Reading Roundup - July and August 2018

Full disclosure, it took me a long time to
realise which two towers the title referred to.

A double event this month, having missed last month.

The Two Towers continues my revisiting of The Lord of the Rings, and another interesting aspect of this is that I think this is my first reread since seeing the movies, and so my first chance to really appreciate the way in which Jackson’s aesthetic has infiltrated my visualisation of Middle Earth. This time out, the big revelation was in the depiction of the orcs. Yes, they are foul, and yes, they are degenerate, but overall they are shown in the novel as soldiers. They bicker and fight over spoils and glory, but they aren’t nearly as bestial as other interpretations make them. 

Of course, this is also the book with the Southrons in, and all the… difficulties that they present. In and of themselves, they are a really interesting concept; a race very like the men of the west, led by descendants of Numenor, but in league with or thrall to the Dark Lord. Where it falls down is that they happen to be the folk in the parts of Middle Earth which map to Africa and the Middle East, and whether Tolkien loathed analogy or not, you can’t just ignore that. I suspect that he legitimately meant nothing by it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t meaningful or problematic.

Deep Roots is the second novel in the Innsmouth Legacy series, Ruthanna Emrys’ pro-fish revision of the Cthulhu Mythos, following the adventures of Aphra Marsh and her circle, as they travel from the ruins of Innsmouth – itself faced with the spectre of gentrification since they have begun its reoccupation – to New York, in search of a potential long-lost cousin or two. Negotiating the interest of the closeted Agent Spector’s extended family – a New York Jewish community who have reached the level of nuptial desperation which leads respectable royal courts to consider ‘shoeless beach waif’ a godsend – and their fraught relationship with the FBI’s more decorated and action-oriented paranormal team. Finding one of their kin caught up with a group of Mi-Go, Aphra and her Deep One kin must struggle with their own prejudices to decide if the Mi-Go can be trusted, or whether they need to go on the offensive while the FBI are seeking to establish diplomatic ties. With this second volume, we see that the Aeonist perspective which does not fear the Yith is yet repulsed by the inhuman cosmopolitanism of the Mi-Go, which threatens the Deep Ones’ sense of physical identity with its focus on the mind as the only relevant centre of being. Emrys also ensures that Aphra’s choices have consequences, as her decision to conceal the actions of the Yith from the FBI in Winter Tide comes back to bite her.

Once again, this is a slow-burner; like, a really slow-burner, even managing to be quite sedate during an honest-to-goodness commando raid. It’s nothing like you would expect from a Cthulhu Mythos story, of course, continuing Emrys’ tour de force reimagining of the mythos from the viewpoint of the disadvantaged outsiders who were Lovecraft’s villains.

Another revisiting this time, as for some reason – seriously, I can’t remember what my impetus was on this – I reread Anno Dracula, the first volume of Kim Newman’s alternate historical series of the same name, which takes as its premise the idea that Dracula defeated his hunters in the narrative timeline of Dracula, married the widowed Victoria and took over England, transforming it into a vampire utopia that is simultaneously decadent and selectively puritanical, as well as being inhabited by a broad spectrum of historical and fictional characters. Newman’s original characters, Renaissance vampire Genevieve Dieudonne and gentleman-spy Charles Beauregard, find themselves at the centre of the hunt for the serial killer Jack the Ripper, who murders vampire prostitutes with silver knives, while Arthur, Lord Godalming plots to elevate himself in society and the great and the good of the Gothic and the grand guignol seek their own advantage in the chaos.

Honestly, a large part of the appeal in Newman’s writing, especially the Anno Dracula series, lies in spotting the cameos, and I definitely get more of them than I used to. I was surprised by the relative absence of Kate Reed, a minor character from early drafts of Dracula who appears in an unflattering role in Dracula Unredacted, and does much more in later novels in this series (although despite Newman’s apparent fondness for her, I’m not sure she is ever very effectual. I guess I’ll see as I go through.) The story is okay, the setting much more interesting, if only for its inclusion of every conceivable form of fictional vampire – including the Chinese hopping variety – or fictional human. It’s not deep, but it’s good fun.

