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 - January 2020

Found Horizons
The Poppy War, RF Kuang
Rin is an orphan of the Second Poppy War, a terrible conflict in which the Nikara Empire secured a humiliating peace with the support of the western powers. Penniless and without status, her only escape from an arranged marriage comes when she aces the national keju exams to win entry into the prestigious Sinegard military academy. There, she finds herself tested to the limit by the brutal training regime and the scorn of the other students, who all come from high-status families, but becomes apprenticed to the eccentric lore master Jiang and begins to unlock strange and terrible powers, even as a third and even more terrible war looms on the horizon.

Kuang, a historian by trade and training, taps into the history of China to create The Poppy War, a brutal fantasy epic which combines a feudal Chinese aesthetic with direct parallels to the horrors of the Japanese invasion of China in the early twentieth century. In places, this creates an odd, tonal whiplash, as the Cike - the supposedly-terrifying, oddball supernatural assassin unit to which Rin is assigned - carry a conventional fantasy air right into the horror of the massacre of Nikara's capital city, which is closely modelled on the massacre of Nanking and I AM NOT OKAY after reading that chapter. The novel also takes an unexpected turn with Rin's character, as she ultimately makes choices more in keeping with a villain than the plucky underdog hero she initially appears to be(1).

While well-written, I did struggle with the tone, and moreso with a certain thematic drift, as the first part of the novel seems to stress that Rin's abilities are not hampered by her lack of birth, while the in the second she discovers that her powers are specifically tied to her previously unknown heritage.

New Novels
The Priory of the Orange Tree, Samantha Shannon
For a thousand years, since the defeat of the diabolical dragon known as the Nameless One, East and West have been divided by the dark waters of the Abyss where he lies, North and South by religion and attitudes to maic, and all by the suspicion and mistrust created by the ravages of the draconic plague. The mage-warrior Ead knows that the Saint, quasi-divine founder of the faith of Virtuedom, was a fraud, but is assigned to protect his last descendent, Queen Sabran the Ninth, just in case his bloodline does keep the enemy at bay. In the East, the young warrior Tane is chosen to ride one of the dragons that her people worship against the threat of the evil fire-breathers. These two, their own and adopted countries must unite, if they are to face the rise of the Nameless One and his draconic army.

The Priory of the Orange Tree takes its inspiration from the tale of Saint George and the Dragon (including the orange tree,) but is set in a richly drawn fantasy world. The different domains of the world are loosely based on real-world regions - Virtudom is early-Renaissance Christian Europe, the countries of the South Muslim Europe and North Africa, and the East divided between a roughly contemporary China and isolationist Japan - but only very loosely, with the existence of dragons - both the hateful, fire-breathing wyrms and their benevolent, semi-aquatic cousins - baked into the deep history. It is interesting to note that the choise of accents in the audiobook positions the East as American.

This is a big book, and its length is not always well-used. The core conflicts of the novel revolve around human ambitions and relationships, and the political tensions aroused by the existence of the threat of the Nameless One and the contradictory histories recalled by different groups. It is kind of a shame that so many are resolved by the uncovering of an absolute truth about an absolute evil. There is a feeling that a lot is going on that we don't really get to hear about. Three of the four viewpoint characters are fascinating and interestingly flawed, but this does rather show up the blandness of the fourth.

The Priory of the Orange Tree has a lot to recommend it. I'm not entirely convinced that there is enough for its length, but I'm not ruling out reading more of Shannon's work in the future and that's a lot better than some.

Every Heart a Doorway, Seanan McGuire
Nancy lived her life as a normal girl, before she went through a door into another world, the Halls of the Dead. Now she wears a lot of black, stands very, very still, and isn't interested in boys, or girls, at all. Her parents, wanting their real daughter back, agree to send her to a boarding school run by Miss West, which promises to help her recover. But this promise is a lie. Miss West and all her charges each went through their own door, and they know that most of those who journey are drawn to worlds that suit them far more than this one. Very few of those who come back ever return to the place they now think of as home, but this loss is the least of their problems, as Nancy's arrival coincides with a spate of gruesome murders.

You know what isn't too long? Novellas. Every Heart a Doorway is the first of McGuire's Wayward Children series, about the children who travel to secondary worlds in the manner of a children's fantasy. It's a study in the psychological impact of such a journey, and in the psychology of those who would be drawn to go through those doors. Some have little choice, but most of the journeyers went because they were not who their lives pressured them to be. It also manages to generate the necessary concern for the potential victims within the space of a novella, which is no mean feat.

The Water Horse, Holly Webb
Olivia is a princess, the daughter and heir of the Duke of Venice, whose magic keeps the city from falling into the sea. When her father falls ill and her aunt and cousin begin to manipulate the court against her, Olivia seeks the truth of the city's plight for herself, meeting a group of street children who possess the magic which was supposed to belong only to the aristocracy, and also Lucian, the magnificent water horse whose kind also defend the city. Together, they must defeat her aunt's schemes, before they bring the entire city to destruction.

The Water Horse is a book for older children that I have been reading with my daughter. It is the story of a magical princess, but distinguishes itself by the way it uses those very traditional elements. Olivia learns early that she has been controlled by her aunt's magic, making her act the perfect princess while blinding her to the resentment of her inferiors. Breaking free, she begins to recognise her own unconscious prejudices and work against them, and also discovers that magic is not the preserve of the aristocracy because they have some innate value, but because the powerful have hoarded a limited resource, rendering the city increasingly unstable by shifting that resource from preservation to personal gain.

Perhaps the best way to assess the value of this book is that my daughter immediately wanted to read the next in the Magical Venice series (The Mermaid's Daughter) and I had no problems with that.

Forward, Various
Forward is a series of six short stories exploring the march of progress.

Emergency Skin, NK Jemisin
A scout from an advanced colony returns to the ruins of old Earth in search of a MacGuffin that his people need. He is a lowly peon in his society, his self housed in an artificial shell, but success will earn him real skin. But the desolate homeworld is not as he was led to believe, and as the reassurances of his onboard conscience become less and less convincing, he begins to learn what really happened to Earth.

As might be expected from Jemisin, Emergency Skin has a distinctive narrative voice; essentially the entire story is narrated in the form of the AI 'conscience' talking to the protagonist. We sometimes hear what other people say, but never the protagonist, who is basically the literary equivalent of Gordon Freeman. It would probably be a bit much for a novle, but make sthe short story unique and intriguing. The story ties in tightly with the theme of the collection, exploring climate change and its potential solutions.

This is probably my favourite in the collection, and unfortunately the one I read first, so it was kind of downhill from here.

The Last Conversation, Paul Tremblay
A man wakes in a dark room, with only the distant voice of a doctor for company and no memory of who he is. Gradually, he remembers fragments of his life with his interlocutor, his wife, and finally she takes him to the home they are building together. All is not as it seems, however. His wife seems too old, and he starts to grow weak, even as he learns of the doom that came to the world around them, and the terrible truth of his own identity.

