Reading Roundup - January 2019

Happy New Year!

In 2018, I managed a fairly respectable bit of reading/listening. I got through thirty-one new(1) novels – although only one of them fit the old Found Horizons challenge, or I guess two if I can still count Soviet-era SF – and twelve new graphic novels, re-read thirteen novels, listened to nine substantial new audio plays, five regular or binged podcasts, and re-read an additional six novels with my daughter, Arya. Let’s see how we can do in 2019.

A Glimmer of Hope, by Steve McHugh(2)

We begin with the first volume of The Chronicles of Avalon, in which a young woman stumbles on the existence of a secret world of magical beings and strange powers, discovering a power of her own that she must learn to harness, before those who would see her harmed catch up with her, or the source of those powers consumes her.

This is one of a number of books that I’ve bought on Audible having picked up the Kindle version as part of my Prime subscription, and it’s not one that I would have gone for at price, but honestly it isn’t terrible. Layla Cassidy may be a little more badass than is entirely credible in a hard-working metallurgy student, but the absence of any chosen oneness is refreshing, as is the aversion of such tropes as love triangles or douchebag soulmates. Layla doesn’t fall swooningly in love with a dreamy-eyed protector who alternates between lovey-dovey and passive aggressive, and honestly it’s depressing that this absence is a virtue instead of a given. McHugh’s world is interesting, although it’s occasionally apparent that he’s operating in a setting established in someone else’s story, usually when someone goes on about how cool an apparently minor character is. This last is a symptom of the writing style, which is far more functional than sophisticated (he said, aware that it makes him sound like a bit of a pseud, but there it is.)

As a side note, it’s kind of weird to see a series like this set in England. There’s something odd about fantasy violence set in one’s own country, less because I genuinely think ogre massacres would go unnoticed in Wisconsin than because, on a subconscious level, my brain considers ‘the USA’ to be on the same ontological level as Middle Earth.

Terrahawks – Vol. 1 (audio play)

Big Finish continue their bid to license my entire childhood with the first volume of their continuation of the Gerry Anderson series Terrahawks. Never as famous as Thunderbirds, this was nonetheless my first experience of the Anderson canon, featuring a secret organisation dedicated to defending Earth against the threat of intergalactic warlord Queen Zelda. In retrospect, a lot of things about it don’t make a lot of sense - Earth’s entire defence force is five people, as many spaceships and an indeterminate number of Zeroid combat robots, but then the entire invasion force of an intergalactic conqueror consists of half a dozen ships, the Queen and her immediate family, and an indeterminate number of Cube combat robots – but I always loved it, and Big Finish do it proud. Original cast members Jeremy Hitchen, Denise Bryer and Robbie Stevens return (with Beth Chalmers filling in for the late Anne Ridler and Hitchen taking over Zeroid commander Sergeant-Major Zero from the retired(3) Windsor Davies,) which together with authentic early-80s sound effects and the original theme music recreates the feel of my impressionable youth in a hard-to-fail fashion. Also present and correct is the somewhat tongue-in-cheek style, satire and vaguely ludicrous scenarios of the original, although that does not leave the series without its more powerful moments, such as in an episode where Zelda targets Tiger Ninestein’s clones, killing several and forcing another to choose between his own life and the protection of the Earth.

The Return of the King, by JRR Tolkien (re-read)

Wrapping up my re-read of The Lord of the Rings(4), I went through The Return of the King this month. There’s a lot of stuff in this one I’d forgotten or, perhaps, skimmed through, most of which amplifies how much Jackson shrunk Middle Earth in his adaptation, so that Faramir’s defence of Osgiliath was a short charge with a few dozen knights and the Ride of the Rohirrim a few nights gallop rather than an extended trek through the forest of the Woses. Also, remember Imrahil? This also has some of the worst of Tolkien’s unconscious racism, with Haradrim troops including ‘huge black men like trolls, with red mouths and white eyes.’ Seriously, JRR, I’m trying to think well of you, but there’s only so much I can do with that, and with your ‘swarthy, slant eyed’ outsiders invading the peace of the Shire in the final part of the book. The Scouring of the Shire is another episode which I’d blanked a lot from, which is a shame because it’s where Merry and Pippin hit their stride as leaders, and the entirety of Sam’s romance with Rose Cotton plays out.

So, yeah… JRR Tolkien, a writer of his time, but also the creator of so many of the tropes which so dominated a century of fantasy writing that they now seem like clichés. Despite the jading of years, however, those tropes do not seem stale here. Tolkien was not a great writer, at least in terms of the pure quality of his prose, but his line of epic descriptive and declamation has a timeless quality that serves very well here. Again, for all his hatred of allegory, it can’t be ignored that the closing chapters of The Return of the King are about soldiers coming back from war to find themselves and their home both changed in ways that are not always compatible. Sam, Merry and Pippin may come home with skills that not only allow them to overthrow Saruman and his ruffians, but to play key roles in the restoration and advancement of the Shire, but Frodo only comes back broken, unable to participate in the lifestyle he has protected.

A Conspiracy of Alchemists, by Liesel Schwarz

Elle Chance is an adventurous airship courier; a daring pilot, determined to make her own way in the world. Don’t worry, though; this isn’t actually important to the plot or anything. Recommended by her booker, Patrice, she takes a job for the mysterious Hugh Marsh, but her package is stolen by Alchemists, who are intent on remaking the world to their own ends. Marsh is a Warlock, somewhat immortal and sworn to oppose the Alchemists, and Elle might be the one thing that both the Warlocks and the Alchemists need to achieve their goals.

