Reading Roundup - February 2020

New Novels

At Childhood's End, Sophie Aldred
It has been years since Ace travelled with the Doctor. Now she goes by her real name and runs the philanthropic empire A Charitable Earth and keeps watch over the world in the absence of UNIT and Torchwood. When young people begin to be abducted, the trail leads Dorothy McShane to a hidden spaceship in lunar orbit, where she meets Yaz, Ryan, Graham, and the Doctor, who is now a woman, and looks younger than Ace. Can they overcome past distrust and work together to learn what links these events to Ace's past, and stop both the campaign of abductions and a relentless interstellar crusade.

The continuing story of Ace, as both written and read by the original Ace, Sophie Aldred, was an irresistable draw to me, and I was not disappointed. It's not the highest literature, and there are a couple of errors which should have been fixed either in editing or direction, suggesting that production was a little rushed. Overall, however, this is a cracking return for one of my favourite companions, without selling the current crop short, and confronts the sometimes manipulative nature of the relationship between Ace and the Doctor through the lens of an older, wiser Dorothy and the Doctor's newer, more open incarnation.

Aldred has her own character down, and does a fair job with the new bunch, both in writing and performance. I could complain that Dorothy's relationships post-series seem to have gone in a disappointingly hetero direction, and indeed I just did, but then Ace's sexuality was always a matter of interpretation. It's good to hear from an older Ace, even if for me - as a Big Finish fan - her younger incarnation is still going strong, and if this isn't a perfect work, it doesn't offend.

Re-Reads

The War of the Worlds, HG Wells
In the last years of the 19th century, an invasion force lands in England, carried by interplanetary missiles launched from the surface of the planet Mars. As the Martians stride forth in their terrible machines, and bring their superior weaponry to bear against the unprepared defences of Earth, the ordinary (upper middle class) folk of England are pushed to the limits of their own humanity.

HG Wells was one of the visionaries of early science fiction, and if his science wasn't up to Verne's exacting standards, his fiction was more gripping, and never involved three page descriptions of fish. The War of the Worlds was not only one of his finest works, but one that has provided a template for alien invasion narratives ever since. It's hard to think how it would have been received by a British middle class secure in their own power, this narrative of a quintessential English gentleman reduced to punching out a clergyman and contemplating the ultimate capitulation of suicide by Martian.

I revisited this novel as part of a collection of Wells' SF released by Audible. The War of the Worlds is read in this collection by David Tennant, who of course puts in a sterling performance.

The First Men in the Moon, HG Wells
During a sabbatical, failed entrepreneur Mr Bedford falls in with the eccentric scientist Cavor. Learning of the latter's work on a remarkable anti-gravity material dubbed 'Cavorite', Bedford is immediately gripped by the commercial and industrial possibilities, and throws himself into assisting the inventor, first in processing the material, and then in using it to construct a sphere designed to travel to the Moon. Here, the two men discover an insectoid race that they dub the Selenites. They are captured, but escape, although only Bedford is able to reach the sphere and return to Earth. Over time, he receives a series of messages from Cavor, describing the society of the Selenites, their physically differentiated castes, and their massive-brained leader, the Grand Lunar.

The First Men in the Moon was one of the Wells novels most closely paralleled by one written by his near-contemporary Jules Verne, and was cited by Verne in an attack on Wells' science (poo-pooing the invention of an anti-gravity substance in comparison to his own more solidly scientific 'giant cannon' lunar launch.)  It is less about the moon or space travel, and more about the callowness of the Empire spirit, with the alliance of Bedford's shallow commercialism and Cavor's blind scientific curiosity combining to court continual disaster.

The Audible version is narrated by Alexander Vlahos, who brings out Bedford's ambition, superficiality and self-serving unreliability as a narrator brilliantly.

Audio Plays
Curse of the Crimson Throne
Ezren the wizard, Merisiel the rogue, Harsk the ranger and Valeros the warrior travel to Korvosa - a city existing under the shadows of an assassinated king and past rule by a dark empire, whose inheritors oppress the native populace - and in search of Merisiel's friend, Kyra. What they find is a queen, seeking power, surrounded by enablers and willing to embrace any darkness, any cruelty in order to achieve her aim of eternal life. Working with and against nobles and commoners, criminals and monsters, seers and priests, the four heroes must first determine what is right, and then see it through.

