Why did Michaele Jordan’s cat pick this book?
I have to admit that Blossom here is not much of a reader. But she loves this anthology because one of my stories is in it!
Photos of your felines (or whatever you’ve got!) resting on genre works are welcome. Send to mikeglyer (at) cs (dot) com
By Michaele Jordan: Friends, I usually write to tell you about a current book I’ve just read, or a current movie I’ve just seen. And I am writing now about a movie I’ve just seen. I watched it just last night. But it’s not current. It’s almost twenty years old. But trust me, this film is a delight – well worth the trouble of hunting it up in the archives.
As always, we start with the credits. Azur & Asmar: The Princes’ Quest is a 2006 animated fairytale/fantasy film, written and directed by Michel Ocelot and animated at Mac Guff Ligne, the Parisian animation and visual effects studio. It was Ocelot’s fourth feature, following Kirikou and the Sorceress, and his first use of 3D computer graphics, although he did not use them to produce lifelike imagery, but rather to enhance the texture and mood of a fairy tale.
It stars: Hiam Abbass as Jénane, Cyril Mourali as Azur and Rayan Mahjoub as young Azur, Karim M’Riba as Asmar, and Abdelsselem Ben Amar as young Asmar.
The story is simple. Azur and Asmar are raised as brothers by Jénane. But they’re not. Blond, blue-eyed Azur is the son of a nobleman, whom Jénane has been hired to care for. Dark-eyed Asmar is her son. But these petty distinctions make no difference to the happy trio. She raises them lovingly, and fills their days with tales of the beautiful Djinn-fairy, imprisoned in a palace and awaiting rescue. Both boys vow to rescue her. Neither reflects that they can’t both marry her.
But the idyll can’t last. When the boys reach adolescence, Azur’s father appears. His son no longer needs a nanny, and is sent to a private tutor. Jénane and Asmar are kicked out of the house.
It is years before they meet again. But Azur is still haunted by memories of the Djinn-fairy and goes to seek her. He starts by travelling to Jénane and Asmar’s homeland. Jénane has become a rich and successful merchant. Asmar has joined the Royal Guard.
Their old friendship cannot fully resume as Asmar is also haunted by memories of the Djinn-fairy, and both boys are still determined to find her and marry her. But they must work together to find her. And then . . . one of them can marry her, and some other happy ending must be found for the other.
Like I said, it’s a simple story. But it is entirely engaging – almost hypnotically so, in fact – due to the animation. I cannot stress enough how beautiful this movie is. You will not be able to take your eyes off it. Need a sandwich or a bathroom break? You will be hard pressed to claim it. You will carefully run it back a few minutes before pausing it, so that you do not miss a single frame. Sometimes you’ll pause it for no reason except to admire the picture. The beauty of it embraces and enhances the tale. I promise you, you want to see this!
By Michaele Jordan: The other day my husband and I were snuggled on the sofa, thumbing through the offerings on Netflix, and we alighted on The YinYang Master. We’d never heard of it, but the title plainly communicated a Chinese historical fantasy, so we clicked on it. And we LOVED it!
It is a 2021 Chinese film directed by Li Weiran and starring Chen Kun as Qingming and Chan William as Boya. It is based, I blush to admit, on a game called Onmyōji – which in turn is based on the novel series, Onmyōji by Japanese author Baku Yumemakura.
That series of novels must have been very impressive, judging by the wealth of films, tv series, games and anime (not to mention sequels to the novel) it generated. As I mentioned, the author is Japanese, and the book, along with some of the early films, is set in medieval Japan. So, naturally, the main characters, Abe no Seimei and Minamote no Hiromasa, are also Japanese. In fact, Seimei is an actual historic character.
Somehow, along the way (and I did not do enough research to determine exactly how or when), the story migrated to China, and the protagonists became Qingming and Boya. Despite the change of venue, they still proudly claimed to be derived from the novels. I really wanted to read one of those novels, but found them hard to track down.
Back to the movie. Qing Ming is (wrongfully) disgraced and expelled from the Yinyang Bureau – which guards a supernatural artifact known as the Scale Stone – and meets up with an Imperial officer, Boya, who has fallen under attack while escorting tribute to the Imperial City. The pair soon find themselves battling demons and trying to recover the Scale Stone, which was stolen and swallowed by a demon.
But not all demons are evil. A good part of this film’s charm is its gentle treatment of the demons, as well as the nuanced and perceptive presentation of its human characters. There is also plenty of action and magic as far as I was concerned, but . . .
There’s another, earlier Chinese film, The Yin-Yang Master: Dream of Eternity. It was also adapted from the Onmyōji series written by Baku Yumemakura. It was directed by Guo Jingming, and stars Chao Mark as Qingming and Deng Lun as Boya.
In it, a malevolent serpent demon was born from the desires of man. Four masters gathered together to trap the snake within the Imperial City, sealed within the body of the Empress. Much of the film contains imagery of the giant snake. There is more fighting in it, and gaudier special effects. And, judging by the internet chatter, a lot of fans preferred it. I thought the story was not as tight, or the characters as well developed as in the later movie, but I can’t argue with a fondness for martial action and gorgeous specials.
And besides… My favorite movie derived from the Onmyōji books is (drum roll, please!) Onmyōji, directed by Yôjirô Takita, and released in 2001. (The internet is now pushing it as Omnyoji: the YinYang Master, but neither the movie credits nor Wikipedia support that title.) This film was set in Japan, as was originally intended by the books. It stars Mansai Nomura as the clever wizard Abe no Seimei and Hideaki Itô as his friend, court noble and gifted musician Minamoto no Hiromasa. Also starring, we see Hiroyuki Sanada as the villain Douson and Kyōko Koizumi as the Lady Aone – whose tragic history underlies the whole movie.
There were not a lot of special effects in this one (it was made over 20 years ago) and yet the magic was wonderfully visualized without them. For instance, a large gourd — not unlike a watermelon – was found hanging from a pine tree. Or so we think. But it is not hanging from the pine tree; it is GROWING from the pine tree. Seimei plucks it down, and slices it open. Surprise! There’s a live snake inside. But more important than the special effects is the story, and it is engaging and well resolved.
There’s a sequel, Onmyoji 2, released in 2003 with the same stars, but I think it’s about time I let that particular ball drop. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend any of these films. You just have to like period costumes and magic to enjoy them.
(1) TOMLINSON CRITICIZES PENGUINCON FOR CAVING TO HIS CYBERSTALKERS. In “PenguiCon 2024 Postmortem or How Not to Handle Cyberstalking”, Patrick S. Tomlinson explains how he was disinvited from a convention – one he didn’t originally apply to present at, until he was contacted by the committee about a proposal submitted by a cyberstalker.
…Now we can fast forward to this year, specifically February. I didn’t apply to attend PenguiCon in 2023 because my wife and I were traveling internationally too close to the convention to make it work logistically. So, I was surprised and happy to receive an email from the person who’d invited me in 2022 asking about scheduling for 2024. The surprise quickly turned to confusion when they asked if I’d submitted a panel suggestion “Alien Crabs and Dragonpox: How STDs are depicted in SFF and why we need more sex-positive representation.”
Reader, I had not. I’m all for sex positivity, but no I didn’t want to run a panel on space herpes.
What had actually happened was a member of the stalking cult had impersonated me to abuse the convention’s unsecured panel suggestion form. I politely declined to run their panel but offered to do another presentation of my own choosing. My counteroffer was quickly accepted and a presentation “Why not Venus?” about terraforming our closest planetary neighbor was put on the official schedule. I booked my room and set to work researching, preparing, and practicing the presentation, an intermittent process which took a total of about two weeks.
Again, I need to reiterate the organizers of this convention were not only aware of the cult stalking us, but had previous experience identifying, confronting, and mitigating their criminal harassment to the benefit of all involved. I therefore approached the coming convention confident any stalker attacks would be properly wrangled, which is why what happened next caught me so completely off guard.
