The Girl with All the Gifts

"Not every gift is a blessing"

Melanie's world is very small. There is the cell, the corridor, and the classroom. Sergeant and his people move her from place to place in a chair with straps. Saturday and Sunday have no lessons, and on Sunday the children are fed and showered. She thinks that she would like to leave this word one day, but it might just be that she is wrong.

The Girl with All the Gifts represents Mike Carey's move into 'grown up' writing. It's not his first novel, but the switch to initials distances this book from his others, asserting a different authorial identity. His past work is mostly in comics and paranormal adventure; The Girl with All the Gifts is a grim, post-apocalyptic road novel about a small group of survivors crossing a hostile Britain.

The bulk of the novel is made up of the interactions of five self-loathing characters in the claustrophobic setting of a trek across enemy country, and the evolution of the relationships between them. None of the characters are particularly likable, but the combination has a kind of alchemy that makes them work as a unit where they would not as lone protagonists. It's not a fun book, but it is effecting and it manages to break new ground despite belonging to a popular subgenre (which I won't specify for the sake of spoilers).

The Girl with All the Gifts is well worth a read, but it is pretty grim and is pretty rough on its child characters.

Redshirts

The Universal Union's flagship Intrepid is the most prestigious posting for the young officers of 'Dub U', and the most dangerous. Every mission seems to result in the death of at least one junior crewmember, and the old hands all duck out when the senior staff come looking for someone to add to the away team. Could a ship really be this unlucky? Could the amazingly handsome Lieutenant Karensky really survive so much punishment? And why is it that backstory seems to pop into people's heads as if it had always been there?

John Scalzi's Redshirts kicks off as a sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead for Star Trek, with a clear division between the scenes which are just the junior crew chatting and those where the senior crew drag the focus back onto them (mostly in the form of a change in the occurence of swearing and sexual references from 'lots' to 'none'). It then pushes into its own territory as Ensign Andy Dahl tries to escape the predestined fate of all short-arc supporting characters via a rogue mission to exploit the bad time travel mechanics of the Narrative and stop the deaths at their source: the basic cable show The Chronicles of the Intrepid.

Redshirts is not a new idea - within the text itself Scalzi openly refers to half a dozen implementations of the 'characters talk to their creator' concept, and people have been making jokes about red shirts for as long as I've been alive - but the central characters are lively and entertaining, and the bafflement of the various officers as the Narrative spotlight comes and goes is entertaining, as well as really rather creepy.

Once the main narrative is exhausted, Scalzi does go off the boil a little, however, and apparently needing some extra pages to make contract adds three codas, each one following one of the 'real world' characters. They're not bad in themselves, but they feel extraneous (which is, I suppose, why they're codas), and more like the author playing around with alternative approaches to his concept than like they are truly related to the main story.

Ancillary Justice

Breq has a mission. Once she was a soldier, she was many soldiers, and the ship that carried them; now she is but a single body, a single killer with a singular grudge. She is seeking a weapon, and a way to reach its target, but she may not be as single-minded as she believes.

Ancillary Justice is the debut novel by author Ann Leckie, and the first volume in a space opera trilogy set in the galactic empire of the the Radch. The Radch is a super-culture, which is reaching the end of several thousand years of continual expansion across occupied human space. Their military forces are unparalleled, both their AI-driven warships and their ancillary armies, the bodies of conquered peoples slaved to the control of the same AIs. Breq was once an ancillary of the AI Justice of Toren, but is now the only remaining part of the distributed consciousness, following the betrayal and destruction of the ship herself.

The first high-concept challenge for Leckie to get past is therefore that of convincingly representing the memories of the Justice of Toren as those of a multifaceted being, and this she manages quite well. Where she is slightly less successful is in establishing the distinctions between the facets of her personality, but although there is a little more tell than show in this area, it is not actually a failure. All of this - together with a distinctive SF universe - would be impressive on its own, but this is not the book's only conceit.

The language of the Radchaai is ungendered, and as a result Breq, as first person narrator, simply refers to everyone as she, whether they are male or female (in fact, many characters, including Breq herself, are never clearly established as either sex). The ungendered language itself is not extraordinary, but simply by referring to every character in the book as she (save when a few supporting characters are speaking some other language), Leckie challenges conventional assumptions and forces the reader to look at the characters without one of the standard props.

The story is both a good story, and makes use of the high-concept aspects of the story. The multiple nature, not only of the Justice of Toren and of the Emperor of the Radch, is at the core of the narrative. The nature of war and humanity are also explored, along with some - fairly broad - commentary on prejudice and privilege, although the latter is not the most effective part of the book.

Ancillary Justice is well worth a read, and I will be keeping an eye out for part two.

Red Seas Under Red Skies

The second book in the Gentlemen Bastards series sees Locke and Jean caught mid-game by old enemies and delivered into the power of the military governor of a merchant state, and the action - once more consisting of a series of increasingly large gambles and deceptions - is transferred from the Elderglass towers of Camorr to the witchwood hull of a pirate ship and the terrace merchant city of Tal Verrar, where the Gnetlemen Bastards still plan to pull off their magnum opus, and at the same time remind the great and the good that however big you are, no-one fucks over a Camorri and walks away from it.