Despite a promising set-up, A conspiracy of Alchemists suffers from a contrived plot and a highly unconvincing romance based, as ever, on the magnetic appeal of an authoritarian douchebag who suddenly starts treating the female lead with the bare minimum of common courtesy. Or maybe it’s the title. Are women in Steampunk alternate-Victorian England still suckers for a title? Also, what is ‘spark’, the power source for the Steampunk revolution, if it isn’t – and they say it isn’t – magic? There’s a balance in these things between ‘show, don’t tell’ and ‘just go with it,’ and this novel leans too much towards ‘just go with it.’ I’m not a fan of the world set-up that magic in the light world (as opposed to the shadow world of faeries and vampires) all originates with a female Oracle who is the gilded prisoner of the men who use her magic, but while she may swoon a little too easily in the direction of our sexy, shirtless warlock-in-particular, Elle certainly has no truck with this scenario. I do feel that ‘go home and get married’ is a sub-optimal way of avoiding this fate – Marsh actually talks about going into hiding mere pages before it turns out that they have just gone home – but there it is.

Also, there’s just not enough of Lucretia the sassy vampire. She was a rare breath of Austen and I missed her after she left to winter in Castle Dracula(5).

The Half-Blood Prince, by JK Rowling (re-read with Arya)

As we approach a year since I started re-reading Harry Potter with my daughter, we’re coming into the home straight with the end of The Half-Blood Prince(6). Harry now knows that it is his destiny, because of Voldemort’s attempt to kill him, to either destroy the Dark Lord or at last to be destroyed. Dumbledore sets out to teach him about Voldemort’s past, and to uncover to him the secrets of Voldemort’s immortality. Meanwhile, Harry’s feud with Professor Snape comes to a head, and the Order’s absolute trust in Dumbledore as their sole strategist sets them up for a crisis.

Bit of an odd fruit, this one. The build-up of Voldemort’s past is pretty good, and the black lake remains fairly horrible, but the teenage romance is… Man, I don’t know. I didn’t do much in the way of teenage romancing, so maybe it is like this. Who knows. Anyway, overall the book is good; I enjoyed it, and so did Arya, although what she takes in about the books is a strange and curious business. She can identify Dolores Umbridge from a brief description in The Deathly Hallows, but despite her excitement at the Quidditch scenes was completely unable to recall even that Harry is the Gryffindor Seeker, let alone what any of the other positions are.

Cry Fox, by Ben Aaronovich (graphic novel)

Completing a trifecta of Rivers of London graphic novels – thanks to my early-year birthday – Cry Fox is another single-case story, with Peter’s cousin Abigail caught up in a ransom kidnapping and then held, along with DS Sahra Guleed, to be part of a people hunt for diabolical dipshit landowners. It’s brief and focused. The fact that the two captured characters are women has… unfortunate implications, but they retain agency throughout and are never damseled.

While the title mostly relates to the fox-hunting aristos, the story also involves Abigail's contacts among the talking foxes of London and environs (although this doesn't explain them any more than any of the novels that they have appeared in.) I'm rapidly becoming more interested in Abigail's corner of the weird world than Peter's, and that's a boost for this story for me.

(1) New to me.

(2) New year, new format!

(3) At time of recording; he passed this January.

(4) I’ll probably leave The Hobbit to read with Arya, but might take a swing at The Silmarillion some time.

(5) No, really.

(6) Apparently, I never noted the end of The Order of the Phoenix, but we did.

Reading Roundup - November 2017

2017 Reading Challenge

I kind of made progress on the challenge this month, completing the first of a newly-instated 'Russian SF' category with Roadside Picnic, by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. It's a bleak look at a capitalist response to an utterly enigmatic alien visitation, from the perspective of writers living and working within the Soviet Union and its centrally controlled publishing industry.

Otherwise, November has been very much a month of Discworld, as I continued my re-reading of the Pratchett canon with books four to eight: Mort, Sourcery, Wyrd Sisters, Pyramids and Guards! Guards!.

Mort is the first novel in the Death strand of the series. Death has appeared in every book so far(1), but this is the first time he has been given a starring role, rather than popping up in a cameo, perhaps to confirm that someone didn't make it. It's the story of Mort - short for Mortimer - an awkward youth who becomes Death's apprentice, learning the trade and giving his master a chance to experience something of humanity. Published in the same year as Equal Rites(2), it rapidly established itself as the first 'gateway novel' in the series, frequently recommended as a starting point to the new reader. It mixes wit and whimsy with more serious themes - such as justice, faith and the complex relationship of a ruler's personal qualities and their competence as a ruler - with the deftness that leaves The Colour of Magic for dust. It has a likable, if not particularly deep, quartet of characters in Mort, Ysabelle - making a much more sympathetic showing than in her cameo in The Light Fantastic - Princess Keli(3) and Cutwell, with able support from the irascible and enigmatic domestic Albert, although the star is undeniably Death himself.

Stern and kind, wise and wondering, ancient and innocent, the Death of the Discworld is one of the great literary creations. With him, Pratchett turned the end of life from horror into comfort, and sought to explore and expand upon the many mysteries of life. THERE'S NO JUSTICE, Death often reminds us. THERE'S JUST ME. I think I could, pardon the phrase, live with that.

Death makes his next appearance right at the beginning of Sourcery, in which the failed wizard Rincewind is once more called upon to prevent Armageddon(4). This time, a wizard has broken the usual rules of celibacy with such enthusiasm as to produce eight children(5), the last being a Sourcerer, capable of creating magic, instead of merely shaping it. This is arguably Rincewind's finest hour, although his supporting cast are only so-so. Conina - the daughter of Cohen the Barbarian and a temple dancer he rescued from an unspecified fate - and wannabe barbarian hero Nijel the Destroyer are independently quite interesting characters, but are awkwardly paired off; awkward because one of them is described as a highly attractive, adult woman, then other as a gangly teenager apparently still in the throes of puberty.

I have literally no clue what is
going on with this cover.

