborn
Few revolves around the clashes engendered by the changing culture this has
brought to the once-isolated Fleet.
With Record of a Spaceborn Few,
Becky Chambers reaffirms her place as one of the leading lights of character
driven SF. While her world is built on a solid, crunchy foundation, the stories
are about people and how they deal with this vast galaxy. The clash between the
traditions of the Fleet and the ways of the Galactic Commons, the perils of a
life lived in space, and the impact of outsiders on a relatively closed
culture.
We stay in space for Ancillary
Mercy, the final instalment of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy. Fleet
Captain Breq has effectively declared independence for the Atoeck(1) system. With
at least one aspect of the Lord of the Radch definitely out to get her, and her
identity as the last ancillary body of the troop carrier Justice of Toren an increasingly open secret, she must scramble to
assemble her few allies into an effective resistance against the master of a
thousand worlds. Given its set up, it is perhaps unsurprising that Ancillary Mercy never goes full space
battle. Breq’s force – basically consisting of Breq’s patrol ship Mercy of Callah, a few administrators
and labourers, and a mostly friendly botanist – is so massively outmatched that
the conflict is more interestingly shifted into the political domain. The
result is a tense narrative, making inventive use of Breq’s first person
narrative through her ability to directly receive sensory feeds from multiple
sources.
Next up, it’s a shift to a fantasy notBritain for The Apprentice Witch and A
Witch Alone, debut and follow up novels from former Ely librarian James
Nicol(2). When Arianwyn Gribble’s assessment goes wrong, she is denied qualified
witch status, but due to some irregularities and her grandmother’s influence, instead
of being sent back to school, she is assigned to on-the-job training as
resident witch to the village of Lull. Here she makes friends, clashes with
overbearing bureaucrats, encounters strange and sometimes dreadful creatures from
the Great Woods, and accidentally becomes mentor to her former witch school bully,
Gimma.
These books are aimed at a much younger readership than me. The same is
true of a lot that I read, but this is definitely for children rather than my
more usual teenage/YA minimum, so that should be born in mind regarding this
review. The story and characters are very simple, and the setting feels more
like an accumulation of ideas than a fully realised secondary world, and has a few head-scratching moments (for example, all the
witches we see are women(3), but civic and temporal power is all held by men.) On the other hand, there is plenty to like in the world Nicol has created, and I am especially taken with the system of magic used by the witches, which is based on a simple set of glyphs which can be combined to different effects.
Overall, while
I’d be very happy to read this one with my daughter, and there is an appeal to Arianwyn’s
misadventures, most of the twists are fairly obvious to an adult reader, and
the ‘the power was inside you all along’ resolution is one that I am kind of
over, at least where that power is some unique magical ability rather than a
more mundane realisation of agency.
Man; speaking of agency, the next book is Isaac Asimov’s classic SF
novel, Foundation, in which a ‘psychohistorian’
creates an organisation, the titular Foundation, designed to survive the
downfall of a galactic empire and ensure the restoration of civilisation after
a mere millennium, rather than thirty-thousand years as originally predicted, which
is some serious long game ambition, if nothing else. In order to bring about
his planned future, he has carefully aligned the starting conditions of the
Foundation to bring about an inevitable and necessary outcome, and chaos theory
bedamned. Set over the first century and a half of the Foundation’s era, Foundation collects four previously
published short stories and a fifth written as a prequel for the collected edition.
After establishing the creation of the Foundation in ‘The Psychohistorians’,
the other stories follow the transition of power from ‘The Encyclopedists’, to ‘The
Lord Mayors’, ‘The Traders’ and finally ‘The Merchant Princes’, with each transition
happening at a moment of crisis, and followed by a time-locked message from Hari
Seldon, basically congratulating them on following his masterplan unawares and
noting that, by the by, all that they have worked for has now served its
purpose, so they can hand off to the next bunch kthxbye.
As with much golden age SF, there is a fascinating juxtaposition in Foundation between the still quite
visionary futurism, and the entirely outmoded social assumptions that Asimov was
probably quite unaware of, like the Foundation being composed of a number of
good ‘men’ and their wives and children(4). Asimov also presents atomic power
as the Apex of galactic technology. The Foundation is the only group retaining mastery
of atomic science, whereas the fading Empire can only maintain its atomics, and
the splinter kingdoms of the galactic periphery have no atomics at all, but
they do have faster than light travel. They can’t harness the atom but can defy
the fundamental limitations of physics with their, presumably, coal-fired
spaceships; with no female crew.
Foundation is good, but it’s
very much of its time, is what I’m saying.
Prophets of Waaagh! isn’t
actually a book, but rather a series of three short audio dramas – ‘End of It’s kind of silly, good fun, and features a rare modern appearance of a MadBoy, a concept little seen since their origin in the days before mental health sensitivity and here transposed from uncomfortable cute lunatic to the primary receivers of the psychic attack signal that is the Waaagh!
Finally, The Burning Page is
the third part of Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library series. Irene is on
probation after ditching her official duties to rescue her apprentice, Kai,
from a chaotic alternate Venice, and their local friend Vale is succumbing to
chaos infection… and also drug addiction. It is at this point that gates to the
library begin to fail in a particularly incandescent fashion, as the Library
itself comes under attack by its arch-enemy, the renegade Librarian Alberich.
I had some issues with the last instalment of the Invisible Library – The Masked City – but I’m pleased to say
that I enjoyed this one a lot more. Vale’s combination of condescension and
actually being that good is less annoying when it is both a vector and a symptom
of his chaos contamination, and I appreciate that Irene is not spending the
entire story obsessing about Kai (even if I did want her to give Vale more of an
earful for making her the stick for his pity piñata.) It helps, a lot, that
Irene gets to show her strengths, particularly in facing off against Alberich,
and that in acting as the moderate influence against Kai and Vale’s anti-fae extremism,
she is proven to be in the right, rather than being taken advantage of.
(1) As a reminder, I am working from hearing instead of seeing the
names.
(2) He was doing an author visit at the library which my daughter
attended, where she picked up the first book for me and the second for her
other daddy.
(3) There is one mention of a male witch, but he’s only referred to.
(4) There are all of two women in the entire novel with actual screen
time, and only one of them really qualifies as a character.
