Another twofer, covering May and June.
Found Horizons
Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri
Okay; you know the drill. 'Ordinary' girl, secret powers, moody sexy man of mystery. So snowflake, such been there.
Except that we haven't; not really.
Mehr is the daughter of two cultures. He father is a noble and official in the in the all-conquering Ambhan Empire, while her mother is one of the Amrithi, a nomadic culture persecuted by the Empire. She practices her mother's customs at the indulgence of her father's authority, putting her at odds with her stepmother, and ultimately bringing her to the attention of the Mystics, the religious fanatics in the service of the Maha, immortal founder of the Empire. Her Amrithi blood gives her rare powers, but also comes with a burden that she does not understand until it is used against her.
The balance of power and frailty is just one of the ways in which Empire of Sand stands apart from the crowd of lesser efforts with which is shares some rudimentary plot beats (The Hundredth Queen, I'm looking at you here.) Others include a romance which builds out of shared horrors, not some instant attraction to a pair of dreamy eyes (her husband Amun is far more complex than just being a love interest, and has somewhat scary black eyes,) and a willingness to sacrifice both life and love for the good of the world, rather than vice versa. Mehr acknowledges her early naivety and struggles to learn from it, and succeeds by understanding other people, rather than by simply denying their position until the world validates her.
In short, Empire of Sand is notable both for its atypical setting - a secondary fantasy world based on Mughal India, rather than the conventional mediaeval European model - and for taking a whole bunch of tired and/or unhealthy tropes and doing them really well.
New Novels
Provenance, by Ann Leckie
Ingray Aughskold is going to show them all. She has a plan. The only problem is that it's a terrible plan, which involves paying a vast sum of money to have a criminal extracted from not-prison-honestly to embarrass her adoptive mother's political rival on their homeworld, Hwae. It's a plan that will ultimately involve her in a murder mystery, a fake identity scandal, a diplomatic incident and an attempted interstellar insurgency, all revolving around Hwae's obsession with vestiges, the physical artefacts associated with historic events.
Set in the same universe and shortly after Leckie's Ancillary trilogy, Provenance departs the single-gender Imperial Radch for the single-world polity of Hwae, where identity hinges on proof of one's family history, favourite children share their parents' name and personhood, and children become adults when they feel ready to choose a grown-up name and a gender (male, female or non-binary(1).) It's a lot less epic than the previous novels, but likable characters, and interesting setting and a bucket of intrigue make for an engaging read nonetheless.
Whereas the singularity of gender identity in the Ancillary series is an intriguing deconstruction that is kind of adjacent to the main story, this is a book all about identity: the self-determined gender of the Hwaeans, their fixation on - slightly questionable - physical artefacts to define their history, and that history to define both their cultural and personal identity, and the personal struggle of the various characters to discover or define who they really are.
Bloody Rose, by Nicholas Eames
Tam Hashford is the daughter of a mercenary and a bard, and longs to have adventures of her own, but her father has decreed that she spend her life at home, where it is safe. But then Fable, the greatest band in the world, come to the tavern where she waits tables, and Tam has a chance to become their bard, and join them on the road for their last tour, and at the end of it, the greatest gig in history; something that will put even the reputation of Golden Gabe into the shade.
The sequel to Kings of the Wyld follows the band led by the titular Bloody Rose, the daughter of Saga's lead singer Gabriel, and that's just the start of the band's daddy issues. In fact, if there's a glaring flaw with the novel it's the focus on Rose's struggle to rise out of Gabe's shadow when the rest of the band's paternal units are a monstrous tyrant, a violent abuser, and the kind of emotional fuck-up who can't get his own head out of his arse. Still, it actually makes sense that these similarly damaged folks would find each other in an emotionally complex world of touring stadium gladiators.