Wyrd Sisters picks up the adventures of Granny Weatherwax(6) after Equal Rites, now a member of a three-witch coven in the mountain kingdom of Lancre, with long-time best friend/archnemesis Gytha 'Nanny' Ogg, and hippy dippy newcomer Magrat Garlick. The three of them are caught up in a coup d'état when they rescue a young baby, the rightful heir to the throne, from the usurping Duke Felmet and his terrible wife. Borrowing heavily from Macbeth - among other things - for plot and dialogue, and introducing a solid power trio in Granny - the serious one - Nanny - the motherly one - and Magrat - the nice one - and more pathetic fallacies than Jove could cast a thunderbolt at, this is the real beginning of the Witches stream, with Equal Rites a sort of precursor. It is interesting in retrospect that Magrat decides that witches only do kind things for selfish reasons, given that Tiffany Aching later determines that witches even do selfish things for kind reasons.

Pyramids, on the other hand, is a standalone, featuring the prince of a small, yet once great, kingdom - Djelebeybi - returning home after the death of his father and seeking to overturn the millennia of stagnant tradition upheld by the priests of the kingdom's many, many, many gods. While the story stands alone, and Djelebey

bi would never make another significant appearance, the novel also introduces Tsort and Ephebe, the equivalents of Troy and the Hellenic city states, whose millennia old feud is checked only by the intervening territory of Djelebeybi; at least until an oversized pyramid causes a complete collapse of space time and makes the kingdom disappear. This is also the first major appearance of the ongoing theme of belief shaping reality, as the collapse of the kingdom into a pocket of time causes the myriad conflicting deities of Djelebeybi to simultaneously manifest.

There is a lot to like in Pyramids, and I'm a sucker for a good bit of fantasy Egypt, but overall this is a bit of an also-ran. Pteppic is a fair lead, but deuteragonist/quasi-love interest Ptraci(7) is underdeveloped, and both pale next to Dios, a classic Pratchett villain, determined to do what he believes is the right thing for everybody, no matter how many people it hurts.

Finally, we come to Guards! Guards!, the start of the City Watch stream and, as it happens, the first Discworld novel I ever read. It introduces Sam Vimes and his 'boots theory of socioeconomic unfairness,' and the rest of the Watch: Sergeant Colon, Corporal Nobbs and new bug Lance-Constable Carrot. While it features a dragon, the novel is pitched primarily as a police procedural, of sorts, and as such is probably the first step on the road to the Disc's transformation from high fantasy to industrial spellpunk. It is also probaball of the characters are brilliant. Not the watch, not the villain, and neither the Patrician(8) nor dragon expert Lady Sybil Ramkin are throwaway or half-finished characters. Everyone is sharing the love, and it's brilliant.

ly the first Discworld novel in which

But it's not been all Discworld, and I finally managed to get through the rest of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The fifth book in the series is often held to be the weakest, but while I still feel that it is overlong and sags in places(9), it's definitely better than I remember; possibly because I didn't need to carry the hardback around to read it. It took a while to get through because of my intense dislike of Dolores Umbridge(10), the unacceptable face of the Ministry of Magic's slide towards a totalitarian cult of personality. I couldn't listen to anything with Umbridge in while I was going to sleep, which led to me favouring the Discworld novels all around. Much as I find the character uncomfortable, I acknowledge that the effect is intentional, serving to strip away the protected feeling which surrounds Hogwarts, and put the young leads well and truly on their own for the first time.

Of course, this all serves to highlight the frankly appalling level of pastoral care and gross favouritism in play at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry(11), even before Umbridge gets all up in it. It also exposes the deep corruption in the Ministry of Magic, and in many ways it's no wonder that a regime like Fudge's - broadly ineffectual, conciliatory, nepotistic, corrupt, and unduly tolerant of ultraconservative attitudes within society - would breed a far right revolution from those who simultaneously recognise the government's shortcomings, yet regard their centre right political leanings as insufferably liberal. While I joke about this, once more Rowling turns in an unmistakably political novel, with thinly veiled attacks on OFSTED, and the Hitler Youths of the Inquisitorial Squad. These are books to make children think, rather than simply to entertain them.

(1) And will appear in almost, if not every book hereafter.

(2) The first of six consecutive years to see a double Discworld event.

(3) Pronounced in the audiobook 'khey-lee' and not, as I had always assumed, Kelly.

(4) Or more accurately, the Apocralypse.

(5) Despite being a gold standard douchebag.

(6) Not that Granny would hold with adventures, most likely.

(7) Pronounced here 'puh-tra-chee', rather than as I would have thought, 'Tracy'.

(8) Making his first major appearance, after cameos in The Colour of Magic and Sourcery.

(9) It is no surprise that Rowling broke with her editors during the writing of the novel, as it is in need of some trimming just to tighten up the edges.

(10) Not least because of the utter chill factor of Stephen Fry's performance of her sickly-sweet voice.

(11) And that's another thing; are witchcraft and wizardry in any way distinct save in the gender of the caster? What would a non-binary magic user do?

Reading Roundup - September 2016

Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine is a steampunky alchemical fantasy, set in a world in which the dominant global power is the Great Library of Alexandria. Popular technology is largely Victorian, while the great institutions of the world - most notably the Library itself - have access to high speed trains and sophisticated automata, much of it based on the Library's monopoly on the practice of Alchemy. The Library also seeks to assert ownership over all original works, allowing access to books through blanks, alchemical Kindles able to download any book from the Library through their pages.

Jess Brightwell is a London lad, born into a family of book smugglers who deal in rare original manuscripts. Lacking the mercenary zeal for the business, his father buys him a place on the Library's apprentice course, hoping to place a family member in a position of advantage. Along with his cohort and under the firm hand of Scholar Wolfe, he undergoes the harsh and competitive process of training and selection, but before graduation, the pupils and their teacher are all plunged into a life and death struggle, not just against those who would destroy the Library's power, but against the Library itself.

Subject of many rave reviews, Ink and Bone has a slow start, and suffers somewhat from placing its narrative focus on Jess, whose vacillation makes him perhaps understandable, but also one of the less compelling and likable of the students. In addition, one of the major twists at the end of the book is not only cruel, but predictable, and as much as I hoped it might be averted, cast something of a pall over the pacier second half of the story. I'm also not sure how I felt about the seeming assertion that burning books is better than letting the Library monopolise them. Still, I might go for the next in the sequence, and Ben Allen provides a lively narration.

