Reading Roundup - February 2020

New Novels

At Childhood's End, Sophie Aldred
It has been years since Ace travelled with the Doctor. Now she goes by her real name and runs the philanthropic empire A Charitable Earth and keeps watch over the world in the absence of UNIT and Torchwood. When young people begin to be abducted, the trail leads Dorothy McShane to a hidden spaceship in lunar orbit, where she meets Yaz, Ryan, Graham, and the Doctor, who is now a woman, and looks younger than Ace. Can they overcome past distrust and work together to learn what links these events to Ace's past, and stop both the campaign of abductions and a relentless interstellar crusade.

The continuing story of Ace, as both written and read by the original Ace, Sophie Aldred, was an irresistable draw to me, and I was not disappointed. It's not the highest literature, and there are a couple of errors which should have been fixed either in editing or direction, suggesting that production was a little rushed. Overall, however, this is a cracking return for one of my favourite companions, without selling the current crop short, and confronts the sometimes manipulative nature of the relationship between Ace and the Doctor through the lens of an older, wiser Dorothy and the Doctor's newer, more open incarnation.

Aldred has her own character down, and does a fair job with the new bunch, both in writing and performance. I could complain that Dorothy's relationships post-series seem to have gone in a disappointingly hetero direction, and indeed I just did, but then Ace's sexuality was always a matter of interpretation. It's good to hear from an older Ace, even if for me - as a Big Finish fan - her younger incarnation is still going strong, and if this isn't a perfect work, it doesn't offend.

Re-Reads

The War of the Worlds, HG Wells
In the last years of the 19th century, an invasion force lands in England, carried by interplanetary missiles launched from the surface of the planet Mars. As the Martians stride forth in their terrible machines, and bring their superior weaponry to bear against the unprepared defences of Earth, the ordinary (upper middle class) folk of England are pushed to the limits of their own humanity.

HG Wells was one of the visionaries of early science fiction, and if his science wasn't up to Verne's exacting standards, his fiction was more gripping, and never involved three page descriptions of fish. The War of the Worlds was not only one of his finest works, but one that has provided a template for alien invasion narratives ever since. It's hard to think how it would have been received by a British middle class secure in their own power, this narrative of a quintessential English gentleman reduced to punching out a clergyman and contemplating the ultimate capitulation of suicide by Martian.

I revisited this novel as part of a collection of Wells' SF released by Audible. The War of the Worlds is read in this collection by David Tennant, who of course puts in a sterling performance.

The First Men in the Moon, HG Wells
During a sabbatical, failed entrepreneur Mr Bedford falls in with the eccentric scientist Cavor. Learning of the latter's work on a remarkable anti-gravity material dubbed 'Cavorite', Bedford is immediately gripped by the commercial and industrial possibilities, and throws himself into assisting the inventor, first in processing the material, and then in using it to construct a sphere designed to travel to the Moon. Here, the two men discover an insectoid race that they dub the Selenites. They are captured, but escape, although only Bedford is able to reach the sphere and return to Earth. Over time, he receives a series of messages from Cavor, describing the society of the Selenites, their physically differentiated castes, and their massive-brained leader, the Grand Lunar.

The First Men in the Moon was one of the Wells novels most closely paralleled by one written by his near-contemporary Jules Verne, and was cited by Verne in an attack on Wells' science (poo-pooing the invention of an anti-gravity substance in comparison to his own more solidly scientific 'giant cannon' lunar launch.)  It is less about the moon or space travel, and more about the callowness of the Empire spirit, with the alliance of Bedford's shallow commercialism and Cavor's blind scientific curiosity combining to court continual disaster.

The Audible version is narrated by Alexander Vlahos, who brings out Bedford's ambition, superficiality and self-serving unreliability as a narrator brilliantly.

Audio Plays
Curse of the Crimson Throne
Ezren the wizard, Merisiel the rogue, Harsk the ranger and Valeros the warrior travel to Korvosa - a city existing under the shadows of an assassinated king and past rule by a dark empire, whose inheritors oppress the native populace - and in search of Merisiel's friend, Kyra. What they find is a queen, seeking power, surrounded by enablers and willing to embrace any darkness, any cruelty in order to achieve her aim of eternal life. Working with and against nobles and commoners, criminals and monsters, seers and priests, the four heroes must first determine what is right, and then see it through.