The third, and so far final, series of audio adventures based on the adventure paths of the Pathfinder RPG, is - for the most part - an urban conspiracy with fantasy monsters. It's been a rare, and unusually successful exercise in fantasy audio drama, which has typically struggled with the show, don't tell nature of audio and its intersection with the monsters and magic of the genre. It also confirms the previously hinted bisexual identification of one of the iconic Pathfinder characters, and I am definitely here for increased representation in RPGs.

The Liberator Chronicles, Volume 1
Vila and Avon infiltrate a Federation research base, with Vila posing as a scientist and Avon as an advanced android. Their goal is to steal a Federation android prototype, but even if Avon can pass as a robot, can he successfully convince the scientists that he is a robot that can pass as human.

Vila wakes on the Liberator, his memory badly fragmented. His only companion is the voice of an Auron scientist named Nyrron. What happened? Where are his companions? And who is Vila, really?

Blake infiltrates a mine producing Illusium, a uniquely adaptable mineral which could make the Federation unbeatable. The scientists are less cooperative than he might have hoped, but he has an unexpected ally: The relentless paranoia and backbiting of Federation politics.

Having acquired the Blake's 7 license, Big Finish produced a number full cast audio plays - beginning with Warship - but with an increasing part of the original cast either retired or dead, the bulk of their output in the range came in the form of the Liberator Chronicles, a series of augmented readings in the vein of the Companion Chronicles for the Doctor Who range. In this case, featuring original actors Paul Darrow, Michael Keating and Gareth Thomas (two thirds of whom have since passed.) Like Terrahawks, it's a bit of a nostalgia fest for me, although I came to the original series a little later in life.  The performances here are on point, and the stories the classic mix of SF and human drama, without the original's telltale white plimsoles.

New Comics
Giant Days, Volume 11
The end approaches - for everyone but medical student Susan - as the final year of university rolls by. The end of the year sees Daisy stumble into the role of cult recruiter for a Christmas village, Esther fighting the siren call of 'sure thing' Ed after her years of turbulent and unproductive romantic entanglements, while Ed travels to Australia to visit his girlfriend's family. Daisy struggles with the continuing presence of her ex-girlfriend, and Susan with the looming spectre of domesticity in her life with McGraw.

Once again, not much to say about this volume that I haven't said about the others. I still hope that Esther and Ed don't end up together, since it would reinforce a fairly negative narrative track, although if I'm honest I trust Allison to do whatever he does well.

As with By Night, it's a bit odd to see Allison's style transplanted away from the North (in this case, to Australia, or some approximation thereof.)

Total read - 6
Female authors - 1
PoC authors - 0

Not a great showing on expanding my horizons this month then, but it's early days.

Reading Roundup - July and August 2018

Full disclosure, it took me a long time to
realise which two towers the title referred to.

A double event this month, having missed last month.

The Two Towers continues my revisiting of The Lord of the Rings, and another interesting aspect of this is that I think this is my first reread since seeing the movies, and so my first chance to really appreciate the way in which Jackson’s aesthetic has infiltrated my visualisation of Middle Earth. This time out, the big revelation was in the depiction of the orcs. Yes, they are foul, and yes, they are degenerate, but overall they are shown in the novel as soldiers. They bicker and fight over spoils and glory, but they aren’t nearly as bestial as other interpretations make them. 

Of course, this is also the book with the Southrons in, and all the… difficulties that they present. In and of themselves, they are a really interesting concept; a race very like the men of the west, led by descendants of Numenor, but in league with or thrall to the Dark Lord. Where it falls down is that they happen to be the folk in the parts of Middle Earth which map to Africa and the Middle East, and whether Tolkien loathed analogy or not, you can’t just ignore that. I suspect that he legitimately meant nothing by it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t meaningful or problematic.