Book Two of Charlie Fletcher's Oversight series, The Paradox, returns us to a London in the care of the Free Company of the London Oversight, the group who police the boundary between the mundane and the magical like Pilgrim's heavily-armed younger brothers and sisters. Despite the recent recruitment of Charlie Piefinch and Lucy Harker, the Oversight is still in a parlous state, especially with Jack Sharpe and Sara Falk still lost in the mirrors. As the two young recruits enter training, Sharpe and Falk seek for each other, avoid the sinister John Dee and the hungry wights of the mirror realms, and eventually come upon the secret behind the near-destruction of the Oversight. Meanwhile, other forces are moving, other Free Companies and freelancers are hunting. The Sluagh are looking for a way to be free of the ancient bane of iron, the Citizen schemes, and the House of Templebane is seeking its revenge.

The Paradox suffer a bit from middle volume sag, and a lot of its time is spent moving from beginning to end, rather than doing its own thing. Lucy Harker also comes off badly, her understandable reluctance to trust or be tied down unfortunately mutating into an unlikable selfish streak. The other characters are more balanced between strengths and flaws, and perhaps the most interesting theme of the book is raised by the Sluagh chieftain who tells the Smith that the Oversight is supposed to protect the border, but only ever do so in one direction, allowing the mundane to bind the old world in iron. This is never really followed up, but hopefully will be returned to in book 3.

Charlie Fletcher is not as good a reader as Simon Prebble, but neither is he as bad as many Audible reviews make out.

My final September book - I've been getting back into audio plays in a big way - is The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, one of the leading works of the modern Chinese SF scene. Set through the Cultural Revolution, it is an alien invasion story in which no aliens actually invade, instead somehow manipulating the universe in such a way as to convince scientists that physics does not work, driving several to suicide and aiming to paralyse human progress in preparation for the actual invasion in about four hundred years time.

Translator Ken Liu and narrator Luke Daniels convert the text into one redolent with familiar idiom, and while the details of the Cultural Revolution may be surprising to western readers/listeners, as they were to me, the production as a whole eschews the lure of oriental exoticism and lets the speculative fiction speak for itself. As with The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet there is a section which takes the narrative viewpoint away to the alien world of Trisolaris which, for my money, is the weakest part of the book. I would have liked to have seen more of that background explored through the Three Body game, but I kind of understand the choice. It's definitely worth a read, and quite different to anything else I've read.

Reading Roundup - August 2016

The Scar is the second of China Mieville's Bas-Lag novels, named on my copy as the New Crobuzon series, and although the action of The Scar leaves the outskirts of the city itself in the prologue and never goes back, it does loom large in the thoughts of our protagonist throughout. Belis Coldwyn is an author and linguist, and as an ex-lover of Perdido Street Station's Isaac, unreasonably high on the government's to do list. She jumps on a ship to the colonies, but when that ship is intercepted by the forces of the floating city of Armada she is caught up in something vaster than she could have imagined. Some in the floating city have an audacious plan to tether an extradimensional leviathan and so make their way to the ruins of an ancient Empire and plunder their unimaginable power.

As with Perdido Street Station, the scope of The Scar is colossal. Geographically it far exceeds its predecessor, although the bulk of the action is restricted to Armada itself. The rough and gritty thaumpunk dystopia of Bas-Lag opens out from the claustrophobic glory of New Crobuzon through the eyes of Belis and a handful of other viewpoint characters, all of whom play key roles in the plot without any of them being major players, even when they think that they might be, as it rambles towards what is more of an end than a conclusion. The Scar is very much about the journey, rather than the destination.

Damian Lynch provides a radically different voice to Jonathon Oliver, and at first I did find this a bit distracting. Ultimately, however, he brings his own energy to the reading.

Sleeping Giants is the debut novel from author Sylvain Neuvel, and takes the form of a series of statements and interviews with the personnel of a highly secret project, recorded by the programme's enigmatic and ludicrously well-connected backer. The statements reveal the discovery of the pieces of a giant, alien mech functioning on an utterly unknown level of science, the underhanded and even illegal steps taken to secure it in US control and the intricate web of contingency plans and conspiracy used to bring it into the open.

While only touched on briefly, the mech's origins hint at future conflict with an ancient empire long-since withdrawn from Earth along with the planet's eleven other protectors, and the novel is pitched as Volume 1 of The Themis Files. I confess, I'm not rushing for the next one. While the multi-voice recording was excellent - I am hugely in favour of multi-voice recordings in general and this one had a talented cast on its side - I was not quite taken enough with the characters to truly get into the story, and given the archival approach I felt that it might have benefited from taking a broader view and including outside perspectives on the programme and the appearance of the robot on the world stage.

Not remotely a debut novel for prolific military scifi writer Jack Campbell, The Dragons of Dorcastle is the first in a series set in a world in which the ordinary people are caught between the mutually antagonistic influences of the two Great Guilds, the Mechanics and the Mages. The Mechanics create the devices on which society runs and insist on their exclusive right, indeed ability, to provide and maintain them, while the Mages manipulate reality by embracing a philosophy which insists that nothing is actually real. Neither have much time for the Commons.

When Mari and Alain, prodigies of the Mechanics and the Mages respectively, are thrown together by circumstances it at first seems to be nothing more than your average star-crossed love affair, but even as their feelings challenge their Guild teachings and their experiences reveal the internal corruption and contradictions of their masters, Alain becomes aware that Mari is a figure of prophecy fated to stand against a great Storm that threatens to tear the world apart. To defeat it, however, she needs to overthrow the established order of both Guilds and rally them in common cause with the ordinary people of Dematr, a level of change that neither Guild will allow, even if the alternative is destruction.

