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.

Reading Roundup - May 2018

This month's reading begins with The Night Alphabet, a collection of twenty-six short stories - arranged into an alphabet of themes - loosely bound by a common source in dreamed inspiration. There's a broad range of works on offer here, from the Gaimanesque whimsy of 'Mr Martello and the Cloud Castle' to the Lovecraftian horror of 'Solomon's Gate' or 'The Gap', to more distinctly unique chapters such as 'The Cherry Tree' and 'The Sandwich Thief'. The bad news is that this means that few readers will get on with every story in the book, but the good news is that is that - unlike with, say, Lovecraft himself, who can get a little samey - there is no danger of tedium setting in, and that there is something for most palates within.

Generically, the book is broadly described as horror, although 'dark fantasy' is probably more apt, with only a few of the stories slipping into full-blown chiller mode. Some of the stories are very short, others a little bit longer. The writing is strong throughout, even in the simplest works, with characters efficiently drawn so as to quickly engage the reader's sympathies. 

Next up was a repeat of an old favourite, as I kicked off a re-read of JRR Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings with The Fellowship of the Ring, and the thing that really strikes me... Well, it may seem odd, but I really hadn't considered before how odd it is that the Shire has a postal service. The single greatest kingdom in the known world exchanges diplomatic communiques with its client states by sending a man on a horse with a red arrow, and the bucolic, forgotten pastoral has stamps. Also, having made an informed decision to not skip the Old Forest this time around, damn I'd forgotten how weird and creepy Tom Bombadil (Tom Bombadillo) actually is. I mean, everyone remembers that his whole episode is random as hell - Peter Jackson memorably replaced his entire impact on the wider plot(1) with a bag - but as much as I don't think it was Tolkien's intention, having Goldberry begin and end her explanation of who Tom Bombadil is with the phrase 'Tom is the master' is pretty fucking cult programming.

It's amazing how much re-visiting a familiar text allows you to focus in on the small details, is what I'm saying.

The book begins with the famous foreword in which Tolkien discourses on his mortal horror of allegory, before proceeding to 'Concerning Hobbits,' a rambling history of the 'little people,' which I usually skim, and hoo-boy is there a lot that I didn't remember. The bulk of the story - from Hobbiton to Rauros, by way of the bloody Old Forest, of Bree and Weathertop and Rivendell, Caradhras and Moria, Lothlorien and the Anduin - I remember much better, probably because it gets much more love in adaptation(2). It quite surprised me, however, that I left Boromir alive, and Merry and Pippin quite at liberty, rather than Fellowship encompassing the skirmish at Rauros.

My last actual book for the month was The White City, follow-up to Down Station, continuing the misadventures of an ethnically diverse group of survivors in an alternate dimension with no clothing stores(3). Dalip, Mary and their dwindling group of friends continue to seek for the secrets of Down, the alternate dimension to which they fled from the apparent annihilation of modern London. Their quest leads them to the fabled White City, but all that they know of this place comes from the treacherous Crows. Loss and separation follow, and even on reaching the city the group remain fragmented. What do the masked rulers of the city really want? Will the group find freedom with a band of pirates? What did happen to Grace back in Down Station? And is there a reason why this Narnia is so shit?

The White City is a decent follow-up to Down Station, although I'm not sure that any definite cause was ever going to be as satisfying as the mystery of Down. The whole is well-crafted, and the peril to the characters, both physical and spiritual, feels real and compelling. As before, the contrast between the fierce, instinctual Mary and the measured, analytical Dalip provides a rounded perspective. The infinitely duplicitous and self-justifying Crows is a bit of a villain for the ages, utterly amoral, yet appallingly affable.

The rest of my month was split between comics and audio plays, which apparently are appearing here now.

I kicked off my comics with Hellboy and the BPRD - 1952-1954. A prequel to the main Hellboy series, they feature the titular archfiend as a young demon, going on his first missions for his adoptive father and the BPRD. This brings the same mix of folkloric monsters, weird science and vigorous face-punching that fans of the main series have become accustomed to, but with a less seasoned protagonist and a more expansive role for Professor Bruttenholm than being killed by a frog monster. If you like Hellboy, and I do, this is going to be another winner, although I can see that you might want to ration yourself a bit more than I did; binging Hellboy can get a little… Samey suggests a level of repetition that isn't actually there, but it is an anthology series, and that doesn't lend itself to bigger chunks.

I also finished off Book 2 of Saga, a sprawling space opera following the life of Hazel, the daughter of two soldiers on opposite sides of a galaxy-spanning war. Hunted by both sides as evidence against the alleged incompatibility of the two sides, Hazel and her parents find strange allies and stranger enemies, as they balance the need to hide and survive with a desire to change the world that they live in.

