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 - February, March and April 2019

Three months at a pop this time (I missed two and its taken most of the third to get this written up.) I managed two entries for the Found Horizons challenge, three other new novels, seven comics, two audio plays and eight re-reads.

Found Horizons
Throne of the Crescent Moon, by Saladin Ahmed
Picked up on a recommendation from James Holloway, this has also started a bit of a kick on fantasy novels taking their model from something other than mediaeval European history and/or Tolkien. In this case, the setting is influenced by the Thousand and One Nights. The novel is supposedly part one of a trilogy, but is largely complete in itself and the second part hasn't emerged in the seven years since this one came out.

The novel follows the struggles of the ghul hunter, Doctor Adoullah Makhslood, and his friends and assistants against a mysterious and terrible dark sorcerer bent on seizing an ancient and apocalyptic power from the fallen empire on whose ruins the current Kalifate was built. The ageing Doctor battles using costly and exhausting sacred invocations, and fights alongside the holy swordsman Rasheed, lion shapeshifter Zamia, and his old friends the mage Dawoud and the alchemist Litaz. All of them have incredible powers, but the society in which they live has no respect for their abilities or their fight. In addition to the supernatural threat they face, they must struggle with social unrest: A revolution led by the charismatic Falcon Prince, and the violence of the thuggish zealots known as the Young Scholars, whose seeming-piety Rasheed admires, but who are little different from modern fundamentalists, white nationalists, or those who use the phrase 'Brexit means Brexit' without irony.

While the characters and plot aren't bad, the real strength of the book is in its worldbuilding, which is deep and compelling, and a refreshing change from more conventional fantasy.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf, by Marlon James
They call him Tracker, and it is said that he has a nose. One eye is that of a man, the other of a wolf. If you want someone found, he will track them into the underworld itself. Twice, he has been called upon to find a child, and now the child is dead. Someone wants to know why. Someone wants to know how. Tracker may be the only one who knows, but he isn't going to be quick to tell.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the first fantasy novel by Jamaican author Marlon James. It follows the deeply personal odyssey of Tracker - the wolf of the title - as he moves through the the great events of his day, across a sprawling secondary world steeped in the folklore of Africa (primarily southern Africa, I believe, but I'd still be writing these reviews in June if I tried to track down everything in this book to its source.) Tracker - a gruff, misanthropic loner by nature, whose motto is 'nobody loves anybody else' - is both our protagonist and our deeply unreliable narrator; called on to give testimony to an inquisitor, he instead tells a series of interlinking stories which lie somewhere nebulously between objective truth and outright lie. In his search for the missing boy and his monstrous captors, he is forced to work with an old partner - the shapeshifting black leopard - and a ragtag band of equally truculent souls, as well as navigating an increasingly complex web of lies surrounding the identity of the child in question.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf is an intricate exploration of internal and external truth, as well as a sort of survival-horror-level approach to fantasy, set in a world completely unfamiliar to the European reader. It also features another rarity in that its grumpy, anithero protagonist is gay. It's highly profane in its language, bleak in its outlook, and definitely on the dark side of the genre.

A word of warning: bad things happen to children in this book. A lot.

New Novels

The flamboyantly camp Dr Tachyon, depicted
on this cover, is 100% straight, as is pretty
much everyone in this book.

Wild Cards, edited by George RR Martin
An alien force comes to Earth, bringing with them a virus intended to transform the human genome to generate psychic abilities. Conflict with a defector and the interference of a human criminal result in the 'Wild Card' virus being released over New York, and so the age of superpowers begins. Some of those infected recover, most die horribly, and some are changed, into superpowered 'Aces' (a few with very specific, low-utility powers are called 'Deuces') or disfigured 'Jokers'.

First published in 1987, this first anthology in a shared world series edited by George RR 'Song of Ice and Fire' Martin... is really, really eighties. Almost all of the major characters are men, with women playing supporting and usually romantic roles. The two significant female Aces in the collection are a woman who absorbs the knowledge and personalities of other people, ultimately becoming overwhelmed by the burden of the minds of the great men whose knowledge she now holds, and a young radical whose rape caused her to turn into a vigilante subway car. Minor female characters include several Jokers with exotic deformities, and one who has passive sex powers. There is also a half-Japanese, half-African American Ace who is a pimp with sex-fuelled magical powers; not precisely a negative portrayal, but the book is hard into exoticism. Notably, this edition has three stories not in the original printing, which includes 'Ghost Girl Takes Manhattan', and that has a much more active female character, Wraith (although even she spends a striking amount of time naked.)