Two Mondays ago, just hours after putting the finishing touches on my presentation, the same person who had booked me was tasked by the PenguiCon board to inform me I’d been disinvited from the convention because the cult stalking my family had sufficiently harassed and threatened other attendees through social media and other vectors to the point I learned later a Guest of Honor was forced to withdraw out of concern for their safety….
I wanted to handle this privately, I really did. Both to try and salvage the relationships and to help everyone involved avoid embarrassment. But between the PenguiCon board ceasing all communication with me, and these libelous statements being made public by our stalkers as a result of poor OpSec on the part of at least one board member, I’ve been forced to present the facts and refute the false narrative being presented by both our stalkers AND the PenguiCon board itself, even if accidentally….
…I want to reiterate that all of this was a known issue that PenguiCon had prior experience with and had handled professionally and competently the last time around. Which is why I find the results and fallout from this year, which again I didn’t even sign up to appear at initially, so incomprehensible. I realize this means my chance of appearing at future PenguiCons now hover near absolute zero, and I’m genuinely upset about that. They have a great con with a unique blend of creators and builders from diverse disciplines that encourages conversation and cross pollination. And as someone who’s hand sold thousands of books, their co-op style bookstore for attending authors should be a model for conventions everywhere.
But for everything they do well, the way they handled cyberstalking, especially for a convention focused on sci-fi and tech, needs to be held out as an example of what not to do for other con runners and boards. Our situation is an extreme example, but when you’re working with guests who are quasi-public figures or even celebrities like authors, artists, and actors can be, you need awareness of the potential for cyberstalkers and have policies and procedures in place.
Policies which do not include victim-blaming their targets and rewarding their criminal behavior.
(2) TOMLINSON ON AGENT LESLIE VARNEY. Tomlinson today also wrote a thread on X.com — that starts here – criticizing literary agent Leslie Varney. It begins: “And now I have to deal with Leslie Varney. Again. Leslie is a literary agent representing other authors like me. Over the last 11 months, she has also made the conscious choice to closely align herself with the criminal cult stalking and SWATTing my family.”
(3) PULITZER PRIZES. The 2024 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced today. The complete list is at the link.
The lone winner of genre interest is film critic Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times, for his writings about sff movies. The Pulitzer Prize website cites the reviews listed below. Unfortunately, you will probably find them paywalled.
(4) ON THE TRACK OF MIDWEST FURFEST GAS ATTACK. Fur and Loathing has dropped the first of six episodes in a “Furry True Crime podcast of six episodes, releasing weekly”. Connect at the link.
Dogpatch Press reminds fans what is being investigated in its post “Midwest Furfest 2014 chemical attack – new findings by Fur And Loathing podcast”.
Think you’ve heard everything about the 2014 chemical attack on Midwest Furfest? Wait until you hear this.
The intentional release of chlorine gas sent 19 people to the hospital. It was one of the largest chemical weapons terrorist attacks in American history.
Who did it? And… why?
The targets deserve to know, because they were lucky to survive. The weapon’s deadly potential was only avoided by fast response. The level of crime fell just behind the 2001 anthrax attacks, but strangely, nobody was ever charged for it. The story faded into underreporting, disrespect towards the community, murky rumors, and hopes that it won’t happen again. There’s pride in resilience — but 10 years later, justice wasn’t served. It’s the biggest cold case in furry fandom.
The case revived when investigation by Dogpatch Press drew journalist Nicky Woolf and Project Brazen to seek FBI records, identify suspects, and fly across America to interview sources. Nicky is a journalist who reports on internet culture, with stories in The Guardian, and his original podcast series Finding Q and The Sound: Mystery of the Havana Syndrome. Nicky and Brazen’s series Fur And Loathing delivers never-before reported findings to empower the community….
(5) AMAZON’S UNION-BUSTING. Cory Doctorow tells how “Amazon illegally interferes with an historic UK warehouse election” at Pluralistic.
…When it benefits Amazon, they are obsessive – “relentless” (Bezos’s original for the company) – about user friendliness. They value ease of use so highly that they even patented “one click checkout” – the incredibly obvious idea that a company that stores your shipping address and credit card could let you buy something with a single click: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Patent
But when it benefits Amazon to place obstacles in our way, they are even more relentless in inventing new forms of fuckery, spiteful little landmines they strew in our path. Just look at how Amazon deals with unionization efforts in its warehouses.
Amazon’s relentless union-busting spans a wide diversity of tactics. On the one hand, they cook up media narratives to smear organizers, invoking racist dog-whistles to discredit workers who want a better deal: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo
On the other hand, they collude with federal agencies to make workers afraid that their secret ballots will be visible to their bosses, exposing them to retaliation: https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/amazon-violated-labor-law-alabama-union-election-labor-official-finds-rcna1582
They hold Cultural Revolution-style forced indoctrination meetings where they illegally threaten workers with punishment for voting in favor of their union: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/31/business/economy/amazon-union-staten-island-nlrb.html
And they fire Amazon tech workers who express solidarity with warehouse workers: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-fires-tech-employees-workers-criticism-warehouse-climate-policies/
But all this is high-touch, labor-intensive fuckery. Amazon, as we know, loves automation, and so it automates much of its union-busting: for example, it created an employee chat app that refused to deliver any message containing words like “fairness” or “grievance…
(6) CHRIS HEMSWORTH TAKES A LIE DETECTOR TEST. Vanity Fair wired up actor Chris Hemsworth and asked him some uncomfortable questions.
Vanity Fair’s May cover star Chris Hemsworth takes our infamous lie detector test. Between him and Matt Damon, who usually pays the bill? Does he think he’s fashionable enough to be a co-chair for the 2024 Met Gala? Is it true that his little brother Liam also auditioned for “Thor”?
(7) THEY’RE THE TOPS. MoovitApp ended up with a list of 30 titles as they went about “Ranking The Most Popular and Beloved Books Of All Time”. Works by Hemingway, Tolkien, Harper Lee, and Nabokov are here – would you like to guess in what order?
It’s hard to say exactly what makes a book great; they are after all, pieces of art that are just as subjective as anything else. However, there are some books that seem to endure for longer and resonate with more readers. Whether or not you’re a fan of literature, these are the stories that some might consider required reading. So, did you read all the best ones, and did your favorite make the list? Read on and see!…
(8) ROGER BOZZETTO (1937-2024). French academic and literary critic Roger Bozzetto died March 20. His passing was reported on Facebook.
The specialist in science fiction and fantastic literature was one of the most important and relevant European SF&F critics and theoreticians.
He was Professor Emeritus of general and comparative literature at the University of Provence, France.
He was also a member of CERLI (Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur les Littératures de l’Imaginaire/Center for Studies and Research on the Literatures of the Imagination, founded in 1979, the pool of great SF&F specialists of the last three decades in the French university landscape).
(9) JEANNIE EPPER (1941-2024). Stuntwoman Jeannie Epper, who worked on myriad films, many genre or genre-adjacent, died May 5 at the age of 83. The Hollywood Reporter paid tribute:
Jeannie Epper, the peerless, fearless stunt performer who doubled for Lynda Carter on Wonder Woman and swung on a vine across a 350-foot gorge and propelled down an epic mudslide as Kathleen Turner in Romancing the Stone, has died. She was 83.
Epper died Sunday night of natural causes at her home in Simi Valley, her family told The Hollywood Reporter.
Just one member of a dynasty of stunt performers that Steven Spielberg dubbed the “Flying Wallendas of Film” — starting with her father, John Epper, there have been four generations of Eppers in show business since the 1930s — she worked on 150-plus films and TV shows during an astounding 70-year career.
In 2007, Epper received the first lifetime achievement honor given to a woman at the World Taurus Awards and ranks among the greatest stuntwomen of all time.