Saga is… Well, it's big. It's also self-consciously mature and edgy. It's actually kind of a triumph that it transcends being one step beyond PWP(4), although it does mean that my usual reading opportunities - sitting with my daughter as she goes to sleep; the waiting room of my daughter's ballet class - seem inappropriate, hence it has taken me a while to get through this one. It has a gritty edge to it which means that no-o

ne seems safe, but develops enough sympathy for its characters that not only mortal perils, but separation and potential breakups work on the heartstrings.

Sadly, Book 3 is a long way from omnibus.

Completing this month's comic trifecta was Volume 1 of The Complete Valerian. I'd read the first Valerian story - City of Shifting Waters - before, but this omnibus also includes the zeroth book, Bad Dreams, and the second, The Empire of a Thousand Planets. Despite the title, the comics are very much Valerian and Laureline, with the female lead, a strikingly intelligent young woman from mediaeval France, surprisingly close to being the equal of her male partner in the Spatio-Temporal Agency; impressive for a comic created in the late sixties.

Bad Dreams tells the story of the first meeting of our heroes, as Valerian is sent back in time to protect the fabric of history from a wizard. Here he encounters Laureline, a tough survivor with somewhat unlikely hair, who helps him to complete his mission, despite being temporarily transformed into a unicorn. In The Empire of a Thousand Planets they are sent to scout out a new civilisation for first contact, only to find that the name of Earth is known… and hated. Empire breaks away from the first two and contains no actual time travel, although the same technology that allows the Spatio-Temporal Agents to travel in time appears to

solve the problems of FTL travel.

Valerian and Laureline contains a lot that feels familiar, from Valerian's hapless everyman antics - his cunning plans are as likely to end with him falling on his face in plain view of his enemies as in success - to Laureline's role as a female partner who is competent, intelligent and driven, but it's hard to imagine that this would have been the case in 1967.  I feel as if Luc Besson missed a lot of potential in his film adaptation, but then again it's a lot easier to take a risk like setting your pilot story in the last years of modern society as seen through the eyes of a time agent from the distant future in a comic than a big budget movie.

So, the last part of this month's 'reading' is made up of audio plays, as I've been getting back into Big Finish via the medium of sales.

Dark Eyes is a sprawling serial, bringing the 8^th Doctor out of his Byronic phase and towards the cynicism that led to his embrace of the War Doctor at his regeneration in the short film The Night of the Doctor. After the loss of a companion and a family member at the conclusion of the 8^th Doctor Adventures series, the Doctor was prevented from throwing himself to the far end of time by the Time Lords, who recruit him to find and protect Molly O'Sullivan, a WWI voluntary aid worker who turned out to be the key to an insidious plot hatched by the Dalek Time Controller and a renegade CIA(5) agent and caught up in the transtemporal rise and fall of a terrible galactic menace known as the Eminence.

In the third series of plays, Molly is kidnapped by the Master and his 'companion', Sally Armstrong, with the intention of using the power forced into her body to usurp the Eminence's control of its zombie-like Infinite Warriors.  This Master, played by Alex Macqueen, is a slightly camp, slightly cheeky character, but as ruthless and calculating as any of his incarnations, and is more in control of his temporary alliances with the Daleks and the Eminence than his earlier versions, who always seemed not only unprepared when his fair weather friends turned on him, but actually surprised. The Doctor and his current companion, future physician Liv Chenka, take on the Master and thwart his plans, only to find him resurgent in Dark Eyes 4, conquering the Earth once more.

Dark Eyes is a dark entry in the history of Doctor Who. It's brilliantly performed and realised, and runs the titular renegade through several wringers in the course of its run. If I have a complaint, it's that it feels like running the Doctor through hell is a little too much the point, rather than a simple consequence of the plot. Still, I am a big fan of the McGann Doctor, and Nicola Walker and Ruth Bradley make superb companions as Liv and Molly respectively.

The Worlds of Big Finish was released as a celebration of the company's non-Doctor Who works, following a pattern established in The Worlds of Doctor Who, telling a single story by passing the narrative from each group of characters to the next(6).

We begin with Graceless, a series for which I frankly care very little. I'm not sure it's actively bad, but its positioning as adult, sexy and edgy puts it on the Torchwood end of the Whoniverse, for which I don't especially care even when it's good. Anyway, this entry features weird magic girls Zara and Abby - loosely the wild one and the good one, although from the one series I did pick up, Abby is also the more ruthlessly pragmatic of the two - visiting a vast, pan-dimensional library called the Archive. Arriving much later than intended, they stumble on an apocalypse cult's attempt to destroy every book which describes the destruction of Earth in the early twenty-first century by a force of multidimensional conquerors called the Magog. They thwart this attempt and send the last book to Earth, concealing it in an antiquarian collection.