The third, and so far final, series of audio adventures based on the adventure paths of the Pathfinder RPG, is - for the most part - an urban conspiracy with fantasy monsters. It's been a rare, and unusually successful exercise in fantasy audio drama, which has typically struggled with the show, don't tell nature of audio and its intersection with the monsters and magic of the genre. It also confirms the previously hinted bisexual identification of one of the iconic Pathfinder characters, and I am definitely here for increased representation in RPGs.

The Liberator Chronicles, Volume 1
Vila and Avon infiltrate a Federation research base, with Vila posing as a scientist and Avon as an advanced android. Their goal is to steal a Federation android prototype, but even if Avon can pass as a robot, can he successfully convince the scientists that he is a robot that can pass as human.

Vila wakes on the Liberator, his memory badly fragmented. His only companion is the voice of an Auron scientist named Nyrron. What happened? Where are his companions? And who is Vila, really?

Blake infiltrates a mine producing Illusium, a uniquely adaptable mineral which could make the Federation unbeatable. The scientists are less cooperative than he might have hoped, but he has an unexpected ally: The relentless paranoia and backbiting of Federation politics.

Having acquired the Blake's 7 license, Big Finish produced a number full cast audio plays - beginning with Warship - but with an increasing part of the original cast either retired or dead, the bulk of their output in the range came in the form of the Liberator Chronicles, a series of augmented readings in the vein of the Companion Chronicles for the Doctor Who range. In this case, featuring original actors Paul Darrow, Michael Keating and Gareth Thomas (two thirds of whom have since passed.) Like Terrahawks, it's a bit of a nostalgia fest for me, although I came to the original series a little later in life.  The performances here are on point, and the stories the classic mix of SF and human drama, without the original's telltale white plimsoles.

New Comics
Giant Days, Volume 11
The end approaches - for everyone but medical student Susan - as the final year of university rolls by. The end of the year sees Daisy stumble into the role of cult recruiter for a Christmas village, Esther fighting the siren call of 'sure thing' Ed after her years of turbulent and unproductive romantic entanglements, while Ed travels to Australia to visit his girlfriend's family. Daisy struggles with the continuing presence of her ex-girlfriend, and Susan with the looming spectre of domesticity in her life with McGraw.

Once again, not much to say about this volume that I haven't said about the others. I still hope that Esther and Ed don't end up together, since it would reinforce a fairly negative narrative track, although if I'm honest I trust Allison to do whatever he does well.

As with By Night, it's a bit odd to see Allison's style transplanted away from the North (in this case, to Australia, or some approximation thereof.)

Total read - 6
Female authors - 1
PoC authors - 0

Not a great showing on expanding my horizons this month then, but it's early days.

Reading Roundup - January 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re-reads

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading Roundup - 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 - May and June

Another twofer, covering May and June.

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

Except that we haven't; not really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very simple. Good stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Audio Plays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Re-reads

Peter Pan
All children grow up, except one.

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

Old stuff. It's got challenges.

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

Reading Roundup - January 2019

Happy New Year!

In 2018, I managed a fairly respectable bit of reading/listening. I got through thirty-one new(1) novels – although only one of them fit the old Found Horizons challenge, or I guess two if I can still count Soviet-era SF – and twelve new graphic novels, re-read thirteen novels, listened to nine substantial new audio plays, five regular or binged podcasts, and re-read an additional six novels with my daughter, Arya. Let’s see how we can do in 2019.

A Glimmer of Hope, by Steve McHugh(2)

We begin with the first volume of The Chronicles of Avalon, in which a young woman stumbles on the existence of a secret world of magical beings and strange powers, discovering a power of her own that she must learn to harness, before those who would see her harmed catch up with her, or the source of those powers consumes her.