With all of this in mind, 'Wild Cards' presents a history of a world with superheroes in an interesting way. The quality of the stories varies, but they are generally well-written, albeit unevenly characterised. It's likely that, if this were written today - and edited by anyone by Martin - I wouldn't give it the time of day, but as a historical artefact I'm kind of interested to see how the series is going to progress and transform through the succeeding books.

Although there are twenty-seven of them, so don't hold your breath.

The Restless Girls, by Jessie Burton
So, here's a book that I saw on a poster at the railway station. Seriously.

In a Mediterranean-type kingdom, an adventurous queen dies, leaving a dozen daughters and an overprotective father who decides that they will be safer without hobbies, dreams or excessive direct sunlight. He locks them in a single dormitory, watched over by a portrait of their late mother. The girls discover a hidden door behind the portrait, and a path which leads to a hidden palace where they dance with a crowd of animals every night, until the King notices how fast they are going through shoes. He exiles the oldest daughter, and determines to marry one of the others to a man who can take up his crown. Only one prospective suitor meets the king's challenge, but is he all that he seems?

Jessie Burton's retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses - which I read to my partner, and let me tell you, I really need to pick books for reading aloud that require fewer than a dozen distinct voices throughout - is a gently subversive delight, which flips the script on the bartered bride mode of fairy tale. The princesses are great, and their mother - although dead for the entirety of the story - is an absolute baller.

It may be a bit of a liberty to call this one a novel, it's more of an illustrated novella, but I won't hold that against it.

The Battles of Ben Kingdom: The Claws of Evil, by Andrew Beasley
In Victorian London, apprentice cooper Ben Kingdom is about to stumble into an ancient conflict between the rooftop-running Watchers and the subterranean Legion: a conflict over nothing less than the fate and soul of the world itself. Subject of apocalyptic prophecy, Ben is fated to choose between good and evil and so bring an end to this war. But which side will he choose, and which is which anyway? (Spoiler warning, the ones who live underground, have violent hazing rituals, cages full of monster birds, and fantasize about world domination are the baddies, while the ones who work with an actual angel aren't.)

As I might have given away with that synopsis, the big problem with this otherwise enjoyable Victorian supernatural adventure is that its central conflict lacks a fundamental element of suspense. The story wants us to question which side Ben will choose - even throwing in a Macguffin to tempt him towards the wrong choice - but since it also wants us to like Ben, it's fairly clear that he's going to end up on the literal side of the angels. In fact, this means that the fate of dissenting miniboss Ruby 'too cute for villainy' Johnson is far more interesting than Ben's, because she genuinely could go either way.

I got this one from the library, so no telling if or when I might get hold of the second and third volumes, but if I see them I will.

New Comics
The Power of the Dark Crystal, by Simon Spurrier, Kelly Matthew and Nicole Matthews
The official continuation of the story of the movie The Dark Crystal - an absolute corker, if you don't know it - was going to be a film, but ended up as a 12-issue comic. Set many years after the film, the comic sees the Gelfling race restored and now ruling Thra from the Castle of the Crystal. Jen and Kira are ancient, and the rule of Thra is mostly undertaken by a corrupt priesthood who demand extortionate 'offerings' in exchange for access to the crystal and to Jen and Kira.

A being called Thurma, a fireling, comes to the castle, asking for a shard of the crystal to save her world, which lies deep beneath the surface of Thra. Denied, she steals a shard, bringing back the Skekses and Mystics, and flees with the aid of a conflicted temple acolyte called Kensho. As the two young fugitives bond, pursued by the agents of the priesthood, the tools of the Skekses now controlled by Jen, and by the whining Chancellor, the ancient Aughra struggles to understand what is happening, and how the world can be on the brink of destruction again.

As a huge fan of The Dark Crystal, and having written a failed pitch for inclusion in an authorised anthology, I was very keen to read this. It's pacing is a little slow, and honestly it probably could have stood to be six-to-eight issues, but I did enjoy the ideas and the sense of impending doom was on point. It is a fairly tragic capper to the story of Jen and Kira, as the hope of Thra - and the subterranean world of Mithra - is passed to Thurma and Kensho.

There's a follow-up being released at the moment, which I'll catch up with once it's in trades.