We then proceed to the early twentieth century, as Sherlock Holmes thwarts a bomber targeting antiquarian book dealers, and then on a few more years to a time when Dorian Gray interceded in an attempt to usher forth the destruction of the world(7). The book surfaces again at the time of the described destruction, but trans-temporal adventuress Iris Wildythyme(8) rambles in to save the day by ramping a time traveling double-decker bus off of Tower Bridge. With the world saved, we then flash forward to the future, where travelling trouble - and person - shooter Vienna Salvatori is hired to recover the book for a criminal big shot on Mars. Now, Vienna is kind of edgy and sexy in the same way as Graceless, but somehow I mind a lot less. It's odd, because I really went into Vienna's first solo adventure expecting to hate it, but it really grabbed me. Maybe it's because it doesn’t feel the need of a lot of sex to be sexy, or just because it manages to make her more likable than either Abby or Zara, but I thoroughly enjoy her brand of sci-fi noir.

We wrap up with Bernice Summerfield thwarting a last hurrah by the Magog to complete their conquest of Earth, before falling more or less into Vienna's lap and finally choosing to conceal the book in question in the one place a book can really disappear: the vast, pan-dimensional library called the Archive.

The Worlds of Big Finish is a lot of fun. Essentially a single story with rotating leads, narrators - Holmes, Gray and Salvatori all provide their own voice-overs - and styles, it's a grand Macguffin hunt, and a fair introduction to the range of stories Big Finish are telling these days.

That being said, the one world decidedly not featured is that of Pathfinder Legends, which I visited after picking up the second series, Mummy's Mask, in another sale. I thought about getting the third, but I'm buying a house, so I have to draw a line somewhere.

Unsurprisingly, Mummy's Mask takes our four intrepid adventurers - atheist wizard Ezren, sassy elven thief Merisiel, lunk of the world Valeros, and grumpy dwarf Ranger Harsk - to the Aegyptian corner of the Pathfinder world. Entering a lottery to be assigned a building to explore in the necropolis of a city long-abandoned to an ancient plague, they stumble on another cult set on restoring a long-dead ruler to power, in this case the Pharaoh Hakotep, who has a fleet of flying laser pyramids and a major chip on his undead shoulder.

Mummy's Mask is a much more substantial offering than Rise of the Runelords, with each of the audio plays in the series twice as long as the previous. One of the things this gave me the chance to notice is that the dialogue is actually incredibly clever. The four leads are somewhat at odds with the world around them in their mode of speech because they are PCs. While there aren't the usual run of pop culture references, everything about them - Harsk's use of what are almost catchphrases, Valeros and Merisiel's lack of commitment to 'period' dialogue - makes sense if they are being voiced by the players, while the supporting characters are NPCs being run by the DM.

Although mostly a decent production, Mummy's Mask suffers a little from having an ancient Egyptian setting written with limited reference to academic sources and depicted by the voice actors available. In Big Finish's defence, the vast majority of the support players are of middle eastern origin, but there are a few dodgy accents, and of course the PCs have a bit of a white saviour role, having come from the more Euro-fantasy part of the world to save notAegypt.

Also, there is a gay couple in this one. They die, I'm sorry to day.

(1) Which amounts to giving the hobbits some Numenorean shivs.

(2) Although saying that, either the extended Fellowship or the extended An Unexpected Journey includes about 60% of the text of 'Concerning Hobbits' - specifically the stuff that doesn't connect the Shire to the rest of the world or depict the hobbits as in any way badass - as voice over.

(3) Two books in, and Dalip is still wearing his Transport for London-issue, Gitmo-chic Orange jumpsuit.

(4) Porn without plot.

(5) Celestial Intervention Agency, the Time Lords' dirty tricks brigade.

(6) The Worlds of Doctor Who featured the Big Finish spin-offs Jago and Litefoot, Countermeasures and Gallifrey, as well as a pair of hapless UNIT goons featured in two of the Companion Chronicles.

(7) Which means that Big Finish's Sherlock Holmes adventures and Confessions of Dorian Gray are in canon with Doctor Who.

(8) Like the Doctor, but female, drunk, and simultaneously more and less effective; also, only occasionally capable of regeneration.

Reading Roundup - January and February 2018

New Horizons Challenge: TheHandmaid's Tale

In January, I treated myself to the 4^th and 5^th volumes of Giant Days, John Allison's comic following the adventures of Scary-Go-Round alumna Esther de Groot and her friends at the University of Sheffield (as I'm sure I've explained before.) 