Like Kings of the Wyld, Bloody Rose is probably a better book than it has any right to be, given that it's basically a one-joke concept - a world right out of fantasy RPGs, in which PC parties are effectively rock stars - as Eames puts in the humour and character work to make the whole far more interesting than the sum of its concepts. It has a few inherited diversity issues - one of the leads is a humanoid rabbit, but none are people of colour, because fantasy Europe - but there is at least some gay and bi representation and plenty of complex female characters. Rose may struggle to measure up to her dad, but that's because his life has almost accidentally made him a legend in the golden age of the mercenaries, not because she's a woman.
Deadly Desert, by Marcus Sedgwick
Elf Girl and Raven Boy are on a quest, but the truth is that they aren't very good at it. They need to find the artefact that will save their forest from ultimate evil, but they're not very qualified for heroism, lacking greatly in the fields of courage and badassery, and being a little too loose-lipped when it comes to the question of wishes. Still, they're all there is to prevent the forest becoming a barren waste like the Deadly Desert.
The third part of the Elf Girl and Raven Boy series - first I've read; the joys of library reading - is a fun, light-hearted little adventure with actual stakes. Sedgwick's usual metier is gothic bleakness, but he manages the shift of tone neatly, and the result is weird and sweet and yet with a bit of weight to its events, despite having a villain who never actually puts in an appearance. It also features one of the more self-aware 'three wishes' scenes I've read; good enough I was willing to give a pass to assigning three wishes to a genie (whose traditional bit is 'your wish is my command', which is a whole different scope than the fairy godmother thing.)
Very simple. Good stuff.
The Questing Knights of the Faerie Queen, by Geraldine McCaughrean
In the land of Faerie a queen rules, Gloriana, mistress of a court of chivalry and virtue, who dispatches her knights on quests to reaffirm the rule and role of virtue in the world: George Redcrosse, seeker after holiness; Sir Gunion, in need of temperance; Sir Campbell, in want of friendship; Britomart, chaste champion of true love; Sir Artegall, champion of justice; and Calidore, the courteous. Their stories overlap, with each other and with the quest of Arthur, king of legend and knight of all virtues, in a mosaic of courage, combat and romance.
Prolific children's author McCaughrean presents a lavishly illustrated retelling of Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene is a witty effort, although it does from time to time struggle with the source material, especially in Sir Artegall's misogyny and transphobia(2). The result is a diverting enough read, although if sharing it with childrne, this is on the 'complicated conversations end of the bedtime reading spectrum (see also Peter Pan, below.)
The illustrations by Jason Cockroft are bright and striking, although a little excess of enthusiasm with the rosy cheeks of Gloriana make the Faerie Queen look like she's gone a little heavy on the booze for the past eternity.
The October Man, by Ben Aaronovitch
A mysterious death, potentially supernatural means, and a problem that seems determined not to go away. This looks like a job for Peter Grant, jobbing copper and apprentice wizard... but it isn't. It isn't, because the death occurred in Trier, which puts it square in the bailiwick of Tobias Winter, sole apprentice magician in the German equivalent of the Folly, and his local liaison Vanessa Sommer.
The two main criticisms of The October Man that I've seen are 1) that it's too short, and 2) that the protagonist is a little too like Peter Grant in his dry, sarcastic first person narrative.
Point one is... fair. Novellae(3) by established authors are a bit of a racket in sales terms, but if they tend to be priced to give less bang for your buck in terms of solid page count, they also provide a welcome uptick in the old release schedule without turning your author into a desperate shell of humanity, plagued by the fear of 'going Jordan' and leaving the TV finale as the only one there is(4).
On point two... I actually don't know. This is one area where it makes a huge difference that I was listening to an audiobook. Once I'd recovered from the fact that a Rivers of London story wasn't being read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith(5) that fact in itself transformed the narrative voice for me. It also seemed to me that, alongside a different set of cultural references and hobbies, Toby was... well, a bit less of a dog than Peter, describing the women he meets in more practical terms. While he always respected them, especially in his early outings, Peter kind of had the hots for every woman he met, whereas Toby and Vanessa come across as colleagues with a natural working rapport. I liked that.
Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions - Mission 1: Salvage Trouble, by JS Morin
I don't make a habit of picking up books based on recommendations on the Facebook, because they usually look terrible (she's cool, she's hot, she hunts demons for the Vatican, but she isn't religious or anything(6).) The Complete Black Ocean - or possibly the Complete Galaxy Outlaws, I'm a little confused as to the title of this collection - has something different. Specifically, it's an omnibus with like, eighty-five hours of listening for a credit.
Carl Ramsey is an ex-Navy pilot running a mostly-legal freight and salvage operation on his ship, the Mobius, with his nails-hard ex-Marine ex-wife, a hard-drinking uplifted chimpanzee mechanic, an alien cat-woman who is more apex predator than fanservice, and a beatnik wizard. In this first story they lose their communications tech rescuing a stranded lifepod, and take on board a priestess and her charge, a young boy with secrets. As a result of this, and Carl's need to showboat, they quickly end up on the wrong end of a lot of heavily-armed attention. Fortunately, the crew of the Mobius know how to look after themselves.
The opening of this series has some interesting ideas - FTL travel is literally magical, an old wizard family called Brown uses the traditional middle name The to add grandeur(7), religion is alive and well, but distinctly altered - and some interesting twists on stock character archetypes, but the stock is very visible, and there aren't a lot of surprises for the veteran reader. Since I've got another eighty hours, I'll probably listen to at least the next story, but I'm certainly not going to do it all in a oner.
Audio Plays
Criss-Cross (Big Finish)
Leading WREN Constance Clarke is the leader of a group of hard-working ladies, crunching numbers at Bletchley Park to help break the German Enigma code, the silent muscle behind the male academics; academics like Doctor Smith, with his particular interest in a German agent named Spark.
The first of four Big Finish plays I worked through this month, Criss-Cross revisits familiar territory (actual Bletchley Park being ironically reminiscent of the Highland ersatz Bletchley from The Curse of Fenric, which the Doctor won't actually visit for another lifetime,) and introduces a new companion in the form of Mrs Constance Clarke, who is exactly the kind of no-nonsense travelling companion who complements the Sixth Doctor's excesses.
The plot manages to both celebrate the work of Bletchley and throw some shade on the moral ambivalence of intelligence work in general, with the eponymous Agent Criss-Cross hailed as a hero by various factions while betraying most of them for his one true loyalty to himself. The specific alien threat is a little mechanical, however, serving primarily to give the Doctor his interest in the earthbound events.
Planet of the Rani (Big Finish)
There is a prison, where the worst of the worst are held, and where the worst of the worst of the worst... has been rehabilitated. When Constance finds an email inviting the Doctor to attend the Rani's parole hearing, they discover that the renegade Time Lord is running the show. But that's not what she's really after; what she wants is to go back to the planet she made her own, and the child she created to be the progenitor of a master race under her command, and she doesn't care who gets hurt in the process.
As often happens, especially with a new companion, this run of three plays follows a close chronological sequence, and focuses on the development of the new character. Constance has joined the Doctor to take care of 'personal business,' and with every intention of returning moments after she left, because she ain't no deserter. We also learn that life in wartime has made her harder than many companions, not afraid of a little rough stuff and willing to encourage a more aggressive course of action than the Doctor might prefer.
Siobhan Redmond brings the requisite overwhelming arrogance to her performance as the Second Rani, and her co-option of a thoughtless childhood experiment of the Doctor's plays up the chilling childishness of her unsympathetic ambition.
Shield of the Jotun (Big Finish)
In the not-too-distant future, the Sixth Doctor and Constance stumble upon an ancient Viking burial mound in the central United States, at the heart of a site intended for development of a climate-saving terraforming engine. But there is something terrible buried with the Vikings, a device at the heart of a plan for the Earth to become a frozen paradise for alien colonists fleeing their own doomed planet.
Classic Who this one: Bit of environmental message, aliens bent on world domination, and an earnest attempt at compromise by a Doctor who is doomed to eternally being not angry, just disappointed. Constance has mostly settled into her companion mode for this one, but I expect to see her through plot reappear in the next set of three.