After the whiplash change of pace from Deep Roots to Anno Dracula, I did another reversal into Record of a Spaceborn Few, the third novel in the Wayfarers series. Even more loosely connected than the first two – one of the several viewpoint characters is the sister of the captain in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet – this novel follows a disparate group of characters in one of the ships of the Exodus Fleet, the semi-nomadic collective of self-sufficient vessels which carried the human race away from the dying Earth. In the wake of a disaster which destroyed one of the homestead ships, the others have accepted aid from various alien races to upgrade their dwellings, and the narrative of Record of a Spaceborn Few revolves around the clashes engendered by the changing culture this has brought to the once-isolated Fleet.

With Record of a Spaceborn Few, Becky Chambers reaffirms her place as one of the leading lights of character driven SF. While her world is built on a solid, crunchy foundation, the stories are about people and how they deal with this vast galaxy. The clash between the traditions of the Fleet and the ways of the Galactic Commons, the perils of a life lived in space, and the impact of outsiders on a relatively closed culture.

We stay in space for Ancillary Mercy, the final instalment of Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch trilogy. Fleet Captain Breq has effectively declared independence for the Atoeck(1) system. With at least one aspect of the Lord of the Radch definitely out to get her, and her identity as the last ancillary body of the troop carrier Justice of Toren an increasingly open secret, she must scramble to assemble her few allies into an effective resistance against the master of a thousand worlds. Given its set up, it is perhaps unsurprising that Ancillary Mercy never goes full space battle. Breq’s force – basically consisting of Breq’s patrol ship Mercy of Callah, a few administrators and labourers, and a mostly friendly botanist – is so massively outmatched that the conflict is more interestingly shifted into the political domain. The result is a tense narrative, making inventive use of Breq’s first person narrative through her ability to directly receive sensory feeds from multiple sources.

Next up, it’s a shift to a fantasy notBritain for The Apprentice Witch and A Witch Alone, debut and follow up novels from former Ely librarian James Nicol(2). When Arianwyn Gribble’s assessment goes wrong, she is denied qualified witch status, but due to some irregularities and her grandmother’s influence, instead of being sent back to school, she is assigned to on-the-job training as resident witch to the village of Lull. Here she makes friends, clashes with overbearing bureaucrats, encounters strange and sometimes dreadful creatures from the Great Woods, and accidentally becomes mentor to her former witch school bully, Gimma.

These books are aimed at a much younger readership than me. The same is true of a lot that I read, but this is definitely for children rather than my more usual teenage/YA minimum, so that should be born in mind regarding this review. The story and characters are very simple, and the setting feels more like an accumulation of ideas than a fully realised secondary world, and has a few head-scratching moments (for example, all the witches we see are women(3), but civic and temporal power is all held by men.) On the other hand, there is plenty to like in the world Nicol has created, and I am especially taken with the system of magic used by the witches, which is based on a simple set of glyphs which can be combined to different effects. 

Overall, while I’d be very happy to read this one with my daughter, and there is an appeal to Arianwyn’s misadventures, most of the twists are fairly obvious to an adult reader, and the ‘the power was inside you all along’ resolution is one that I am kind of over, at least where that power is some unique magical ability rather than a more mundane realisation of agency.