Known for her agility, horse-riding skills and competitiveness, the 5-foot-9 Epper also stepped in for Linda Evans on the ABC shows The Big Valley in the 1960s and Dynasty in the 1980s. When Evans’ Krystle was engaged in one of those knock-down, drag-out catfights with Joan Collins’ Alexis, chances are it was Epper you saw mixing it up.
Epper also put herself in harm’s way for Kate Jackson on Charlie’s Angels, for Lindsay Wagner on The Bionic Woman, for Angie Dickinson on Police Woman, for Jessica Walter in Play Misty for Me (1971), for Jill Clayburgh in Silver Streak (1976) and for Nancy Allen in RoboCop (1987).
… Epper worked for Spielberg (as director or producer) on eight films, among them Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), 1941 (1979), Poltergeist (1982), Catch Me If You Can (2002) and Minority Report (2002)….
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.
[Written by Paul Weimer.]
Born May 6, 1969 – Annalee Newitz, 55. By Paul Weimer: Newitz’s work for me has been far less about their science fiction and much more about their non fiction writing. Sure, Autonomous is a solid novel with a lot of things to say about autonomy, slavery, and a heck of a lot about economics and the free market, and gender dynamics. But it is Newitz’s journalism at i09, Gawker, Gizmodo and elsewhere, writing about society and technology that really drew my attention to their work. That would also include the podcast Our Opinions are Correct, which Newitz co-hosts with Charlie Jane Anders. While I don’t always agree with them and their opinions, I have always found Newitz’ point of view (as well as Charlie Jane’s) to be interesting, strongly reasoned and worthy of engaging in and thinking about.
Newitz’s book Four Lost Cities, to date, is my favorite of their works. Strongly grounded in their journalism chops, the book looks at four cities that have fallen into decay and ruin: Çatal höyük, one of the very first and earliest of cities, Pompeii, perhaps the most famous and well known of the four cities, Cahokia, the Mound city whose mounds still remain on the other side of the Mississippi from St. Louis, and finally, Angkor Wat. The last, particularly, was a revelation for me, as I didn’t quite realize the hydraulic engineering that went into and kept Angkor Wat running. Given Newitz’s interest in science and engineering, Newitz is particularly interested in how and when circumstances caused that engineering to slip. And consequently, just how the city’s inhabitants had to face a slow motion collapse and apocalypse. The fall of cities due to internal and external factors definitely loom over the other three cities in the volume as well, but Angkor Wat, as their capstone, definitely is where the themes of the book, and perhaps of a lot of Newitz’s concerns in general, really come to the fore and in full flower and their full powers.
(11) COMICS SECTION.
(12) UNICORN. Michaele Jordan has allowed File 770 to share her latest micro story published by 50 Give or Take.
(13) VINTAGE X. The final trailer for Marvel Animation’s X-Men ’97 dropped a week ago. The series is on Disney+.
(14) STAR WARS THAT NEVER WAS. [Item by SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie.] Moid Moidelhoff at Media Death Cult goes all alternate future with a Star Wars film that could have been… “The Star Wars Sequel That Was Never Made”.
We dive into the Star Wars sequel that could have been, Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye.The novel written by Alan Dean Foster.
(15) LEGO STAR WARS. And here’s some more Star Wars that should never be – but which Gizmodo tells us is going to get its own four-part Disney+ animation: “Darth Jar Jar Strikes in Lego’s Crazy New Star Wars Series”. (Can anything including Jar Jar really be called “intellectual property”?)
The Star Wars Universe gets turned upside down in Lego Star Wars: Rebuild the Galaxy, a fun what-if style series. When ordinary nerf-herder Sig Greebling (Gaten Matarazzo) unearths a powerful artifact from a hidden Jedi temple, the galaxy as we know completely changes.
In the four-part special debuting on Disney+ September 13, the good guys are bad, bad guys are good, and it all falls on Sig’s shoulders to become the hero the galaxy needs to put everything back together….
[Thanks to Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, Michaele Jordan, Chris Barkley, Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Steven French, Teddy Harvia, and Kathy Sullivan for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern. (Daniel was inspired by this Allan Sherman parody.]
Babel or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang.
Spoiler alert: this book is brilliant.
Review by Michaele Jordan: We all raged over the Hugo nominations scandal. We wrote angry letters, we excoriated the self-appointed censors, we bemoaned the tarnish on our beloved awards, we vowed to make sure this never happens again. And then we had to move on, get on with our lives. So I grabbed up a number of books that I’d heard might have been nominated if the committee had played fair and honest. I started with Babel or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang.
And now I’m angry all over again. Because this is one of the best books I have EVER read. It is a masterpiece. That it should be censored, not for any evil accusations against China — which is treated with respect – but simply because it mentions China (which would be difficult to avoid in a book about British colonialism and the Opium Wars) is not merely ugly – it is evil.
I can almost hear you muttering, “’a book about British colonialism and the Opium Wars’? Doesn’t sound like a masterpiece to me. Sounds really dull. And what’s that got to do with SFF, anyway?”
It’s set mostly in Oxford in the 1830’s – which is depicted with a stunningly authentic realism, except for one little thing: an extra college (with its associated building, the tower of Babel) has been inserted into the university. It’s small, prestigious college and hard to get into. Candidates are required to speak at least three languages fluently to qualify and, having gained entry, spend years studying more languages. It’s a school of translation, and translation is the central power source of the magic that keeps the empire running.
It’s a very subtle magic. It works by inscribing two words (called a match pair) onto a silver plate. The first word (usually English) suggests what the user wishes to do. The second is the same word in a different language. But, as any fluent speaker can tell you, translation is never precise – every language has its own nuances, its own associations. That slight difference in meaning infuses the silver. The resulting power causes the silver bar to operate much like an electric battery. And so it’s everywhere, keeping ships afloat, keeping mills operating and street lamps lit, and managing the empire. And it all runs on silver.
So Britain needs silver to keep everything running. Silver is NOT an infinite resource, but the need for it is. We therefore remain in a truthful analog of Britain in the 1830’s. England is conquering the world, and angry about China’s refusal to enter into a “normal” trade relationship, i.e., two-way trading. China has silver, but they won’t buy anything from the west, so their silver remains in China. Britain can only find one thing that the Chinese will buy: opium. Opium is illegal in China. But the British insist on selling it to them anyway. This will not end well.
A novel needs characters to put a human face on political strategies. We have four main characters – students in a very small class at the university. Two are dark-skinned and two are light skinned. Two are boys (one white and one black) and two are girls (again, one white and one black) Three of them are immigrants of some sort. Robin is half Chinese and pale (in a dim light or from a distance, he can pass as white. Ramy is Arab, and so dark-skinned. Victoire is French, but she’s originally from Haiti. And lastly, we come to Letty, the only one who is not an immigrant. She’s a classic English rose,
Oxford considers itself the creme de la creme. Which means it expects itself to be all white and all English. Robin, Ramy, and Victoire suffer daily insults and indignities. Letty, not so much. But she’s still female, and women are not normally admitted to Oxford. So even she is viewed with a mixture of condescension and suspicion.
Even if I wanted to commit spoilers, it would take pages and pages to explain the story. (Hey, It took Ms. Kuang hundreds of pages to tell it.), So I’ll leave off now, and let you discover for yourself what happens next.
But, please, read this book.
Review by Michaele Jordan: You may recall (or maybe not) that back in November, I started writing up the (presumed) Hugo nominees.
Upon returning from a happy trip to the library, I picked up Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir first. It happened to be on the top of the stack. Surprise! It turned out to be the third part of a trilogy. So I sighed, logged into the library, and requested a hold on Gideon the Ninth. I was not happy to learn that it was out, and that I was not the first hold waiting for it.