Deep Roots is the second novel in the Innsmouth Legacy series, Ruthanna Emrys’ pro-fish revision of the Cthulhu Mythos, following the adventures of Aphra Marsh and her circle, as they travel from the ruins of Innsmouth – itself faced with the spectre of gentrification since they have begun its reoccupation – to New York, in search of a potential long-lost cousin or two. Negotiating the interest of the closeted Agent Spector’s extended family – a New York Jewish community who have reached the level of nuptial desperation which leads respectable royal courts to consider ‘shoeless beach waif’ a godsend – and their fraught relationship with the FBI’s more decorated and action-oriented paranormal team. Finding one of their kin caught up with a group of Mi-Go, Aphra and her Deep One kin must struggle with their own prejudices to decide if the Mi-Go can be trusted, or whether they need to go on the offensive while the FBI are seeking to establish diplomatic ties. With this second volume, we see that the Aeonist perspective which does not fear the Yith is yet repulsed by the inhuman cosmopolitanism of the Mi-Go, which threatens the Deep Ones’ sense of physical identity with its focus on the mind as the only relevant centre of being. Emrys also ensures that Aphra’s choices have consequences, as her decision to conceal the actions of the Yith from the FBI in Winter Tide comes back to bite her.

Once again, this is a slow-burner; like, a really slow-burner, even managing to be quite sedate during an honest-to-goodness commando raid. It’s nothing like you would expect from a Cthulhu Mythos story, of course, continuing Emrys’ tour de force reimagining of the mythos from the viewpoint of the disadvantaged outsiders who were Lovecraft’s villains.

Another revisiting this time, as for some reason – seriously, I can’t remember what my impetus was on this – I reread Anno Dracula, the first volume of Kim Newman’s alternate historical series of the same name, which takes as its premise the idea that Dracula defeated his hunters in the narrative timeline of Dracula, married the widowed Victoria and took over England, transforming it into a vampire utopia that is simultaneously decadent and selectively puritanical, as well as being inhabited by a broad spectrum of historical and fictional characters. Newman’s original characters, Renaissance vampire Genevieve Dieudonne and gentleman-spy Charles Beauregard, find themselves at the centre of the hunt for the serial killer Jack the Ripper, who murders vampire prostitutes with silver knives, while Arthur, Lord Godalming plots to elevate himself in society and the great and the good of the Gothic and the grand guignol seek their own advantage in the chaos.

Honestly, a large part of the appeal in Newman’s writing, especially the Anno Dracula series, lies in spotting the cameos, and I definitely get more of them than I used to. I was surprised by the relative absence of Kate Reed, a minor character from early drafts of Dracula who appears in an unflattering role in Dracula Unredacted, and does much more in later novels in this series (although despite Newman’s apparent fondness for her, I’m not sure she is ever very effectual. I guess I’ll see as I go through.) The story is okay, the setting much more interesting, if only for its inclusion of every conceivable form of fictional vampire – including the Chinese hopping variety – or fictional human. It’s not deep, but it’s good fun.

After the whiplash change of pace from Deep Roots to Anno Dracula, I did another reversal into Record of a Spaceborn Few, the third novel in the Wayfarers series. Even more loosely connected than the first two – one of the several viewpoint characters is the sister of the captain in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – this novel follows a disparate group of characters in one of the ships of the Exodus Fleet, the semi-nomadic collective of self-sufficient vessels which carried the human race away from the dying Earth. In the wake of a disaster which destroyed one of the homestead ships, the others have accepted aid from various alien races to upgrade their dwellings, and the narrative of Record of a Spaceborn Few revolves around the clashes engendered by the changing culture this has brought to the once-isolated Fleet.

With Record of a Spaceborn Few, Becky Chambers reaffirms her place as one of the leading lights of character driven SF. While her world is built on a solid, crunchy foundation, the stories are about people and how they deal with this vast galaxy. The clash between the traditions of the Fleet and the ways of the Galactic Commons, the perils of a life lived in space, and the impact of outsiders on a relatively closed culture.

