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 - March 2018

In the relatively distant future, former soldier-turned-career criminal Takeshi Kovacs is killed resisting arrest, and a few decades later his consciousness is sent to Earth - distant cradle of humanity - where a millionaire wants him to solve his murder. This is all possible because in this particular future, all humans have their mind recorded on a 'cortical stack', so that it can be recovered after death, or transmitted across vast distances, to be rehoused in a new body, or sleeve. In an unfamiliar sleeve, on the unfamiliar streets of the homeworld (Kovacs hails from a colony world far from Earth,) Kovacs must use all his training as an Envoy - a sort of multiclassed diplomat/commando - to adapt, take in information, and complete his commission before someone kills him.

Perhaps due to the trappings of noir(1), Altered Carbon assures us that the gender binary will be alive and well in the post-human, body-switching, interstellar future. 'Cross-sleeving' is a thing, but it's still a thing, and despite several characters using custom-made, artificial sleeves, none of them are even a little bit non-binary(2). Sex workers are all female, and the wife in a tricentennial, ultrarich marriage is a jealous femme fatale with sexy super pheromones built into her cloned sleeve. Her sleeve is also significantly younger than her husband's. This is not to say that there are no good female characters in the book - tough cop Kristen Ortega, punch-clock enforcer Trepp and blue-collar hacker Ava Elliott - but that the world has a lot of retained monotony for a society in which you can, in theory, be anyone you want to be.

That aside, there's a decent mystery at play, integrated well with the sci-fi conceits. It is very heavy on the violence - in a world where it actually takes some serious work to actually and properly kill someone, Kovacs regularly goes the extra mile - and contains at least one sex scene which abuses the good name of 'gratuitous', but it also has a trigger-happy, sentient hotel, so there's that.

Giant Days Volume 6 is - and I know you may not be prepared for this - the sixth volume collecting issues of John Allison's Giant Days comic, and takes our heroines - Susan, Daisy and 'Dark' Esther - into their second year at Sheffield University. Second year means, as anyone who has been through the British further education system will recall, no University-supplied accommodation(3), so our young ladies are in a house-sharing situation, made more complicated by the shenanigans of the previous tenants, the proximity of McGraw (plus new girlfriend), Ed and their monstrous third, Dean Thompson, the irresistible onset of adulthood and responsibility, and of course the usual parade of social and romantic entanglements and, where unavoidable, education. Daisy gets a girlfriend, somewhat against her better judgement, Esther gets a job, and Susan throws a fancy dinner party. 

There's not much to say about Volume 6 that I haven't already said about 1-5. I like it, if you hadn't guessed by the fact that I've got as far as Volume 6. I also found time to read the two Giant Days holiday specials, which are much the same, but more Christmassy.

Also in comics, I picked up Volume 2 of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic comic book, collecting two two-part stories. In the first, Big Macintosh wanders around the Ponyville hoedown, looking for nails to repair a gazebo, while the second recounts the story of how Twilight Sparkle's brother, Shining Armour, and Princess Cadence became one another's very special someponies(4). The first is an amusing comedy of errors, while the second - called 'Neigh Anything' - is a razor-sharp parody of 1980s romcom, which also manages to avoid any of the pitfalls of that genre, by making Cadence an active participant in the comedy, rather than a prize to be won, and avoiding most of the tropes of toxic nerdery in Shining Armour and his O&O(5) group.

Finally for the month - lots of birthdays, lots of time off not listening to audiobooks as I travelled - is Blood of Elves.

Years and years ago, I picked up a short story anthology by Polish author Andrej Sapkowski, who at the time was a fantasy rock star in Poland, and almost unheard of in England. This was before The Witcher hit the fantasy action RPG computer game scene like a sledgehammer, so The Last Wish was pretty obscure at the time. I'd consider myself an early adopter, but I then didn't read anything much else by Sapkowski until well after I'd played some of The Witcher(6); until this month, in fact.