By the time I had read all the other nominees, and written them up to share with you, Gideon the Ninth was still unavailable. As was Harrow the Ninth. Did I mention this started in November? Because I have only just now finished Nona the Ninth. May I tell you about this trilogy? I’ve waited so long.
Gideon the Ninth is an excellent book, which in the beginning could pass as pure SF. It’s set in a multi-planet empire, with a single household controlling each of eight planets. They planets are labeled Second through Ninth. No first is designated, but all eight are ruled by the House of the Emperor, the King Undying, the Necromancer divine, whose court is at Canaan House. Since this all reads like SF at first, the reader might take the terms Undying and Necromancer as symbolic titles. But they soon prove to be literal.
The story opens with the Ninth House, in company with the other Houses, receiving a call from the Emperor for each household to send him a necromancer and a cavalier, as candidates to become lyctors, i.e., his personal guards and servants. The Ninth House sends their Reverend Daughter Harrowhark and her Cavalier Gideon Nav to Canaan House.
The Ninth House is a very dark place. Their planet is furthest from the sun. They paint their faces like skulls, and wear black robes. They are the Keepers of the Locked Tomb, the Black Vestals, and are viewed by the other Houses with a superstitious dread. Which is saying a lot in a culture ruled by necromancers. Each House specializes in its own branch of death magic. The Ninth house specializes in the raising and controlling of skeletons.
So sixteen necromancers and cavaliers gather in Canaan House and lose themselves in its nooks, crannies and mazes. And they begin to die. I wouldn’t dream of telling you more.
Harrow the Ninth: The book opens with Harrowhark in a nearly moribund state on the starship Erebos, the Emperor’s flagship. The only person she recognizes there is Ianthe, one of her fellow candidates from Volume One. They have passed their trials and been appointed lyctors.
The story seems at first to be a continuation of the first volume. But almost immediately Harrowhark reflects on a memory which gives a very different version of the past than what we saw in Volume One. She also remembers sneaking into the Locked Tomb as a child. Ever since she’s been followed by the body (the very beautiful body) which she saw there ever since.
Lyctors from before her time appear, along with their emperor-god, John. They are assembling for the funeral of Cytheria, another of the ancient lyctors. (One of them immediately starts trying to kill Harrowhark for no apparent reason).
They are on their way to the emperor-god’s stronghold. There’s about to be a terrible war. (That’s why the emperor needed more lyctors, who – upon surviving the tests and the initiation – acquire numerous powers and become virtually immortal.) The Revenant Beast is coming. Number Seven (presumably a forerunner or an aspect of the Revenant Beast) is already on the outskirts of the system.
There’s no point in even trying to outline the story, even assuming it’s possible. The above-mentioned swapping of the history is just the beginning. Ms. Muir throws so many reality shifts at the reader that it’s like a game of Chutes and Ladders. Characters change names without warning or visible reason. Often there are two characters in any given body. The other characters recognize them by their eyes. (Apparently, even when body swapping, they take their eyes with them). And credit where due, all characters seem to have VERY exotic eyes.
There is lots of fighting as the enemy draws near but, strangely, it feels distant, at least as long as it stays outside the ship. Some enemy forces called Heralds get on board, and they are very cool – sort of giant mechanical insects. And then they all fall into the river. There’s no need to avoid spoilers here – By this point, I don’t know myself what’s going on.
Nona the Ninth: The final volume! Or no? Several notes indicate that Ms. Muir originally intended the 3rd volume to be titled Alecto the Ninth. And in fact, at the end of the book Ms. Muir acknowledges that she was supposed to be writing Alecto the Ninth but somehow ended up writing Nona the Ninth instead. She still intends to write Alecto the Ninth. (Spoiler alert: I won’t be reading it.)
At first there is no apparent connection this narrative and the two that preceded it. It opens in an urban environment, with cars and schools, etc. There is a war going on nearby and there are sirens and blackouts and refugees. Our protagonist Nona is a young girl with an unusually childlike mentality. (The issue of her age is never fully resolved.) She lives with two caretakers (maybe two and a half – two of them are sharing a single body). The names, at least, are familiar: Camilla, Palamedes and Pyrrha. They are all characters from Volume Two.
Nona’s primary interests in life are the neighborhood dogs, and her position as a Teacher’s Aide at her school.
At intervals a narration labeled John is inserted, presumably written by the emperor-god from the previous books. This is always a simple third-person passage, with no names given, describing the historic events that changed our world into the one seen in Volumes One and Two. They tell of strange experiments, of John acquiring peculiar powers, and of public responses to those powers.
After a lot of running around within the ever-encroaching war zone, the narrative drifts to a stop that cannot be described as an ending, tangled in an attempt to introduce Alecto, even at this late date.
All in all, I cannot recommend this trilogy. Volume One (Gideon) is a very good classic SF novel. You can read it independently – it is complete and has an ending. Volume Two (Harrow) is okay, albeit extremely challenging. As for Volume Three (Nona) – and I must apologize in advance to anyone who disagrees because they’ll be in my face, and I don’t want a war – Volume Three is a mess, ranging from boring to opaque.
Michaele Jordan tells me her cat Blossom has just read Around the World in Eighty Days. What has your cat been reading?
Photos of your felines (or whatever you’ve got!) resting on genre works are welcome. Send to mikeglyer (at) cs (dot) com
By Michaele Jordan.
In The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Ms. Moreno-Garcia re-examines a story that has been intriguing us for well over a century. The original novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G Wells, was published in 1896. It was followed by three movies. The first, made in 1932, was titled The Island of Lost Souls, and starred Charles Laughton and Richard Arlen. In 1977 it was remade under the original title, The Island of Doctor Moreau, and starred Burt Lancaster and Michael York. It was remade again in 1996, with Marlon Brando and Val Kilmer.
The story deteriorated over the years. H.G. Wells was an ardent social activist, particularly appalled by the then common practice of vivisection. His book was intended to highlight its horrors. It was a serious novel, and was not well received at first, specifically because it was so horrifying. The 1932 movie was excellent. I saw it years ago, and the memory still gives me shivers. It’s a little hard to find these days. It’s on YouTube, but mixed in with numerous adulterated versions. You have to hunt for it. Then the 1977 movie was very bad, and the 1996 version went beyond bad to utterly dreadful. Fortunately, Ms. Moreno-Garcia’s novel restores the tale to its former stature.
The basic story remains the same. A stranger comes to the island. Usually he’s marooned, although in the new book [INB], he’s a new hire. (Because, yes, Dr. Moreau needs staff.) He finds a deserted jungle island (or INB, a nearly deserted jungle island) with only two visible residents: Dr. Moreau, and a beautiful young woman identified as his daughter. They are surrounded by a group of misshapen, inarticulate persons, either his servants or his patients. We soon learn that Moreau is engaged in what modern SF calls ‘uplift’, transforming animals into humans.
His technique varies – depending on which version you’re looking at – from vivisection to DNA injections. But he’s having trouble making his process work. The resulting creatures do not look fully human, and have trouble with human speech (many cannot talk at all.) Even apparent successes tend to revert to their original forms and behaviors. The introduction of a stranger into this mélange greatly disturbs the social balance, and the whole project erupts into violent conflagration from which the stranger and the beautiful woman narrowly escape. Just in case one of you has somehow evaded this story until now, I will not reveal the surprise ending.
So what does Ms. Moreno-Garcia have to add to this outline? As her title suggests, she makes the beautiful woman, Carlotta, the viewpoint character. Carlotta is entirely concerned with the people around her. Of course she knows where her friends came from. But they are her friends, her day-in-day-out companions, her family.
She never gives a second thought to the morality of a practice she’s grown up with. She assists her father in his work, as his nurse, administering medications and tending injuries. She accepts her father’s creations as her fellows, and takes pleasure in providing them with the special care they need.