Rat Queens Volume 1: Sass and Sorcery, by Kurtis J Wiebe
In a world where the rough and tumble of high fantasy is giving way to a more orderly world of trade and culture, the town of Palisade is faced with the question of what to do with the adventurers who once tamed the land and protected the borders, but are now just a drunken, violent threat to civic harmony. Best - or worst - of the crowd are the Rat Queens, a quartet of hard-drinking, bar-brawling women: Hannah, an elf necromancer; Vi, a dwarf fighter; Delilah, a human cultist of a blood-drinking squid god, turned cleric of no particular deity; and Betty, a smidgen(1) with an appetite for drugs, ladies and stabbings. When the merchants guild hires assassins to wipe out the adventurers, the Rat Queens take it personally, which is going to be bad news for someone.

Probably the greatest triumph of this opening volume of the Rat Queens' adventures is not concisely presenting the above information to bring us into their world, but in creating characters who are not only complex and engaging - even likable, for all their rough edges - but convincing both as comic characters and as roleplaying PCs. Wiebe captures the weird banter of the game table with uncanny accuracy, but also creates convincing protagonists.

My only real problem with the book is that it kind of impinges on one of those ideas I probably wouldn't have had time to write anyway - what if a roleplaying world were real, and most of the monsters were dead now - although a) 'The Boys from the Borderlands' would be a lot less fun, and b) it woudl already have been clashing with Kings of the Wyld.

Rat Queens Volume 2: The Far Reaching Tentacles of N'rygoth, by Kurtis J Wiebe
Huh. So it turns out that I picked up volume 2 of Rat Queens in a sale pretty much right after writing the review above, but before publishing this roundup. (Seriously, I need to get on with these reviews a lot faster.)

Picking up directly from the end of volume 1, this one sees a revenge plot against the captain of the watch - a former assassin and Hannah's on/off booty call - expand to exploit Delilah's ex-deity and basically destroy the world, so that everyone can experience one man's pain (albeit only for the few moments it takes for the rest of existence to fold up like a barely-spoiled tablecloth.

While still not a million miles from the style of its roleplaying roots, The Far-Reaching Tentacles of N'rygoth is very much more a conventional narrative than Sass and Sorcery, which is probably a vital step after the establishing chapters. On the other hand, it has the sort of increasingly relevant backstory that is the hallmark of character-heavy RPGs, including an appearance by Delilah's never-before-mentioned husband, and flashbacks to Vi's break with her traditional dwarf family (in regards to which, I loved the fact that the family armoury business was run like a dynastic fashion house.) Betty has a bit of a side role in this, but I'm sure she'll get to break out of her tragicomic sideline in future volumes.

Still on board for this one. Roll on the next sale.

Giant Days: Vol 8, by John Allison
Man; what else can I say about Giant Days? While Vol. 8 brings new stories and new challenges, the series is sufficiently slanted towards character material that recapping the stories feels somewhat redundant. It's all 'Susan, Esther and Daisy do some stuff and shenanigans ensue', and as much as it's all glorious, its strength lies in 'Susan, Esther and Daisy,' rather than in the nature of either stuff or shenanigans. Maybe one of the girls gets into trouble due to romance, politics or a misunderstanding, or perhaps one of them tries to introduce the others to some new activity, but the drama, tension and comedy are in their reactions and interactions.

On the character front, Susan, Esther and Daisy continue to mature, and to grow apart, as Susan and Daisy's love-lives bring tension into the household (Esther's love-life is a train wreck, but a largely self-contained train wreck.) If I have a criticism of Vol. 8, it's that this growing-apartness cuts down that so-important level of interaction between the three central characters. I am also increasingly aware that a university-based series has a natural end point, which must be coming up in the not-too-distant future. This makes me sad, especially given that Allison's webcomic, Bad Machinery, has ended and that I am into the later stories re-reading it on Go Comics, but fortunately my next read was...

By Night: Vol 1, by John Allison
It is so weird to read a John Allison comic that isn't even slightly set in the north of England.

Jane is a chemistry major and aspiring documentarian whose awesome-if-unruly hair seriously suggests a way-back family connection to Giant Days' Daisy Wooton. Interning at a lab in her home town, she crosses paths with former BFF and early-onset silver vixen Heather, and the two of them set out to explore Charleswood, the recently-abandoned estate-cum-designer-community created by the town's founder, Chet Charles, and document its decline into ruin. There they unexpectedly discover a portal to another world, and with the assistance of Jane's work colleague and Heather's recently unemployed father they plan to expand their explorations into terra incognita.