This is one of a number of books that I’ve bought on Audible having picked up the Kindle version as part of my Prime subscription, and it’s not one that I would have gone for at price, but honestly it isn’t terrible. Layla Cassidy may be a little more badass than is entirely credible in a hard-working metallurgy student, but the absence of any chosen oneness is refreshing, as is the aversion of such tropes as love triangles or douchebag soulmates. Layla doesn’t fall swooningly in love with a dreamy-eyed protector who alternates between lovey-dovey and passive aggressive, and honestly it’s depressing that this absence is a virtue instead of a given. McHugh’s world is interesting, although it’s occasionally apparent that he’s operating in a setting established in someone else’s story, usually when someone goes on about how cool an apparently minor character is. This last is a symptom of the writing style, which is far more functional than sophisticated (he said, aware that it makes him sound like a bit of a pseud, but there it is.)

As a side note, it’s kind of weird to see a series like this set in England. There’s something odd about fantasy violence set in one’s own country, less because I genuinely think ogre massacres would go unnoticed in Wisconsin than because, on a subconscious level, my brain considers ‘the USA’ to be on the same ontological level as Middle Earth.

Terrahawks – Vol. 1 (audio play)

Big Finish continue their bid to license my entire childhood with the first volume of their continuation of the Gerry Anderson series Terrahawks. Never as famous as Thunderbirds, this was nonetheless my first experience of the Anderson canon, featuring a secret organisation dedicated to defending Earth against the threat of intergalactic warlord Queen Zelda. In retrospect, a lot of things about it don’t make a lot of sense - Earth’s entire defence force is five people, as many spaceships and an indeterminate number of Zeroid combat robots, but then the entire invasion force of an intergalactic conqueror consists of half a dozen ships, the Queen and her immediate family, and an indeterminate number of Cube combat robots – but I always loved it, and Big Finish do it proud. Original cast members Jeremy Hitchen, Denise Bryer and Robbie Stevens return (with Beth Chalmers filling in for the late Anne Ridler and Hitchen taking over Zeroid commander Sergeant-Major Zero from the retired(3) Windsor Davies,) which together with authentic early-80s sound effects and the original theme music recreates the feel of my impressionable youth in a hard-to-fail fashion. Also present and correct is the somewhat tongue-in-cheek style, satire and vaguely ludicrous scenarios of the original, although that does not leave the series without its more powerful moments, such as in an episode where Zelda targets Tiger Ninestein’s clones, killing several and forcing another to choose between his own life and the protection of the Earth.

The Return of the King, by JRR Tolkien (re-read)

Wrapping up my re-read of The Lord of the Rings(4), I went through The Return of the King this month. There’s a lot of stuff in this one I’d forgotten or, perhaps, skimmed through, most of which amplifies how much Jackson shrunk Middle Earth in his adaptation, so that Faramir’s defence of Osgiliath was a short charge with a few dozen knights and the Ride of the Rohirrim a few nights gallop rather than an extended trek through the forest of the Woses. Also, remember Imrahil? This also has some of the worst of Tolkien’s unconscious racism, with Haradrim troops including ‘huge black men like trolls, with red mouths and white eyes.’ Seriously, JRR, I’m trying to think well of you, but there’s only so much I can do with that, and with your ‘swarthy, slant eyed’ outsiders invading the peace of the Shire in the final part of the book. The Scouring of the Shire is another episode which I’d blanked a lot from, which is a shame because it’s where Merry and Pippin hit their stride as leaders, and the entirety of Sam’s romance with Rose Cotton plays out.

So, yeah… JRR Tolkien, a writer of his time, but also the creator of so many of the tropes which so dominated a century of fantasy writing that they now seem like clichés. Despite the jading of years, however, those tropes do not seem stale here. Tolkien was not a great writer, at least in terms of the pure quality of his prose, but his line of epic descriptive and declamation has a timeless quality that serves very well here. Again, for all his hatred of allegory, it can’t be ignored that the closing chapters of The Return of the King are about soldiers coming back from war to find themselves and their home both changed in ways that are not always compatible. Sam, Merry and Pippin may come home with skills that not only allow them to overthrow Saruman and his ruffians, but to play key roles in the restoration and advancement of the Shire, but Frodo only comes back broken, unable to participate in the lifestyle he has protected.