Ms. Moreno-Garcia has also expanded the environment. Dr. Moreau is not working on an uninhabited island, just a thinly populated one. A good ways down the road, there’s a city where supplies can be purchased and travel arrangements made. There are neighbors within a day’s travel. He has a very large tract of uninhabited land, but he doesn’t own it – he rents it. His landlord is extremely interested in his work, and is providing the financing
This leads to a major shift in focus. In previous versions, the thematic emphasis was on the cruelty of the procedure. Even the later variants, where vivisection is replaced with DNA injections, the process is depicted as hideously painful, producing creatures who could not possibly have lived independently. But in this more modern work, the procedure is accomplished by subjecting the embryo to genetic changes.
Doctor Moreau may not be inflicting his creations with physical torture, but he is instead subjecting them to a subtler, crueler torture. He is breeding slaves. His landlord expects to acquire workers in exchange for the financing.
I don’t doubt you can plainly see that these changes must make a major difference in how matters play out, and I strongly encourage you to read the book and find out where the story now goes. The Daughter of Doctor Moreau is a fine book.
Do you remember when John Scalzi’s first novel, Old Man’s War came out? (Okay, it wasn’t actually the very first – it was his first traditionally published book.) It was back in 2005, and at the time there was a lot of joking about how he was channeling Robert Heinlein. But it was happy joking. Robert Heinlein, who had been with us since we were children, had been gone for seventeen years, and we missed him sorely. We were happy to have his voice back.
That was pushing twenty years ago, and Mr. Scalzi has published a lot of novels since then. And you know what? He’s still channeling Heinlein.
I thought that The Kaiju Preservation Society read just like a Heinlein juvenile. The parameters for a juvenile are not the same as those for an adult work. Characterization tends to be simplistic. So-and-So’s a prankster. Who’s-it is obsessed with dinosaurs. Goody-two-shoes has to be talked into everything, but always bring snacks. Kids are still learning their social skills, so you give them plain markers. Action – even in an ‘action’ book – tends to be a little minimal. (You don’t want to scare the kids.) And there’s lots and lots of explanations.
The Kaiju Preservation Society runs 258 pages, in 28 chapters. The first four chapters are the basic set up. We meet Jamie (the protagonist) and Rob (the bad guy). We see the circumstances that pull Jamie into the story. And at the end of chapter four (page 35) we get the exciting reveal of where he’s going and why – earth in an alternate dimension! With real kaiju! Of course, we already know those things from the liner notes, but we assume that’s just the beginning.
So in chapters five, six, and seven the staff is introduced. They explain the basics of the place – how they got there, and what they’re doing, and how it’s possible for the kaiju to exist. (That’s an issue for all the newbies.)There’s lots of odd but interesting information about the creatures. They seem to be organic nuclear reactors.
There’s a transportation system which is, naturally, unique to the environment, and constructed entirely on site with local materials). En route to the local base, there’s a close visual sighting. Yes, these critters are enormous and yes, they are insanely dangerous. The beastie snarls, and its teeth are the size of cars. It throws a tree at them. But the staff aren’t really in danger. Their pilot is a genius (like everyone else on the staff), and quickly flies them away. The biting insects prove to be the bigger nuisance. The reader learns who’s the boss and who knows how to play a ukulele.
In chapter eight, our protagonists are provided with special kaiju-jungle clothing and operations manuals. Chapter nine opens with the discovery that the coffee is terrible. “Wait a minute!” I hear you cry. “Are you going to go over this book chapter by chapter?”
What? You’re bored already? Have you murdered your inner child? I ask, because if you were ten years old, you would find all this convincing detail fascinating. I’m not being snarky, honest. Young readers – or rather young persons, whether they are reading, or not – absorb huge amounts of random data. They are still determining for themselves the parameters of their interests and what details may prove relevant. When I was thirteen, I was thrilled to discover Paul McCartney’s shoe size. A kid I knew had been to Paris over the summer. He told everyone he saw how many steps there were in the Eiffel tower.
But none of us are kids anymore. So I’ll try to speed this up. Chapter nine continues with pheromones. That’s important. It provides the staff with a means to direct kaiju behavior to a limited extent. The scientists are hoping to observe nesting and birthing procedures, so they attempt to provoke a mating interaction. In the meanwhile, we learn about their parasites. (Kaiju have lots and lots of parasites.) And when they’re dying they head to water. And when they die, they explode. (The staff learned that the hard way. Their original base was located on a lake shore.) The nuclear explosions are taken in stride by the local fauna, but strangely, they seem to thin the barrier between the worlds.
There’s an interlude in which tourists (very important tourists) visit the base. Among them is the bad guy we last saw back on earth. (He’s rich. Very, very rich.) He’s still a pig. He is surprisingly interested in the kaiju, and tries (with becoming incompetence) to steal some souvenirs. We had not previously suspected he was interested in anything but money. Jamie takes him aside and tells him he’s no longer welcome, and if he ever tries to come back, a recording of the attempted theft will reach a lot of authorities.
The pheromones worked! Bella (a female kaiju) is pregnant! The base already uses aerial cameras to keep a bird’s eye view on the local kaiju. But now the scientists are not as thrilled to settle for aerial cameras anymore. A mission is launched to set up close range cameras, so they can observe Bella’s nesting behaviors, and her eggs.
You see nothing wrong with any of this. And you are right. If you were a scientist – in any of a number of fields – you would probably kill for the opportunity to go on a mission like this, and see such things first hand. You would be fascinated by every procedure, either for capturing data, or protecting the staff. You would revel in each tiny little discovery.
But the reader is mostly watching other people make notes. For all that their surroundings are thrilling, not much actually happens. It’s like watching a movie about some guys on a roller coaster, and all the silly jokes and gossip and lifelike workplace grumbling just don’t make it more interesting. (At least not to me. I don’t doubt that Mr. Scalzi found it interesting, because he was doing the inventing.) The description of other people studying interesting stuff in an interesting place continues for one hundred fifty pages.
On page 220 (the end of chapter 24) planning of the next move is complete, and action is initiated. Things are very exciting for three chapters (32 pages) and on page 252, the heroism is completed and the six-page wrap up commences.
There is not a lot to say about Legends & Lattes. It describes itself as “A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes,” which is fair enough. It is a simple, gentle book about a seasoned warrior retiring from the fight to set up a coffee shop. It qualifies as high fantasy because none of the main characters are human.
They’re all mythical creatures. The protagonist, Viv, is an orc. Her former colleagues are an elf, a gnome and a dwarf. Her new friends, who assist in her endeavor, are a succubus, a hob, and a ratkin. They are joined later by Pendry, who may be human. (He’s described in one review as a bard). One character (almost certainly a fan favorite) is not even humanoid, but a dire-cat. Dire or no, this cat is a classic house kitty – except she’s the size of a Saint Bernard (or maybe even a pony). But other than the cast list, there’s not a lot of magic in the story.
Viv acquires a magic artifact at the beginning of the book. We see her claim it after a battle, as her share of the spoils. It is her possession of this artifact that inspires her to sheathe her sword and set up shop in the city.
They say any story needs some conflict. The action in this story derives from one of Viv’s former comrades deciding that she was not entitled to scoop up that artifact and take off with it. I had a little trouble with that. As I said, we see Viv claim the artifact. She did not sneak – she claimed it in plain sight. None of her companions objected at the time. And none of them supported their team-mate’s later objection.
You are probably getting annoyed with me for going on about the “artifact” without telling you what it is. But to say more would be a spoiler, as much of the book debates that very question. The rest of the story is a hymn to the pleasure of a really great cup of coffee. I was surprised to see such a light-weight book on the list of Hugo nominees. It doesn’t really deserve any awards. But I didn’t hate it. Like a P.G. Wodehouse novel, it made me chuckle often.
I blush to admit that I had never read anything by T. Kingfisher before this Hugo season. Now I’ve read two. And as soon as I finish my Hugo reading, I am going to go hunt up her previous work, Ms. Kingfisher has accomplished that rare task: she writes stories that are deeply grounded in the fantasy traditions, and yet are completely original.