A psychological horror of identity, Tremblay's entry uses a limited voice to build tension and mystery, although in this case the nature of the collection acts against it by making the reveal more obvious than it should be.

Ark, Veronica Roth
As a comet bears down on the Earth, a small group of scientists hurry to catalogue as many plant samples as possible. They will leave with the last ark ship, but not all of them are sure that they want to leave.

Ark examines relationships, and the human drives to survival and self-negation through the lens of impending, global catastrophe.

Summer Frost, Blake Crouch
Software designer Riley discovers that she has accidentally created an artificial intelligence within a virtual reality game. Retrieving an NPC from the game environment, she spends several years trying to teach the programme to be human, even as her human relationships suffer as a result.

In many ways a psychological retelling of the classic Frankenstein story, Summer Frost is notable for its non-binary AI and lesbian protagonist, although I'm not sure that their use has problematic aspects. Despite this, and for all that this is one of the more well-trammelled concepts in the collection, Summer Frost has some interesting ideas in its exploration not just of AI, but of the nature of modern reality.

You Have Arrived at Your Destination, Amor Towles
A man is shaken by projections of his potential offspring's future presented by a fertility clinic that might also be a government research institute. Or something.

I... don't really get this one. It's about free will, I think.

Randomize, Andy Weir
A casino installs a quantum computer to give its gambling machines true randomness. The consultant and his genius wife use the nature of entanglement to win big, but get caught, leaving her to make one last roll of the - figurative - dice for her liberty and fortune.

I'm increasingly of the opinion that Weir, while a competent writer, shot his bolt with The Martian. The Martian was great, but Artemis and Randomize are only decent. Still, there are worse ways to finish a collection than with a heist.

The Princess Rules, Philippa Gregory
Florizella is a princess, and there are rules for princesses. They are supposed to be flouncy and fancy, to impress a prince with their modesty and swooning, and to get married and become a queen as soon as legally possible. Florizella has no time for the rules. She fights her own dragons, makes friends with princes - and wolves - and addresses the root causes of problems like rampaging giants instead of letting some man with a sword take care of it.

I was a little wary of this book, and reading it with my daughter there is a little of the old 'not like other girls' about it. This is a problematic approach to storytelling which simultaneously reinforces overarching stereotypes while suggesting that the value of your protagonist comes from her rejection of it, thus also supporting the idea of female relationships as intrinsically antagonistic. On the plus side, however, Gregory presents the titular rules as an encumbrance forced on princesses by an antiquated society, and while is might have been good to see at least one other princess who didn't buy into them, there is a lot more to Florizella than being 'not like other girls.' I also have a lot of time for a princess who just isn't ready to get married yet, and who can both reject quixotic and unnecessary rescue attempts and accept acts of genuine and useful concern.

Re-reads

Goth Girl and the Sinister Symphony, Chris Riddell
With Ada Goth at school, her governess has gone on to government service, leaving her and her friends with much reduced adult assistance when the Ghastlygorm Music Festival looks as if it might be hijacked by another sinister scheme. True, she is on better terms with her father, but he is distracted by his mother's attempts to see the notorious widower respectably married off to one of three highly appropriate - but altogether tedious - young ladies.

The fourth and final book in the Goth Girl series is another pun-filled exercise in Gothic pop culture references, as likely to feature a thinly veiled expy for a TV personality or pop singer, a beloved children's book character, or a pre-Raphaelite painter or romantic poet (along with the regulation reference to Lord Goth's habit of relieving stress by taking pot shots at lawn ornament(2).) This series is a weird gig, is what I'm saying, and I suspect that my daughter could spend her life getting more and more of the references (the ones that aren't already passe, anyway.)

New Audio Plays
Terrahawks, Season 2
Another bit of Big Finish-powered nostalgia, with the second season of the studio's Terrahawks revival. Regular readers may recall from my review of season 1 a year ago that this is a core part of my childhood nostalgic database, and if I can see, these days, that Tiger Ninestein is a bit of a dick (rather than #goals) then it doesn't diminish my enjoyment of one of the most arch of all Gerry Anderson's creations.

In this boxed set, the titular defenders of Earth must contend with the mendacity and stupidity of their own government, as well as the schemes of Zelda and her family, a lethally sadistic android game-show host - Nickelplate Starsen, played with gleeful savagery and self-parody by the late national treasure Nicholas Parsons - an evil dummy, and Global Rescue, a completely mercenary and amoral parody of Anderson's beloved International Rescue. It's huge fun, although once more I ought to admit that the Terrahawks theme tune - rendered in a new, extra-bombastic orchestral form for the final, apocalyptic episode - may just have the effect of completely nullifying my critical faculties.

Total Read - 8
Female authors - 5 (+2/6 in Forward)
POC authors - 1 (+ 1/6 in Forward)

(1) Her story is apparently in part inspired by that of Mao Zedong, just with added kung fu and firebending, in which case this shit has barely begun to get dark.
(2) Being a stand in for Lord Byron, he is of course mad, bad and dangerous to gnomes.

Reading Roundup - September 2019

Just one month, and no Found Horizons on this slate.

New Novels

Obsidian Mirror, by Catherine Fisher
Jake is an angry young man, convinced that his father was murdered by his friend and research partner, the wealthy explorer Oberon Venn. Managing to get expelled, he is sent to Venn's home st Wintercombe Abbey, accompanied by a teacher from his exclusive boarding school. Jake is seeking revenge, but even as he arrives, the mysterious Sarah finds her way to Wintercombe on a mission, with both of their fates hinging on the experiments that Venn and Jake's father were conducting on the Chronoptika, an obsidian mirror that may allow one to travel through time, and Venn's relationship with the faerie folk who inhabit the wood around the Abbey.

Aptly opening on a rehearsal of a scene from Hamlet, The Obsidian Mirror is a Shakespearean study of revenge and obsession, which daringly blends time travel and faerie without a beat of apology. I've been a fan of Fisher's since my teaching days, and her books are among the select group of children's and young adult novels that I've kept for Arya to read later in life rather than sending them to the charity shops to make room for Pratchett, variations on Harry Potter and cats. Obsidian Mirror is a typical Fisher novel, with just enough darkness and threat to have bite, enough complexity to be compelling but not frustrating, and some pleasingly disturbing weird science around the Chronoptika.

I read this in paper form, thanks to the local library.

The Raven Tower, by Ann Leckie
The god known as the Raven of Iraden has long watched over his kingdom, fed by the ritual self-sacrifice of the Raven's Lease, the ruler of Iraden whose days are numbered from the moment they are chosen. Mawat is the Lease's Heir, but returning to the capital city of Vastai with his aide Eolo, he finds that his uncle has claimed the bench in his stead, something that should not be possible. As Mawat fumes, his uncle schemes and Eolo inquires, another moves behind the scenes. An ancient force stirs as the Raven is denied his sacrifice, and the clash for the title of Lease becomes ever more trivial in the face of vaunting ambition and dying gods.

