Reading Roundup - June 2016 redux

So, I missed a couple of books in my last roundup, and have added a couple more since.

A Face Like Glass comes from the reliably offbeat Francis Hardinge, who never fails to impress, or to challenge generic assumptions. This is perhaps her most conceptual novel to date, the City and the City of her canon, taking place in the vast and apparently unmappable underground city of Caverna, where thousands toil to create 'true delicacies', foods and wines and perfumes that beguile the senses, manipulate the mind and transform reality. The other notable feature of Caverna is that its denizens are expressionless until they are taught to form one or more faces.

Into this world comes Neverfell, a foundling with the titular 'face like glass', her every emotion displayed clearly on her features. Escaping from her concealed childhood with a master cheesemaker, she stumbles into a Byzantine web of political intrigue woven by the powerful court and the near-omnipotent Grand Steward, whose left and right brains sleep alternately and pursue differing and increasingly antagonistic policies. The world and characters of Caverna are in many ways a picture of a thinly sketched, high concept dystopia, but in Hardinge's hands their artificiality is explicit and important, informed by and supporting a regime in which cruelty contents itself with the contentment of a slave caste restricted to a single Face and so unable to look anything but content, reinforced by mind-controlling perfumes and wines, and intrinsically and increasingly fragile. Neverfell occupies the space of the superspecialsnowflake by virtue of not being a superspecialsnowflake, but rather than only ordinary girl in a storm of artfully maintained perfection.

Alys, the debut novel from celebrity YouTube nerd Kiri Callaghan is rather less unique in its world, drawing most of its material at least from earlier works. It tells the story of a small town girl whose GBF kills himself, unable to cope with the life of the only gay in the middle American village. As she herself flees her oppressive life, she finds herself dragged into a twisted version of Wonderland which borders on the Shakespearean Forest of Arden, and where a young prince has been displaced by creatures out of nightmares; quite possibly her nightmares.

On the surface, Alys reads like an Alice in Wonderland/Midsummer Night's Dream crossover fanfic (I'm not judging, I've written far worse,) but it has plenty of its own ideas on the nature of dreaming which make the borrowed elements slip into place. It's a quick read as well, at only I don't know how many pages because Kindle has stolen that as a benchmark, but it isn't long. It purports to be part of the Terra Mirum Chronicles, of which there are no other parts as yet, but I'll certainly keep an eye out for them.

Like both of the above, K. Eason's Enemy is an inventive take on a stock genre. Set in a fantasy realm dominated by a great empire, it follows a renegade, an exile and a soldier who stumble onto a planned coup d'etat. Its twists are that the empire is controlled by the matriarchal, once-subterranean Dvergir, and that some time in the recent past they conducted a purge to rid the empire not merely of religion, but of gods. The coup is planned not by humans, but by the most powerful of the old gods, who wants her power and position back. Set in a cold, harsh climate, the book has a cold, hard feel to it, especially in the depictions of a spirit world that is not exactly welcoming to mortal mystics who wander there.

The narrative strictly follows its three main protagonists, thief/physician/magician Snowdenaelikk, mysterious foreigner and probable shaman Veiko, and straight-laced legion scout Dekkla, as they struggle against conspiracy, murder, spirit quests, the terrors of unbridled god magic and the apparent impossibility of them ever trusting one another enough to truly work together against a lethally organised foe that the empire itself would rather not admit exists.

With this one, I went with the audiobook for convenience, voiced with a range of slightly random seeming accents by Faye Adele, and the switch was well worth it. The writing style is fairly unique, hopping out of third person for first person interjections, as if of the viewpoint character's thoughts - about 60% of which include the expletive chain 'fuck and damn' - and this is well served by an involved narrator.


Also set in a bleak, unwelcoming world, Ready Player One tells of a world in which most of humanity chooses to retreat from a shitty, decaying reality into the virtual world of an immersive, multiuser simulation called the Oasis. Created by a now deceased billionaire, the Oasis is a free-to-access haven from a world on the verge of collapse, and also holds the key to a potentially better world. On his death, the creator, James Halliday, set a challenge: The first person to find and complete a set of challenges and find an Easter egg hidden in the Oasis will inherit his vast fortune and control of the Oasis source code.

The narrator of the book is Wade Watts, an orphaned high school kid and Gunter (short for 'egg hunter',) who stumbles on the first key to the puzzle and finds himself embroiled in a literal life or death struggle against Innovative Online Industries, a soulless multinational corporation determined to take over and monetise the Oasis. Together with the other successful Gunters, whom he knows only through their online avatars (he himself goes by Parzival in the Oasis,) Wade must find a way to defeat IOI before the Oasis becomes a rich man's playground.

Celebrity supernerd and former maligned boy genius Wil Wheaton brings a certain mix of pathos and gravitas to the voice of Parzival (and I find it hard to hate a novel that drops a nod to Wolfram von Eschenbach,) and the book balances its mix of over the top action, 80s pop culture references and existential crisis well. It's an imperfect novel in that it never really confronts the question of whether a virtual world can be an adequate, or even healthy alternative to actual reality, but it's a pacy, fun thriller with just enough edge of peril.