Volumes 4 and 5 follow the trio of Esther, Susan Ptolemy and Daisy Wooton through the final term of their freshman year, the summer vacation and the beginning of their second year. Independent film-making provides a distraction from the horrors of money troubles and house-hunting, and a new shadow falls over the group as shady entrepreneur Dean Thompson appears on the scene. The summer brings the excitement of the Wye Valley music festival, and then the new year the group's first shared housing. As ever, Giant Days combines its lively sense of the absurd with a touch of the mundane to produce a fast-paced, madcap bundle of fun. Well worth the reading. 

These volumes also feature a return to the nexus of weird that is Tackleford, and are notable for their treatment of supporting character Ed Gemmell. Previously Esther's nice-guy semi-stalker, Allison takes the unusual and refreshing step of having the character recognise that pining over a girl won't make something happen, and then move on before the whole thing becomes a festering toxic pit of entitlement.

Also courtesy of Comixology was The Witchfinder General, a six-part limited series, following the misadventures of Drew Jackson, a Pentagon intern who finds himself assigned as apprentice to the US Witchfinder General and then rapidly promoted to become head of the department after his boss spontaneously combusts. The Department of Witchfinding has a fine tradition of ruthlessly suppressing the supernatural, but Drew has a very different approach, trying to make friends out of enemies. It's a philosophy that looks set to cut little ice with the Nine, an ancient cadre of nigh-immortal witches set for their ninth and final assault on the pillars of reality, but it is the one thing he has going for him that generations of more powerful and experienced Witchfinders General didn't have. 

I really enjoyed The Witchfinder General. It follows the fairly well-trodden path of young rookie stumbles into contact with ancient mysteries, winds up out of his or her depth, tries to do something new, but it does it well and it's definitely better than holding up the witchfinders of the past as shining paragons of virtue. Also, it features Benjamin Franklin in the role of armoured, time-travelling badass the Clockwork Minuteman. That's the kind of secret history it's hard not to like.

Next up, I hit Stephen Fry's new collection of Greek mythological retellings: Mythos. This is an odd beast, with Fry - as both author and narrator, the latter continuing a recent trend in my listening, from Harry Potter and the Audible complete Sherlock Holmes collection, as well as the free sampler of their equally Frylicious reading of Holmes-adjacent detective series, Max Carados - recounting his material somewhat in the style of a media journo recapping the soaps. From the teenage emo crushes of the Titans to the sleazy leching of Zeus and the almost mature and considered love affairs of other gods and mortals, Fry focuses his gaze heavily on the early cosmic myths of creation and espeically the Theogony of Hesiod, rather than the more conventional greatest hits entries of the Age of Heroes: Heracles, the Argonauts, the Trojan War, and all of that jazz. This combination of voice and material results in something markedly different to your typical myth collection; a cosily accessible anthology of child-eating, spouse-eating, abuse cycles, metamorphoses and domestic douchebaggery. It's a lot of fun, but won't float your boat if you like your mythology done with proper epic reverence.

What the Hell Did I Just Read? is the third volume in the David and John cosmic horror series by David Wong. As with the previous volumes in the series - John Dies at the End and This Book is Full of Spiders Serious Dude,Don't Touch It - What the Hell Did I Just Read? is a fast-moving fusion of cosmic horror, supernatural action and scatological humour, as David and John bring their barely understood and virtually unearned abilities to bear on a case of monstrous child kidnapping. Now, if you know me at all - either in person, or through the blog - you'll know that this was always going to be a tough one for me. Whether because of this, or because the joke is wearing a little thin, I definitely found this tougher going than either of the previous novels. On the other hand, I was impressed that the book addressed a crucial and often overlooked point regarding its own protagonist: That it is entirely possible that someone faced with constant struggles with the supernatural, cursed with unique insight beyond the ken of ordinary mortals, and stalked by malignant extradimensional entities, could also suffer from serious, but treatable mental illness. Props for that.

Barchester Towers is the second volume of the Barchester Chronicles of Anthony Trollope. It continues to follow the doings of the clergy of the cathedral city of Barchester, as the Chapter faces the upset of a new bishop. Dr Proudie is a henpecked man, given the seat in preference over the Archdeacon, son of the previous Bishop and presumed successor until an eleventh hour fall of the friendly ministry. Along with his overbearing, self-righteous wife, Dr Proudie brings into the cathedral close the scheming and obsequious Mr Slope, one of literature's finest and most mundane villains. Once more, other men take up arms over Mr Harding's position at Hiram's Hospital, and the struggle between Mr Slope, Mrs Proudie and Archdeacon Grantly for control of the cathedral and the diocese threatens to overthrow all peace in the hallowed halls of Barchester. As with The Warden, the delight of Barchester Towers lies mostly in Trollope's wry, satirical style, and in particular his great pains to relieve the reader of any concern that his heroine, the widow Mrs Bold, might end up with the ghastlier of her suitors. I suspect that at the time it was pretty scathing satire, but with time it has become a rather cosy read for when you don't want to be doing with violence and inhumanity.

