Reading Roundup - October/November 2019

New Novels

Under the Pendulum Sun, by Jeanette Ng
From an alternate Britain, where Captain Cook discovered a (largely conceptual) passage to the land of Faery, Catherine Helstone takes ship to Arcadia in search of her missing brother, Laon(1), who has taken a post as a missionary there, preaching the gospel to the fae. Trapped for an unmeasurable period in Gethsemane, a house granted to the representative of the London Missionary Society. She learns a little about the fae during her stay, especially from the gardener, Mr Benjamin, the only convert in Arcadia, before her brother's return and a visit by Mab, one of the Queens of Arcadia, brings the offer of a chance to take the mission further into Arcadia, but also revelations about the nature both of Faery and the Helstones themselves which threaten to tear Catherine and Laon apart.

Under the Pendulum Sun is a gothic romance, with trappings of a Shakespearean fairy land, which reads as much as anything like a companion piece to Jonathon Strange and Mr Norrell set entirely in Faerie. The Helstones are subjected to all the cruelties of the fae, and this makes the story hard going at times, despite - or perhaps even because - several of the story's twists are easy to see coming. The strength of the novel lies in rich language and worldbuilding, but the characters are less compelling. Laon in particular is viewed only through the almost worshipful gaze of his sister, yet comes across as a bit of a dick, and as an atheist I personally found it very difficult to relate to their burning desire to spread the gospel to the faery.

As a debut novel, this is an impressive piece of writing, and Ng is the author whose acceptance speech for the John W. Campbell Award got it renamed to the Astonishing Award That Isn't Named After a Known and Unrepentant-in-his-Lifetime Fascist(2). The audiobook is not all it could be, with an American reader doing posh British, with a few really odd bits of pronunciation and, honestly, not a tace of the Helstones' native Yorkshire to be heard(3). The book also features some of the most toxic relationships I've read lately - much Wuthering, so Heights - but it does seem in little doubt that that is what they are.

I'd definitely read something else by Ng, but the further adventures of the Helstones hold no specific interest to me.

The Tyrant's Tomb, by Rick Riordan
Following the tragic events of The Burning Maze, the all-too human Apollo, and his master, Meg McCaffrey, make their way to Camp Jupiter in northern California. There they must commit a friend to eternal rest, before facing off against a direct assault by the forces, monstrous and mercenary, of the Emperors Commodus and Calligula, and their mysterious and terrifying allywhose tomb holds the secrets of life or death, not just for Apollo, but for all the gods of Greece and Rome.

Book four of The Trials of Apollo brings Apollo through the dark nigth of the soul which began in The Burning Maze and - by way of battle and suffering - to a brighter, better day. Mostly. Like most of Riordan's books, it is a fast-paced, emotionally engaging read, with Apollo continuing to be a surprisingly sympathetic narrator despite his constant name-dropping, self-pity and claims to have invented or inspired every major cultural or artistic achievement of the last three millennia. The reading is good, capturing Apollo's air of ironic melancholy nicely.

What can I tell you? If you like Riordan's work, you'll almost certainly enjoy this, but it's really not a starting point(4).

Guardians of Magic, by Chris Riddell
In a world of magic and fairytales, children wish on the cloud horses said to hatch in nests in the Forever Tree. But the Forever Tree and magic in general are in danger from rat gangsters, giant slayers and loggers, with only a handful of ballet dancing bears to defend them. Three children, Zam, Phoebe and Bathsheba - a baker, a musician and an apprentice giant-slayer with... questions - receive mysterious gifts of carved wood which grant them extraordinary abilities. Each driven out of their community by those who would see magic destroyed, the three must come together to save the Forever Tree and restore wonder to a world in the grip of greed and cruelty.

The first book in a new series by former Children's Laureate and big favourite of mine, Chris Riddell(5), Guardians of Magic is an ambitious work, introducing three characters, their friends and their cities within the space of a modest-length book, as well as telling its own tale of adventure and friendship, in which the real magic is empathy and understanding.

An excellent adventure story for bedtimes and young readers.