Man; speaking of agency, the next book is Isaac Asimov’s classic SF novel, Foundation, in which a ‘psychohistorian’ creates an organisation, the titular Foundation, designed to survive the downfall of a galactic empire and ensure the restoration of civilisation after a mere millennium, rather than thirty-thousand years as originally predicted, which is some serious long game ambition, if nothing else. In order to bring about his planned future, he has carefully aligned the starting conditions of the Foundation to bring about an inevitable and necessary outcome, and chaos theory bedamned. Set over the first century and a half of the Foundation’s era, Foundation collects four previously published short stories and a fifth written as a prequel for the collected edition. After establishing the creation of the Foundation in ‘The Psychohistorians’, the other stories follow the transition of power from ‘The Encyclopedists’, to ‘The Lord Mayors’, ‘The Traders’ and finally ‘The Merchant Princes’, with each transition happening at a moment of crisis, and followed by a time-locked message from Hari Seldon, basically congratulating them on following his masterplan unawares and noting that, by the by, all that they have worked for has now served its purpose, so they can hand off to the next bunch kthxbye.

As with much golden age SF, there is a fascinating juxtaposition in Foundation between the still quite visionary futurism, and the entirely outmoded social assumptions that Asimov was probably quite unaware of, like the Foundation being composed of a number of good ‘men’ and their wives and children(4). Asimov also presents atomic power as the Apex of galactic technology. The Foundation is the only group retaining mastery of atomic science, whereas the fading Empire can only maintain its atomics, and the splinter kingdoms of the galactic periphery have no atomics at all, but they do have faster than light travel. They can’t harness the atom but can defy the fundamental limitations of physics with their, presumably, coal-fired spaceships; with no female crew.

Foundation is good, but it’s very much of its time, is what I’m saying.

Prophets of Waaagh! isn’t actually a book, but rather a series of three short audio dramas – ‘End of

Dayz’, ‘Bozgat’s Big Adventure’ and ‘The Waaagh! Faker’ – featuring the Orks of Warhammer 40K. As Orks, the characters are basically thugs (albeit mechanically brilliant thugs, since they are mostly MekBoyz, the Orks’ mechanical savants,) and not terribly sympathetic, which ironically makes them one of the more accurate representations of the 40K universe when compared to the novels featuring human or Space Marine protagonists, who are typically absurdly cuddly for denizens of the hypermacho grimdark forty-first(5) millennium, showing concern for the rights of civilians and underlings and everything.

It’s kind of silly, good fun, and features a rare modern appearance of a MadBoy, a concept little seen since their origin in the days before mental health sensitivity and here transposed from uncomfortable cute lunatic to the primary receivers of the psychic attack signal that is the Waaagh!

Finally, The Burning Page is the third part of Genevieve Cogman’s Invisible Library series. Irene is on probation after ditching her official duties to rescue her apprentice, Kai, from a chaotic alternate Venice, and their local friend Vale is succumbing to chaos infection… and also drug addiction. It is at this point that gates to the library begin to fail in a particularly incandescent fashion, as the Library itself comes under attack by its arch-enemy, the renegade Librarian Alberich.

I had some issues with the last instalment of the Invisible Library – The Masked City – but I’m pleased to say that I enjoyed this one a lot more. Vale’s combination of condescension and actually being that good is less annoying when it is both a vector and a symptom of his chaos contamination, and I appreciate that Irene is not spending the entire story obsessing about Kai (even if I did want her to give Vale more of an earful for making her the stick for his pity piñata.) It helps, a lot, that Irene gets to show her strengths, particularly in facing off against Alberich, and that in acting as the moderate influence against Kai and Vale’s anti-fae extremism, she is proven to be in the right, rather than being taken advantage of.

(1) As a reminder, I am working from hearing instead of seeing the names.

(2) He was doing an author visit at the library which my daughter attended, where she picked up the first book for me and the second for her other daddy.

(3) There is one mention of a male witch, but he’s only referred to.

(4) There are all of two women in the entire novel with actual screen time, and only one of them really qualifies as a character.

Reading Roundup - June 2018

So, this past month I’ve been reading through the first two Harry Potter books with my daughter(1), using the large, illustrated editions to keep her from going all pie-eyed at the walls of text. We’ve started on The Prisoner of Azkaban, but after that we’re going to need to wait for the next one to come out next year. She’s not the most focused of listeners, but she frequently surprises me with her acuity and recall. Of course, we’ve hit a bit of a complication as her brain smooshes various media – book, film, LEGO video game – together into a single narrative, but so it goes, and I’m honestly kind of proud of her ability to zone out Gilderoy Lockhart.