More even than in The Lies of Locke Lamora, the strength of Red Seas Under Red Skies lies in its characters. Jean has far more voice in this volume, and whereas Lies was about 90% Locke, the split here is roughly even. This is in part because the big, dramatic character moments fall to Jean, although that is not to say that Locke gets no growth.

Red Seas Under Red Skies is a fine follow-up to The Lies of Locke Lamora. By received wisdom, sequels need to get bigger, get smarter or get more personal, and this one definitely gets bigger, opening up the canvas as well as having the Bastards take on two of the most powerful men in their region for profit and vengeance.

The Throne of Fire and Scrivener's Moon

About two or three months ago, the library in Littleport reopened. We took Arya along, and I renewed my library card and picked up a couple of books; or I tried to. Actually, what happened was that my card had been unused for so long they wanted to see my passport. I was busy, so I said I'd come back, leaving the books with them.

A month later they emailed to say that the books which were sitting on their shelf were overdue.

When I popped in, they didn't care about my passport, gave me my new card and checked the books out for two months, since they're closed again now for roof repairs.

The first of the two books was The Throne of Fire, second volume in the Kane Chronicles, by Rick 'Percy Jackson' Riordan. Despite the slightly feeble film effort, I remain an adamant fan of Percy Jackson and of Riordan's writing. In the Kane Chronicles he does for Egyptian mythology pretty much what he did for Greek and Roman myth in his other books, but with a twist. Carter Kane and his sister Sadie aren't the children of gods, but magicians of the House of Life, an ancient order dating back to Dynastic Egypt. They are capable of great feats of magic on their own, but against the teachings of the House they study the path of the Gods, a magical practice which allows them to call on the power of the Gods directly, and which their parents and their uncle believe to be necessary to save the world from Apophis, the ultimate expression of evil and chaos.

The Throne of Fire gives Carter and Sadie a bit of a power downgrade (in the first book, The Red Pyramid they channeled the power of Horus and Isis directly, but by this point have decided this is too dangerous. They also, however, have students, and crushes, which alternately help and hinder as the siblings set out to raise the Sun God Ra from his sleep of millions of years (that's a technical Egyptian term, not a literal length of time).

I personally find the Kanes a little more stock than Percy Jackson, as characters, although it might just be a result of Riordan's attempts to express Sadie's British habits to a US teen audience. I do enjoy his narrative mechanism of having Carter and Sadie narrate separate and occasionally overlapping segments. The stories themselves are good and the mythology, as in the Percy Jackson books, both well researched and interestingly interpreted. The nods to the Olympian series - Egyptian magicians, for reasons unspecified, avoid New York, the home of the Olympian Gods - are a nice touch, although with Norse Gods dropping into Boston next year, it's a wonder there is any room for humans on the East Coast.

Scrivener's Moon, the latest entry in Philip Reeve's Fever Crumb series, which are in turn a prequel to the Mortal Engines Quartet, is about as bleak as its pedigree would suggest, mixing black humour and sly nods to the world that once was with dramatic and brutal action sequences. It introduces mammoths to the world of Mortal Engines, and also features a rarity in children's literature as Fever Crumb begins to question her sexuality.

It's a cracking, if rather bloody, adventure story, and while much of it is bleak and the outcome of the climactic battle not in doubt (such is the nature of prequels), the final scenes are actually some of the most hopeful in the sequence, outside of the epilogue to A Darkling Plain. I would still recommend Reeve's Larklight trilogy as a better starting point for younger readers, but this is solid fare for teenage adventure fans.

The Lies of Locke Lamora

Camorr is a city on the make, an urban sprawl squatting ostentatiously in the remnants of an ancient and alien civilisation, where power is shared between a corrupt Duke and an all-powerful crime lord. The rich are rich, the poor are poor, and a secret pact maintains the status quo and binds all parties to keep to their own. All, except for the Gentlemen Bastards.

Scott Lynch's debut novel reads like The Hustle meets a prequel to Gormenghast, set before the latter's precursors completely decayed, and written before Mervyn Peake went completely bugnuts. It's a caper novel set in a grim fantastic world of alien glass and sorcery, featuring a band of rogues who survive - when they do - through an alchemical mixture of competence, luck, and balls-to-the-walls audacity.

It's not a deep novel with a lot to say about the human condition, but it doesn't try to be. It's a layered story peopled by entertaining characters, with enough complexity to make things interesting, but not so much that you need a diagram to follow it. It does something a bit different with its core concepts, and has a lot of fun about it, even if it gets a bit grim in places.

If I hadn't picked them up as an omnibus, I would definitely look at getting the next book in the series, Red Seas Under Red Skies, but as I did I don't have to.

Comic Book Adaptation - Not Doing, but Falling

A post on my movie blog with relevance to comic books.

Not Doing, but Falling