Also dragons.

MacLeod Andrews provides a good reading, although I did hear 'Alain' as 'Elaine' to start with. Overall, The Dragons of Dorcastle has an involving story and an interesting set-up, but personally I could have done with less romance. It doesn't feel like Campbell's strong suit, and narratively it primarily serves to provide a reason for the two leads not to discuss the vital prophecy in a timely and useful fashion.

Finally this month - this feels thin. I'm sure there must be something else I'm missing, although in my defence, The Scar is fucking immense - is Hamlet's Hit Points. One of my rare non-fiction reads, in this book rock star games designer Robin D. Laws uses a system of beat analysis to break down the fluctuation of hope and fear in the dramatic and procedural plots of three famous narratives, in order to provide exemplars for games masters to consider when pacing their own offerings. In addition to providing an interesting and innovative reading on three well-worn texts - Shakespeare's Hamlet, Dr No and Casablanca - and providing some interesting examples of technique for the storyteller or game writer, Laws discerns some under-discussed elements of the works involved, such as a eakness in Hamlet's supposed tragic flaws or the Freudian subtext of No. It's a genuinely fascinating approach and one I shall likely be applying to my future storytelling.

Reading Roundup - June 2016 redux

So, I missed a couple of books in my last roundup, and have added a couple more since.

A Face Like Glass comes from the reliably offbeat Francis Hardinge, who never fails to impress, or to challenge generic assumptions. This is perhaps her most conceptual novel to date, the City and the City of her canon, taking place in the vast and apparently unmappable underground city of Caverna, where thousands toil to create 'true delicacies', foods and wines and perfumes that beguile the senses, manipulate the mind and transform reality. The other notable feature of Caverna is that its denizens are expressionless until they are taught to form one or more faces.

Into this world comes Neverfell, a foundling with the titular 'face like glass', her every emotion displayed clearly on her features. Escaping from her concealed childhood with a master cheesemaker, she stumbles into a Byzantine web of political intrigue woven by the powerful court and the near-omnipotent Grand Steward, whose left and right brains sleep alternately and pursue differing and increasingly antagonistic policies. The world and characters of Caverna are in many ways a picture of a thinly sketched, high concept dystopia, but in Hardinge's hands their artificiality is explicit and important, informed by and supporting a regime in which cruelty contents itself with the contentment of a slave caste restricted to a single Face and so unable to look anything but content, reinforced by mind-controlling perfumes and wines, and intrinsically and increasingly fragile. Neverfell occupies the space of the superspecialsnowflake by virtue of not being a superspecialsnowflake, but rather than only ordinary girl in a storm of artfully maintained perfection.

Alys, the debut novel from celebrity YouTube nerd Kiri Callaghan is rather less unique in its world, drawing most of its material at least from earlier works. It tells the story of a small town girl whose GBF kills himself, unable to cope with the life of the only gay in the middle American village. As she herself flees her oppressive life, she finds herself dragged into a twisted version of Wonderland which borders on the Shakespearean Forest of Arden, and where a young prince has been displaced by creatures out of nightmares; quite possibly her nightmares.

On the surface, Alys reads like an Alice in Wonderland/Midsummer Night's Dream crossover fanfic (I'm not judging, I've written far worse,) but it has plenty of its own ideas on the nature of dreaming which make the borrowed elements slip into place. It's a quick read as well, at only I don't know how many pages because Kindle has stolen that as a benchmark, but it isn't long. It purports to be part of the Terra Mirum Chronicles, of which there are no other parts as yet, but I'll certainly keep an eye out for them.

Like both of the above, K. Eason's Enemy is an inventive take on a stock genre. Set in a fantasy realm dominated by a great empire, it follows a renegade, an exile and a soldier who stumble onto a planned coup d'etat. Its twists are that the empire is controlled by the matriarchal, once-subterranean Dvergir, and that some time in the recent past they conducted a purge to rid the empire not merely of religion, but of gods. The coup is planned not by humans, but by the most powerful of the old gods, who wants her power and position back. Set in a cold, harsh climate, the book has a cold, hard feel to it, especially in the depictions of a spirit world that is not exactly welcoming to mortal mystics who wander there.

The narrative strictly follows its three main protagonists, thief/physician/magician Snowdenaelikk, mysterious foreigner and probable shaman Veiko, and straight-laced legion scout Dekkla, as they struggle against conspiracy, murder, spirit quests, the terrors of unbridled god magic and the apparent impossibility of them ever trusting one another enough to truly work together against a lethally organised foe that the empire itself would rather not admit exists.

With this one, I went with the audiobook for convenience, voiced with a range of slightly random seeming accents by Faye Adele, and the switch was well worth it. The writing style is fairly unique, hopping out of third person for first person interjections, as if of the viewpoint character's thoughts - about 60% of which include the expletive chain 'fuck and damn' - and this is well served by an involved narrator.


Also set in a bleak, unwelcoming world, Ready Player One tells of a world in which most of humanity chooses to retreat from a shitty, decaying reality into the virtual world of an immersive, multiuser simulation called the Oasis. Created by a now deceased billionaire, the Oasis is a free-to-access haven from a world on the verge of collapse, and also holds the key to a potentially better world. On his death, the creator, James Halliday, set a challenge: The first person to find and complete a set of challenges and find an Easter egg hidden in the Oasis will inherit his vast fortune and control of the Oasis source code.

The narrator of the book is Wade Watts, an orphaned high school kid and Gunter (short for 'egg hunter',) who stumbles on the first key to the puzzle and finds himself embroiled in a literal life or death struggle against Innovative Online Industries, a soulless multinational corporation determined to take over and monetise the Oasis. Together with the other successful Gunters, whom he knows only through their online avatars (he himself goes by Parzival in the Oasis,) Wade must find a way to defeat IOI before the Oasis becomes a rich man's playground.