Shield of the Jotun is probably the weakest of these three, with some gorgeous soundscapes but a fairly simplistic motivation for its antagonists. Still, even weak Big Finish tends to be pretty solid stuff.
You are the Doctor and other stories (Big Finish)
The Doctor is teaching Ace to pilot the TARDIS, and it's going about as well as you might expect. She's looking for sun, sea, sand, and presumably not too many personal revelations. What she finds is a trash ship where she and the Doctor are caught up in a choose your own adventure, a murder mystery weekend in time and space, a hotel where they are caught up in a heist, or a revolution, or both, and a space tourist vessel, where they are caught up in an attempted real estate scam. Pure bad luck, or is there a connection?
Somewhat ironically, given my regular lambasting of the single-episode-story approach of nuWho, I've always rather enjoyed the four-story collections in the Big Finish main range, and this is no exception. You get a good spread of stories, and it helps that this uses my favourite classic pairing of the Seventh Doctor(8) and Ace. A good finish to the month's Who.
Alien III, by William Gibson
Alien3 had a famously troubled production, not least due to its reason for existing being 'Aliens made a tonne of money, this franchise is bank,' rather than 'and this is the next story we want to tell in this universe.(9)' Many fans of the franchise and critics of the eventual film - whichever version of it you want to consider canonical - have long hewed to the touchstone that 'the original script' would have been better. Written by Neuromancer scribe Gibson, this script has since seen the light of day as a comic book, and now as Alien III, an Audible-produced audioplay(10), starring Michael Biehn, Lance Hendricksen and the American residents of producer-director Dirk Maggs' contacts list.
Do you remember when Biehn was a hot young talent, fresh from playing the love interest in The Terminator? When his star was rising and he looked set to be the kind of leading man not even the box office poison of Navy SEALS could stop? Those days are long past, and to be honest between this and Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, I don't think he was ever that great at voice acting. Still, an Alien story only calls on him to be gruff, protective of Ripley, and vaguely paternal towards Newt(11), and he can do that.
The script almost immediately eliminates Ripley(12), which probably saved a major bit of recasting, since Sigourney Weaver still has a movie career, and instead follows Hicks as he recovers, sees Ripley and Newt to safety, and then tries to protect as many members of the crew of a science station as he can after Weyland-Yutani once more try to re-engineer the Alien. Meanwhile, an entirely parallel and as-yet largely unmade movie is taking place on a Communist station, and I kind of wanted to hear more of that one, if I'm honest.
It's very short for a full credit, but it helps calm the franchise completist in me that knows I will never be able to get all of the comics.
Re-reads
Peter Pan
All children grow up, except one.
An established classic to which I came late, I remain impressed by the book's awareness of its titular characters glaring flaws, but it's still a highly problematic work; less for the massive of indescribably gruesome violence obliquely referenced throughout the text than for its depiction of Wendy, a character so utterly indoctrinated into the Edwardian patriarchy that motherhood is for her not merely a goal but a sacred purpose. Also, it has the redskins in, which I had to explain to my six year old daughter are not aliens, but instead a racist caricature of native Americans.
Old stuff. It's got challenges.
(1) I totally stole this idea for the elves in my D&D setting, by the by.
(2) TLDR, Amazons upset the order of his world by making him wear a dress, so he murders them all.
(3) Novellas? I don't know; this isn't a hill I'm prepared to die on or anything.
(4) If that's not too specific.
(5) For the record, I don't think he should play the part in the TV series if and when it gets made. His voice is Peter for me, but on screen they need to cast someone younger.
(6) Paraphrased, but not made up. The synopsis is written in first person and uses the phrase 'put on my big girl pants' with no sign of irony.
(7) The Mobius's wizard is thus legally known as Mordecai The Brown, for example.
(8) Don't @ me.
(9) See also the entire Alien vs. Predator subfranchise, which despite a few successes very much a product of 'wouldn't it beprofitable cool' thinking.
(10) Audible are getting really into Alien spin-off material; I suppose they must have secured a deal of some sort.