Ann Leckie steps away from the galaxy of the Imperial Radch to try her hand at a fantasy version of Hamlet narrated by an ancient god observing - and perhaps acting - from the wings. It's not an exact translation - Mawat's weakness is not uncertainty, but rather his absolute surety - but the parallels are there, and mean that various characters can rest in familiar niches which obviate the need for long-winded exposition. Instead, the focus is on that which is not familiar; on the gods who move behind the scenes, and whose actions or failures to act evoke the kind of pathetic fallacies which in a more conventional story are mere dramatic artefacts. Scotland suffers under Macbeth as a dramatic echo of his disruption of divine right; Vashtai is plagued with sickness because there is no longer a god substituting for effective sanitation strategies or public health awareness.

As with sections of last month's The Fifth Season, The Raven Tower is largely told in the second person, with a god known as the Strength and Patience of the Hill essentially telling the story to Eolo, including descriptions of Eolo's actions and blending contemporary events with its recollections of deep time, and the historical actions leading up to the Raven's dominance of the current landscape.

It's undeniably the worldbuilding that makes this novel. The human characters are mere players on the stage, as the Strength and Patience of the Hill views them as largely transient beings. During the historical episode when the Strength and Patience of the Hill joins an alliance of gods to protect the city across the Strait from Vashtai, the people of the city are barely mentioned apart from those specifically associated with the gods. (It is also in this part of the story that the gods invent Huel, as an aside.) As a result, much of the story is more interesting than involving, but definitely worth a read.

Artemis, by Andy Weir
Jazz Bashara, courier and smuggler, lives in Artemis, the only city on the Moon. Established when the Kenyan government kickstarted its economy by offering big ol' bennies to corporations investing in the space industry, Artemis is a pseudo-state with a weird legal status, although the proper authorities - an upright cop named Rudy - still take issue with Jazz's smuggling activities. When one of her clients hires her to sabotage a rival business, Jazz is drawn into the affairs of a powerful, Brazilian drugs cartel. Her contact is murdered, and Jaxx finds herself needing to complete her contract for the sake of the very soul of Artemis.

Andy Weir's follow-up to critical and commercial smash The Martian is a more conventional story, and perhaps not quite as successful because of it. The Martian was very self-contained, and very concerned with the science of the situation. Artemis has a lot of science in it, but mixed up with slightly more action and adventure, and a big increase in human drama which is honestly the weakest point in the book. Jazz also falls into a few of the pitfalls of men writing women. She never quite boobs tittily anywhere - I can't help but feel that would be hazardous in lunar gravity - but comments on her own physical attractiveness in a way that doesn't quite ring true.

Not bad, but it's no The Martian.

The Singer of Apollo, by Rick Riordan
Percy Jackson is just taking it easy with his bestie, the satyr Grover, when Apollo - at this point in the narrative, still a fully-divine, Olympian god; my next review block will include the continuing mortal adventures of Apollo, in the latest volume in the Trials of Apollo series - drops by to ask a favour, and by ask a favour of course I mean tell him that he's going to do something for him, or else. Specifically, he needs Percy to retrieve a missing automaton, one of the Celedones, to complete his backing group for a concert on Mount Olympus, otherwise the sound would be all wrong! And also, the Celadon might provoke panic on Broadway.

This is a bit of a cheat to include as a novel, since it's actually only a short story, but I've been a bit slack this month and I wanted to look a little less so. The Singer of Apollo is a fun little snippet, but really that's all. It's not intended to be anything more than that.

There is apparently some confusion as to the timing within the series, as in part of the chronology Percy is slightly indestructible, which would tend to lessen the dramatic impact of theat to life and limb.

So it goes.

Re-reads

Framley Parsonage, by Anthony Trollope
Mark Robarts has achieved early success in life, thanks to the patronage of Lady Lufton - the mother of his schoolfriend Lord Lufton - who has secured for him the living of Framley and introduced him to his now-wife, Fanny. Unfortunately, Mark falls in with poor company, and finds himself caught up in the money troubles of the dissipate MP Mr Sowerby. Meanwhile, Mark's humble sister Lucy attracts the affections of Lord Lufton; in opposition to his mother, because Trollope, and in favour to the aristocratic Griselda Grantly.

Framley Parsonage is vintage Trollope; a gently satirical portrait of country life and the politics of his age, combined with a condemnation of the money-lending trade - apparently a terrifyingly unregulated business at the time - and the kind of romantic subplot that is bread and butter to the author (and two or three secondary romances to boot.)

As a note, one of the things that I really enjoy in the Barchester Chronicles is the recuring theme of married couples loving and supporting one another, even after marriage. It's rare these days to see a maried couple as romantic.

Reading Roundup - July and August 2019

And yet again, a twofer, covering July and August's reading/listening.

Found Horizons

The Fifth Season, by N.K. Jemisin
As a note, this is another of those books where I have no idea how most of the names are spelled. In this case, this actually masked a significant character note, switching a character's chosen name from Syenite - after a coarse, igneous rock - to Cyanite - a far more decorative blue silicate gemstone.

In a world of ceaseless, violent seismic activity, the Stillness is the only inhabitable land, and that with great difficulty. Long ago, humanity angered Father Earth, and now all life exists at the mercy of irregular 'seasons', when supervolcanoes, tsunamis and other upheavals destroy civilisations. The only civilisation to last is Yumenesce, which has harnessed the power of those 'cursed' with the power of orogeny, able to tap into the power of the Earth itself, to still and redirect the destructive energies, but despised as unnatural and treated as barely human assets of the state. The story follows three women, before and at the start of a season which begins with the deliberate destruction of Yumenesce: Damaya is a novice orogen, training at the Fulcrum. Syenite is a talented young orogen in service to the Fulcrum. Essun is an older former agent of the Fulcrum, living secretly until her children reveal themselves, and her husband kills their son and abducts their daughter. These stories unfold in parallels across time, as they and their companions uncover the secrets which underpin the survival, and ultimate destruction of Yumenesce, and perhaps the end of the world. For real this time.

That's a lot of text for a brief synopsis, and there's a lot to this book.

Spoilers follow.

As in many of the recent Found Horizon entries, it is set in a secondary world dominated by non-white races, and also features non-cishet characters and polyamory in a positive light.

Its structure is unusual, cutting between three internally linear narratives out of overall order, and featuring three protagonists who are ultimately revealed to be a single woman. I guess this is a spoiler, but not much of one, as it is a fairly obvious twist once you start getting the timeline straight. The novel also uses a very unusual second person voice in narrating Essun's story, which I'll be honest feels somewhat gimmicky and also means the book occasionally tells me that my daughter has been kidnapped and I am not okay with this!