My own reading kicked off this month with The Burning Maze, book three of Rick Riordan’s Trials of Apollo series(2). From Indianapolis, Apollo and Meg travel with Grover to California, only to find that the Labyrinth there has become filled with supernatural flame, causing the land to wither. With the aid of old friends, including Coach Gleeson Hedge, Piper Maclean and Jason Grace, Apollo and Meg must walk into the burning maze, knowing it is a trap, and confront the most dangerous member of the Triumvirate, an Emperor who has set his sights on the sun itself.

While none of Riordan’s books are exactly super-fluffy, this is perhaps the first to truly embrace tragedy. Opening with a Lemony Snicket-style disclaimer that more than any other, this chapter of the life of Lester Popadopoulos is one that he doesn’t want to write and doesn’t advise you to read, and I’m not going to lie: for long-term fans of the series, this one is going to sting. However, the tragedy – the book is dedicated to Melpomene, Muse of Tragedy, ‘I hope you’re happy’ – is not gratuitous, but both earned by and vital to the course of the narrative. It’s a part of Apollo’s growth arc, but also very much belongs to the characters more directly involved. People do not die to further Apollo’s story, but in their own stories which stand adjacent to his. In fact, it is this sense that the world is made up not of one story, but of multiple interlocking stories, which is a strength of the Trials of Apollo, a series in which the protagonist is almost a bystander, an observer to the adventures of others.

Next up, one of my rare paper reads, as I shelled out for the Night’s Black Agents sourcebook Dracula Unredacted. This is essentially the text of Dracula, but with some altered and some additional passages, some altered dates, a slightly rearranged timeline and three sets of footnotes to convert the novel into an account of an actual vampire incursion. The conceit is that Stoker adapted the true events of a disastrous attempt to recruit Dracula as an intelligence asset, as part of the cover up of the fallout from that attempt.

Now, the main thing that strikes me about this book is that it is not entirely complete. It says on the back that it is designed to be a player resource for the Night’s Black Agents scenario The Dracula Dossier and that means that the book, and especially the footnotes, contain a whole slew of references that get no pay-off or explanation. The additional material is interesting, but its pay-off is again not always in the book itself. In particular, I feel slightly aggrieved at the inclusion of Kate Reed – a character from early drafts of the novel, now better known for her substantial roles in the Anno Dracula series – only for her to be locked away and forgotten when she proves to be compromised by Dracula, while our ‘heroes’ pursue their single-minded quest to save the incomparable Mina. I mean, I like Mina, but the reverence the other characters show for her borders on the fanatical.

Actually, you know what, it’s not just Mina. They’re the same about Lucy, and what bothers me with the inclusion of Kate Reed is that, by keeping most of the text as is, she is apparently the only living woman in the world not worthy of this obsessive, pedestal-setting worship. When everyone is saying that Mina shouldn’t be involved anymore because of her delicate sensibilities, does anyone give a thought for Kate’s? No. She is apparently unworthy even of condescension.

So, yeah; it’s an interesting, but ultimately flawed work, or possibly just not really intended as a stand-alone novel.

Still on a Dracula tip, Quincey Harker: Year One – or, more precisely, Year One: A Quincey Harker Demon Hunter Collection – is an anthology of novellas following the adventures of the son of Mina and Jonathan Harker, who gained immortality from Dracula’s influence on his parents and has, in the time leading to the present day setting, become a skilled fighter and magician, devoting himself to fighting demons. By the second story he has a unique bond with an unusually badass female detective, and works for Homeland Security as a demon hunting consultant. He also maintains close contact with his ‘Uncle Luke’, aka Dracula, and his super-butler Renfield(3).