Weird fiction, fantasy, mature exploration of the disconnection of youth and the collapse of the industrial society taken for granted by past generations, By Night is your typical John Allison mix of whimsy and introspection, and I am so here for it, even if I do assume on some primal level that all these small-town Americans are secretly from Yorkshire. I haven't embraced Jane and Heather as much as the Giant Days crew, perhaps because I don't have the 'in' of a familiar character (as Esther crossed from Scary-Go-Round,) but I'm happy to put the effort in to get to know them.

Vox Machina Origins, by Matthew Mercer, Matthew Colville, Olivia Samson and Chris Northrop
Speaking, as I was a couple of books ago, about roleplaying characters, I picked up the first six-issue arc of Vox Machina Origins, a comic recounting of the earliest adventures of the heroes of the Critical Role D&D(2) stream. Before they were a party, let alone heroes of Tal'dorei, the future members of Vox Machina were a scattered bunch of socially inept (either through inability or antisocial tendencies) sellswords doing grunt work in the swamp port of Stilben. What is the link between their various quests? Who is disappearing the poor? And what exactly is the legal, copyright standing of Scanlan Shorthalt's persistent filking?

I'm a bit of a recent convert to Critical Role, having started off at the top of Campaign 2 after failing twice to get into Campaign 1 - partly because of the relatively low video quality, partly because it comes in with the characters already at level 7 from the pre-stream game with the backstory to match, and partly because of the intimidating volume of video to go back through - I'm now working my way back through the Vox Machina streams. Moving up towards episode 100, I feel I know the characters well enough to pick up the backstory comics.

It makes an interesting contrast to Rat Queens, in part because, despite the characters actually being the PCs from a roleplaying game, they're written to be more like conventional narrative characters (probably in part because the CR team are fans of the Queens - that's how I came across that series - and are wary of too much parallel humour.) It's also interesting to get a look into the early days of the characters, before they had access to all the magic and all the powers. Good fun, and I'm looking forward to meeting early Pike and Percy later this year.

Heart of Empire, by Bryan Talbot
In 1999, Bryan Talbot released the sequel to his 1970s psychedelic epic, The Adventures of Luther Arkwright. Heart of Empire: The Legacy of Luther Arkwright had the characters of the original aged pretty much in real-time, and Arkwright's daughter, Princess Victoria, as its protagonist. Victoria's mother, Queen Anne, is the monstrous, psychic ruler of a global empire every inch as corrupt and repressive as the Puritan regime that it replaced, and much more powerful. The comic essentially follows Victoria's personal progress as she discovers the truth of the world she has been insulated for, and in doing so confronts the impending destruction of the multiverse and the real fate of her supposedly-assassinated twin brother and long-vanished father.

Heart of Empire is a much more conventional story than Luther Arkwright. It is a linear narrative and concerned with a much less philosophical threat at its core (the Disruptors wanted to guide history to their own, mysterious ends; the Heart of Empire just wants to rip everything apart at the molecular level.) It features the completion of a process shown in the end of the first graphic, where we saw the victorious rebels already beginning to become the new oppressors. This British Empire has a slave- and tribute-based economy, and a massive dose of legally-supported racism, contrasted with a more liberal America.

Ultimately, Heart of Empire lacks the iconic heft of Luther Arkwright. It also lacks the unfortunate 70s tropes, although it does have a few 90s tropes to regret in retrospect; in particular, Victoria lacks agency for much of the story, although less because she's a 90s female character and more because she, like her father, is a pawn of destiny.

It's okay, is what I'm saying. Easier to read than its predecessor, but with less staying power as a consequence.

Audio Plays

Last of the Cybermen
Jamie and Zoe are waiting for the Doctor to return, but when they see him take a fall and run to help him, they find in his place a large and more bombastic man in an outrageous coat. The Sixth Doctor has been transported into his own past, and he needs to make sure he doesn't change anything, doing everything as his second incarnation would do. Unfortunately, it's been a long time since he had to deal with The Last of the Cybermen.

This is the second part of the 'locum Doctor' sequence; a set of three plays in which the Big Finish Doctors are swapped with their past selves to interact with the surviving companions (although unlike Legend of the Cybermen, the director doesn't force poor Wendy Padbury to do an impression of her younger self, which can't be easy to maintain for an entire play.) Threatening the Doctor's mission are a cyber-cult within the elite educational institute that made Zoe the superlogical polymath she is, and the usual greed and corruption of humanity. The Sixth Doctor also lacks the Second's tenacious will to remain free at all costs, and if he succumbs to his own impulse to take the pragmatic course, how will that change the world?