Celebrity supernerd and former maligned boy genius Wil Wheaton brings a certain mix of pathos and gravitas to the voice of Parzival (and I find it hard to hate a novel that drops a nod to Wolfram von Eschenbach,) and the book balances its mix of over the top action, 80s pop culture references and existential crisis well. It's an imperfect novel in that it never really confronts the question of whether a virtual world can be an adequate, or even healthy alternative to actual reality, but it's a pacy, fun thriller with just enough edge of peril.

Necronomicon, The Long Utopia and Steelheart

Necronomicon is a compilation of readings of various stories by HP Lovecraft. There no particular theme to the collection, which encompasses most of the classics ('The Call of Cthulhu', 'The Colour Out of Space', 'The Shadow out of Time' et al, although not 'At the Mountains of Madness' or 'The Shadow Over Innsmouth'), but the resulting collection is 21 hours of very well read Lovecraftian horror, and like many first person narratives, Lovecraftian horror benefits greatly from a good reader.

The absence of 'At the Mountains of Madness' is the greatest omission, presumably because it's chunky enough to be published on its own. Other than that, the main problem with this and other Audible short story collections is the lack of any easily accessible indexing. If I wanted to go back and relisten to 'The Horror at Red Hook', I'd have to take pot luck.

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The fourth book in the Long Earth sequence, The Long Utopia shares with its predecessors a combination of intricate world-building and faintly half-arsed plotting aimed more at making a philosophical point than servicing a conventional narrative. Each book jumps ahead five to ten years and seems to spend most of its bulk catching us up on what's happened in the interim rather than moving the story forward in any meaningful sense. The multitude of viewpoints also serves to distance the reader instead of increasing involvement, and the whole thing ends up rather dry. It feels that the series as a whole would have been better served by either abandoning conventional narrative altogether to create a pseudohistory, or more rigorously enmeshing the cosmological musings with the story of a specific set of characters.

It's rare that I have a serious complaint about Audible readings, and I have nothing but respect for Michael Fenton Stevens as an actor, but honestly the fact that so much of the book is set in America - and that Fenton Stevens range encompasses few, if any, convincing American accents - makes the choice of a British reader frankly baffling.

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The nature of its own purpose and identity is not one that Brandon Sanderson's Steelheart shares. Sanderson's superhero deconstruction, the first of a series - The Reckoners - set in a world in which superhumans have appeared and proven to be universally megalomaniacs who despise ordinary humans and lesser 'Epics' for their weakness, is unabashed dark fantasy. In the city of Newcago - formerly Chicago - the word of Steelheart is law and humanity lives as an underclass in the transformed remnants of their old world. The Reckoners are the ones who fight back, humans who hunt Epics, and newcomer David thinks that they should be setting their sights on bigger game.

Steelheart is a pacy adventure, as well as a deconstructionist musing on the nature of absolute power. It's not a breathtaking work of existential genius, but it would be surprised if anyone expected it to be, and that is to its credit.

Heroes of Olympus - The Mark of Athena and The House of Hades

I've been getting caught up on Percy Jackson lately, inspired by my partner's run at the original heptalogy. The Mark of Athena was for a long time a sticking point for me, since my commute got bigger and more crowded and the hardback is fricking huge. So I bought the kindle edition as well and read that on the train.

Annabeth, Jason, Piper and Leo have flown to Camp Jupiter in the magical trireme Argo II, in the company of Coach Gleeson Hedge, action satyr. Percy and his friends Hazel and Frank are more than happy to sign on to the Quest of the Prophecy of Seven, but when Leo unaccountably opens fire on the camp, they are forced to set out straight off and pursued by Roman forces, heading for the forbidden Ancient Lands and a Greek treasure stolen long ago by the Romans. Banishing ghosts and battling monsters, they make their way across the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and Rome, where Annabeth has to go it alone in pursuit of the Mark of Athena, while Jason and Percy overcome their alpha-hero antagonism to take on a pair of giant twins.

Although technically victorious, our heroes begin the next book in the series, The House of Hades, separated, and indeed with Annabeth and Percy literally in Hell, or at least Tartarus.

With time running out, and at different speeds for those in and out of Tartarus, the heroes must make their way to the two sides of the Doors of Death in order to close them. En route, Annabeth and Percy must befriend those whom they might have thought implacable foes and learn the meaning of sacrifice. In the mortal world, Frank embraces his inner war god and Hazel is chosen by Hecate to learn to control the Mists. Meanwhile Leo, the perpetual seventh wheel of the quest, finds his destiny and proves that in some ways he is better than Percy Jackson, and Nico di Angelo comes out (which for a popular children's series is pretty huge.)

Riordan continues to combine rollicking adventure, snarky humour and mild horror to good effect. Especially effective is some of the soul-searching in The House of Hades, where Percy is faced with the consequences of his past heroism, not just in the resentment of monsters he has killed, but of those he has left behind and never thought of again (a not uncommon failing in ancient heroes.)

The Aeronaut's Windlass

With the surface of the world a lethally hostile place, the civilised nations of humanity live in towering spires of imperishable stone while bold aeronauts ply the skies between them. Captain Grim, privateer of Spire Albion, is caught up in the machinations of an ambitious rival Spire when he is retained to transport a team of inexperienced young guards, a cat and a mad Etherialist in search of saboteurs. Unfortunately, war is just the tip of the iceberg, with a swarm of lethal surface monsters and a sinister rival Etherialist manipulating events while being manipulated herself by... something else.

I've read a few of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. I quite liked them, but I hit them at the last wind of my paranormal mystery period and there just seemed to be so many of them. The Aeronaut's Windlass is the first book in a new series (like, super new; I had no idea how new and now I'll have to wait if I want to read the next one) so doesn't have the terrifying prospect of trying to catch up with a jillionty titles, which is an advantage. Loosely it's somewhere between actually steampunk and conventionally steampunk, with Spire Albion (Britain) on the brink of war with Spire Aurora (clearly Spain, but also a bit Napoleonic France) in a world of titanic towers and technomagic. Oh, and intelligent, insufferable cats.