The Secret Commonwealth, by Philip Pullman
It has been twenty years since Lyra Belaqua was saved from the great flood, and almost ten since Lyra Silvertongue returned from her adventures in the North and beyond. Now, she is a student at St Sophia's College, and still lives at Jordan under the shield of scholastic sanctuary, but that may be about to change. In the Levant, powerful forces - the Magisterium and the puritanical 'Men from the Mountain'(6) - are seeking to control production of a specific rose oil, linked to a place where daemons do not go... and a place where perhaps only daemons go. Lyra and Pantalaimon are at odds when they stumble on a murderous plot, and are thrown together with Malcolm Polstead and the extraordinary intelligence service known as Oakley Street. Together, and separately, they begin to move against a Magisterial body known as La Maison Juste, and a plot to bring Britain back under the complete control of the authorities spiritual, and the ambitious Marcel Delamare. Both Delamare and his aleithiometrist, Olivier Bonneville have a personal interest in Lyra, and when Lyra leaves Oxford in search of the absent Pan, she finds herself wandering in the demimonde of the Separated, and the mystical hinterland known to her Gyptian friends as the secret commonwealth.

I... really wanted to love this book. I'm a big fan of Pullman, and there's a lot in here that I do like, but there is also a lot that I don't. The conflict between Lyra and Pan is heartbreaking, the language often mesmerising, and the villains are a strong component, but the tentative romance between Malcolm and Lyra is frankly a bit squicky. The twelve year age gap isn't insurmountable, but the fact that he first met her as a baby and she first met him as her teacher makes the whole thing a lot more... Well, it's not helping my opinion of either character. There's also a lot of women being terrorised by men, including an attempted rape, which I think puts The Book of Dust at two for two in using rape as a device, and that's really not good.

So, yeah. I wanted to love this book. I don't love this book.

Rites of Passage, by Mike Brooks
The Lady Chettamande is a Navigator, the widow of Lord Azariel, head of the wealthy and powerful House Brobantis. Moving to take control of the House and secure the legacy of her children, Chettamande finds herself not only mired in the politics of the Navis Nobilite, but uniquely placed to investigate a series of brutal murders and - possibly - prevent the machinations of a Champion of the ruinous powers, bent on plunging world after world into the roiling hunger of the Warp.

I'm not a huge reader of 40K fiction, although I have a more than passing familiarity with the setting and its lore(7). I made and exception for Rites of Passage primarily because an internet commentator got het up about a positive depiction of a nonbinary character within the Imperium. I mean, as positive as you can really be while still being within the Imperium, given that the Imperium is a festering sinkhole of oppressive superfascism.

So, you know, it's not ordinarily something I would read, but I enjoyed it. It contains a good depiction of the Imperium, in all its messed up glory. The Champion of Chaos is a serial murderer intent on the deaths of billions, but he is aided by a local cult whose goals and motivations for rebellion are more in the order of 'wanting to get into the restricted section of the library,' 'wanting to be accepted for what she is and not fed to the monstrous life-support machinery of the corpse-Emperor,' and 'because this universe is a crapsack.'

It's probably not a good point of entry into the 40K universe, but then I'm actually not sure that the 40K universe really admits of a point of entry these days.

New Comics

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 1
Doreen Green, fledgling superhero, is going to college. Yes, this complicates her life of crime fighting and means moving out of the Avengers' attic, where they totally know she's been living, I'm sure, and it means living in halls with a roommate who might or might not be cool, and hiding her giant, fluffy tail down the back of her pants, but at least she can focus on a normal life, instead of fighting Kraven the Hunter, bank robbers or the world-eating monster Galactus.

Oh, wait...

I've heard a lot about Squirrel Girl for a while now, and I admit, at first I was kind of down on the idea of a character who seemed designed to make other superheroes look stupid. The more I learned, however, the more it sounded like it might be worth the hype, so I figured I'd give it a go, beginning with the first trade paperback of Doreen's own title.

And it's delightful. The key to its appeal is that Doreen is not overwhelmingly powerful, instead 'defeating' amazingly powerful foes through ingenuity and the willingness to engage them as thinking beings with motivations, rather than simple punchbags. I honestly dread the day that comic trends lead to someone writing a story where Doreen goes all dark and brooding - there's a lot of potential for a story in which Doreen is forced to confront challenges to her optimistic worldview, but it would have to be done with more nuance than, say, the 90s - but for now this feels like something very special.