The Secret History
Steven and Vicki are taking a break with the Doctor in Ravenna, capital of the Western Roman Empire, when their Doctor is swapped with his much less vacay-happy Fifth incarnation. Belisarius is struggling to reunite the Empire, against the paranoia of the Emperor Justinian, and someone is keen to get the Doctor involved in events. Quintus, a roman medic with too much knowledge of time and space, and an axe to grind against the Doctor for perceived past - or rather future - wrongs.

The final locum Doctor play sees the Fifth Doctor step into the shoes of the First, and the Fifth Doctor is very different from the First, the coolly pragmatic history tourist who seriously considered bashing a caveman's skull in with a rock that one time. Finally, the plan which has set all these events in motion comes to fruition, and the Doctor is left to struggle not just for his life, but for his very existence.

Re-reads
Doctor Thorne, by Anthony Trollope
After a bit of a break, I've taken another step on the re-visiting of the Barchester Chronicles with Doctor Thorne, which I think may be the last one I've actually read (although that might be Framley Parsonage.)

We take a step out of Barchester itself for this one, and into the genteel countryside of Barsetshire. Here, the eponymous Doctor Thorne has his practice. A modestly well-off, educated physician, Thorne is somewhat looked down on by his fellow doctors for his mercenary nature - he has a set schedule of fees for different visits, instead of just modestly accepting much more money without comment - and tendency to diagnose on the basis of symptoms and other such malarkey, but highly respected by the local worthies. The light of his life is his niece, Mary, who has been educated with the children of the Squire of Greshamsbury. In Mary Thorne we meet another of Trollope's saintly young women, who through the book weathers the condemnation of society after the penurious squire's son and heir, Frank, falls in love with her despite the family's injunction that he 'must marry money.'

Thankfully, she is in a Trollope novel and not a more harshly realistic milieu, so it all ends happily thanks to virtue, and indeed just about everyone ends up well, except for the most pernicious and unrepentant of Mary's nay-sayers, who loses two fiances in the course of the narrative, because that's the worst thing that can happen to a woman.

So, yeah; it's Trollope. It's lovely and fluffy and very old-fashioned, and also introduces Miss Martha Dunstable, a bastion of common sense and awesomeness.

The Sleeper and the Spindle, by Neil Gaiman
When a mystical sleep begins to spread across a kingdom, the young queen of a neighboring country, a woman with experience of magic, sets out with her dwarf companions to investigate. In a tower, in a castle, a maiden sleeps. While she sleeps, those in the castle sleep; all save a crone who watches over her. We know the story, we know the cure, but is this the story that we think it is?

Neil Gaiman is an accomplished reteller of fairy tales, and this Briar Rose/Snow White mashup - illustrated by Chris Riddell, which is something that, if you haven't gathered, I always have time for - has a definite twist in the tail. It also has a princess - or rather, a queen, who has no time to be waiting around for rescue, and indeed walks out on her own 'happy ending' to help others, swapping a wedding dress for armour and a sword - which, again if you haven't gathered, is something I will always have time for, as indeed are fairy tale retellings with a bit of a twist.

This is another story that I read to me partner at bedtime.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard, by JK Rowling
Another bedtime story for my partner, and another book illustrated by Chris Riddell (and not the last of either for these three months.) The Tales of Beedle the Bard is a metatextual DVD extra of a book, combining an in-universe collection of wizards' fairy tales with in-universe commentaries on the stories by Albus Dumbledore, providing the kind of Wizarding World deep cuts which have gained Rowling such derision from those who feel it is the fans job to create that sort of thing(3), and a few extra bits of metacommentary from Rowling herself in her role as... Harry Potter's biographer? It's all very literary agent theory.

The tales themselves are a mixed bag of morality tales, and perhaps most intriguingly quite deliberately feature magic which lies outwith that possible in the Wizarding World, which I suspect is a more interesting commentary on the nature of wizards than Rowling necessarily intended.

This is my second copy of Beedle the Bard, by the way; less because I love the stories than because Chris Riddell.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by JK Rowling
And while we're on the subject, Arya and I finished the main Harry Potter series, wrapping up The Deathly Hallows almost exactly a year after we began The Philosopher's Stone. I re-read this myself not long ago, so I won't do any kind of in-depth analysis of the book itself at this juncture.