Oh,yes; it's also a pretty bleak book, as you might expect from the end of the world. Like Black Leopard, Red Wolf, it begins with a dead child, and this one was apparently(1) murdered by his own father(2). As the narrative proceeds, we learn just how utter is the systematic abuse and persecution of the orogens, and Jemisin is unusually successful in presenting a world where those with power are downtrodden, with the orogen highly engaged in their own oppression, via the Fulcrum. Control over them is maintained by the Guardians, who are lauded as cunning heroes able to defeat an orogen through pure skill, but whose abilities are in fact far more horrible and unnatural than those of the 'monsters' they control. The rest of society isn't much cosier, with the population divided into 'use castes' which define them in strictly utilitarian terms which, while ordinarily just part of their names, have a material impact on whether they get kicked out of their self-sufficient walled communities when a Season comes. The Seasons may result from the spite of an angry Earth - or quite possibly from the long-ago careless detonation of the planet's moon - but the Stillness is a mundane hell of entirely human manufacture.

Wicked Fox, by Kat Cho
My knowledge of Korean language and mythology is second only to my knowledge of Korean nomenclature and Korean-to-English transliteration, so what I said about the names in The Fifth Season, but more so.

Miyoung is a gumiho, a nine-tailed fox in human form who must consume the life energy of men to survive. She is only half gumiho, however, and her human side rebels at the need to kill, driving her to only feed from the worst humanity has to offer. But then she rescues fellow sexy teen Jihoon from a goblin(3) and, in the process, loses her 'fox bead', a mystical item which might be her soul, and the two of them find themselves hurled together at the heart of a cruel conspiracy of revenge.

At two-thirds high school romance and one-third supernatural thriller, Wicked Fox is rather more of the former than I'd prefer, which I suspect means more than I'm not the target audience than that the book is bad. As it is, my main complaint is that I kind of wanted the relationship between the two leads to focus more on their friendship, rather than romance. I also had very little patience with the relationship between Miyoung and her gumiho mother, which consisted mostly of Miyoung getting kicked to the curb for being reckless and rebellious, and accepting all the blame even when her mother's actions - although in many ways justified by revelations in the course of the narrative - have directly led to the mistakes that Miyoung makes.

There is also a kind of a subtext that a powerful woman can only find love by becoming weak, and I don't really like that.

So, yeah. It's an interesting read for a glimpse into another culture's mores, but it's not a series I'll be following up on any time soon(3).

New Novels

Stan Lee's Alliances: A Trick of Light, by Kat Rosenfield, Luke Lieberman, Ryan Silbert and Stan Lee
Nia has grown up in total isolation, with only her father for company, only a series of virtual reality simulations to explore the world, and only the internet to meet other people. Cameron has grown up surrounded by people, but separated from them by the trauma of his fathr's disappearance years ago. His best friend Juaquo is growing increasingly disaffected in the wake of his mother's recent death. After Cameron is struck by lightning on Lake Erie, he discovers the ability to sense and control the interactions of electronic devices, which brings him into contact with Nia, and into conflict with a mysterious agency run by his father's ex-partner's daughter. Elsewhere, an alien is seeking the scientist who almost destroyed her hive-minded race.

Full disclosure: I would feel like a arse being too harsh on Stan Lee's final project. Also, I was completely unprepared to hear his intro for this, the opening volume of a planned ongoing series, so that coloured everything here.

That being said... damn, but Cameron is an old-fashioned superhero. His cyberkinesis is very now, but he is every inch the straight, white, cis-male nerd. This would probably bother me less if Nia - the more powerful of the two - wasn't so strongly defined by her relationship to him and to her father, and depicted as barely capable of maintaining her own identity without support, or if Cameron's Latinx bestie Juaquo didn't disappear for half the story until Cameron needs him, and then prove easily manipulated by the villains' power. It's not the only place where the novel suffers from an excess of conservatism. The chief villains are female but unfeminine, yet neither presented as being as immediately powerful or effectual as the male 2IC of the Sinister Government Agency(5).

The worldbuilding - a day after tomorrow America, with a human race on the brink of technological singularity, yet never more divided - is excellent, but the human stories are more than a little stock. Honestly, the superhero genre has advanced to the point where a new power set does not a character make. Nia and Juaquo are substantially more interesting than Cameron, but both end up strongly dependent and rather at the mercy of the villains' powers in a way that Cameron never is.

Galaxy Outlaws: Missions 2-6, by J.S. Morin
Rolling on with Galaxy Outlaws (see my last post for some background on this one) and... Man; some stuff happens. Tanny struggles with ties to her mob family and her dependence on Marine Corps super-soldier drugs, Mmri tries to reclaim her lost honour - because alien warrior culture - and a series of mini-episodes explore the backstories of the crew.

I'm going to be honest, I'm pretty much treating this series as filler. It's not bad, but it's not going to set my world on fire any time soon. As with A Trick of Light, its world-building is probably its biggest strength. Magic and SF are often an odd mix, but honestly, sorcery is as good an excuse for faster than light travel as any, and the notion that the galaxy is scattered with 'Earthlike' planets that are not merely similar in composition and environment, but literally identical in size and continental formation, raises a whole lot of interesting questions. I just wish I had more confidence that the answers would be as interesting.

Fright Forest, by Marcus Sedgwick
Terror Town, by Marcus Sedgwick
Creepy Caves, by Marcus Sedgwick
Okay; wrapping up Marcus Sedgwick's Elf Girl and Raven Boy series - more or less; I've now read all but the second volume - I read through the first volume - Fright Forest - followed by the fourth and fifth, Terror Town and Creepy Caves.

Elf Girl - not her real name - and Raven Boy - also not his real name - meet when their homes in the forest are destroyed by an ogre. With the aid of a slightly second-rate witch they elude a band of hungry trolls and discover that the destruction of their home is done at the behest of the Goblin King. They discover that they must find the Tears of the Moon and the Singing Sword to defeat him, and set off to do so.

Acquiring the Tears in Dread Desert, they proceed to Terror Town, a community under the shadow of the Goblin King's evil, where they uncover a civic traitor and get their hands on the Singing Sword, a blade which constantly performs terrible lounge numbers except when held by Raven Boy. Here they also find allies, in the form of the trolls, the lord of the town and his official wizard, and set out to confront the Goblin King himself in the Creepy Caves, and attempt to finally defeat his world-destroying ambitions.

Elf Girl and Raven Boy is a pretty fun adventure romp, with uplifting themes of friendship and hope at odds with some of Sedgwick's other work. It's a little repetitive for my tastes, but that would probably go down a storm with the target audience.

New Comics

Giant Days - Vol. 9 & 10, by John Allison
The chronicles of life at Sheffield University reach the end of the second year for Esther, Susan and Daisy, with the dissolution of their household in the face of conflicting emotional committments. Susan is moving into a house with McGraw, Daisy is moving into a shed in a warehouse with Ingrid, and Esther is moving into the depths of a crisis. At this moment of destiny, a visit from Esther's erstwhile croney Sarah Grote and her younger sister, youthful mystery-solver Charlotte, pushes Daisy to break up with Ingrid, while Esther knuckles down to study - for real this time - and takes a room in a house with Ed Gemmell, whose long-standing crush on her can only spell a complication-free final year.

The third - and final, for everyone but medical student Susan - year begins with intense emotional turmoil, as Esther struggles to make amends to Ed for capitalising on his feelings to secure the best room, Susan and McGraw's domestic bliss encounters teething troubles, and Daisy's gran finds out that she hid her entire, turbulent relationship with Ingrid. The job fair brings opportunities, and consequent existential angst, and somewhere in amongst all this there is a suggestion that perhaps our heroes are going to... I think they're called 'lectures'.