(11) Honestly, I can forgive a lot for not just writing out Newt for the sake of convenience.
(12) This is not one of those things.
Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri
Okay; you know the drill. 'Ordinary' girl, secret powers, moody sexy man of mystery. So snowflake, such been there.
Except that we haven't; not really.
Mehr is the daughter of two cultures. He father is a noble and official in the in the all-conquering Ambhan Empire, while her mother is one of the Amrithi, a nomadic culture persecuted by the Empire. She practices her mother's customs at the indulgence of her father's authority, putting her at odds with her stepmother, and ultimately bringing her to the attention of the Mystics, the religious fanatics in the service of the Maha, immortal founder of the Empire. Her Amrithi blood gives her rare powers, but also comes with a burden that she does not understand until it is used against her.
The balance of power and frailty is just one of the ways in which Empire of Sand stands apart from the crowd of lesser efforts with which is shares some rudimentary plot beats (The Hundredth Queen, I'm looking at you here.) Others include a romance which builds out of shared horrors, not some instant attraction to a pair of dreamy eyes (her husband Amun is far more complex than just being a love interest, and has somewhat scary black eyes,) and a willingness to sacrifice both life and love for the good of the world, rather than vice versa. Mehr acknowledges her early naivety and struggles to learn from it, and succeeds by understanding other people, rather than by simply denying their position until the world validates her.
In short, Empire of Sand is notable both for its atypical setting - a secondary fantasy world based on Mughal India, rather than the conventional mediaeval European model - and for taking a whole bunch of tired and/or unhealthy tropes and doing them really well.
New NovelsProvenance, by Ann Leckie
Ingray Aughskold is going to show them all. She has a plan. The only problem is that it's a terrible plan, which involves paying a vast sum of money to have a criminal extracted from not-prison-honestly to embarrass her adoptive mother's political rival on their homeworld, Hwae. It's a plan that will ultimately involve her in a murder mystery, a fake identity scandal, a diplomatic incident and an attempted interstellar insurgency, all revolving around Hwae's obsession with vestiges, the physical artefacts associated with historic events.
Set in the same universe and shortly after Leckie's Ancillary trilogy, Provenance departs the single-gender Imperial Radch for the single-world polity of Hwae, where identity hinges on proof of one's family history, favourite children share their parents' name and personhood, and children become adults when they feel ready to choose a grown-up name and a gender (male, female or non-binary(1).) It's a lot less epic than the previous novels, but likable characters, and interesting setting and a bucket of intrigue make for an engaging read nonetheless.
Whereas the singularity of gender identity in the Ancillary series is an intriguing deconstruction that is kind of adjacent to the main story, this is a book all about identity: the self-determined gender of the Hwaeans, their fixation on - slightly questionable - physical artefacts to define their history, and that history to define both their cultural and personal identity, and the personal struggle of the various characters to discover or define who they really are.
Bloody Rose, by Nicholas EamesTam Hashford is the daughter of a mercenary and a bard, and longs to have adventures of her own, but her father has decreed that she spend her life at home, where it is safe. But then Fable, the greatest band in the world, come to the tavern where she waits tables, and Tam has a chance to become their bard, and join them on the road for their last tour, and at the end of it, the greatest gig in history; something that will put even the reputation of Golden Gabe into the shade.
The sequel to Kings of the Wyld follows the band led by the titular Bloody Rose, the daughter of Saga's lead singer Gabriel, and that's just the start of the band's daddy issues. In fact, if there's a glaring flaw with the novel it's the focus on Rose's struggle to rise out of Gabe's shadow when the rest of the band's paternal units are a monstrous tyrant, a violent abuser, and the kind of emotional fuck-up who can't get his own head out of his arse. Still, it actually makes sense that these similarly damaged folks would find each other in an emotionally complex world of touring stadium gladiators.