We stay in space for Ancillary Mercy, the final instalment of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy. Fleet Captain Breq has effectively declared independence for the Atoeck(1) system. With at least one aspect of the Lord of the Radch definitely out to get her, and her identity as the last ancillary body of the troop carrier Justice of Toren an increasingly open secret, she must scramble to assemble her few allies into an effective resistance against the master of a thousand worlds. Given its set up, it is perhaps unsurprising that Ancillary Mercy never goes full space battle. Breq’s force – basically consisting of Breq’s patrol ship Mercy of Callah, a few administrators and labourers, and a mostly friendly botanist – is so massively outmatched that the conflict is more interestingly shifted into the political domain. The result is a tense narrative, making inventive use of Breq’s first person narrative through her ability to directly receive sensory feeds from multiple sources.

Next up, it’s a shift to a fantasy notBritain for The Apprentice Witch and A Witch Alone, debut and follow up novels from former Ely librarian James Nicol(2). When Arianwyn Gribble’s assessment goes wrong, she is denied qualified witch status, but due to some irregularities and her grandmother’s influence, instead of being sent back to school, she is assigned to on-the-job training as resident witch to the village of Lull. Here she makes friends, clashes with overbearing bureaucrats, encounters strange and sometimes dreadful creatures from the Great Woods, and accidentally becomes mentor to her former witch school bully, Gimma.

These books are aimed at a much younger readership than me. The same is true of a lot that I read, but this is definitely for children rather than my more usual teenage/YA minimum, so that should be born in mind regarding this review. The story and characters are very simple, and the setting feels more like an accumulation of ideas than a fully realised secondary world, and has a few head-scratching moments (for example, all the witches we see are women(3), but civic and temporal power is all held by men.) On the other hand, there is plenty to like in the world Nicol has created, and I am especially taken with the system of magic used by the witches, which is based on a simple set of glyphs which can be combined to different effects. 

Overall, while I’d be very happy to read this one with my daughter, and there is an appeal to Arianwyn’s misadventures, most of the twists are fairly obvious to an adult reader, and the ‘the power was inside you all along’ resolution is one that I am kind of over, at least where that power is some unique magical ability rather than a more mundane realisation of agency.

Man; speaking of agency, the next book is Isaac Asimov’s classic SF novel, Foundation, in which a ‘psychohistorian’ creates an organisation, the titular Foundation, designed to survive the downfall of a galactic empire and ensure the restoration of civilisation after a mere millennium, rather than thirty-thousand years as originally predicted, which is some serious long game ambition, if nothing else. In order to bring about his planned future, he has carefully aligned the starting conditions of the Foundation to bring about an inevitable and necessary outcome, and chaos theory bedamned. Set over the first century and a half of the Foundation’s era, Foundation collects four previously published short stories and a fifth written as a prequel for the collected edition. After establishing the creation of the Foundation in ‘The Psychohistorians’, the other stories follow the transition of power from ‘The Encyclopedists’, to ‘The Lord Mayors’, ‘The Traders’ and finally ‘The Merchant Princes’, with each transition happening at a moment of crisis, and followed by a time-locked message from Hari Seldon, basically congratulating them on following his masterplan unawares and noting that, by the by, all that they have worked for has now served its purpose, so they can hand off to the next bunch kthxbye.

As with much golden age SF, there is a fascinating juxtaposition in Foundation between the still quite visionary futurism, and the entirely outmoded social assumptions that Asimov was probably quite unaware of, like the Foundation being composed of a number of good ‘men’ and their wives and children(4). Asimov also presents atomic power as the Apex of galactic technology. The Foundation is the only group retaining mastery of atomic science, whereas the fading Empire can only maintain its atomics, and the splinter kingdoms of the galactic periphery have no atomics at all, but they do have faster than light travel. They can’t harness the atom but can defy the fundamental limitations of physics with their, presumably, coal-fired spaceships; with no female crew.

Foundation is good, but it’s very much of its time, is what I’m saying.

Prophets of Waaagh! isn’t actually a book, but rather a series of three short audio dramas – ‘End of

Dayz’, ‘Bozgat’s Big Adventure’ and ‘The Waaagh! Faker’ – featuring the Orks of Warhammer 40K. As Orks, the characters are basically thugs (albeit mechanically brilliant thugs, since they are mostly MekBoyz, the Orks’ mechanical savants,) and not terribly sympathetic, which ironically makes them one of the more accurate representations of the 40K universe when compared to the novels featuring human or Space Marine protagonists, who are typically absurdly cuddly for denizens of the hypermacho grimdark forty-first(5) millennium, showing concern for the rights of civilians and underlings and everything.