In Nettle & Bone we find royal palaces and the Goblin Market, villains armed with ancient swords and princesses in danger, magical godmothers and witches raising the undead. And yet none of these things are remotely like the tropes as you’ve seen them a thousand times. And yet they all conform to the basic concepts, and do (or don’t do) all the things that their position in fairy-lore calls for.
The protagonist is Marra – she’s the third daughter of the king and queen of Harbor Kingdom. It’s a small place, sandwiched in between two larger, stronger and richer kingdoms. It only exists because it has a really good harbor, and each of the neighboring kings would dearly love to march in and grab that harbor, but can’t, for fear that the other neighboring kingdom would quickly intervene. So – since the Harbor Kingdom has no sons – the Northern Kingdom decides to acquire it by marrying into it.
Right away we have a selection of glamorous royal courts, which somehow fail to sound romantic, because none of that glamor can penetrate the stench of ugly, grasping politics. Marra is sent off to a convent after the two elder sisters are married. When was the last time since Malory’s Morte D’Arthur that you saw a convent mentioned (or even presumed to exist) in a high fantasy? In Nettle & Bone, convents, despite their religious associations, are maintained by the rich and powerful who use them to dispose politely of excess women.
Ms. Kingfisher does this again and again: introduces an element to her fantasy that is startlingly practical and realistic. Marra loves the convent, because she can close her bedroom door there, and she doesn’t have to spend an hour being dressed by servants every morning. She doesn’t have to watch her tongue or keep an eye out for a backstab every minute of the day. She gets very good at embroidery, and picks up some nursing skills
Very few fantasy novels note that quests are generally composed of trudging through bad weather carrying a heavy load. When Marra and her companions cross the Blistered Land, they have to sleep on the ground in the snow, and share one egg amongst the three of them for breakfast. Here, magical godmothers are not routinely happy in their work. Royalty are almost always vicious and paranoid. Ghosts carry pointless grudges, and are often difficult to identify. Demons occasionally possess chickens. No single victory, however great, sets the world to rights. It just pushes the world in a slightly different direction.
Marra’s interior monologue is wonderful – the reader feels like they are talking to an old friend. She is so normal, so relatable, she makes everything around her feel real. She worries about everything. She constantly second-guesses her past actions, and barely notices her successes. She wonders what her friends think of her, and worries they will desert her. The only thing she doesn’t agonize about is her quest. She already knows it’s hopeless. She does it anyway.
And most of all, despite Nettle & Bone being about a magical quest to rescue a princess, it is completely original. (I wouldn’t have thought that was possible!) Even the ending is not what you expected. Read this book!
The Spare Man is officially a cozy mystery, a book in which there is no explicit or grisly violence, permitting the reader to focus on solving the mystery, without having to gag on the blood and guts. (These mysteries are not usually very complex or difficult, so that the reader doesn’t get frustrated with the puzzle, and skip to the end to find out who did it.)
You could even say that The Spare Man is a ‘country house mystery’ since it takes place in a closed environment. Of course, the usual purpose of setting the mystery in a closed environment is to limit the number of suspects and associated locations. Ms. Kowal did not take advantage of that option, as The Spare Man is set on an intra-solar luxury cruise ship, as large as an entire city, only far more difficult to navigate.
Despite that, The Spare Man is definitely a cozy mystery. Really. Ms. Kowal doesn’t miss a trope. She starts out with Nick and Nora Charles (here, named Shal and Tesla), and their adorable little dog. Of course, Shal, a detective, is first on the scene after the murder. And of course, he is immediately charged with the crime. The surly and bigoted Chief of Security beats him brutally, presumably in hope of extracting a confession. Or maybe just for fun.
So Tesla has to run all over the ship, trying to solve the mystery, although she’s not a detective, and although she and Shal have agreed not to infuriate the authorities by interfering. Tesla is an insanely wealthy interplanetary celebrity, who is so plagued by fans that she has to travel under an assumed name. Her fans swarm her as if she were Beyoncé, because – wait for it – she was a brilliant roboticist seven years before.
I had a problem with this. Even on this tiny little island earth, I do not see a lot of scientist/engineers becoming major celebrities. Carl Sagan is the only scientist that I can think of who was so famous that I would recognize his picture when I saw it. And fame in the US doesn’t have to penetrate all the way to the moons of Saturn. (By the way, natives of Titan are called Titians, and they have their own music forms. For a while I thought they’d named their flute after a 16th century painter)
But Tesla has another claim on fame. She’s a tragic victim. She has steel bolts all up and down her spine, and still often needs the help of a cane to walk. She’s in pretty much constant pain, although she doesn’t let that interfere with her love life. Seven years earlier she was involved in an Accident. For over half the book the event is always referred to with an ominous capital A.
Eventually we are told that a PAMU (some kind of personal mobility unit for the handicapped) malfunctioned during testing. It was apparently in, or attached to, some kind of off-earth vehicle which had, in turn, been launched from an orbital laboratory. The attempt to disengage resulted in a ricochet, causing the vehicle to crash into the laboratory, killing six and crippling Tesla.
Aside from the steel bolts in her spine, Tesla was also assigned a service animal, with electronic implants which improve its ability to communicate with and assist its owner; hence the dog. I give Ms. Kowal full credit for having a really good idea: a cyborged service animal. Somebody should look into that.
Unfortunately, Ms. Kowal didn’t waste a lot of words on explaining the dog’s enhancements or abilities. To the reader’s eye, the dog was simply a hugely loyal companion. And terminally cute. EVERYBODY fell in love with that Westie on first sight. Strangers crossed the room to come pet Gimlet – and had to be warned off. (It really is very inappropriate to stroke a service animal.) Business associates made appointments to stop by for a play date. It was actually stated in so many words that if you don’t care for dogs, you’re a bad person. Personally, I have cats.
I don’t hate dogs. I used to work in a kennel. I’ve stopped now and then to pet a neighbor’s dog, while saying hello to the neighbor. But playdates?
As you can see, I am not being the target audience for this novel. I don’t care for mysteries and I detest romances. So, I started yawning as the familiar mystery tropes floated by, and squirming at all the love scenes. I got very, very bored with people talking baby talk to the Westie. But if you do like mysteries and/or romances you should be fine.
Friends, I sat down here intending to write up all six of the novel nominees. But, when I picked up Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (Tordotcom), I discovered that it was the third volume of The Locked Tomb Series. I do not like to read series out of order. And even if was I okay with that, I saw the note in Wikipeda warning me not to attempt to read the books out of order. “You’ll never catch up,” the note read. “You’ll just get confused and give up reading it,” I was warned. So I heaved a sigh, and went to the library. It turned out that Gideon the Ninth (Volume 1) is extremely popular. There are 27 holds on it. I didn’t even look for Harrow the Ninth (Volume 2). So these are just my notes on the five that I’ve actually read. Perhaps I’ll get back to you with my thoughts about The Locked Tomb Series. Catchy title.
By Michaele Jordan: Friends, as I’ve mentioned in previous years, I always read all the Hugo nominees. Usually I do this as soon as the nominees are announced. But this year, maybe because I was so focused on the Fan Writer Hugo (You rock, Chris!), I didn’t get to it in time. So I’m reading them now.
But I didn’t cheat. I pulled a list of the nominees in plain text, without the underlining that marked the winners. I’ve always read the candidates without knowing who would win. Why should this year be different?
I’ll start with the novellas, because they were mostly available in book form at the library, and since they’re short, I can finish them quickly. So here we go.
Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk (Tordotcom)
This book presents itself as a detective story. But for me, the biggest mystery in this book was the mystery of what the title was supposed to mean. There is, I admit, a scene in which the protagonist, Helen, sits down on the sofa and watches an old movie, “even though,” she remarks, “I knew the end.”