The Last Wish is an anthology of short stories, loosely inspired by fairy tales, but with more swordfights and explicit shagging(7). Blood of Elves is the first of the Witcher novels, and if I can say one thing for it, it's that it gives you a new appreciation of Tolkien's ability to weave backstory and character names into the narrative, especially in the opening scene, when the troubadour Dandelion(8) is grilled about his sources by a parade of people who insist on naming themselves and their affiliations as they speak in order to give some background on the political upheavals of the area, the impending threat of Nilfgaardian invasion, and the prophecied survival of a girl with more titles than Harry Potter - Ciri, Lion Cub of Cintra, eponymous Blood of Elves, the 'Child Surprise' - who is fated to come under the protection of Geralt of Rivia, most infamous of the self-mutated, monster-hunting Witchers. 

This part of the story proves to be true, with Geralt taking in the girl some time after her escape from the sack of Cintra during the first Nilfgaard war. He takes her to Witcher camp for a while, where she trains in combat, cross-country running and monster hunting, then brings in the sorceress Triss Merigold to assess her magical potential. Finding her potential to be best described as 'ludicrously vast,' they move her to a nunnery and place her under the tutelage of Geralt's Facebook-it's-complicated, Yennefer of Vengerberger(9), while Geralt goes looking for whoever is asking questions about Ciri.

Cover also available in macho.

There is a spy searching for Ciri, and a bunch of political shenanigans, but plotwise that's about it, and I admit I was a bit taken aback when the book ended with little or no fanfare and no significant cliffhanger. It picked up a lot from the rather stilted opening, although its omniscient third-person narration leaves the characters as little more than cyphers. In particular, we never really get a handle on why the monster-hunting James Bond Geralt is so determined to protect Ciri, beyond a certain inherent bloody-mindedness and general feeling of Witcherly defensive duty. It's also difficult to get a handle on the general historicity of the world, which mixes high fantasy with fairly modern scientific terminology. It's not terrible, but I'm certainly not rushing to the next volume.

(1) Or at least of Bladerunner's particular style of scifi noir.

(2) At least, none that are memorable.

(3) This is totally not true if you went to Cambridge.

(4) I know my stuff, okay. I'm down with the ponies.

(5) Oubliettes & Ogres, which I'm pretty sure was Ogres & Oubliettes in the show.

(6) Only some; I have no patience with CRPGs.

(7) Not the swing dance.

(8) Dan-del-ee-on, rather than dandy-lion.
(9) Not, as I keep thinking it, Vengabus.

2017 Reading Challenge - Carpentaria

Carpentaria by Alexis Wright (read by Isaac Drandich)

Reason for Reading: A while back, I caught the first episode of a series called Cleverman, which has joined the list of stuff I Will Get Back to One Day. I've mostly put off watching it because it's a pretty dense piece of work, and quality, thoughtful TV requires more focus than I necessarily have to spare from family life from day to day. Anyway, this prompted me to add Australian literature to my challenge list, specifically seeking out Aboriginal writers. The research I was able to do with my limited time and resources turned up two significant titles: The Deadman Dance by Kim Scott, and Carpentaria.

Sometimes comic, often tragic, Carpentaria presents the struggle of an indigenous people to retain their meaning and relevance in the face of a world that wants to forget their stories. In a rambling, non-linear narrative, the novel tells the story of the town of Desperance on the Gulf of Carpentaria, where the aboriginal families of the Pricklebush live uncomfortably alongside the white folks of Uptown. Through the lives of Pricklebush patriarch Normal Phantom and of his estranged son Will, of travelling religious leader Mozzie Fishman, of Norm's wife Angel Day and of Elias, an amnesiac white man washed ashore on the beach, and through the blending of the natural world, Christianity and the ancestral spirit world of the Queensland Aborigines, Wright weaves a tale that, although set about fifty years later and on the other side of the world, is a close match for the first book in my challenge, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The parallels are not so exact as to suggest plagiarism, merely indicative of similar influences. Both are set in isolated, ill-founded towns – Desperance was created as a deep-water port, only for the river to shift course and leave it locked behind miles of mudflats and simultaneously exposed to cyclones – whose local worthies struggle against outside authority. Both towns hold strong against government interference, but capitulate to the crushing power of international capitalism; the Gurfurrit Mine takes the ancestral land of the Pricklebush mob, and offers them dangerous jobs in return. Both feature characters with their own, eccentric religious and philosophical views. They even both end with a catastrophic storm sweeping away all that has gone before. Where they differ markedly, however, is in their narrative voice, with Wright adopting the customs of oral storytelling in contrast to Garcia-Marquez's intense literary style. This is not to say that Carpentaria is less well-written than One Hundred Years of Solitude. It is a meticulous piece of writing, where a deliberate rawness rubs shoulders with profound eloquence.

