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.

Reading Roundup - September 2016

Ink and Bone by Rachel Caine is a steampunky alchemical fantasy, set in a world in which the dominant global power is the Great Library of Alexandria. Popular technology is largely Victorian, while the great institutions of the world - most notably the Library itself - have access to high speed trains and sophisticated automata, much of it based on the Library's monopoly on the practice of Alchemy. The Library also seeks to assert ownership over all original works, allowing access to books through blanks, alchemical Kindles able to download any book from the Library through their pages.

Jess Brightwell is a London lad, born into a family of book smugglers who deal in rare original manuscripts. Lacking the mercenary zeal for the business, his father buys him a place on the Library's apprentice course, hoping to place a family member in a position of advantage. Along with his cohort and under the firm hand of Scholar Wolfe, he undergoes the harsh and competitive process of training and selection, but before graduation, the pupils and their teacher are all plunged into a life and death struggle, not just against those who would destroy the Library's power, but against the Library itself.

Subject of many rave reviews, Ink and Bone has a slow start, and suffers somewhat from placing its narrative focus on Jess, whose vacillation makes him perhaps understandable, but also one of the less compelling and likable of the students. In addition, one of the major twists at the end of the book is not only cruel, but predictable, and as much as I hoped it might be averted, cast something of a pall over the pacier second half of the story. I'm also not sure how I felt about the seeming assertion that burning books is better than letting the Library monopolise them. Still, I might go for the next in the sequence, and Ben Allen provides a lively narration.

Book Two of Charlie Fletcher's Oversight series, The Paradox, returns us to a London in the care of the Free Company of the London Oversight, the group who police the boundary between the mundane and the magical like Pilgrim's heavily-armed younger brothers and sisters. Despite the recent recruitment of Charlie Piefinch and Lucy Harker, the Oversight is still in a parlous state, especially with Jack Sharpe and Sara Falk still lost in the mirrors. As the two young recruits enter training, Sharpe and Falk seek for each other, avoid the sinister John Dee and the hungry wights of the mirror realms, and eventually come upon the secret behind the near-destruction of the Oversight. Meanwhile, other forces are moving, other Free Companies and freelancers are hunting. The Sluagh are looking for a way to be free of the ancient bane of iron, the Citizen schemes, and the House of Templebane is seeking its revenge.

The Paradox suffer a bit from middle volume sag, and a lot of its time is spent moving from beginning to end, rather than doing its own thing. Lucy Harker also comes off badly, her understandable reluctance to trust or be tied down unfortunately mutating into an unlikable selfish streak. The other characters are more balanced between strengths and flaws, and perhaps the most interesting theme of the book is raised by the Sluagh chieftain who tells the Smith that the Oversight is supposed to protect the border, but only ever do so in one direction, allowing the mundane to bind the old world in iron. This is never really followed up, but hopefully will be returned to in book 3.

Charlie Fletcher is not as good a reader as Simon Prebble, but neither is he as bad as many Audible reviews make out.

My final September book - I've been getting back into audio plays in a big way - is The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu, one of the leading works of the modern Chinese SF scene. Set through the Cultural Revolution, it is an alien invasion story in which no aliens actually invade, instead somehow manipulating the universe in such a way as to convince scientists that physics does not work, driving several to suicide and aiming to paralyse human progress in preparation for the actual invasion in about four hundred years time.

Translator Ken Liu and narrator Luke Daniels convert the text into one redolent with familiar idiom, and while the details of the Cultural Revolution may be surprising to western readers/listeners, as they were to me, the production as a whole eschews the lure of oriental exoticism and lets the speculative fiction speak for itself. As with The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet there is a section which takes the narrative viewpoint away to the alien world of Trisolaris which, for my money, is the weakest part of the book. I would have liked to have seen more of that background explored through the Three Body game, but I kind of understand the choice. It's definitely worth a read, and quite different to anything else I've read.

Reading Roundup - April-June 2016

It's time for another reading roundup, as I quickly review the books I've read or listened to lately.