I also decided that I was going to go back to a YA series I never finished when I first read it, and so began from the start with the eponymous first volume of the Skulduggery Pleasant series. Stephanie is drawn into a weird secret world of secrets and sorcery when her uncle dies, leaving her a house, a fortune, and an occult secret or two. Attacked by magical henchmen, she is rescued by Skulduggery Pleasant, a skeletal magician with more than a few secrets of his own, who becomes her teacher as well as her guardian, as the two seek to prevent a sorcerer named Nefarian Serpine gaining ultimate power and returning his dark gods to the world. 

Skuldugery Pleasant is witty and fast paced, with a fairly rugged magic system and an effective, show-not-tell approach to most of its world-building. Bursting with one-liners, action scenes and more entertaining, misguidedly self-assumed nomes de guerre than you can shake a stick at, this is a solid opening chapter, and I think I'll make an effort to get through the whole series this time.

My final read for this period was a bit of a struggle. The Masked City is the second book of the Invisible Library series, following Irene Winters, a relatively junior agent of an extradimensional library devoted to maintaining the balance between order - represented by the dragons - and chaos - embodied in the fae. When a pair of power-hungry fae known as Lord and Lady Guantess abduct her dragon apprentice, Kai, Irene is willing to go to any lengths to prevent the long-standing cold war between dragons and fae erupting into open conflict, and to rescue her friend. There's a lot to like in the Invisible Library series, not least the fact that the masked city of the title is a high chaos world that is basically nothing but Venice in carnival, but also a lot that gives me significant pause.

There's a tentative romance between Irene and Kai that is literally the least interesting thing about either character, and tritagonist Peregrine Vale brings all the least appealing features of the Holmsian detective into play with his arrogance and effortless competence, not only assuming that a lady must need protection but somehow being able to offer that protection to Irene soundly within her sphere of competence. The book isn't terrible, but I wanted to like it much more than, in the end, I was able to.

Reading Roundup - September 2017

Another month goes by with no progress on the 2017 Challenge. This time, it's basically because I've thrown my back out and can't afford to carry a large dead-tree volume to and from work. I've therefore invested in the first volume of the 'Emancipation' theme on Audible, so watch this space for my take on the suddenly much-discussed(1) The Handmaid's Tale.


Kalinda - Kali for short - is a trainee at warrior nun school, and thus destined to become a warrior nun unless she is claimed by one of the benefactors as a wife, courtesan or servant. She is tall and gawky in a culture of petite curves, so of course she is claimed by the Rajah to be his hundredth wife, thus elevating him to near-godly megastud status... but only after she has faced challenges from any of his roughly nine squintillion concubines who seek to claim her place. This is not a fate she would have chosen even if the Rajah wasn't a drunken douchebag, which he is, and even if her appointed bodyguard wasn't the fantasy Indian equivalent of Jet Li in The Bodyguard from Beijing(2), which he is, and who sees beauty in the form she considers gangly and awkward, which he does. Unfortunately, that is the fate she's got, and now she will have to find the holy book of an outlawed sect of magic ninjas, survive her 'rank tournament', marry the Rajah and murder him, all without getting the gorgeous Deven Nyk(3) murdered by succumbing to the gravitational attraction of dem eyes.

The Hundredth Queen - or, to give it its alternative title, The Several Hundredth Fantasy Novel About a Special Snowflake With a Destiny and a Dreamy-Eyed True Love - is... Okay, actually it's not as awful as I'm making out, but it is so very much of a type that it is not merely easy to mock, but almost impossible to take seriously. Of its ilk, it is not terrible, and it has some gorgeous imagery, but it's just so rote. Magical powers, secret relations, dreamy love interest, utterly diabolical villains. There are a few twists towards the end, as the massively oppressed magical ninjas turn out to be so over peaceful co-existence, but for the most part its all par for the course, and there's a point in the middle where our star-crossed lovers are contemplating their prospects and I just wanted to slap them both for their utter egocentrism. Deven not only declares that he can find the thing the Bhutas(4) have been searching for for years because his love for Kali is more motivation than the impending extermination of their entire race and potential release of a world-consuming evil super ninja, but turns out to be right, only for their ill-conceived plan and Kali's hare-brained rescue attempt to get Kali's best friend killed and Deven lost down a river. And do either of them ever admit that this happened because they were reckless, foolhardy and selfish? Do they bollocks.