Like Kings of the Wyld, Bloody Rose is probably a better book than it has any right to be, given that it's basically a one-joke concept - a world right out of fantasy RPGs, in which PC parties are effectively rock stars - as Eames puts in the humour and character work to make the whole far more interesting than the sum of its concepts. It has a few inherited diversity issues - one of the leads is a humanoid rabbit, but none are people of colour, because fantasy Europe - but there is at least some gay and bi representation and plenty of complex female characters. Rose may struggle to measure up to her dad, but that's because his life has almost accidentally made him a legend in the golden age of the mercenaries, not because she's a woman.
Elf Girl and Raven Boy are on a quest, but the truth is that they aren't very good at it. They need to find the artefact that will save their forest from ultimate evil, but they're not very qualified for heroism, lacking greatly in the fields of courage and badassery, and being a little too loose-lipped when it comes to the question of wishes. Still, they're all there is to prevent the forest becoming a barren waste like the Deadly Desert.
The third part of the Elf Girl and Raven Boy series - first I've read; the joys of library reading - is a fun, light-hearted little adventure with actual stakes. Sedgwick's usual metier is gothic bleakness, but he manages the shift of tone neatly, and the result is weird and sweet and yet with a bit of weight to its events, despite having a villain who never actually puts in an appearance. It also features one of the more self-aware 'three wishes' scenes I've read; good enough I was willing to give a pass to assigning three wishes to a genie (whose traditional bit is 'your wish is my command', which is a whole different scope than the fairy godmother thing.)
Very simple. Good stuff.
In the land of Faerie a queen rules, Gloriana, mistress of a court of chivalry and virtue, who dispatches her knights on quests to reaffirm the rule and role of virtue in the world: George Redcrosse, seeker after holiness; Sir Gunion, in need of temperance; Sir Campbell, in want of friendship; Britomart, chaste champion of true love; Sir Artegall, champion of justice; and Calidore, the courteous. Their stories overlap, with each other and with the quest of Arthur, king of legend and knight of all virtues, in a mosaic of courage, combat and romance.
Prolific children's author McCaughrean presents a lavishly illustrated retelling of Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene is a witty effort, although it does from time to time struggle with the source material, especially in Sir Artegall's misogyny and transphobia(2). The result is a diverting enough read, although if sharing it with childrne, this is on the 'complicated conversations end of the bedtime reading spectrum (see also Peter Pan, below.)
The illustrations by Jason Cockroft are bright and striking, although a little excess of enthusiasm with the rosy cheeks of Gloriana make the Faerie Queen look like she's gone a little heavy on the booze for the past eternity.
The October Man, by Ben AaronovitchA mysterious death, potentially supernatural means, and a problem that seems determined not to go away. This looks like a job for Peter Grant, jobbing copper and apprentice wizard... but it isn't. It isn't, because the death occurred in Trier, which puts it square in the bailiwick of Tobias Winter, sole apprentice magician in the German equivalent of the Folly, and his local liaison Vanessa Sommer.
The two main criticisms of The October Man that I've seen are 1) that it's too short, and 2) that the protagonist is a little too like Peter Grant in his dry, sarcastic first person narrative.
Point one is... fair. Novellae(3) by established authors are a bit of a racket in sales terms, but if they tend to be priced to give less bang for your buck in terms of solid page count, they also provide a welcome uptick in the old release schedule without turning your author into a desperate shell of humanity, plagued by the fear of 'going Jordan' and leaving the TV finale as the only one there is(4).
On point two... I actually don't know. This is one area where it makes a huge difference that I was listening to an audiobook. Once I'd recovered from the fact that a Rivers of London story wasn't being read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith(5) that fact in itself transformed the narrative voice for me. It also seemed to me that, alongside a different set of cultural references and hobbies, Toby was... well, a bit less of a dog than Peter, describing the women he meets in more practical terms. While he always respected them, especially in his early outings, Peter kind of had the hots for every woman he met, whereas Toby and Vanessa come across as colleagues with a natural working rapport. I liked that.
Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions - Mission 1: Salvage Trouble, by JS MorinI don't make a habit of picking up books based on recommendations on the Facebook, because they usually look terrible (she's cool, she's hot, she hunts demons for the Vatican, but she isn't religious or anything(6).) The Complete Black Ocean - or possibly the Complete Galaxy Outlaws, I'm a little confused as to the title of this collection - has something different. Specifically, it's an omnibus with like, eighty-five hours of listening for a credit.
Carl Ramsey is an ex-Navy pilot running a mostly-legal freight and salvage operation on his ship, the Mobius, with his nails-hard ex-Marine ex-wife, a hard-drinking uplifted chimpanzee mechanic, an alien cat-woman who is more apex predator than fanservice, and a beatnik wizard. In this first story they lose their communications tech rescuing a stranded lifepod, and take on board a priestess and her charge, a young boy with secrets. As a result of this, and Carl's need to showboat, they quickly end up on the wrong end of a lot of heavily-armed attention. Fortunately, the crew of the Mobius know how to look after themselves.
The opening of this series has some interesting ideas - FTL travel is literally magical, an old wizard family called Brown uses the traditional middle name The to add grandeur(7), religion is alive and well, but distinctly altered - and some interesting twists on stock character archetypes, but the stock is very visible, and there aren't a lot of surprises for the veteran reader. Since I've got another eighty hours, I'll probably listen to at least the next story, but I'm certainly not going to do it all in a oner.
Audio Plays
Criss-Cross (Big Finish)
Leading WREN Constance Clarke is the leader of a group of hard-working ladies, crunching numbers at Bletchley Park to help break the German Enigma code, the silent muscle behind the male academics; academics like Doctor Smith, with his particular interest in a German agent named Spark.
The first of four Big Finish plays I worked through this month, Criss-Cross revisits familiar territory (actual Bletchley Park being ironically reminiscent of the Highland ersatz Bletchley from The Curse of Fenric, which the Doctor won't actually visit for another lifetime,) and introduces a new companion in the form of Mrs Constance Clarke, who is exactly the kind of no-nonsense travelling companion who complements the Sixth Doctor's excesses.
The plot manages to both celebrate the work of Bletchley and throw some shade on the moral ambivalence of intelligence work in general, with the eponymous Agent Criss-Cross hailed as a hero by various factions while betraying most of them for his one true loyalty to himself. The specific alien threat is a little mechanical, however, serving primarily to give the Doctor his interest in the earthbound events.
Planet of the Rani (Big Finish)
There is a prison, where the worst of the worst are held, and where the worst of the worst of the worst... has been rehabilitated. When Constance finds an email inviting the Doctor to attend the Rani's parole hearing, they discover that the renegade Time Lord is running the show. But that's not what she's really after; what she wants is to go back to the planet she made her own, and the child she created to be the progenitor of a master race under her command, and she doesn't care who gets hurt in the process.
As often happens, especially with a new companion, this run of three plays follows a close chronological sequence, and focuses on the development of the new character. Constance has joined the Doctor to take care of 'personal business,' and with every intention of returning moments after she left, because she ain't no deserter. We also learn that life in wartime has made her harder than many companions, not afraid of a little rough stuff and willing to encourage a more aggressive course of action than the Doctor might prefer.
Siobhan Redmond brings the requisite overwhelming arrogance to her performance as the Second Rani, and her co-option of a thoughtless childhood experiment of the Doctor's plays up the chilling childishness of her unsympathetic ambition.
Shield of the Jotun (Big Finish)
In the not-too-distant future, the Sixth Doctor and Constance stumble upon an ancient Viking burial mound in the central United States, at the heart of a site intended for development of a climate-saving terraforming engine. But there is something terrible buried with the Vikings, a device at the heart of a plan for the Earth to become a frozen paradise for alien colonists fleeing their own doomed planet.
Classic Who this one: Bit of environmental message, aliens bent on world domination, and an earnest attempt at compromise by a Doctor who is doomed to eternally being not angry, just disappointed. Constance has mostly settled into her companion mode for this one, but I expect to see her through plot reappear in the next set of three.