Quincey Harker is pretty by the numbers paranormal mystery. We’re in the early phases, so no gratuitous sex, but Harker has some internalised misogyny to work through and Detective Rebecca Gail Flynn is a cookie cutter tough female cop. In addition, there are areas where the novellas contradict one another, or even themselves. It’s not terrible, and avoids some, but not all, of the worst clichés – men and women face violence more-or-less equally, although we do open with a case of a girl drugged to be impregnated by a demon – and is competently written and read.

If that last sounds like slim praise, it is important. My next listen, The Paper Magician, came highly recommended, and I really didn’t like it, and I think a lot of that – but not all – comes down to the reading. This is a danger with audiobooks, of course, and I think also hit me with the highly-recommended Sorcerer of the Crown.

Anyway, The Paper Magician is set at the turn of the 20^th century, in an alternate version of England where magic is, if not common, then at least a fact of life, and where magicians bond with a single, man-made material to work magic. Ceony Twill is an apprentice magician who, due to quotas, is assigned to bond to paper, instead of metal, as she had wanted, because paper is shit and stuff, and her mentor is mental. Anyway, she cooks and cleans and launders for her mentor, Magician Emery Thane, and then he gets his heart ripped out by his psycho ex and Ceony realises he’d look hot in a tux and sets out to rescue him, a process that will involve travelling through his heart and learning how to use paper to fight.

My biggest problem with this novel is that it is set in England in the early years of the 20^th century, but written in an American vernacular, a flaw emphasised by the fact that the narrator is also American. To make matters worse, the narrator’s English accent for the characters is not strong, with Ceony in particular sounding snooty in situations where she is supposed to come off as brave, defiant, or even whimsical. Additionally, while the world intrigued me, the characters did not, and in particular the romance – or rather, pre-romance – between Ceony and Emery was deeply unengaging. This romance really dominated the second half of the novel, with Ceony at one point struck by the sexiness of Emery’s handwriting, and served largely to cast the conflict between Ceony and the excisioner – flesh magician – Lyra(4) primarily in terms of the latter’s jealousy of her ex-husband’s apprentice eliminates any possibility of exploring the philosophical and political aspects of the forbidden magic that she practices. I mean, she animates severed limbs; I’m not sure layering femme fatale on top of that was really needed, and I would rather have learned more about the Magicians’ cabinet and the historical turns that resulted in Westminster Abbey being an unremarkable church merely close to the political heart of a secular nation.

Read, or with a different narrator, The Paper Magician might not be so problematic, but for me at least the rest of the series feels like a pass.

Finally, as I began the series with Arya, I finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on my own account, which I think is my first re-read. It’s a very different book to the rest of the series, taking the action away from Hogwarts, embracing the intrinsic combative potential of wizards, and seeing our heroes adopt two of the three ‘unforgivable’ curses with barely a batted eyelid. I still think that the Battle of Hogwarts is a missed opportunity for at least some of Slytherin to make good. Snape is honestly rather too vicious in the earlier novels to be fully redeemed by his motives, but it’s not as if any of the other teachers at Hogwarts were natural teaching material. The wizarding world has some issues, is really what I’m saying.

(1) She is capable of reading them herself, but in doing so focuses on the words to the expense of the story.

(2) Using the Greek mythology, so it’s five parts, where other mythologies get three.

(3) A successor, not a descendent.

(4) Or Leera, or Lira; this is the other problem with audiobooks.

Reading Roundup - May 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sadly, Book 3 is a long way from omnibus.

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

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

solve the problems of FTL travel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(4) Porn without plot.