Like The Wretched of Muirwood, there is a disconnect between the espoused values of the world and the actions of the characters. Sisterhood is promoted strongly, but while she does act in support of the other women of the royal harem on many occasions, she is also willing to skip out on any chance of affecting real change to live her sexy dream life with Deven (who, incidentally, is literally the first man she ever sees.) King paints a world in which nothing is supposed to come easily, but only a handful of characters in the book actually seem to understand the concept of sacrifice and most of those get pretty short shrift from Kali in her role as narrator.

I will say this for the book; the rampant sexism of its culture was more than an assumption. While we open with a world where women are basically chattels, it emerges throughout the book that this was not always the case. Women once held significant power, before the Rajahs and other wealthy (male) benefactors were able to promote the once-outlawed rank tournaments as a means of making women battle each other for favour. It makes a change from just imposing historical chauvinism on a world where people can set each other on fire with their minds.

A terrible conflagration forces a group of cleaners and maintenance workers to flee from the London Underground, through a door into another world. Mary is a juvenile delinquent with an iron will. Daleep is a nice Sikh boy with a formerly bright future in engineering. They, along with Bosnian track worker Stanislav, shift mum Mama, and three other cleaners find themselves in Down: 'Not just a direction, but a destination;' a seemingly unspoiled wilderness where geomancers tap into powerful energies flowing between the portals to London.

The group soon find themselves at the mercy of these competing magicians, but Dalip and Mary each find a peculiar strength in Down, Mary becoming a geomancer herself, and Dalip discovering a warrior spirit which seems to reshape his body into fighting trim. It seems that Down is a place to find yourself, although some find worse selves than others.

Down Station is hands down the best book I've read/listened to in September, coupling interesting and flawed characters with a novel and compelling form of secondary world; a sort of emergency Narnia which takes people in mortal peril out of London, but never sends them back. The reversal of expectations in making the cerebral Dalip into a fighter and natural-born scrapper Mary into the magician makes both characters more compelling, and their interactions with their various allies - especially the desperately broken Stanislav - at least as intriguing as the battle with the Geomancer and her guards. It's also notable that the book quietly eschews the standard assumption of white leads, with Mary being mixed-race and Dalip a Sikh, and their allies mostly black or Eastern European. The second book of the series, The White City, is definitely higher on my to-read list than The Fire Queen.

In fact, with The Hundredth Queen being set in fantasy India, that means that Architects of Destiny and Veil of Reality, the first two volumes of the scifi epic Cadicle feature my only white protagonists of the month. Well, and Harry Potter, but I haven't finished The Order of the Phoenix because I find it so hard to go to sleep while listening to any scene in which Dolores Umbridge is present and not being savaged to death by weasels.

The Tararian Empire is a vast, interstellar dominion, ruled by the corporate nobility of the High Dynasties and mediated by a no-longer-religious Priesthood. Christoph Seitinen is the heir to one of the Dynasties, and was born with telepathic powers that he refuses - against all policy - to deny. Indeed, his powers are substantially greater than those of most telepaths. And how can this be? For he is the Kwisatz Haderach...'s dad.

After running away from home, Chris is located by the Tararian Selective Service, a sort of general purpose agency responsible for getting shit done in the Empire, and permitted to train its agents to use their telepathic powers. While in training, Chris meets a girl and they fall in love at first sight, despite her turning out to be a Dynastic scion as well. We later learn that this is because they were genetically programmed to be super hot for one another, but they don't find that out until book two. In fact... very little happens in Architects of Destiny. Chris runs away from home, gets a job on a freighter, eats street food, gets picked up by the TSS, has a training montage, then gets married.

Veil of Reality picks up fourteen years later, implying that the entire first book was a bit of a digression and that we're really interested in the future Primus Elite/Cadicle/Dragon, Will Seitinen. Chris and Kate's son is a prodigy, with vast intelligence and psychic welly. He is kidnapped by the Baksen, an alien force at double-secret war with the Tarans, who torment him with loaded hints about the real plot and apparently want him to join their team. Chris undertakes a rescue mission while Kate hunts a traitor in the TSS, and as a result all the stuff about generations of Dynastic scions being programmed to ultimately create Will in order to counter the telepathic threat of the Baksen comes out (although not the secret of the Baksen's origins; I'm calling early attempts to genetically engineer a psychic super-race, but they were unstable/too powerful/slightly off-putting with their rough skin and red eyes and got mad when the Priesthood tried to scrap them.)

I've got the third book in the same omnibus as the first two, so I guess I'll give it a go sometime, but I can't say I care that much. The absolute focus on the wealthy elite and the shady super-agency is especially egregious for having gone out of the way to introduce the idea that the populace thinks that the system of rule really sucks. The complete absence of ordinary folks from the narrative is all the more striking for the fact that the Seitinens are described as blonde haired and blue eyed, as a result of their generational drive for genetic purity. In addition, there are no strong female characters at all, with Kate's informed brilliance doing her no good at all when called on to track down the traitor responsible for trying to kill her son.

