Author: Cheryl Morgan

Cheryl Morgan is the editor of Salon Futura and owner of its publisher, Wizard's Tower Press. She is also non-fiction editor for Clarkesworld Magazine. Cheryl has won three Hugo Awards: Best Fanzine in 2004 for Emerald City, Best Fan Writer in 2009 and Best Semiprozine for Clarkesworld in 2010. She is a director of San Francisco Science Fiction Conventions and of Association for the Recognition of Excellence in SF & F Translation. She lives near Bath in the UK.

Issue 83

Issues

This is the August 2026 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Art: The Green Man’s Debt: This issue's cover is The Green Man's Debt by Ben Baldwin

  • The End of Everything: The latest (last?) novel by M John Harrison is a near-future post-semi-apocalyptic story set in an England invaded by aliens where everyone keeps calm and carries on

  • Halcyon Years: The latest novel from Al Reynolds is a murder mystery set on a generation ship in which the detective is a reincarnated Yuri Gagarin, and part of the mystery is how the heck he got there

  • The Blue Book of Nebo: For Women in Translation Month, Cheryl looks at one of the most famous works of contemporary Welsh literature

  • National Eisteddfod 2026: Books, music and people in silly costumes. Yes, the Eisteddfod is Worldcon for Welsh speakers. Cheryl explains why.

  • Oath of Fire: Cheryl makes up for her mistake of last issue by reading the first book in K Arsenault Rivera's new series

  • Spider-Man: Brand New Day: The wise-cracking web-slinger is back for another outing, and his has lost none of his charm

  • All That is in the Earth: Andrew Knighton's novella is a solid piece of science fiction with surprisingly deep worldbuilding

  • Tolkien and Wales: How much influence did Wales, its language and its mythology influence the creation of Middle Earth? More than you might think.

  • X-Men ’97 – Season 2: Our beloved mutants are back for another much too short season of animated adventures. Of course Cheryl watched it.

  • Editorial – August 2026: Cheryl is too busy to write an editorial

Art: The Green Man’s Debt

083, Art, Ben Baldwin

This issue’s cover is Ben Baldwin’s art for the latest Juliet McKenna book, The Green Man’s Debt. If you want to know all about wolves in Ireland, go buy the book (or pre-order it if you are reading this before September 10th).

As usual, an unadulterated version of the art appears below.


The End of Everything

083, Book Review, M John Harrison

I bought this book in Glasgow when I was up there for the European Conference on the Fantastic, but I didn’t take it to Eurocon and Finncon with me, so it has taken a while to get round to it. Because I got it in a big Waterstones, it has a sticker on the front saying ‘Signed by the author’. Inside there is a squiggle. It might say ‘M John Harrison’, but it might not. Who can tell? The sticker doesn’t even promise that. It says the book is signed by ‘the author’, not Harrison. Is he The Author, or is that someone else?

The worlds of Harrison’s fiction are like signatures: vague, indistinct, liable to look like something else if you view them from a different angle. Or if you squint. From that point of view, the world of The End of Everything is the quintessential Harrison novel.

We are told that the book is set in England. In Kent, to be precise. More on geography later. But this Kent exists on the far side of an event horizon and we can never be quite sure what we are looking at.

The event in question is the arrival of the iGhetti. They are aliens. They seem to have entered our reality from another dimension rather than landing in flying saucers. No one quite knows what they look like. They have made their home in the Square Mile, the old City of London, the Financial District of a once powerful nation. The government is apparently engaged in a years-long relentless campaign of attacks with bombs and missiles to try to drive them back whence they came, but there is a suspicion that this military action is stuck in a time loop, the same failed attacks failing all over again, predictably. Is time actually looping in London, or does the government never learn from its mistakes?

The iGhetti are not new, by the way. They first appeared in a short story called ‘The Crisis’, which you can find in the collections, You Should Come With Me Now, and Settling the World. You can see Harrison experimenting with the ideas which became a novel in that story. In it he described the iGhetti as follows:

“They seemed like neither a thing nor a picture of a thing: they seemed to be extruded from a space that wasn’t quite in the world.”

What is clear is that Kent is now a focus for a very different sort of refugee crisis. Well-to-do middle class families are selling up everything they own and taking ship for The Continent. Is Europe still there? No one knows. All that we can be certain of is that no one who has left on the ships ever comes back. There is a sense that when someone says, ‘I am sailing tomorrow’, it is actually a euphemism for suicide.