Shield of the Jotun is probably the weakest of these three, with some gorgeous soundscapes but a fairly simplistic motivation for its antagonists. Still, even weak Big Finish tends to be pretty solid stuff.
You are the Doctor and other stories (Big Finish)
The Doctor is teaching Ace to pilot the TARDIS, and it's going about as well as you might expect. She's looking for sun, sea, sand, and presumably not too many personal revelations. What she finds is a trash ship where she and the Doctor are caught up in a choose your own adventure, a murder mystery weekend in time and space, a hotel where they are caught up in a heist, or a revolution, or both, and a space tourist vessel, where they are caught up in an attempted real estate scam. Pure bad luck, or is there a connection?
Somewhat ironically, given my regular lambasting of the single-episode-story approach of nuWho, I've always rather enjoyed the four-story collections in the Big Finish main range, and this is no exception. You get a good spread of stories, and it helps that this uses my favourite classic pairing of the Seventh Doctor(8) and Ace. A good finish to the month's Who.
Alien3 had a famously troubled production, not least due to its reason for existing being 'Aliens made a tonne of money, this franchise is bank,' rather than 'and this is the next story we want to tell in this universe.(9)' Many fans of the franchise and critics of the eventual film - whichever version of it you want to consider canonical - have long hewed to the touchstone that 'the original script' would have been better. Written by Neuromancer scribe Gibson, this script has since seen the light of day as a comic book, and now as Alien III, an Audible-produced audioplay(10), starring Michael Biehn, Lance Hendricksen and the American residents of producer-director Dirk Maggs' contacts list.
Do you remember when Biehn was a hot young talent, fresh from playing the love interest in The Terminator? When his star was rising and he looked set to be the kind of leading man not even the box office poison of Navy SEALS could stop? Those days are long past, and to be honest between this and Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, I don't think he was ever that great at voice acting. Still, an Alien story only calls on him to be gruff, protective of Ripley, and vaguely paternal towards Newt(11), and he can do that.
The script almost immediately eliminates Ripley(12), which probably saved a major bit of recasting, since Sigourney Weaver still has a movie career, and instead follows Hicks as he recovers, sees Ripley and Newt to safety, and then tries to protect as many members of the crew of a science station as he can after Weyland-Yutani once more try to re-engineer the Alien. Meanwhile, an entirely parallel and as-yet largely unmade movie is taking place on a Communist station, and I kind of wanted to hear more of that one, if I'm honest.
It's very short for a full credit, but it helps calm the franchise completist in me that knows I will never be able to get all of the comics.
Re-reads
Peter Pan
All children grow up, except one.
An established classic to which I came late, I remain impressed by the book's awareness of its titular characters glaring flaws, but it's still a highly problematic work; less for the massive of indescribably gruesome violence obliquely referenced throughout the text than for its depiction of Wendy, a character so utterly indoctrinated into the Edwardian patriarchy that motherhood is for her not merely a goal but a sacred purpose. Also, it has the redskins in, which I had to explain to my six year old daughter are not aliens, but instead a racist caricature of native Americans.
Old stuff. It's got challenges.
(1) I totally stole this idea for the elves in my D&D setting, by the by.
(2) TLDR, Amazons upset the order of his world by making him wear a dress, so he murders them all.
(3) Novellas? I don't know; this isn't a hill I'm prepared to die on or anything.
(4) If that's not too specific.
(5) For the record, I don't think he should play the part in the TV series if and when it gets made. His voice is Peter for me, but on screen they need to cast someone younger.
(6) Paraphrased, but not made up. The synopsis is written in first person and uses the phrase 'put on my big girl pants' with no sign of irony.
(7) The Mobius's wizard is thus legally known as Mordecai The Brown, for example.
(8) Don't @ me.
(9) See also the entire Alien vs. Predator subfranchise, which despite a few successes very much a product of 'wouldn't it be
(10) Audible are getting really into Alien spin-off material; I suppose they must have secured a deal of some sort.
(11) Honestly, I can forgive a lot for not just writing out Newt for the sake of convenience.
(12) This is not one of those things.