It’s kind of silly, good fun, and features a rare modern appearance of a MadBoy, a concept little seen since their origin in the days before mental health sensitivity and here transposed from uncomfortable cute lunatic to the primary receivers of the psychic attack signal that is the Waaagh!

Finally, The Burning Page is the third part of Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library series. Irene is on probation after ditching her official duties to rescue her apprentice, Kai, from a chaotic alternate Venice, and their local friend Vale is succumbing to chaos infection… and also drug addiction. It is at this point that gates to the library begin to fail in a particularly incandescent fashion, as the Library itself comes under attack by its arch-enemy, the renegade Librarian Alberich.

I had some issues with the last instalment of the Invisible Library – The Masked City – but I’m pleased to say that I enjoyed this one a lot more. Vale’s combination of condescension and actually being that good is less annoying when it is both a vector and a symptom of his chaos contamination, and I appreciate that Irene is not spending the entire story obsessing about Kai (even if I did want her to give Vale more of an earful for making her the stick for his pity piñata.) It helps, a lot, that Irene gets to show her strengths, particularly in facing off against Alberich, and that in acting as the moderate influence against Kai and Vale’s anti-fae extremism, she is proven to be in the right, rather than being taken advantage of.

(1) As a reminder, I am working from hearing instead of seeing the names.

(2) He was doing an author visit at the library which my daughter attended, where she picked up the first book for me and the second for her other daddy.

(3) There is one mention of a male witch, but he’s only referred to.

(4) There are all of two women in the entire novel with actual screen time, and only one of them really qualifies as a character.

2017 Challenge - The Bell Jar

Book 5 (March, Mad People)

The Bell Jar, by Silvia Plath (read by Maggie Gyllenhaal)

Reason for Reading: The Bell Jar was one of the first entries on the original list, recommended by Sara, and the month's overarching theme of Mad People was suggested by Abi to link it with Trainspotting. This was a book that I went into pretty much blind. I knew that it was a novel by the poet Sylvia Plath and that it was called The Bell Jar, and that was about it.

Esther Greenwood is an academically successful girl, whose life seems to have peaked. Having earned the chance to spend a month in New York as one of twelve guest editors on a magazine she finds herself at a loss in the big city, and then unable to find herself once she returns to her home in the suburbs of Boston. She suffers a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide, before slowly returning to health in a private asylum. The book's first person narrative follows Esther's skewed and unreliable perspective as she attributes sinister and selfish objectives to the people around her, as viewed through the distorting glass and suffocating air of the bell jar which separates her from normality.

The book depicts a world and a mental health system far removed from our own, despite the relatively short gap between Plath's time and ours. With her country tan fading Esther calls herself 'yellow as a chinaman,' and her first psychiatrist assigns her crude ECT after two sessions. While I am approaching this challenge as a means of exploring other viewpoints, however, I was surprised how much I recognised in Plath's semi-autobiographical narrative from the time of my own lowest ebb. I was never so bad that I could not read, but the sense of that distorting glass is one I once knew well.

The Audible release of The Bell Jar is read by Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose cool, almost detached delivery renders the mesmerising language of the novel all the more affecting. And it is the language that is perhaps the most remarkable thing in this novel. Like the superb translated text of 100 Years of Solitude, The Bell Jar contains not a sentence that is purely functional, not a word that is present simply to convey a single, dry piece of information. The prose itself is art, beyond its value as a medium for the story.

Dracula

Audible's new version of Bram Stoker's Dracula is a multi-voiced recording, each actor taking one of the epistolary narrators. Alan Cumming plays John Seward, while Tim Curry is Van Helsing (and thus has almost no lines; seriously, there's a couple of letters and some telegrams.) The promise 'all-star cast' is B-list at best, but competent. Especially interesting in terms of performance is the varied approaches to the dialogue of other characters. In particular, it is notable that Lucy mimics the accents of her friends, while Mina just reports their words.

Narratively speaking, revisiting Dracula always brings home that it's basically a story of a bunch of stuffy white blokes throwing money at a problem that happens to be a vampire. It's actually a very, very weird story by modern standards.