Part 2 of Tad Williams' epic 'Sorrow, Memory and Thorn' trilogy, Stone of Farewell, was kind of jarring for me as a kid, shifting book 1's child-principals - especially Simon and Miriamele - into young adult mode with what seems almost indecent suddenness, and there's a fair degree of the sex given that my impression of Book 1 was that they were about thirteen. In retrospect, they're older, it's just that they're both kind of spoiled and childish teenagers in their own way in The Dragonbone Chair, while here they are forced to grow up fast. There's a lot in here that is pretty stock quest fantasy, but it did a lot to at least reshape the mould at the time. I remember the third book - To Green Angel Tower - receiving one of the first favourable newspaper reviews I'd ever seen of a work of fantasy. The greatest strength of the book is also one I think I failed to appreciate as a young reader, to whit the depiction of a mundane and reasonable feudal empire being overtaken by magic, myth and insanity. It's interesting from a more mature perspective to see the degree of genre-blindness in characters who belong in a respectable mediaeval chronicle when not being forced to deal with bloody elves.

Like The Dragonbone Chair, this was read by Audible regular Andrew Wincott with characteristic gravitas.

China Mieville's Perdido Street Station is a gritty, thaumpunk scientific romance and a sprawling, Gormenghastly epic of intertwining plot threads and prose that occasionally forays into sweeping and ornate forms worthy of a star or two from Stella Gibbons. In narrative scope it is somewhat akin to Stone of Farewell, although set in a more confined geography and far, far more aggressively opposed to any sense of conventional fantasy. Mieville creates a dense and layered world of ancient mysteries, steampunk technology and rigorously analysed magic, of part-animal humanoids akin to the images of Egyptian gods and half-machine 'remades', of corrupt civil servants and exotically-armed murder-hobos hell-bent on 'gold and experience'. Into a city on the brink of either revolution or eternal tyranny comes a horrifying apex predator, capable of overwhelming the most powerful of opponents, and petty graft, scientific curiosity and dodgy associations combine to turn a city on its head and the life of one particular scientist and his friends inside out.

This audiobook is excellently read by prolific narrator Jonathan Oliver. Increasingly I find the Audible stable of readers to be a boon; not that I choose by reader, but with a few notable exceptions that I don't get on with, it does tend to mean they'll have someone good to do it.

Un Lun Dun is probably a less technically excellent example of Mieville's craft than Perdido Street Station, and having been written with a much younger readership in mind notably lacks much of the sex, violence and sheer unpleasantness of the earlier book. It begins as a (relatively) straightforward tale of two girls, one special and the other not so special. Zanna is the Shawzy, the prophecied hero of UnLondun who will save the abcity from the depredations of the Smog. Deeba is her sidekick; possibly the clever one, or the funny one, no-one is that bothered, at least until the Shwazy spectacularly fails to save the day. Faced with corrupt officials, nefarious schemes and the single-minded faith of most UnLonduners in obvious heroes, Deeba sets out to convince a city that they are wrong before her own life forgets her.

In its way, Un Lun Dun is as ground-breaking as Perdido Street Station, challenging the hell out of the preconceptions of young adult quest fiction with its offbeat, technofantastical secondary world, failed prophecy and 'wrong' hero. The reading by Karen Cass is overall good, although there is just something in the performance that can't seem to close a chapter.

Childhood's End was pretty groundbreaking at the time, although it's been long enough that it no longer feels it.

I read Arthur C. Clarke's classic tale of quiet invasion and parapsychological evolution in the wake of the recent TV adaptation, which sought to focus on fewer characters for clarity, and succeeded mostly in making the whole thing vastly more sensational by compressing the expansive timeline of the novel to about twenty years. I had previously only read the short story 'Guardian Angel', on which the first part of the novel is based.

It's hard to come at the novel these days without noticing how old-fashioned, even reactionary the future it envisions is. One of the characters is essentially polyamorous, but with no indication that his wife - whose life even in the Golden Age of mankind is as a mother and housewife - wishes for anything more than a stable marriage. The absence of mobile phones is always telling (see also Doomsday Book below) and the horror of the anti-Overlord characters that in the 'Golden Age' there are dozens of channels and people watch up to three hours of television per day makes me blush.