Audio Plays

Jago and Litefoot, Season 8
Jago and Litefoot, investigators of the macabre and infernal, have faced many threats in their time, but many of the worst have emerged from the stage of the New Regency Theatre. Another of these appears in Encore for the Scorchies, a prequel to one of the Companion Chronicles, in which monstrous, psychic aliens in the form of puppets use the theatre to feed their hunger for lifeforce. Then a rival show of a scientific bent appears responsible for the appearance of The Backward Men. A long-dead gangster stalks the sewers; this is a case for Jago & Litefoot & Patsy, but when the peril proves too much, it falls to Higson & Quick to bring the case to a close.

When did I last talk about Jago & Litefoot? Probably a while ago, so as a reminder, the impressario Henry Gordon Jago, and London pathologist Professor George Litefoot were the joint Watsons to the Doctor in the classic, but problematic(8), Doctor Who serial 'The Talons of Weng Chiang'. The interaction between the blowhard Jago and fastidious Litefoot made the mlong-time favourites, and eventually Big Finish brought back original actors Christopher Benjamin and Trevor Baxter for one of the Companion Chronicles, The Mahogany Murders. This was such a success that they went on to commission an ongoing series which ran to thirteen four-disc boxed sets before Baxter passed away in 2017.

Season 8 follows a tried and tested formula, as well as offering slightly expanded roles for regular supporting characters, Ellie the immortal, ex-vampire barmaid, and recently promoted police Inspector Quick. It also features a full-fledged musical episode, as the Scorchies telepathically force our heroes to sing their inner thoughts. Musical episodes don't always work, but this one is a cracker.

Aquitane
Aboard the space station Aquitane, the main computer, Hargreaves, and his various bodies struggle to keep up with a growing to do list, as well as providing daily support to the crew... who are no longer there. The arrival of a blue box and its occupants is just one more mystery, but the Aquitane is the scene of much timey wimey shenanigans, so the Doctor might just be what the situation demands.

Aquitane is a full-on time travel, space gothic mystery, with robots and plant monsters and ghosts. It's a strong look for Doctor Who, and the script manages to balance the companion duties between Nyssa and Tegan via the tried and tested method of sending one of them off on their own. In this case, it's Nyssa who goes solo after being infected with a mystery disease, which I seem to recall is kind of a thing with her. Tegan is high-minded and aggressive, without being whiny, which is a hard balance to write - this is true of a lot of companions who were very much of their time, and for modern audio need to be written both true to their original characterisation and in a way that isn't really grating ot a moern audience - but they really hit it here.

Re-reads
Ottoline and the Yellow Cat, by Chris Riddell
Ottoline Goes to School, by Chris Riddell
Ottoline at Sea, by Chris Riddell
Ottoline and the Purple Fox, by Chris Riddell

Ottoline Brown lives in the Big City, with her best friend Mr Munroe - a small, hairy Norwegian bog man - curating the collections sent home by her explorer parents. Ottoline and Mr Munroe are born mystery solvers, and love nothing more than a good problem to get their teeth into, be it a devious cat burglar targeting the wealthy, an alleged haunting at an exclusive school, Mr Munroe's homesickness, or the tangled love lives of urban foxes.

Chris Riddell's Ottoline books are little treasures. I have the original hardback editions of all four books, and the four Goth Girl books (see below), and I adore them. Illustrated in Riddell's characteristic style, with a single colour - different in each book - added to the black and white images, the querky adventures are told by a mix of text and images which makes them a sort of mid-point between picture books and an illustrated novel, and they are really lovely.

Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse, by Chris Riddell
Goth Girl and the Pirate Queen, by Chris Riddell
Ada Goth lives with her widowed father in a rambling hall, isolated by his grief and their geographical and social isolation. But then she meets the ghost of a mouse, and Emily and William Cabbage - the children of her father's resident inventor, and a new governess, and the Attic Club, a group of young servants who share their observations of the weirdness at Ghastly-Gorm Hall. With the annual metaphorical bicycle race and indoor hunt on the horizon, Maltravers the indoor gamekeeper is up to no good, and with her father sunk in perpetual melancholy, it is up to Ada to see justice done.