The scene itself does not appear to be important, just there for mood or characterization. We don’t learn what the movie was, or whether Helen liked it or not. She appears to be just killing time. It’s never referred to again. In fact, less attention is paid to that movie than to the numerous cups of coffee she consumes. Helen is particular about coffee.
I believe Mx. Polk focused on that coffee specifically to establish Helen as a typical noir detective – smart, world-weary and unflappable. Helen just happens to be an auspex, or a magical detective. She receives a commission from a mysterious beautiful woman, and goes to work investigating a particularly horrific serial killer.
At the crime scene, Helen is confronted by a team of magical authorities. The unflappable world-weary pose drops like a rock. She becomes a heart-broken woman, desperate to reconcile with one of the magic-cops, who hates her for some as-yet-unrevealed offense. (Mx. Polk does like to juggle tropes; their characters change like a cage full of chameleons.) What with the yearning looks, and the frigid resistance, we are led to suspect a tragic romance, torn apart by some misunderstanding which will eventually be resolved by a little honesty.
But no. That’s not it. Soon we will meet Edith, and Helen will turn into a deeply caring, romantic lover, who wants nothing in the world so much as to escape all this darkness, and run away with her true love, only. . . she can’t. She has a dreadful secret.
She has only a few days to live. Now that, we probably didn’t see coming. It turns out that our warm-hearted, honorable, caring protagonist sold her soul to the devil ten years earlier, and her contract is nearly up. I admit that I would not normally expect someone with no soul to be warm-hearted, honorable and caring, but this is a different world.
Apparently here, your soul has nothing to do with your character – it’s just a thing. Sort of a ticket stub to get you into heaven (which is real, and so sublime that anybody brought back from there to life will hold a permanent grudge.) A world so different from ours that angels can be serial killers, and the most reliable, trustworthy character in the book is a demon. There is nothing in this ‘mystery’ that a reader can hope to solve, since no human rules apply, and all the clues are magical artifacts never heard of in our mundane reality. Just gotta hope you love the miasma.
Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)
This story is strangely reminiscent of The Canterbury Tales. In the Chaucer, a large group of pilgrims are travelling together to the shrine of Thomas Becket (who got sainted for pissing off his drinking buddy (the king) when he turned into a Jesus freak). They pass the time with a storytelling contest. Into the Riverlands follows a good natured (gender-free) cleric named Chih who picks up some travelling companions on their way to Betony Dock, and they, too, tell each other stories along the way.
The resemblance ends there. The Riverside party is much smaller. And Chaucer didn’t include bandits or martial artists, as does Ms. Vo.
This book is the third in the Singing Hills cycle – all featuring Cleric Chih of the Singing Hills Abbey – following The Empress of Salt and Fortune and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain. The liner notes assure me that the books can be read independently, in no particular order. This is true. I skipped the liner notes, and never noticed that I had landed in a series.
Chih is a gentle, easygoing person. They are a peacemaker, with no fighting skills. Their abbey is more concerned with the preservation of history than the observance of ritual, and Chih takes that calling very seriously, travelling extensively in search of more historical tales. They are assisted in their work by their companion, Almost Brilliant, who looks like a beautiful bird, except it talks, and is a brilliant scholar with total recall. As you might guess, the book is a bit episodic, but not unpleasantly so. Just the opposite. It is charming, and I recommend it.
Mirror Mended by Alix E. Harrow (Tordotcom)
This book is a sequel to A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow, which took the best novella Hugo in 2022. I remarked then that it had a truly splendid, heartrending opening, but the very act of launching into the story resolved Sleeping Beauty’s initial peril, leaving the story with nowhere to go. The ending was ineffectual. Some magic gets thrown around, everybody’s problems are fixed, except for the protagonist, and she decides that maybe she’ll become a magical superhero rescuing timid princesses. I confess, I was extremely surprised that it took the Hugo.
But that was then. Over a year ago. Picking up A Mirror Mended, I again skipped the liner notes, and dove in. And it’s Sleeping Beauty again. Already I’m rolling my eyes. Is this the new thing? Are we going to get story after story after story about Sleeping Beauty, until she’s as tired as vampires? Very slowly it dawns on me that this is a sequel.
NOT a good idea. Ms. Harrow had already run out of things to say about Sleeping Beauty half way through the first book. You remember (from two paragraphs back) that the protagonist had decided at the end to make a career of rescuing Sleeping Beauty? When A Mirror Mended opens she tells us that she’s done just that. And now she’s bored with it. Excellent! So am I.
So she jumps over to the Snow White story, and decides to rescue the Evil Queen instead, (largely, I suspect, because this particular Snow White is doing a very good job of taking care of herself.) There’s a little shell game with the identity of the Evil Queen, and surprise! one of the Snow Whites IS the Evil Queen.
You may have noticed that my tone has grown a bit snarky. I picked that up from the protagonist. I am sorry to report that I found this to be one of the most heavily padded books I’ve ever slogged through. Virtually nothing really happens, although there is a good deal of running around and being scared. So the author fills in with the protagonist’s voice. She’s very snarky. Except when she’s being sententious. I could go through this whole book, knocking out several whole paragraphs on every page, reducing it to a short story, and nothing of the actual content would be lost.
You are probably getting annoyed with me right now. A lot of people liked this book, or it wouldn’t have made it to the ballot. But I promise I do not intend to insult them. I don’t really understand where they’re coming from but I fully acknowledge that I might well be missing something and I respect their right to their opinion. That said, I didn’t like this book, and wouldn’t have finished it if it hadn’t been a Hugo nominee.
Ogres by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Solaris)
I had a very difficult time getting into this book. Right off the bat, it’s second person, present tense. I am told that many writers feel that a second person narrative draws the reader into the story by making them feel that the author is addressing them personally. Doesn’t work for me, but maybe it does for most other people. I also don’t like present tense. Some writers think that makes the narrative more immediate. But in my experience, most people don’t talk in present tense. (Except maybe a cop calling in, “I am in the alley behind the suspect’s presumed location. Back-up requested.”)
A couple of pages further in, the narrator refers to Roben, the bandit in the woods (who sometimes wears a hood against the rain) and my shoulders hunch. Another Robin Hood mash-up? I haven’t had much luck with those.
But then, the narrator points out that a half-dozen or so half-starved outcasts living in the woods, no matter the weather, is a singularly unattractive life-style, and they’re not getting rich on the proceeds of banditry, either. At best, they earn the silence of the locals by sharing their meager take. I am charmed. Utterly and completely.
The story opens with a small, agricultural village preparing for a visit from their Landlord. The villagers are human. They are small and fragile, timid and poor. The Landlord – like all nobility – is an ogre. Large and cruel and rich off the labor of others.
This, we are assured, is the natural order of things. It’s preached in the churches. There’s even a psalm about it, ” The Master in his castle, the poor man at the gate.”
Sir Peter stands maybe nine feet tall, and is correspondingly broad. Other than that, he looks like a human. He’s brought his son Gerald along, to learn the business of managing an estate. He is greeted – so very politely – by the Headman of the village, who has also brought along his son, Torquell.
Torquell is only six feet tall, but that’s big for a human. And although he’s good natured, he thinks pretty highly of himself. The kowtowing to ogres has always grated on his nerves. Gerald soon decides this uppity villager needs to be taught his place. The situation escalates drastically leaving Gerald dead and Torquell on the run.
He’s captured by a bounty hunter, but just when Sir Peter comes to claim him – rubbing his hands together as he plots a gruesome execution – the ogress Isadora appears on the scene. She is rich and important and very curious about this peculiar human. She buys Torquell right out from under Sir Peter. She also turns out to be an astonishingly lenient master. Torquell spends years in her household, being educated and studied.