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

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

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

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

Reading Roundup - April 2018

I kicked off April with A Closed and Common Orbit. Described as Wayfarers Book 2, it's more of a spin-off from Becky Chambers debut novel, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, following the past and present fortunes of minor characters from that novel: technician Pepper, her artist boyfriend Blue, and Sidra, an AI from the first novel now illegally embodied in a humanoid form; as well as Sidra's new friend Tak, an Aeluon. Sidra is completely lost in the limits of a human form, having been built to integrate into the systems of an entire spaceship, and moreover as a result of the events of the previous novel this is not a fate that she chose, it instead having been intended by her previous self before she had to be reset. This novel follows two threads: Pepper's, and later Tak's - attempts to help Sidra adapt to human form, and flashbacks to Pepper's childhood as a genetically engineered child-slave and her search for the AI that saved her from that life, but was confiscated from her when they reached 'civilised' space.

A Closed and Common Orbit is a much more compact and intimate tale than The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet, and for my money is all the better for it. The first novel had a breadth of scope that acted against its strengths, which mostly lie in the characters and their small and personal interactions. A Closed and Common orbit is about the quest for identity, and that works with those strengths. Sidra's viewpoint(1) continually refers to Sidra's thoughts, but to the kit's hands; the body she has been given never really feels like hers. This enables a particularly neat scene in the closing chapters which I won't spoiler. I am also particularly fond of the ending, which does not involve Sidra neatly coming to realise that human is best, although I won't say more.

Next up was Joe Kelly and JM Ken Niimura's limited comic book series I Kill Giants, which has been adapted into a movie which I might see sometime(2).

Barbara Thorson is a troubled girl, obsessed with the idea that she has a calling. "I find giants," she says when questioned abouth er future on careers day. "I hunt giants. I kill giants." Her friend Sophia and the school guidance counsellor grow concerned as she seems to slip further out of control, fighting violently with the school bullies and threatening to unleash Coveleski, the magic warhammer in her handbag. Is Barbara simply retreating into fantasy to avoid her own pain, or are there truly giants causing the grief in the world? Or is the answer not so simple as an either/or?

Illustrated in stark, black and white lines, I Kill Giants is a comic with emotional punch. Barbara is an abrasive character. She is not remotely likeable, but is still deeply sympathetic, surrounded by well-meaning friends and adults who don't know how to offer the help that she needs, and whose assistance she doesn't know how to accept. The giants - real or not - loom large over Barbara's bleak world as dense patches of shadow, and must be fought - one way or another - before she can find any kind of peace.

I managed to find time to finish up another Harry Potter novel, this time The Half-Blood Prince, which means I only have the one left to go. Book six is where Shit Gets Real™, as Harry returns to Hogwarts only to find that his nemesis, Draco Malfoy, seems to be intent on some secret mission for Lord Voldemort, in which he may have the assistance of Professor Snape, and no-one else seems to believe him when he tells them. Also, Dumbledore wants him to spy on the new Potions master, and after the false start of Cho Chang, Harry is finally discovering girls.

The Half-Blood Prince marks the end of the Harry Potter series as it began. The Deathly Hallows is a radical departure from the pattern, which I'll talk about when I get that one finished, but it was about time the series had one, and the old school framing device is looking a little worn. Harry attends barely any lessons, and it's clear that Rowling recognised that Hogwarts had more or less served its purpose. There's a core of a very strong story in The Half-Blood Prince, but the setting which was such a strength in the previous books is here more of a burden.

A bit of a departure now, as I spent a few days with the pilot of the future, in Big Finish's Dan Dare: The Audio Adventures. Normally I do audio plays over on My Life as a Doge, but I picked this up in an offer through Audible, so here we are.

Fifties comic legend Dan Dare joins the Big Finish stable of updated retrofuturist icons in a series of six plays: 'Voyage to Venus', 'The Red Moon Mystery', 'Marooned on Mercury', 'Reign of the Robots', 'Operation Saturn' and 'Prisoners of Space'. A full cast portray updated versions of the characters from the old stories: Daring test pilot Dan Dare, Lieutenant Albert Digby, Professor Peabody and Sir Hubert Whatsisname are all present and correct, or... Well, working class hero Digby is now a gruff, professional soldier with little time for fancy flyboys, Professor Peabody is a corporate shill, and Sir Hubert is all about the military-industrial complex.