The next book on my list is That Deadman Dance, which is not available in audiobook or Kindle format, so will be approached in dead tree format, and an imposing format it is.

Reading Roundup - April 2017

2017 Reading Challenge

I dropped a book this time round. April was a very slow month for some reason (mostly Easter, I think,) and I only got through one of my challenge books (which is why I've swapped out 'Big French Novels' for 'The Luke Cage Syllabus' in August.) That book was Irvine Welsh's unrelenting Trainspotting, a brutal and unromantic slice of life from the drug-addled youth of Leith. On the other hand, I have made a decent stab at The Rose That Grew From Concrete, and the next month's books include the very short Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

I kicked off this month with Ancillary Sword, the sequel to Ancillary Justice and the second book of the Imperial Radch trilogy. Having precipitated the militarisation of the schism in the manifold clones of Anaander Mianaai(1), the Lord of the Radch, the rogue ancillary Breq is assigned as captain of a Mercy - smallest of the Imperial Fleet's ship classes - and to command the defence of a world that helps to fuel the Radch's inexhaustible thirst for tea.

Without her overwhelming thirst for revenge, Breq has more time to muse on the psychological impact of her losses in this novel, leading to a slower narrative with less focus on action and more on character. In addition to herself, Breq struggles to integrate Seivarden into the modern fleet, and to help a copy of Anaander Mianaai to become her own person after having her ancillary implants removed. As she bonds with the common folk of the Radch and butts heads with the great and the good, Breq's character emerges as, to paraphrase another work, a great sympathiser for cripples, bastards and broken things.

Adjoa Andoh once more provides a strong reading, and if not much happens in comparison to Ancillary Justice, the novel is never slow. I've got a bit of a backlog to work through, but Ancillary Mercy is definitely on my list for reading in the near future.

Next up is the second book in Rick Riordan's Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard series, as dead boy walking Magnus and Muslim Valkyrie Sam attempt to track down the missing Mjollnir on behalf of it dim-witted owner. Their best option appears to be to try to follow a dangerous ploy set out by Sam's father Loki halfway, then pull a fast one at the last minute, but can you truly pull a fast one on the God of Mischief? And can their new ally be trusted?

I was going to open by saying that Magnus Chase and the Hammer of Thor has little in common with Ancillary Sword, but that's actually not true. The Imperial Radch trilogy's calling card is its almost universal use of feminine pronouns to represent a virtually genderless society, while The Hammer of Thor introduces Alex Fierro, transgender and gender fluid child of Loki, whose greatest fear on arriving in Asgard is that the eternal form of an Einherji would mean sticking in one gender. Embracing the power of Loki in order to own it, Alex is not only an unusual example of a heroic non-binary character... well, anywhere, but especially in mainstream children's adventure fiction(2), but possibly - if it goes the way it's looking - perhaps the first children's adventure transgender love interest.

Kieran Culkin provides a far superior voice for the reading of this volume, as compared to The Sword of Summer's Christopher Guetig, whose performance made Magnus's disaffected narrative voice so unsymapthetic that it put my partner - as great a fan of Riordan's work and listener of audiobooks as I am - off the story altogether until she was able to get a paper copy.

Square cover art = audio only!

Tipped of by my industry contacts(3), I was quick to snap up the free, audio-exclusive short story A Rare Book of Cunning Device, by Ben Aaronovich. It's only thirty minutes long, which is barely a short-story in real terms, but thirty minutes in the world of Peter Grant and the Folly is worth thirty hours of willfully nonprogressive neo-Roman space nazi Scientologists(4). Also, free! And read, as always, by Kobna Holbrook-Smith.