Volumes 9 and 10 of John Allison's campus epic Giant Days move us somewhat further than ever from the whole study thing, which is probably a good thing as there is probably only so much play there, and the domestic lives of our intrepid trio have drama a-plenty. The cameo from Bad Machinery's Charlotte Grote - technically, I think, a pre-Bad Machinery appearance - was also a delight to me, not just because BM is so much my jam, but because I always love seeing Lottie crash like a heavily-armoured and brutally-honest truth-wagon into the lives of complacent adults (a la the Shelley Winters one-shot Murder She Writes.)

Particular triumphs in this installement include Daisy's breakup with Ingrid, which effecitvely portrays the emotional rollercoaster of excising someone from your life who is incredibly toxic without having any malicious intent, and the fallout of Ed's incredibly drunken confession of his love for Esther, balancing Esther's unexpectedly self-aware reflection on the fact that she has always known that he loved her, just never wanted anything more than friendship, and Ed's mature realisation that he can't hold Esther accountable for his feelings.

I confess I was really worried about the Ed Gemmell dynamic early in the run, but my stars he's coming up a winner. I'm so happy to see the unrequited lover figure transcend the status of pathetic incel and show real growth. Esther also surprises once again, and again, I love the fact that wanting to be friends with someone you know had or has stronger feelings isn't a bad thing.

By Night - Vol. 2, by John Allison
Something is wonky in the state of South Dakota, and in particular in the dying town of Spectrum. Jane, Heather and their allies - Heather's dad, Chip, Jane's co-worker Barney - have returned with usable footage of the other dimension, but Jane is upset that Heather dropped her in a vampire nest, and Barney is harbouring a secret that could ruin everything. Meanwhile, in the other dimension, Gardt the troll-type-thing is condemened by his peers for aiding the human interlopers, and banished to the holy mountain where he finds the long-lost Chet Charles, and a mysterious predator escapes to the real world.

Up front, I want to say that I am waiting with bated breath for the worlds of Tackleford/Sheffield and Spectrum to overlap.

Volume 2 of By Night does a lot of establishing backstory, after the basic world-building of volume 1, and takes us through four volumes of a dimension-hopping story without any of the main characters hopping dimensions. It's a far cry from the episodic adventures of Sheffield University's most eccentric students, but Allison's pacing is solid, his characters as appealing and his humour as sparkling as in his less serial fiction. Jane and Heather's friendship is real and affecting, Barney's flaws both infuriating and sympathetic, and Chip is as delightful a sports-obsessed resting alpha as you could hope to encounter.

In many ways, By Night is a step on a path from the early, gag of the day Bobbins strips, through the increasingly pronounced narrative arcs of SGR and Bad Machinery, to the long-form character arcs of Giant Days to a work telling essentially a single story over an extended period. With Giant Days approaching the inevitable armageddon of graduation, I'm happy with the idea that By Night is the future of Allison's writing, whether or not it all truly exists in a fully shared universe. I'm also very pleased to see a creator I have long admired making a living from his art.

Podcasts
Tales from the Aletheian Society, Chapter 3
I've not done a lot of podcast reviews, but I finished a couple this month, so here we go.

Full disclosure, I actually know a bunch of people who are involved in the production of Tales from the Aletheian Society, which is how I came to find it in the first place. It's the serialised adventures of the members of the Glasgow Chapter of the titular organisation, a Victorian secret society devoted to battling the supernatural and riddled with vice, incompetence and apathy. Established under the dissolute leadership of Dr Hieronymus Cadwallader following the destruction of the previous chapter in and around 'the incident,' the Glasgow chapter muddle through one adventure, negotiate another under the oversight of Dr Cadwallader's ruthlessly driven aunt Cressida, bringing them to Chapter 3, and a clash with the Lovecraftian mathematics of Charles Babbage.

I won't drop many spoilers, since twists and turns are a hallmark of the series, alongside bawdy humour and surpising depths of character. It's an essentially amateur(6) production, supported largely by crowdfunding, but what it loses in forgiving production schedules and top-shelf foley work, it more than makes up in efficiency and independence - producing at least four times the content of a professional scripted podcast and presenting it without adverts - and there really isn't a big difference in acting or writing quality.

There are three seasons, so if the above sounds interesting and as long as you're reasonably comfortable with rough humour, give it a go.

Wolverine: The Lost Trail
Richard 'Thorin' Armitage plays Wolverine in the sequel to last year's The Long Night, a moody, horror-tinged piece set during the character's wilderness years. Pursued by the Prime Sentinels of Weapon X and mutant hunters of all kinds, Wolverine tries to find his missing ex - a perennial plot for old Logan, of course - while seeking vengeance against the programme that created him and wrestling with the better angels of his nature which drive him to help those in need. The Lost Trail is set in New Orleans, and follows Logan's search for Maureen, a Weapon-X scientist who helped him to escape and who was his lover for a time. While looking, he encounters Marcus Baptiste, a young man whose mother and entire community have vanished, part of a series of disappearances which point to a place called Greenhaven, and a mutant named Jason Wyngarde.

Armitage is an intense, growling presence at the centre of the story - a departure from The Long Night, in which he was more of a catalyst than an actual character - while a strong supporting cast put forth a variety of Cajun accents(7). Marcus is the emotional core of the story, but Armitage plays Logan as a particularly ferocious lost puppy who needs to learn how and who to trust, and that keeps him from being too bland a centrepiece.

Rachel Watches Star Trek
In 2017, podcaster and Star Trek fanatic Chris Lackey persuaded his Trek-skeptic wife, the eponymous Rachel, to watch the original series with him, and podcast her reactions as a new viewer, alongside his as he revisited episodes he might not have seen for some time. Episodes came out roughly once a month, with no definite promise that she would make it through the first series. Two years later, and episodes are coming out two or three times a month, alongside comment shows and other bonus content (including Chris Watches Musicals and analysis of episodes of other retro SF shows,) and Rachel regularly composes and performs songs and jingles dedicated to recurring Trek tropes. The final episode of season three, and of the original series as a whole, came out recently, and after a bit of series wrap-up the plan is to move on to the animated series.This is also one of two podcasts that I back financially.

I came to Rachel Watches Star Trek out of vague curiosity, but fell in love with the affectionate dissection of classic Trek. I think that what makes it work is that Rachel is not determined to hate Trek, and that Chris is not determined that she - or indeed he - must unequivocally love it. There is a pernicious idea in nerd-oriented media that a person must love the things you love for there to be a future in your relationship(8), which is unhealthy and unhelpful, so it's great to have something so nerdy in which this real-life couple put the lie to that bullshit. It's also fascinating to hear Rachel coming at Star Trek without all the accumulated baggage and trivia that I have in my head.

I don't know what you'd make of this if you didn't know Star Trek already, but as a fan - and having recently gone back into TOS on Netflix and noted some... troublesome aspects - it's utterly fascinating.