There is a lot to like about The Aeronaut's Windlass. Butcher writes good action and has created a neat system of technomagic in the etheric crystals and Etherialists which power the plot. There's a satisfying self-contained plot and plenty of hints at the longer arc story. The aerial combat scenes in particular showed both a deep love of naval extravaganzas and a fair degree of thought as to the implications of taking such a battle to three dimensions. The cats are brilliantly written; insufferable bastards the lot of them, but very convincingly cat, especially in their diplomacy. On the downside, Butcher is a bit patchy on the subject of tea - I will accept a world where the same pot is used for heating and brewing, but the idea of anyone, especially the pseudo-British, putting cream in tea is just wrong - and I began to regret after the first quarter that I wasn't keeping a tally every time someone ground their teeth (I do know that it happened a lot.)

I've caught a few fairly so-so audiobook readings, but Euan Morton (you may know him as the male Sith inquisitor in SWtOR) did an excellent job with this one.

The 5th Wave and The White Tree

First wave: Lights out
Second wave: Surf's up
Third wave: Pestilence
Fourth wave: Silencer

It's the end of the world as we know it, and Cassie Sullivan feels far from fine. When the aliens came, they didn't send ships that could be shot down, didn't land an army of war machines that could be overcome by plucky rebels or exposure to the common cold. Instead, they just parked in orbit and began to take over. First they killed the power, then they dropped massive projectiles into the oceans and drowned the coasts; then came the plague, and once there were just a few handfuls of survivors, the Silencers. Now, there is a 5th wave, and it might well be the last.

Rick Yancey's novel The 5th Wave takes as its first principle that alien invaders are smart; that humanity will never be able to go toe-to-toe with anyone with the capability to travel between stars. At the start of the story - the first part of a trilogy - no human has ever even seen an alien, just the mothership that has slaughtered billions from afar. The narrative is divided between Cassie (voiced by Phoebe Strole) and her unknowing high school crush, Ben Parrish (Brandon Espinoza.) Cassie is a lone survivor, desperate to find her lost brother and forced to trust Evan Walker, a stranger with abnormally dreamy eyes. Ben - aka Zombie - is a child soldier in the last army of resistance, who must question whether he can rely on his messianic CO Colonel Vosch.

The 5th Wave is a pretty creepy book, with Walker setting new standards for creepy behaviour even post-Twilight and both Cassie and Ben forced to become something far darker and colder than their youth should demand. The child army is especially grim. The earliest sections of the book, juxtaposing Cassie's recollection of the first four waves with her struggle to survive, are the most effective, although Ben's part of the narrative plays well with the reader's expectations for alien invasion. Overall, it's a good set up for the rest of the trilogy, although it is sometimes hard to feel for the characters, so shock-hardened have they become.

The book has been optioned for a film. The fact that Liev Schrieber has been cast as Vosch tells you most of what you need to know about Vosch, while the fact that a Nordic blonde has been cast as the specifically Asian child-soldier Ringer tells you as much as you might care to know about Hollywood.

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The White Tree is the first volume of The Cycle of Arawn and tells the story of Dante Galland and Bleys Buckler, a young scholar struggling with a strange power and his swordslinging bessie struggling with a rather silly name*. Dante has stolen a book, 'The Cycle of Arawn', and through its philosophical and religious discourses learned to manipulate the shadow-force of creation, the Nether. With the outlawed worshippers of Arawn fomenting rebellion, Dante and Bleys are directed to travel to the dead city of Narrashtavik** in order to bring down the head of the order and prevent the release of the god himself from his celestial imprisonment.

The White Tree escalates fast, with Dante in particular going from sneak thief to major player on the world stage in the space of about five months. It's a self-consciously 'ordinary' fantasy narrative, replete with coarse language and common concerns, and its strongest point is the friendship between the two boys (although given the absence of any other female protagonists - the only female character of any note is the antagonist - I was disappointed when the beardless, oddly young looking yet surprisingly well coordinated for his age Bleys didn't turn out to be a slightly older girl in drag.) The reader, Tim Gerard Reynolds, manages the dry humour very well indeed, although its hard to escape the conclusion that both Dante and Bleys are borderline sociopaths who leave a procession of corpses in their wake with only occasional twinges of anything approaching conscience.

Many on Goodreads have criticised the use of modern colloquialisms in a fantasy setting, but I figure what the hell; it's not like they're speaking English. On the other hand, there are a few references to specifically primary world things - most glaringly the Olympic games - which are a bit jarring.

* No, really; it's part of the narrative, not me being snarky.
** Having only the audiobook, I can not swear to the spelling.

The Martian

Again with 'A Novel'.

When a Martian storm forces a Mars mission to evacuate their base, one man is seemingly killed in a freak accident. He survives, however, and over the next 550 sols (Martian days) must scrounge, adapt and improvise to stretch mission supplies and resources long past breaking point in order to stay alive. On Earth, NASA struggles to come up with a rescue plan, and in the space between the worlds, the rest of his crew wait to hear the news.

The Martian is part Robinson Crusoe epistolary and part modern narrative, and in all honesty it's the former - botanist Mark Watney's survival log - that is by far the better half. It's not that the rest is bad, more that the log sections, composed in Watney's dryly, humourous voice, are excellent. The sections at NASA are still very good, with a range of accessible, convincing characters and just the right mix of technical detail, drama and humour. The weakest parts are the few occasions when Weir steps back to an omniscient perspective to describe the things that no character can see, because by definition they lack the characters who bring the rest of the novel so vividly to life.

The audiobook reading by R.C. Bray is truly excellent, one of the best single-voice readings I've come across, capturing perfectly the tone of the narrative.

The Long Mars

It has been fifteen years since Yellowstone erupted on the Datum, gouging the heart out of America and plunging the world into a volcanic winter. Emigration to the worlds of the Long Earth has increased, and the population has become attenuated, stretching out across the near-infinite space of the stepward worlds.