A Conspiracy of Alchemists, by Liesel Schwarz

Elle Chance is an adventurous airship courier; a daring pilot, determined to make her own way in the world. Don’t worry, though; this isn’t actually important to the plot or anything. Recommended by her booker, Patrice, she takes a job for the mysterious Hugh Marsh, but her package is stolen by Alchemists, who are intent on remaking the world to their own ends. Marsh is a Warlock, somewhat immortal and sworn to oppose the Alchemists, and Elle might be the one thing that both the Warlocks and the Alchemists need to achieve their goals.

Despite a promising set-up, A conspiracy of Alchemists suffers from a contrived plot and a highly unconvincing romance based, as ever, on the magnetic appeal of an authoritarian douchebag who suddenly starts treating the female lead with the bare minimum of common courtesy. Or maybe it’s the title. Are women in Steampunk alternate-Victorian England still suckers for a title? Also, what is ‘spark’, the power source for the Steampunk revolution, if it isn’t – and they say it isn’t – magic? There’s a balance in these things between ‘show, don’t tell’ and ‘just go with it,’ and this novel leans too much towards ‘just go with it.’ I’m not a fan of the world set-up that magic in the light world (as opposed to the shadow world of faeries and vampires) all originates with a female Oracle who is the gilded prisoner of the men who use her magic, but while she may swoon a little too easily in the direction of our sexy, shirtless warlock-in-particular, Elle certainly has no truck with this scenario. I do feel that ‘go home and get married’ is a sub-optimal way of avoiding this fate – Marsh actually talks about going into hiding mere pages before it turns out that they have just gone home – but there it is.

Also, there’s just not enough of Lucretia the sassy vampire. She was a rare breath of Austen and I missed her after she left to winter in Castle Dracula(5).

The Half-Blood Prince, by JK Rowling (re-read with Arya)

As we approach a year since I started re-reading Harry Potter with my daughter, we’re coming into the home straight with the end of The Half-Blood Prince(6). Harry now knows that it is his destiny, because of Voldemort’s attempt to kill him, to either destroy the Dark Lord or at last to be destroyed. Dumbledore sets out to teach him about Voldemort’s past, and to uncover to him the secrets of Voldemort’s immortality. Meanwhile, Harry’s feud with Professor Snape comes to a head, and the Order’s absolute trust in Dumbledore as their sole strategist sets them up for a crisis.

Bit of an odd fruit, this one. The build-up of Voldemort’s past is pretty good, and the black lake remains fairly horrible, but the teenage romance is… Man, I don’t know. I didn’t do much in the way of teenage romancing, so maybe it is like this. Who knows. Anyway, overall the book is good; I enjoyed it, and so did Arya, although what she takes in about the books is a strange and curious business. She can identify Dolores Umbridge from a brief description in The Deathly Hallows, but despite her excitement at the Quidditch scenes was completely unable to recall even that Harry is the Gryffindor Seeker, let alone what any of the other positions are.

Cry Fox, by Ben Aaronovich (graphic novel)

Completing a trifecta of Rivers of London graphic novels – thanks to my early-year birthday – Cry Fox is another single-case story, with Peter’s cousin Abigail caught up in a ransom kidnapping and then held, along with DS Sahra Guleed, to be part of a people hunt for diabolical dipshit landowners. It’s brief and focused. The fact that the two captured characters are women has… unfortunate implications, but they retain agency throughout and are never damseled.

While the title mostly relates to the fox-hunting aristos, the story also involves Abigail's contacts among the talking foxes of London and environs (although this doesn't explain them any more than any of the novels that they have appeared in.) I'm rapidly becoming more interested in Abigail's corner of the weird world than Peter's, and that's a boost for this story for me.

(1) New to me.

(2) New year, new format!

(3) At time of recording; he passed this January.

(4) I’ll probably leave The Hobbit to read with Arya, but might take a swing at The Silmarillion some time.

(5) No, really.

(6) Apparently, I never noted the end of The Order of the Phoenix, but we did.