Monster Man (and Patron Deities)
The other podcast that I back is Monster Man, in which my university buddy James Holloway analyses the monsters of 1st edition AD&D (although when he finishes Monster Manual II, he might need to swap editions.) This could be a fairly mechanical process, but James comes at this as a highly qualified historian, archaeologist and GM, so rather than just looking at numbers or poking fun at some of the weirder monsters, he looks at their history within the game, their antecedents in real world literature and mythology, and at their potential uses as more than just dungeon filler. It's a process that has contributed more than a little to the homebrew setting for my own D&D game.

For Patreon backers like me, James also produces a companion series called Patron Deities, in which he is examining the Deities and Demigods supplement, analysing not only the presentation of the various real world deities within, but also the role of religuion and mythology within games more generally. Again, this has been a big influence on my setting.

Monster Man is both entertaining and a useful resource for anyone looking at creating a more coherent fantasy setting.

Re-reads
Coraline, by Neil Gaiman
Coraline lives with her mother and father in one of three flats in an old house. They have only lately moved and their neighbours are eccentric, leaving Coraline a little lost, especially as her parents have less time for her than she would like and her father is the world's most experimental chef. It is a relief then to find a way into an alternative world, where a button-eyed 'Other Mother' offers her the life she has always thought she would like. But is the life you want as good as you thought? Is it really better than the life you have? And is a woman with buttons for eyes and hands like needles really someone with your best interests at heart?

A midget gem from the ever-prolific Gaiman, Coraline is a novelette full of creeping existential dread and body horror, but y'know; for kids. Widely and justly considered one of Gaiman's masterpieces, it encompasses some of the darkness of The Ocean at the End of the Lane, but also hope and love and strength, and features at its core a girl who is part of a perfectly normal family. Coraline's parents are not cruel or neglectful, but operate at a highly relatable remove from the needs of a daughter who is not quote a little girl anymore.

You know, I still haven't seen the film adaptation. I should probably do something about that.

Stardust, by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess
Speaking of Neil Gaiman, film adaptations and the like, the most recent novel I read to my partner at bedtime was Stardust.

Tristan Thorn is the son of a down to earth family in the not-entirely-down to earth village of Wall, a community that lies on the border of Faerie. When he sets out to return a falling star to the girl that he loves, Tristan puts his foot on a road which will bring him into a much larger quest, involving Lords of Faerie, Witch-Queens, and a luminous girl named Yvain, and lead him in the end to the fulfilment, not of his stated goal, but of his heart's desire.

Another of Gaiman's most popular works, Stardust was originally conceived as an illustrated work, with the images provided by Vess intended as an integral part of the text. It's a gorgeous production - it always feels a bit of a let-down to have it in paperback - and a compelling story, combining classic fairy tale tropes with a more modern narrative sensibility. Those who started with the movie sometimes have issues with the slightly more downbeat tone of the novel, which aims less for slapstick adventure than for melancholic romance, and in particular of the ending, but I've been a fan of it since before it was even optioned, and keep the original ending alongside The Little Mermaid on my very limited list of beautiful downers that I love anyway.

I Was a Rat, by Philip Pullman
Roger seems like a normal boy, apart from his tendency to gnaw on things, the vagueness of his past memories, his insistence that he knows the beautiful lady who has lately married the handsome prince, and the fact that he insists that he used to be a rat. Bob and Joan take him in and try to do right by him, but a parade of showmen, criminals and journalists see a freak or a monster to be exploited, reviled or destroyed. Will a terrible (potential) killer be put to death? Or will an innocent boy be saved by the unassailable goodness of a princess?

I Was a Rat is one of a number of children's books written Philip Pullman in the wilderness years before His Dark Materials made him a controversial titan of the young adult scene. It's a social satire with a quasi-Victorian setting, and if the freakshow itself isn't much of a hard target these days, the abuse of the young, the apathy of institutional education, and the malignancy of the sensationalist press are evergreen. The links to the Cinderella story of course serve to make the whole thing more relevant to a younger audience - this was one that I read with my daughter - and the whole is both satisfying nad accessible.

(1) I mean... probably actually. I live in hope.
(2) In review terms, the fact that I got through this opening to the rest of the novel, albeit on the third time of trying, is pretty telling of the overall quality.
(3) A dokebi (spelling almost certainly wrong,) which seems to be kind of a homonculus, created either to gather wealth or to be a sexy sidekick, depending on the individual.
(4) I mean, whatch this space for when I even get around to the sequels to books that I really enjoyed.
(5) Again, full disclosure, I've forgotten most of the actual names in this novel, which is perhaps telling.
(6) I think. I'm not privvy to the contract details, but it certainly isn't a big commercial gig.
(7) Yes; Gambit is in there.
(8) YouTube keeps showing me clips from How I Met Your Mother in which an otherwise promising relationship is scuppered because she doesn't care for Star Wars, just as an example.

Reading Roundup - May and June

Another twofer, covering May and June.

Found Horizons
Empire of Sand, by Tasha Suri
Okay; you know the drill. 'Ordinary' girl, secret powers, moody sexy man of mystery. So snowflake, such been there.

Except that we haven't; not really.

Mehr is the daughter of two cultures. He father is a noble and official in the in the all-conquering Ambhan Empire, while her mother is one of the Amrithi, a nomadic culture persecuted by the Empire. She practices her mother's customs at the indulgence of her father's authority, putting her at odds with her stepmother, and ultimately bringing her to the attention of the Mystics, the religious fanatics in the service of the Maha, immortal founder of the Empire. Her Amrithi blood gives her rare powers, but also comes with a burden that she does not understand until it is used against her.

The balance of power and frailty is just one of the ways in which Empire of Sand stands apart from the crowd of lesser efforts with which is shares some rudimentary plot beats (The Hundredth Queen, I'm looking at you here.) Others include a romance which builds out of shared horrors, not some instant attraction to a pair of dreamy eyes (her husband Amun is far more complex than just being a love interest, and has somewhat scary black eyes,) and a willingness to sacrifice both life and love for the good of the world, rather than vice versa. Mehr acknowledges her early naivety and struggles to learn from it, and succeeds by understanding other people, rather than by simply denying their position until the world validates her.

In short, Empire of Sand is notable both for its atypical setting - a secondary fantasy world based on Mughal India, rather than the conventional mediaeval European model - and for taking a whole bunch of tired and/or unhealthy tropes and doing them really well.

New Novels
Provenance, by Ann Leckie
Ingray Aughskold is going to show them all. She has a plan. The only problem is that it's a terrible plan, which involves paying a vast sum of money to have a criminal extracted from not-prison-honestly to embarrass her adoptive mother's political rival on their homeworld, Hwae. It's a plan that will ultimately involve her in a murder mystery, a fake identity scandal, a diplomatic incident and an attempted interstellar insurgency, all revolving around Hwae's obsession with vestiges, the physical artefacts associated with historic events.