The ur-pioneers Joshua Valiente and Sally Lindsay find themselves once more roped into adventures not of their own making. Joshua is recruited by the AI Lobsang to investigate the apparent rise of an intellectually superior subspecies of human, while Sally's father - Willis Lindsay, father of stepping - calls on her to accompany him on a mission not just to Mars, but to The Long Mars (roll credits.) Meanwhile, US Navy captain and veteran explorer Maggie Kaufman is sent out to delve deep into the Long Earth. With two 'Twain' airships and a crew of navy personnel and scientists, her goal is to travel a quarter billion steps from Earth, into worlds as alien as any Mars.

As with previous books in the Long Earth cycle, The Long Mars is a multi-stranded narrative with a somewhat take-it-or-leave-it approach to the conventions of dramatic closure. The main narratives are Sally and Maggie's, with Joshua's primarily serving to set up the final conflict which bring the two other threads together, and the dominant theme of the book is that of the alien. This theme is expressed in the many Marses which exist in their own long chain, distinct from the chain of the Long Earth and only crossing at the Earthless Gap (which may mean that a) every Earth's Mars connects to a different Long Mars, b) every Mars's Earth connects to a different Long Earth, or c) that the Long Mars and Long Earth intersect entirely, but not in a fashion which line up with one another,) but also in the remote Earths which developed in a radically different fashion to the Datum, and the thought processes of the Next.

As in The Long War, the science in The Long Mars is better than the fiction. Although written as a conventional narrative, it has more of a documentary quality to it, leading to an open ending and a lack of really likable characters. Again in common with the previous book, the most sympathetic character is a semi-outsider, aging rocket jockey Frank Wood. In the nature of high-concept hard SF, the resulting novel is more interesting than involving (I think I said the same thing about much of Neal Stephenson's oeuvre,) but it is definitely interesting.

The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle

It is the height and heart of the Industrial Revolution, Victorian London, a city of iron and steam. Horatio Lyle, inventor, detective, special constable and unwilling dog lover, is the embodiment of the brave new world, and as such is called in by Lord Lincoln, aide to Her Majesty herself, when a cultural treasure is stolen. Aided by Thomas, a young gentleman with a connection to the case, and Tess, a girl whom he caught breaking into his house, and Tate, the canine who long ago insinuated himself into his home, Lyle will find his scientific rationality tested by confrontations with things that man was, perhaps, not strictly supposed to wot of.

A Victorian urban fantasy with elements of steampunk in Lyle's advanced use of roughly contemporary science, The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle certainly features and unusual cast of characters. Lyle is a skilled observer and inventor, but is physically weak and afraid of heights, while his more robust young cohorts lack social polish and education in the one case and experience of the real world in the other. The plot is a pretty breakneck affair, and there were points where I could have stood a bit of a breather, but I certainly never found it dragging.

Stardust

"There was once a young man who wished to gain his heart's desire."

When a novel opens with the kind of line that you just know is going to appear at the top of just about every review or description written of it, you know that you have something special. So begins this review, and so begins the tale of Tristran Thorn in Neil Gaiman's Stardust. It seems almost disingenuous to go into the details of a book that is, if not universally acclaimed, then certainly pretty well loved and certainly known by most of the people likely to be reading this blog. The book has been out for years and I own three copies (original UK paperback, Charles Vess illustrated paperback and now Kindle,) so it's not exactly new to me, but there's a virtue all its own to a book you can reread time and again.

The most important, and perhaps most controversial thing I have to say about the book is that I like it better than the film. I like the low key, bittersweet ending and the fact that the girl Tristran runs off to fetch a star for isn't a worthless, preening snob. I adore the way the book wraps magic around old tales and rhymes far more than the film's Babylon Candle, and the inextricable blending of love and loss speaks to me in a way that the films genuine ever-after never has done.

But then I'm the kind of guy who likes the original ending of The Little Mermaid better, although truth to tell my own preferred version is the one where she shivs the prince for being a dick ('Oh, hey there girl who winces with every step; dance for me.')

Stardust. If you're only ever going to like one affectionate reconstruction of the fairy tale milieu, this will be the one. If you're going to like more of them, you've probably already read this.

The Diamond Age, or A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

In a post-national world of primarily economic tribes, a young tribeless girl named Nell receives a stolen book as a gift. This book, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer is in fact a dazzling work of nanotechnology which guides Nell's education as she lives through a period of upheaval in China and its artificial neighbour, the manufactured islands of New Chusan. The book was created by an engineer named John Hackworth, and as Nell's star rises so his falters, setting him on a ponderous quest to find a man called the Alchemist.

Like many of Neal Stephenson's books, The Diamond Age - which I got as an audio book, read by Jennifer Wiltsie, is less a single narrative and more a collection of stories building towards a conceptual conclusion. It is as much about the nanotechnology of their world and the potential revolution embodied in the development of a 'seed' which would permit unmonitored nanotechnological use as it is about Nell and John, and much more about the potential political ramifications of such technologies than their technical specifics. It has many more discussions of cultural and philosophical mores than of emotions, and in many places reads more like a history than a novel. Consequently, it is always more interesting than involving.

As with Snow Crash, I was struck by the 90sness of Stephenson's cultural portrayals, in particular a China more regressing into the 19th century than emerging from Communism, and a slightly piecemeal depiction of Confucianism. I don't think it can be called racism, especially given that the same regressive tendency is depicted in the Anglo-American Neo-Victorians; it is more that Stephenson appears to see a return to pre-information age social structures as a natural consequence of the collapse of the technologies which made them obsolete.

Wiltsie's reading is good. Many audiobook readings suffer from a coolness necessitated by maintaining a clear reading voice, but the nature of this book means that wild emotionality would be out of place anyway. For me, the decision to pronounce primer as 'primmer' was distracting, but that's personal.