Not a great month then, apart from Down Station. Roll on October(5).

(1) And hardly irrelevant before.
(2) Or Kevin Costner, or I suppose Ryan Reynolds.
(3) As always, spellings may be off-base since I listen instead of reading.
(4) The magic ninjas.
(5) Oh, it already did.

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 - July 2016

The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is the debut novel from Becky Chambers, and one of the first novels to be part-funded by Kickstarter. It's essentially a road story, as the crew of the 'tunneling ship' Wayfarer make their way slowly across the galaxy in order to undertake an ambitious contract to create a new sublayer tunnel to link the territory of a formerly xenophobic race at the galactic core to the heart of civilised space. The ship and her crew of (mostly) likable weirdos meander from planet to planet, exploring philosophical issues and species distinctions, being assaulted by pirates, visiting markets, getting arrested and attending the occasional fancy party en route to their destination.

It has just enough technical crunch to feel satisfyingly real, but the real story is about the characters and their journey, so much so that hands down the weakest part of the novel is when the viewpoint temporarily leaves the crew of the wanderer to expand a little on the xenophobic race and their internal politics. While strongly informing the denouement, this interlude feels decidedly strange in comparison to the main narrative, and I don't think that the denouement would have suffered from the actions of the race being largely unexplained, the snippets of prior information enough for the reader to interpolate. Despite this, however, the novel as a whole is excellent, and a rare example of an epic quest with no great cause at stake; just a crew with a job to do.

Chambers is definitely an author to watch for. Audible reader Patricia Rodriguez brings a great range of performance to the characters, and captures the heart of the story.

The Adventures of Tom Stranger, Interplanetary Insurance Agent is basically the furthest from The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet it is possible to get while still operating within the same vague genre, medium and language. Written by Larry Correia and performed by Adam Baldwin (both of whom are also characters within the story,) it's either a scathing satire of the kind of two-fisted, macho, tech-porn action adventure that is almost impossible to distinguish from its own parodies, or the genuine article. I suspect the latter. It's a diverting listen at a mere two hours long, and Baldwin performs it with genuine gusto, but it doesn't really inspire me to seek out Correia's longer fiction. I can't escape the feeling that it would just be exhausting, and that I would just be increasingly desperate for some kind of satire to kick in and relieve the monotony.

Snakewood is another debut, this time from Barry-born games writer Adrian Selby. A fantasy offering in the subgenre I call 'White Company' (which is to say, definitely not the Black Company, guv,) it tells the story of the golden years and decline of the mercenary company known as Kailen's Twenty, and the assassination of its members a decade later. Recounted through a series of journals, letters and confessions recorded by the son of one of the last survivors of the company, the narrative begins at the end, and gradually unfolds the names and nature of the company's hunters, and the manner of the aging soldiers' deaths. It's big twist is a little too telegraphed by simple logic, although there is a second part to it that is harder to see coming.

The strength of the novel is its unique world, in which the flash of wizardly magic is replaced by a form of herbal alchemy. A class of warrior-brewers called the druda provide fightbrews which transform mere men into superhuman engines of battle, poisons in pastes for their blades and aerosolised form to be released from their arrow, and antidotes to be soaked into their armour or applied to their wounds, radically transforming war from a purely military contest to a clash of skill between their druda. The base elements of these concoctions - known collectively as 'plant' - are worth more than gold, and the recipe books of the druda are carefully guarded secrets. Interestingly, some reviewers have contested the right of a novel with 'no magic' to be considered fantasy, but not only is Snakewood clearly set in a secondary world, but to suggest that the druda craft is not magical is frankly ludicrous. If there were any doubt, Selby himself describes it as the world's magic system on his blog.

Where the reader's mileage may vary is in the characters. Well-drawn and convincing, they are nonetheless appalling bastards, pretty much to a man (or woman,) and anyone who prefers to have a side to root for may be in for a frustrating read. The best of the characters are violent junkies, and perhaps the only biting distinction is that only one side is explicitly involved in rape. Do not expect to like these characters, and if listening to the audiobook, try not to be lulled by the reassuring accent, reminiscent of Sean Bean at his most sincere, which marks Joe Jameson's interpretation of Kailen.

In the Darkness That's Where I'll Know You began life as a four-volume serial novel called 'The Black Room'. It tells the story of Charlie Wilkes, an easy going chap who does some dodgy ket at a mate's flat and wakes up inside the head of a neurotic ex-web designer named Minnie Cooper. As he struggles to convince her that he is not just the roaring spectre of mental collapse, he slowly realises that Minnie lives in a different world; not his reality, but a parallel one.