Greg Wagland's reading is good, but ultimately there is no getting away from the fact that this is a novel of its era. In many ways, the most fascinating part in this day and age is the foreword, featuring the ageing Clarke's reflections on his early work and assumptions.

Demigods and Magicians collects the three short stories which cross over between Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson/Heroes of Olympus and Kane Chronicles settings (which also take place in the same world as the Gods of Asgard series, because Riordan is not a man afraid to ask for the plural of pantheon.)

I've already read (and reviewed) 'The Son of Sobek' and 'The Staff of Serapis'. 'The Crown of Ptolemy' wraps up the crossover with the insane, less-dead-than-he-ought-to-be magician Setne attempting to consume the power of all gods and become himself a singular, all-powerful deity. With his mix of Egyptian and Greek magic granting him the ability to consume any power thrown at him from either pantheon, it is up to our heroes - Percy and Annabeth, and Sadie and Carter Kane - to find a way to cross the streams of their respective powers and thwart him.

I read this one the old fashioned way, and from the library no less. Kicking it old school.

'The Crown of Ptolemy' feeds naturally into the beginning of Riordan's new series, 'The Trials of Apollo'. In The Hidden Oracle the Sun God falls, powerless and mortal, into the heart of New York and becomes the slave of feral demigod Meg. As he struggles to reach the relative safety of Camp Half-Blood and to understand why his father has opted to take away not only his divine powers, but his strength, looks, clear-skin and washboard abs, he becomes caught up the attempt of another group of mortals to gain divinity, this time by controlling all of the world's Oracles and thus fate itself. While seemingly less threatening than Titans or Giants, these new enemies have a power and menace all their own, and may in fact have manipulated all of the preceding events in order to facilitate their own selfish designs.

Robbie Daymond is another good reader, and as with previous Riordan novels helps me to get into the correct American milieu for the writing.

While I've been on my current Riordan kick, I also looked to the library for Percy Jackson and the Greek Gods and Percy Jackson and the Greek Heroes. These are secondary works in which Percy narrates the stories of classical mythology in all their gruesome glory and his characteristic irreverent manner. More than just a money-making spinoff, they form a useful pair of companion volumes for a series which gets pretty damned into it sometimes on its mythology, and a decent primer on the canon for anyone old enough to recognise Percy's anachronistic insertions for what they are. Importantly, they don't romanticise the material in the way that a lot of authors do when recounting these much loved tales of bloodshed, parricide, infanticide, patriarchal attitudes, questionably consensual relations and gruesome mutilation.

A modern time travel classic, Connie Willis' Doomsday Book is set in a near-future Oxford where the Faculty of History operates an extensive time travel programme, sending historians to periods considered 'safe' in order to conduct field research. Taking advantage of the absence of the Head of History, Mediaeval plan to send a researcher to the middle ages for the first time, a period previously rated unsafe. Unfortunately, the question of whether or not she is safe in the fourteenth century soon pales as a terrible influenza epidemic sweeps the city, starting with the technician who operated the 'drop'.

Doomsday Book is notable for featuring a female time traveler, and is widely hailed as a classic of the genre. This historical sections are extremely well done, and the theory of time travel is well-developed enough for in-universe discussion, without being precise enough for strict debunking. On the other hand, the near-futurism is damned strange. Despite time travel and the near-elimination of disease, it's very much the 1990s still, with most if not all of the problems in the modern parts of the plot down to the absence of mobile phones, email and virtual networking. It is also quite noticeably an outsider's - specifically an American's - Oxford, with colleges operating their own academic facilities and staff, and archaeological research conflated with history (rather than operating in a separate academic division.) 

While dramatically apt, Jenny Sterlin's narration is perhaps a little too dry for the book's humour, mostly coming into its own in the more somber late sections of the novel.

Finally for this roundup, The Ables is a novel about preteen disabled superheroes learning to overcome their disabilities through cooperation and taking on a messianic cult. It is also, and this has not hurt the sales figures at all, written by Jeremy Scott, the voice of the popular Cinema Sins YouTube videos. The audiobook is also read by Scott, and that was a fascinating experience, as you can almost hear him learning to narrate as the book goes on. It's subdivided into - I think from memory - four books, and continuity references make me suspect it was written with some intent to be released serially as four separate parts. Throughout part one the reading is in the same quickfire delivery as Cinema Sins; so much so that I expected a ding at the end of every sentence. Further on, however, Scott's storytelling style became more relaxed and naturalistic, bending more to the dramatic needs of the story.