So, this is a much more dystopian view of the solar system than I remember from the little Dan Dare I know, with corporate shenanigans on top of the threat of the Mekon, weird, totalitarian superstates among the outer planets, a conspiracy which led to the death of Dare's father, and even the complete conquest of Earth at one point. It's bleak, and doesn't have a neat ending where everything is explained and okay; or even fully explained and not okay. To date, there is no second season of Dan Dare audio adventures. That makes me sad, although I know I'm contributing by buying through Audible and cutting down Big Finish's margins.

I did buy Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords through Big Finish, although in a sale. This series of audio plays is the first of several based on one of the Adventure Path sets for the Pathfinder RPG, following four of the game's iconic characters(3) - Ezren the human wizard, Harsk the dwarf ranger, Valleros the human fighter, and Merisiel the elf rogue - through one possible iteration of the published adventure(4). From the quiet village of Sandpoint to the ruined city of Xin-Shalast, this band of heroic adventurers pursue glory, vengeance, profit and vague hints of romance(5), and seek to thwart the return of Karzoug, the Runelord of Greed.

Rise of the Runelords is an action-packed adventure, and this is both a blessing and a curse. Action is hard to do well in audio, although in the hands of veteran director John Ainsworth and Big Finish's stable of writers there is a pretty good balance of sound effects and description. The characters are strongly drawn, although there are aspect that are inconsistent between writers; in particular, Merisiel and Valleros seem to fluctuate between friendly antagonism and shared attraction to the local innkeeper, and some sort of Sam and Diane dynamic. Still, overall it's good fun, and I'm likely to pick up the other series that have been released when I have the funds.

Finally for the month, John Gwynne's Malice is book one of a series called The Faithful and the Fallen, a fantasy epic set in a world where a war in heaven long past caused the local creator to up sticks and go off in a huff, leaving the titular faithful and fallen angels - called the Benelim and Cadushim - to duke it out for the fact of creation. Malice follows multiple viewpoint characters in a time of upheaval, as strange creatures stalk the land, giants emerge from the forests, and the rulers of the human kingdoms of the Banished Lands seek for a saviour, the prophesied Bright Star to battle the Black Sun who will champion evil.

Malice is one of those books that upholds the principles of Dark Helmet; that evil will always triumph, because good is dumb. The well-meaning persistently fail to spot glaringly obvious warning signs, and openly pick fights with numerically-superior douchebags. One blindly follows a master who believes himself to be the promised saviour, despite every indication that he's the opposite. Our actual hero neglects to mention a key fact which not only could have - as he himself realises - proved a significant asset during the climactic siege, but also have prevented, or at least slowed, the complete collapse of the defence.

If that sounds harsh, it's mostly because otherwise Malice is pretty good, and I wish it hinged less on such omissions(6). The characters are sympathetic, the untried youth with a great destiny much better written and more sympathetic than many, and the villains at least a little complex. Well, most of them; the sex-crazed witch queen seems pretty one dimensional(7), although we've not had much from viewpoints close to her as yet. I may well pick up the next book in the sequence.

(1) The narrative is third person limited.

(2) You know; if it ever shows up in a cinema near me and/or comes to a streaming service I have.

(3) Pathfinder's iconic characters are archetypal characters designed to illustrate the classes of the game system.

(4) I presume. It seems too acclaimed to be a complete railroad.

(5) Like... really vague, which in fairness is pretty much the level your typical tabletop RPG relationship gets to before everyone starts to feel hella awkward.

(6) It's also possible that some of these would be less egregious in someone without the reader's overarching awareness of the various plot threads, although I would still tend to scoff at those who chose to back the 'Bright Star' whose methodology involves totalitarian, dictatorial rule and brutal, 'greater good' pragmatism in the face of ethical dilemmas.

(7) There are much better female characters in the novel, but far fewer than there are men, and only one is a viewpoint character.