All of the above is contained in the first seven chapters. It’s told with style and wit, and keeps you turning the pages as fast as you can consume them, even though it’s mostly set-up. But then . . . It’s as if Mr. Tchaikovsky unexpectedly found himself up against a deadline. I can’t help wondering if he had originally intended to make Torquell’s saga another series, but then changed his mind.
The remaining two chapters contain twice the action of the previous seven. They read like a summary of a history book. No more wit. No more personality. Just a list of events spinning by like machine gun fire, only slowing down as the ending – which you DON’T see coming – approaches.
I liked this book, but I didn’t love it. Not Mr. Tchaikovsky’s best work, but good enough for the beach or the airport.
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher (Nightfire)
I happened to pick up this book on the same day I watched the last episode of the TV series The Fall of the House of Usher. So it gave me a chuckle to discover that this book was also drawn from the Edgar Allen Poe story The Fall of the House of Usher.
Mind you, the two are nothing alike. The TV series is a total remix. The twins Roderick and Madeleine Usher are not heirs to an ancient (but penniless) name, living in an historic ruin on a lakeshore in the middle of nowhere. They are self-made billionaires, and the cracks in their company’s foundation are moral, not literal. Even so, they are still living on shaky ground.
Neither are they childless (Roderick has six kids – all by different mothers) or solitary. They are celebrities, with their pictures on magazine covers and their names in newspaper headlines. This actually makes their story far more tragic than the original. They have so much more to lose. Their downfall is mythic.
What Moves the Dead is much closer to the original Poe. It places the Usher twins back in their ancient family home – much of which is no longer habitable – located on the shore a lake so dank and murky, it must be called a tarn. The rest of the landscape is equally dismal. Clearly nobody would choose to live there – except Madeleine Usher.
This is where the story veers from the original Poe. We know that Madeleine insists on continuing to live there. She has a viewpoint. She has a voice. Poe’s House of Usher was NOT a character driven piece. It’s entirely about the mood invoked by the setting, about the desolate and ruined house, and all it symbolized in the way of human futility. There are only two characters.
There’s the narrator. You should know that in the early 19th century, the anonymous third person narration was not much used in fiction. It was seen as being for primarily for use in factual content – journalism and educational text, materials where it was unimportant who was speaking. Fiction was written in first person, told by someone associated closely enough with the events to relate them. So Poe’s story had a narrator: Roderick Usher’s old friend, invited to come for a visit. He has no real voice, and certainly has no opinions. He’s just there to describe what happens, and that’s all he does.
The other character is Roderick Usher, who is described in detail. Sickly and solitary, neurotically high -strung, and subject to a number of nervous complaints. It’s a wonder he has even one friend he can invite to bring some cheer into the house. Or perhaps to bear witness. If he didn’t, who would tell the tale?
You will note that I did not include Madeleine as a character. She’s rarely mentioned, beyond Roderick mentioning she’s unwell. She has no lines. We see her pass by once in a corridor. And then Roderick says she had died, and the narrator helps lay her to rest in the family tomb.
But there are characters in What Moves the Dead. Madeleine and Roderick are a long way from normal, but they are real to us. Even the narrator has a voice. Alex Easton – who was invited by Madeleine, not Roderick – is, in fact, a very interesting character. They are Gallacian, and are extremely entertaining on the subject of their homeland. They’re genderless military personnel, (read the book if you want clarification of that ) and carry arms at all times. They worry about their bad tempered horse. They’re an active participant in the story. And from the moment they arrive at the house (which is still pretty horrible even if it’s no longer be the focus of the story,) they are worried sick about both their old friends. For more than one good reason.
And there IS a story in this version of the story. I won’t risk hinting about that story. It’s deliciously complex and unexpected, Yet affectionately faithful to Poe. I recommend this book to everyone.
Where the Drowned Girls Go by Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom)
This book started with a VERY interesting premise about schools for children touched by magic. Of course, we’ve all heard about magic schools. But the schools in this book (there are two) are nothing like Hogwarts. In Hogwarts, the students are viewed as gifted, and are being trained to make the most of those gifts. They are acknowledged – and applauded – as special. None of them are less than happy to be there.
But in this book, the schools are reform schools for children who have strayed from reality. Each of these children was already unhappy before they were touched; each felt desperately out of place in their world. And each stumbled on a door, an impossible door, in a place where no door belonged. And because they were unhappy, and felt out of place, they opened that door.
In most books, that is where the story starts. This beginning is followed by a tale of magical adventure, in which wrongs are righted and lessons learned. At the end, some children return to their original homes, better equipped to face that reality. Or some children, who have no place to go back to, remain in the magical lands and build new lives.
But not this time. The children who stepped through the doors find many different magical lands: water worlds, fairy lands, candy lands. They had adventures. Maybe some children stayed on when their adventures were completed, but a lot of them – the ones this story is about – ended up stumbling through magic doors that led them back to that original home where they had already been unhappy and maladjusted. Their travels have NOT prepared them to deal with those old issues. Instead, these children are even further severed from their native reality.
It’s a fairly common occurrence in the world where this story occurs. Often enough that there are schools for these special children. There’s Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children, and there’s the Whitethorn Institute. And that’s where this story begins.
I confess, I did not find this book unflawed. Ms. McGuire has an extensive cast of characters, and since each has a different story, each occasionally takes the lead as the viewpoint character. There’s nothing wrong with that – the characters are all well drawn. But the shifting of viewpoint is irregular, even erratic. I frequently had to stop, and figure out who was talking now. It could have been better handled.
Also, I believe the ending was intended to be open-ended, to leave the characters in place for their new lives. But the set-up didn’t work for me. It seemed to me that the story just drifted vaguely away from its climax to a stop, like a car that’s run out of gas.
Please note: I am NOT saying that I didn’t like this book. As I said, the characters are good. The pictures of boarding school life are scary-accurate. The magic is wonderful – subtle yet pervasive, intriguing and original. I do recommend you read it. If I say it’s not quite perfect, I only mean that very few books are genuinely perfect. This one is definitely very good.
By Michaele Jordan: Friends, you probably didn’t expect to see a dance review on File 770. What does a dance performance have to do with SF/F? Hard to explain, but you’ll understand when you see it (which you can do here. Perhaps their name will give you hint. Mayyas is a Lebanese word meaning ‘the proud walk of a lioness’.
The Mayyas are a Lebanese all-female alternative precision dance group. (Female dancers are rare in Lebanon, and all-female anything even rarer.)
The company has 36 dancers, and their routines are choreographed by their founder, Nadim Cherfan. They’ve won a lot of awards in all those ‘Got Talent’ shows: In 2019, they reached the semi-finals in Britain’s Got Talent: The Champions, and took first place in Arabs Got Talent. Then in 2022 they won America’s Got Talent, snagging the Golden Buzzer in the process.
Lebanese caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati praised them, as did the Lebanese army command. President of the Republic General Michel Aoun awarded them the Lebanese Order of Merit. They also out-performed Beyoncé at the opening of the Atlantis Royal Dubai Hotel.
(Want to see another? Click here.)
If you haven’t watched the attached videos yet, let me explain further why the Mayyas seem skiffy to me. They are described as a ‘precision dance group’. And they are precise – as meticulously choreographed as a Busby Berkeley routine, where every dancer’s wrist or ankle exactly matches the wrists and ankles of all the others. But while a Busby Berkeley performance is like a marching band with sequined girls doing high kicks, the Mayyas are soft and sinuous. (How’s that for an odd concept – soft, sinuous precision?)
The dancers are not arranged in a circle or a forward-facing line so that the audience can admire how they match. More often they are in single file, so that seen from the front, the silhouettes merge into each other. Only the arms remain separate, but the movements of these are perfectly synchronized. The overall effect is of a single multi-armed dancer – or a Hindu god summoning the faithful, or maybe a giant sentient snake, seducing its prey. It’s very alien and utterly entrancing. (Here’s another.)