The Ables is a great idea, and a good novel. It's not perfect, in part because Scott is not able to get entirely into the perspective of a blind boy (I think; hell if I know what a blind boy's actual perspective is.) It also fails the Bechdel test hard, and I'm in two minds about that. On the one hand, d'uh; on the other, it's a book about a twelve year old boy, and twelve is often a very gender divided time. On the gripping hand, it's a book about a twelve year old boy with superpowers, and if we can get behind supergeniuses and telekinetics, we can surely manage to imagine a world in which one or more girls can be part of the gang without fear of an uncontrollable cootie epidemic.

Still, all in all it's not a bad book, and an impressive first effort for someone whose comfort zone is pure snark.

The Aeronaut's Windlass

With the surface of the world a lethally hostile place, the civilised nations of humanity live in towering spires of imperishable stone while bold aeronauts ply the skies between them. Captain Grim, privateer of Spire Albion, is caught up in the machinations of an ambitious rival Spire when he is retained to transport a team of inexperienced young guards, a cat and a mad Etherialist in search of saboteurs. Unfortunately, war is just the tip of the iceberg, with a swarm of lethal surface monsters and a sinister rival Etherialist manipulating events while being manipulated herself by... something else.

I've read a few of Jim Butcher's Dresden Files. I quite liked them, but I hit them at the last wind of my paranormal mystery period and there just seemed to be so many of them. The Aeronaut's Windlass is the first book in a new series (like, super new; I had no idea how new and now I'll have to wait if I want to read the next one) so doesn't have the terrifying prospect of trying to catch up with a jillionty titles, which is an advantage. Loosely it's somewhere between actually steampunk and conventionally steampunk, with Spire Albion (Britain) on the brink of war with Spire Aurora (clearly Spain, but also a bit Napoleonic France) in a world of titanic towers and technomagic. Oh, and intelligent, insufferable cats.

There is a lot to like about The Aeronaut's Windlass. Butcher writes good action and has created a neat system of technomagic in the etheric crystals and Etherialists which power the plot. There's a satisfying self-contained plot and plenty of hints at the longer arc story. The aerial combat scenes in particular showed both a deep love of naval extravaganzas and a fair degree of thought as to the implications of taking such a battle to three dimensions. The cats are brilliantly written; insufferable bastards the lot of them, but very convincingly cat, especially in their diplomacy. On the downside, Butcher is a bit patchy on the subject of tea - I will accept a world where the same pot is used for heating and brewing, but the idea of anyone, especially the pseudo-British, putting cream in tea is just wrong - and I began to regret after the first quarter that I wasn't keeping a tally every time someone ground their teeth (I do know that it happened a lot.)

I've caught a few fairly so-so audiobook readings, but Euan Morton (you may know him as the male Sith inquisitor in SWtOR) did an excellent job with this one.

The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle

It is the height and heart of the Industrial Revolution, Victorian London, a city of iron and steam. Horatio Lyle, inventor, detective, special constable and unwilling dog lover, is the embodiment of the brave new world, and as such is called in by Lord Lincoln, aide to Her Majesty herself, when a cultural treasure is stolen. Aided by Thomas, a young gentleman with a connection to the case, and Tess, a girl whom he caught breaking into his house, and Tate, the canine who long ago insinuated himself into his home, Lyle will find his scientific rationality tested by confrontations with things that man was, perhaps, not strictly supposed to wot of.

A Victorian urban fantasy with elements of steampunk in Lyle's advanced use of roughly contemporary science, The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle certainly features and unusual cast of characters. Lyle is a skilled observer and inventor, but is physically weak and afraid of heights, while his more robust young cohorts lack social polish and education in the one case and experience of the real world in the other. The plot is a pretty breakneck affair, and there were points where I could have stood a bit of a breather, but I certainly never found it dragging.