It gradually becomes clear that there in every world there is a Charlie and a Minnie, and that more often than not, they end up together. The Minnie in this Charlie's world turns out to have died tragically of a suspected overdose, and so despite his own growing feelings for the Minnie whose head he enters, he agrees to be her invisible wingman on a date with her world's Charlie, whom he calls Chuck. Which is the point at which a fairly fluffy sci-fi romance turns into a horror story, as Chuck reveals a terrifying dark secret that threatens Charlie, Minnie and countless other versions of their predestined happiness.

Luke Smitherd reads his own novel, and as with Jeremy Smith's performance in The Ables, it's clear that he's not done this much, with his delivery becoming markedly more assured and fluid in the later parts of the novel. By turns weird, sweet and appalling, In the Darkness That's Where I'll Know You is a unique and intriguing novel, and in a crowded marketplace, that's not nothing.

Of course, I came to Lev Grossman's The Magicians through the current TV adaptation. Like the series, the novel focuses on the progress of Quentin Coldwater, a disaffected youth who is unexpectedly admitted to a secret magical university. Unlike the series, the book casts Quentin as an undergraduate and follows him through years of study before things really start happening. It also casts his former best friend Julia into the wilderness for most of the novel, her story running concurrently, but in the follow-up novel, The Magician King.

The Magicians is basically about Quentin and his inability to ever be happy. He learns that he can do magic, finds a beautiful girlfriend with whom he connects on a deep, emotional level, has the freedom to do whatever he wants and ultimately finds a way to travel to Filory, the magical land of the books he has obsessed over since childhood (a sort of Narnia with the serial numbers filed off,) and still isn't happy, and I'm going to be honest, I wanted to slap book-Quentin even more than I wanted to slap series-Quentin. This is because, far more so than the series, the book is about the modern inability to embrace happiness, the obsession with the something else that will make your life make sense and be perfect, rather than about magicians having adventures. A common rallying cry for fans of the series is Hogwarts + Sex = Brakebills, but the equation is a lot more complex. Hogwarts + Sex - Cosmic Validation + Cosmic Horror - High Jinx + Alcohol + Bitterness - Neat Resolution = Brakebills. Mark Bramhall even reads the audiobook as if it were a particularly grim life story of Charles Foster Kane.

Just One Damned Thing After Another is the first novel in the Chronicles of St Mary's, by Jodi Taylor (not the porn star, thanks Google.) The titular St Mary's is a historical research institute with access to time travel, who shoot cunningly disguised portacabins back through history to observe and record, before returning to manufacture convincing supporting 'research' for delivery to the equally fictional Thirsk University. Like The Doomsday Book, this is a time travel novel with a female protagonist, although Dr Madeline 'Max' Maxwell is a far cry from Kivrin. She's a hard-drinking gal with some serious problems with authority, but the prospect of actual time travel is enough to convince her to apply herself to the grueling training regime and to put up with her less appealing colleagues.

There's a lot to like in this novel, although it's not without its problems. It's not hugely long, but a lot happens and there isn't really one dominant plot thread. The book feels like it ends a couple of times, before getting up and going on. In fact, it feels most of all like a series of linked short stories, rather than a single narrative, and character attitudes and motivations sometimes seem to spin on a dime. It is also one of the first books I've read in a while to feature the once-ubiquitous uncomfortably graphic sex scene apparently thrown in for its own sake.

Zara Ramm works hard to bring the broad cast of characters to life, but overall this is a fun jaunt rather than a life-changing grand tour.

Finally, The Scorch Trials is the second volume in the Maze Runner series, and follows Thomas and the Gladers after their escape from the Maze, as they are tasked with crossing a punishing desert called the Scorch to reach a Safe Zone. WICKED, the group responsible for these tests, subject the group to a series of horrific encounters, and also put them up against 'Group B', a number of female survivors from another maze. The psychological aspect of the trials is ramped up, with each survivor being assigned a role and environmental messages then undermining those roles. Thomas also begins to remember his past, before the Maze, and that he might be responsible for some of what they are going through.

I got this one from the library, because I've not been sufficiently impressed by the franchise to want to sink money into it, and this volume did not change my mind. An awful lot of it feels like the weirdness of the trials is weird for the sake of being weird, rather than having a serious purpose. I guess the Flare is a brain infection, so maybe inducing multiple emotional traumas serves a purpose, but it still feels arbitary, and as of the end of this installment the absolute control WICKED imposes on everything makes the story of our plucky rebels feel more than a little bit futile. Also, Theresa - the female lead of the first book - does not get a good showing here, basically being set up to betray Thomas, either by choice or because she is coerced by WICKED.