Arya did much better than I expected, vis a vis her aversion to emotionally challenging content. She took a bit of a pause after Dobby died, but wasn't as cut up as I thought about Hedwig. Then again, she's never fully accepted that 'cute little mouse' Scabbers was actually, in all conceivable meanings, a rat.

We've been trying since we finished to find another longer form story for me to read with her. We got halfway through the first book in The Land of Stories series before she complained that it was too scary, and dismissed my suggestion that Deathly Hallows was scarier 'apart from chapter 8.' We have, however, found a new jam at last, and indeed we have finished...

It's surprisingly hard to find an image
that isn't from the movie.

The Hundred and One Dalmations, by Dodie Smith
Nice, middle class Dalmatians Pong and Missis are shaken when their puppies are kidnapped by the malevolent, fur-loving Cruella de Vil to be made into coats. With the assistance of the nationwide network of the twilight barking, they set out across country to rescue their puppies from the wilds of Suffolk, only to find that there is much more on the line than just their one litter.

Arya got Cruella and Cadpig on World Book Day, a short story spin-off from a simplified retelling of The Hundred and One Dalmations, which she then asked to buy with her pocket money, so I thought I'd give her a go with the original.

Which is apparently out of print, so what the fuck is that about? I got a second hand set - The Hundred and One Dalmations and the sequel, The Starlight Barking, in which the dogs gain telepathic and telekinetic abilities from an alien god - and have also picked up the kindle versions for night reading.

This remains a damn good story, if a little old-fashioned in places. Missis is a good little wife, stronger in faith, but weaker in wits than Pongo, and the girl puppies are repeatedly noted to be weaker than their brothers, which I'm not sure is a thing. There is also a scene with gypsies which... Well, for starters it includes the word gypsy, and presents them as inveterate dog-thieves, although it also includes mention of the Romany language.

Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
I re-read this one a couple of years ago, but hit it again with the upcoming TV adaptation finally on the definite horizon. I still love it, although I can appreciate some of the flaws in it more each time. In particular, Gaiman and Pratchett have always been a couple of white dudes, and in this and their other early work this is quite apparent, although the development of their female characters in particular marks them as very much white dudes who listened and learned.

Still love it.

The Bloody Chamber, by Angela Carter
Perhaps the best known work by the prolific British author Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber is an anthology of richly Gothic fairy tales, including two takes on Beauty and the Beast - 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon' and 'The Tiger's Bride' - the titular Bluebeard tale, Puss in Boots as a bawdy sex comedy and of course 'The Company of Wolves', a version of the Red Riding Hood story, and a collection of other werewolf anecdotes which inspired the film The Company of Wolves.

Dark, sumptuous, oddly claustrophobic and by turns sensual and nauseous, The Bloody Chamber is arguably the prototype of the subgenre which Gaiman has made his own in works like The Sleeper and the Spindle. It's a lot of fun.

A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
Almost done.

A Short History of Nearly Everything is an accessible potted history of science. It's a lively jaunt through the various developments of the last few centuries of thought, and the last few epochs of geological and evolutionary development. The problem, of course, is that as meticulously research as it was, who knows if the science stands up a decade and a half after publication.

Odd and the Frost Giants, by Neil Gaiman
And the last of our Chris Riddell-illustrated bedtime reads is this little gem, originally written for World Book Day many years ago and now re-released with added Riddell.

Odd is an odd boy, the son of a deceased viking who lives with his mother and step-family in a Scandinavian village. He is lame, having nearly severed his own leg with his father's axe, and considered something of a burden. When winter refuses to leave one year, he sets out into the wilderness, where he meets a fox, a bear and an eagle, and finds his way into an otherworldly adventure which might change the fate of the world.

Very much a novella, rather than a novel, this is a fairly straightforward coming of age tale, featuring a viking hero out of the classic bruiser mould (which is entirely suitable, as any saga would tell you,) learning to be more than a boy through wits instead of might.

(1) An off-brand hobbit.
(2) I think technically at this point they would actually have been Pathfinder characters, but who's counting?
(3) There are valid reasons to pooh-pooh this line of activity from Rowling, relating to the actual content and the decision to relegate it to deuterocanonical sources, but I'm pretty sure there are some nerds who just resent her basically creating her own wikia.