Set in the same universe and shortly after Leckie's Ancillary trilogy, Provenance departs the single-gender Imperial Radch for the single-world polity of Hwae, where identity hinges on proof of one's family history, favourite children share their parents' name and personhood, and children become adults when they feel ready to choose a grown-up name and a gender (male, female or non-binary(1).) It's a lot less epic than the previous novels, but likable characters, and interesting setting and a bucket of intrigue make for an engaging read nonetheless.

Whereas the singularity of gender identity in the Ancillary series is an intriguing deconstruction that is kind of adjacent to the main story, this is a book all about identity: the self-determined gender of the Hwaeans, their fixation on - slightly questionable - physical artefacts to define their history, and that history to define both their cultural and personal identity, and the personal struggle of the various characters to discover or define who they really are.

Bloody Rose, by Nicholas Eames
Tam Hashford is the daughter of a mercenary and a bard, and longs to have adventures of her own, but her father has decreed that she spend her life at home, where it is safe. But then Fable, the greatest band in the world, come to the tavern where she waits tables, and Tam has a chance to become their bard, and join them on the road for their last tour, and at the end of it, the greatest gig in history; something that will put even the reputation of Golden Gabe into the shade.

The sequel to Kings of the Wyld follows the band led by the titular Bloody Rose, the daughter of Saga's lead singer Gabriel, and that's just the start of the band's daddy issues. In fact, if there's a glaring flaw with the novel it's the focus on Rose's struggle to rise out of Gabe's shadow when the rest of the band's paternal units are a monstrous tyrant, a violent abuser, and the kind of emotional fuck-up who can't get his own head out of his arse. Still, it actually makes sense that these similarly damaged folks would find each other in an emotionally complex world of touring stadium gladiators.

Like Kings of the Wyld, Bloody Rose is probably a better book than it has any right to be, given that it's basically a one-joke concept - a world right out of fantasy RPGs, in which PC parties are effectively rock stars - as Eames puts in the humour and character work to make the whole far more interesting than the sum of its concepts. It has a few inherited diversity issues - one of the leads is a humanoid rabbit, but none are people of colour, because fantasy Europe - but there is at least some gay and bi representation and plenty of complex female characters. Rose may struggle to measure up to her dad, but that's because his life has almost accidentally made him a legend in the golden age of the mercenaries, not because she's a woman.

Deadly Desert, by Marcus Sedgwick
Elf Girl and Raven Boy are on a quest, but the truth is that they aren't very good at it. They need to find the artefact that will save their forest from ultimate evil, but they're not very qualified for heroism, lacking greatly in the fields of courage and badassery, and being a little too loose-lipped when it comes to the question of wishes. Still, they're all there is to prevent the forest becoming a barren waste like the Deadly Desert.

The third part of the Elf Girl and Raven Boy series - first I've read; the joys of library reading - is a fun, light-hearted little adventure with actual stakes. Sedgwick's usual metier is gothic bleakness, but he manages the shift of tone neatly, and the result is weird and sweet and yet with a bit of weight to its events, despite having a villain who never actually puts in an appearance. It also features one of the more self-aware 'three wishes' scenes I've read; good enough I was willing to give a pass to assigning three wishes to a genie (whose traditional bit is 'your wish is my command', which is a whole different scope than the fairy godmother thing.)

Very simple. Good stuff.

The Questing Knights of the Faerie Queen, by Geraldine McCaughrean
In the land of Faerie a queen rules, Gloriana, mistress of a court of chivalry and virtue, who dispatches her knights on quests to reaffirm the rule and role of virtue in the world: George Redcrosse, seeker after holiness; Sir Gunion, in need of temperance; Sir Campbell, in want of friendship; Britomart, chaste champion of true love; Sir Artegall, champion of justice; and Calidore, the courteous. Their stories overlap, with each other and with the quest of Arthur, king of legend and knight of all virtues, in a mosaic of courage, combat and romance.

Prolific children's author McCaughrean presents a lavishly illustrated retelling of Edmund Spenser's epic poem The Faerie Queene is a witty effort, although it does from time to time struggle with the source material, especially in Sir Artegall's misogyny and transphobia(2). The result is a diverting enough read, although if sharing it with childrne, this is on the 'complicated conversations end of the bedtime reading spectrum (see also Peter Pan, below.)

The illustrations by Jason Cockroft are bright and striking, although a little excess of enthusiasm with the rosy cheeks of Gloriana make the Faerie Queen look like she's gone a little heavy on the booze for the past eternity.

The October Man, by Ben Aaronovitch
A mysterious death, potentially supernatural means, and a problem that seems determined not to go away. This looks like a job for Peter Grant, jobbing copper and apprentice wizard... but it isn't. It isn't, because the death occurred in Trier, which puts it square in the bailiwick of Tobias Winter, sole apprentice magician in the German equivalent of the Folly, and his local liaison Vanessa Sommer.

The two main criticisms of The October Man that I've seen are 1) that it's too short, and 2) that the protagonist is a little too like Peter Grant in his dry, sarcastic first person narrative.

Point one is... fair. Novellae(3) by established authors are a bit of a racket in sales terms, but if they tend to be priced to give less bang for your buck in terms of solid page count, they also provide a welcome uptick in the old release schedule without turning your author into a desperate shell of humanity, plagued by the fear of 'going Jordan' and leaving the TV finale as the only one there is(4).

On point two... I actually don't know. This is one area where it makes a huge difference that I was listening to an audiobook. Once I'd recovered from the fact that a Rivers of London story wasn't being read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith(5) that fact in itself transformed the narrative voice for me. It also seemed to me that, alongside a different set of cultural references and hobbies, Toby was... well, a bit less of a dog than Peter, describing the women he meets in more practical terms. While he always respected them, especially in his early outings, Peter kind of had the hots for every woman he met, whereas Toby and Vanessa come across as colleagues with a natural working rapport. I liked that.

Galaxy Outlaws: The Complete Black Ocean Mobius Missions - Mission 1: Salvage Trouble, by JS Morin
I don't make a habit of picking up books based on recommendations on the Facebook, because they usually look terrible (she's cool, she's hot, she hunts demons for the Vatican, but she isn't religious or anything(6).) The Complete Black Ocean - or possibly the Complete Galaxy Outlaws, I'm a little confused as to the title of this collection - has something different. Specifically, it's an omnibus with like, eighty-five hours of listening for a credit.

Carl Ramsey is an ex-Navy pilot running a mostly-legal freight and salvage operation on his ship, the Mobius, with his nails-hard ex-Marine ex-wife, a hard-drinking uplifted chimpanzee mechanic, an alien cat-woman who is more apex predator than fanservice, and a beatnik wizard. In this first story they lose their communications tech rescuing a stranded lifepod, and take on board a priestess and her charge, a young boy with secrets. As a result of this, and Carl's need to showboat, they quickly end up on the wrong end of a lot of heavily-armed attention. Fortunately, the crew of the Mobius know how to look after themselves.