In Goth Girl and the Pirate Queen, our intrepid heroine takes a World Book Day trip to Brighton for the Prince Regent's ball, and must contend with high fashion, high society, theft, bathing machines and retired pirates.

The follow-up to the Ottoline series(9) features the adventures of Ada Goth, daughter of the famous bicycling poet, Lord Goth of Ghastly-Gorm. This book sets the format for the series, with a strange and eccentric event attracting strange and eccentric visitors, each of whom is a pastiche of an actual historical - or sometimes contemporary - figure. It is this that makes the book so rich for grown up readers, although it does require a pretty broad cutural base for a younger reader. On the other hand, it could provide an impetus to learn about 18th century poetry and art, or contemporary fashion and baking.

Sympathy for the Devil
The Doctor has been banished to Earth, but not in the 1970s (or is it the 1980s.) Instead, he has arrived in Hong Kong in 1997, just in time for the handover of British rule to China. Here he meets the Brigadier, retired and bitter and running a pub, and stumbles on a mission by the highly militaristic UNIT to extract a defector from mainland China; a defector who is not Chinese, but from somewhere far, far away. Someone who knows the Doctor of old, and has plans for a monastery on a hillside above Hong Kong.

Sympathy for the Devil is far and away the best of the Doctor Who Unbound series of audio plays, featuring alternative Doctors and exploring 'what if...' scenarios; in this case, what if the Doctor missed all of the alien invasions of the UNIT years, leaving the world to become increasingly paranoid and fragmented. David Warner as the alternate Third Doctor perfectly portrays the deep melancholy of the time traveller not only trapped in space and time, but separated from the place he was supposed to occupy. Nicholas Courtney did some of his best work as the aging Brigadier - both with Big Finish and in The Sarah Jane Adventures - in the years before his death.

It's been quite a month (or two) for since deceased Big Finish favourites.

It's steeped in Who lore, but Sympathy for the Devil is also one of the best things that Big Finish has ever done.

Full Fathom Five
Deep beneath the ocean, the work of a research lab is being co-opted by its military paymasters. Into this gothic nightmare of science comes the Doctor, a traveller in time and space, who will do whatever it takes to make sure that this research never sees the light of day. And many years later, the Doctor returns to the same lab, in search of... something.

Full Fathom Five was another Doctor Who Unbound audio play, and the only one in the original run released without a specific 'what if...' tagline, since its core concept was also its twist. It's a dark, dark tale, with David Collings as his most chillingly urbane as the Doctor, and Siri O'Neal as his soon to be disillusioned companion, Ruth, and the now-late Ed Bishop - seriously, what the hell? - as the driven and ruthless General Flint. It works best the first time, but the players still give it some punch on a second listen.

The Burning Maze, by Rick Riordan
I re-read this for my partner this month, but since I only finished it a few months ago, I won't go into it again. Short version - I love it, but my American accents suck.

(1) As always, kistening to books means I have to look up the spellings, and the fact that this was apparently not Leon, but Laon took me by surprise.
(2) Or something of the sort.
(3) Catherine had explicitly never left Yorkshire, but the reader's voice is 'generic posh' rather than remotely northern.
(4) One of the drawbacks to a set of strongly linked arc stories like Riordan's is that there are staggeringly few places to jump into his work, since his bibliography is basically one massive narrative, with even the Kane Chronicles and the Magnus Chase novels taking place in the same continuity.
(5) At a book signing, he drew a sketch of my daughter, which he absolutely didn't have to do.
(6) Who may be the same thing, or at least related.
(7) As was, at least; I'm a little out of the loop, and whatever some may say when vehemently denying that female Space Marines could ever be a thing, the lore has changed significantly over the years.
(8) The villain has such yellowface, so inscrutible.
(9) The first book appears in a bookshop in The Purple Fox, which is a bit meta, but was a grand hook for my daughter.

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.

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.