At some point in the Rivers of London chronology, Peter Grant is called in to investigate what seems to be a haunting among the stacks and automated collection systems of the new British Library, the only problem being that it is much too new for ghosts. On the other hand, some of the books are old... Could be a job for Britain's only apprentice magician (assuming an increasingly narrow interpretation of 'apprentice magician',) assuming he can do the business without melting the tech in the book collecting system. The short story also introduces us to a no-nonsense lady librarian who knew Peter's mother, so I can't believe she's going to prove to have been a one-shot.

I don't usually go through the books that I read with my daughter, but then again there are a lot of them. At some point I ought to do a post devoted to some of them, like the alternative princess stories in Don't Kiss the Frog, Princess Daisy and the Dragon and the Nincompoop(5) Knights and The Princess Who Saved Herself, or the bucolic life lessons of Mathias Feldhaus' Frog books. 

For now, however, we're just going to look briefly at Cinnamon, a short story by Neil Gaiman released in a new edition, illustrated by American artist and author Divya Srinivasan. I picked this up on impulse at my FLBS and for two days Arya refused to let me read it, because it was new and uncertain. Then she agreed, if she could have 'The Clumsy Princess' and The Very Hungry Caterpillar as well, and since then she's asked that the story of a blind princess and the man-eating tiger who sets out to teach her to speak be read to her every night. I call that a success.

(1) Advantages of audiobooks: I would never have pegged the pronunciation of this as An-ah-ander Mee-ah'nee-eye.

(2) Up to younger teen target audience, I mean. Obviously in YA pretty much anything goes, most likely because at that point you're selling purely to the reader and not their parents.

(3) I follow Ben Aaronovich's blog, okay.

(4) More on this when and if I finish the book.

(5) "Does that mean that they poop?" - Arya-Rose, age 4.

2017 Challenge - Trainspotting

Book 6 (March, Mad People)

Trainspotting, by Irvine Welsh (read by Tam Dean Lin)

Reason for Reading: Set primarily in Leith before its late-80s revival, Trainspotting is as alien to me as anything I've yet approached, and the madness which marks it for March reading (and, yes, I actually read it in late April,) relates to heroin addiction, which is also something alien to me.

The striking thing about comparing novels that have achieved classic status to those which have not and likely will not is the language. Your run of the mill fantasy epics, milporn SF and airport potboilers, even the best of them, use language as a simple medium, a means to convey meaning from the author to the reader, and yes, that's what language is, but... But a great book doesn't just do that; a great book contains language that both conveys meaning and is aesthetically striking in its own right, and this is true no less of the profanity laden, idomatic invective of Trainspotting than of the lyrical flow of One Hundred Years of Solitude. The novel contains more uses of the c-word than any, probably every other book I've ever read, but it is never gratuitous, even when it is. If that makes any sense.

Trainspotting is an angry, hard-to-like book about angry, hard-to-like people being angry and hard to like. It's tough going, but it's supposed to be, and it is the triumph of the novel that even if you don't like its various protagonists, you end up kind of getting them. The shifting narrative voice provides multiple perspectives on each character: Of particular note is the tension between self-styled idealist Renton and self-styled man of the world Sick Boy, and the juxtaposition between Spud's rambling speech and more coherent narrative voice. Franco Begbie is a monster for the ages, and Renton's musings on the group's communal creation of the legend of Begbie the hard man, the stand up mate, is one of the most interesting threads of the book.

This is not a book for the faint-hearted, and it's not a book to be approached casually, especially by those not familiar with the Scots - and specifically Leith - vernacular. I went with an audio book, which probably helped, but it still had to go off when I was tired (and of course could not be listened to in bed for fear that my daughter would wake up, wonder in and start calling people doss c&*$s.) Leith-born actor and professional reader of Irvine Welsh novels Tam Dean Burn runs around every conceivable variation of the Leith accent in the course of the book, infecting the listener's inner monologue with the best variation it can manage - in my case, not very good - and an urge to call people radge bastards. That alone speaks to the power of language.

Did I like it? No, but then it's not a book that wants to be liked. It's a very good book, possibly a great book, but you wouldn't want to hang out with it all the time.