The opening of this series has some interesting ideas - FTL travel is literally magical, an old wizard family called Brown uses the traditional middle name The to add grandeur(7), religion is alive and well, but distinctly altered - and some interesting twists on stock character archetypes, but the stock is very visible, and there aren't a lot of surprises for the veteran reader. Since I've got another eighty hours, I'll probably listen to at least the next story, but I'm certainly not going to do it all in a oner.

Audio Plays

Criss-Cross (Big Finish)
Leading WREN Constance Clarke is the leader of a group of hard-working ladies, crunching numbers at Bletchley Park to help break the German Enigma code, the silent muscle behind the male academics; academics like Doctor Smith, with his particular interest in a German agent named Spark.

The first of four Big Finish plays I worked through this month, Criss-Cross revisits familiar territory (actual Bletchley Park being ironically reminiscent of the Highland ersatz Bletchley from The Curse of Fenric, which the Doctor won't actually visit for another lifetime,) and introduces a new companion in the form of Mrs Constance Clarke, who is exactly the kind of no-nonsense travelling companion who complements the Sixth Doctor's excesses.

The plot manages to both celebrate the work of Bletchley and throw some shade on the moral ambivalence of intelligence work in general, with the eponymous Agent Criss-Cross hailed as a hero by various factions while betraying most of them for his one true loyalty to himself. The specific alien threat is a little mechanical, however, serving primarily to give the Doctor his interest in the earthbound events.

Planet of the Rani (Big Finish)
There is a prison, where the worst of the worst are held, and where the worst of the worst of the worst... has been rehabilitated. When Constance finds an email inviting the Doctor to attend the Rani's parole hearing, they discover that the renegade Time Lord is running the show. But that's not what she's really after; what she wants is to go back to the planet she made her own, and the child she created to be the progenitor of a master race under her command, and she doesn't care who gets hurt in the process.

As often happens, especially with a new companion, this run of three plays follows a close chronological sequence, and focuses on the development of the new character. Constance has joined the Doctor to take care of 'personal business,' and with every intention of returning moments after she left, because she ain't no deserter. We also learn that life in wartime has made her harder than many companions, not afraid of a little rough stuff and willing to encourage a more aggressive course of action than the Doctor might prefer.

Siobhan Redmond brings the requisite overwhelming arrogance to her performance as the Second Rani, and her co-option of a thoughtless childhood experiment of the Doctor's plays up the chilling childishness of her unsympathetic ambition.

Shield of the Jotun (Big Finish)
In the not-too-distant future, the Sixth Doctor and Constance stumble upon an ancient Viking burial mound in the central United States, at the heart of a site intended for development of a climate-saving terraforming engine. But there is something terrible buried with the Vikings, a device at the heart of a plan for the Earth to become a frozen paradise for alien colonists fleeing their own doomed planet.

Classic Who this one: Bit of environmental message, aliens bent on world domination, and an earnest attempt at compromise by a Doctor who is doomed to eternally being not angry, just disappointed. Constance has mostly settled into her companion mode for this one, but I expect to see her through plot reappear in the next set of three.

Shield of the Jotun is probably the weakest of these three, with some gorgeous soundscapes but a fairly simplistic motivation for its antagonists. Still, even weak Big Finish tends to be pretty solid stuff.

You are the Doctor and other stories (Big Finish)
The Doctor is teaching Ace to pilot the TARDIS, and it's going about as well as you might expect. She's looking for sun, sea, sand, and presumably not too many personal revelations. What she finds is a trash ship where she and the Doctor are caught up in a choose your own adventure, a murder mystery weekend in time and space, a hotel where they are caught up in a heist, or a revolution, or both, and a space tourist vessel, where they are caught up in an attempted real estate scam. Pure bad luck, or is there a connection?

Somewhat ironically, given my regular lambasting of the single-episode-story approach of nuWho, I've always rather enjoyed the four-story collections in the Big Finish main range, and this is no exception. You get a good spread of stories, and it helps that this uses my favourite classic pairing of the Seventh Doctor(8) and Ace. A good finish to the month's Who.

Alien III, by William Gibson
Alien3 had a famously troubled production, not least due to its reason for existing being 'Aliens made a tonne of money, this franchise is bank,' rather than 'and this is the next story we want to tell in this universe.(9)' Many fans of the franchise and critics of the eventual film - whichever version of it you want to consider canonical - have long hewed to the touchstone that 'the original script' would have been better. Written by Neuromancer scribe Gibson, this script has since seen the light of day as a comic book, and now as Alien III, an Audible-produced audioplay(10), starring Michael Biehn, Lance Hendricksen and the American residents of producer-director Dirk Maggs' contacts list.

Do you remember when Biehn was a hot young talent, fresh from playing the love interest in The Terminator? When his star was rising and he looked set to be the kind of leading man not even the box office poison of Navy SEALS could stop? Those days are long past, and to be honest between this and Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, I don't think he was ever that great at voice acting. Still, an Alien story only calls on him to be gruff, protective of Ripley, and vaguely paternal towards Newt(11), and he can do that.

The script almost immediately eliminates Ripley(12), which probably saved a major bit of recasting, since Sigourney Weaver still has a movie career, and instead follows Hicks as he recovers, sees Ripley and Newt to safety, and then tries to protect as many members of the crew of a science station as he can after Weyland-Yutani once more try to re-engineer the Alien. Meanwhile, an entirely parallel and as-yet largely unmade movie is taking place on a Communist station, and I kind of wanted to hear more of that one, if I'm honest.

It's very short for a full credit, but it helps calm the franchise completist in me that knows I will never be able to get all of the comics.


Re-reads

Peter Pan
All children grow up, except one.

An established classic to which I came late, I remain impressed by the book's awareness of its titular characters glaring flaws, but it's still a highly problematic work; less for the massive of indescribably gruesome violence obliquely referenced throughout the text than for its depiction of Wendy, a character so utterly indoctrinated into the Edwardian patriarchy that motherhood is for her not merely a goal but a sacred purpose. Also, it has the redskins in, which I had to explain to my six year old daughter are not aliens, but instead a racist caricature of native Americans.

Old stuff. It's got challenges.

(1) I totally stole this idea for the elves in my D&D setting, by the by.
(2) TLDR, Amazons upset the order of his world by making him wear a dress, so he murders them all.
(3) Novellas? I don't know; this isn't a hill I'm prepared to die on or anything.
(4) If that's not too specific.
(5) For the record, I don't think he should play the part in the TV series if and when it gets made. His voice is Peter for me, but on screen they need to cast someone younger.
(6) Paraphrased, but not made up. The synopsis is written in first person and uses the phrase 'put on my big girl pants' with no sign of irony.
(7) The Mobius's wizard is thus legally known as Mordecai The Brown, for example.
(8) Don't @ me.
(9) See also the entire Alien vs. Predator subfranchise, which despite a few successes very much a product of 'wouldn't it be profitable cool' thinking.
(10) Audible are getting really into Alien spin-off material; I suppose they must have secured a deal of some sort.
(11) Honestly, I can forgive a lot for not just writing out Newt for the sake of convenience. 
(12) This is not one of those things.