Meanwhile, everyone else keeps calm and carries on.

Phillip Tennent is a beachcomber. In these days that is a potentially valuable occupation, because there are things in the sea. Of course no one knows exactly what they are, or what they can do. All of them are different. But amongst the beachcomber fraternity there is always the hope that one might find something of actual value, and be able to retire on the proceeds.

Phillip lives with his aunt, Marnie, who used to be an artist, and still thinks like one. She talks like one too. I think Harrison is probably satirising the London arts community with Marnie’s speech patterns, but who can tell?

Then, one day, Phillip finds The Artefact. It is quite amorphous when he fishes it out of the sea, but before long it has grown body parts and is learning human speech. He thinks he has struck it rich. Marnie thinks he should throw the thing back, because no good will come of messing with that sort of stuff. Marnie is, of course, correct.

As the lives of Phillip and Marnie unravel, we get to a point where there is a road trip. Harrison writes:

“They are travelling north, towards London, so the land is generally on the right, the sea on the left, but sometimes things are complex.”

They most certainly are. The characters are in Kent. If you drive north along the coast in Kent the sea is to the right. To have the sea to the left, you have to be traveling west. Has Harrison muddled his geography? Is this an unfortunate mistake by an editor? Is the story set in a mirror image of our world in which Kent is somehow in the south-west? Or have the iGhetti messed with the magnetic poles of Earth so that what was once travelling west is now travelling north? Feel free to choose your own explanation.

In reading this book it is inevitable that one will try to understand what Harrison is trying to tell us. What is the message? Harrison might argue that there isn’t one. The book will look different to each reader, after all. And differently to the same reader if you squint hard enough. Nevertheless, one does get the impression that the characters in the book are living in a world in which nothing is quite real any more, that this has been going on for some years now, that it started in the City of London, and that most people have muddled along and tried hard not to notice what was happening.

All of which seems to be true about Britain today.

Harrison has, for a long time, been concerned about what he sees as the damaging effects of fantasy on people’s lives. In The Course of the Heart, Pam Stuvestant makes herself deathly ill through her passion to escape into a fantasy world. Niall Harrison (no relation), in his review of The End of Everything for Locus, suggests that the book is about a world that has become saturated with fantasy, and has overdosed on it. Certainly there is a sense that on social media no one is real, we are all playing characters of some sort or another. Politicians have increasingly decided that the truth is irrelevant, it is how much people like the lies you tell them that is important. And human-made literature and art is being drowned in a tide of machine-generated slop.

In The Course of the Heart Harrison has a comment about amateur landscape painting. He writes:

“One or two of them showed the cottages and the breakwater of a fishing village in some less well- designed world than ours. There was a sunset of suety ochre bands. The boats with their crude triangular sails, you imagined, would shortly go out and fish for something more amorphous, less evolved, than haddock. Someone there would be looking out of a window, writing a letter, ‘We must not judge God by this. It’s just a study that didn’t come off’.”

The End of Everything seems to suggest that we are now living in the world of one of those paintings, but this time the ‘artist’ is an LLM.

The book has made it onto the long list for this year’s Booker Prize. I do hope that it makes the short list. I can’t wait to see what Marnie-like utterances get written about it.

book cover
Title: The End of Everything
By: M John Harrison
Publisher: Serpent's Tail
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Halcyon Years

083, Al Reynolds, Book Review

It has been a while since I read an Al Reynolds book. I loved the Revelation Space books when they came out, but then Reynolds moved on to doing other things, and he clearly didn’t need my help to sell books. However, having had a chance to sit and chat with him in Berlin airport when we were heading out from Eurocon, I got very interested in the next book he’s got in the pipeline. Also the current one sounded really weird, so I figured I should check it out.

Halcyon Years is a generation ship novel. The ship is called Halcyon and it is on its way from Earth to what is expected to be a new home for the 8 million passengers. The book is also a murder mystery, and the detective is a chap called Yuri Gagarin.

Wait, what?

Well it turns out that Comrade Gagarin’s corpse has been preserved, and he was included in a large collection of corpsicles being transported on the Halcyon. Every so often it becomes necessary to revive one of these people, and Gagarin’s number came up. No one on the Halcyon remembers who he was, and so he has ended up running a small, private detective agency. In other words, he is a gumshoe. The world of Halcyon is helpfully 1950s-ish, to fit with the genre. Which, if you think about it, is odd for a generation ship.

The case that Gagarin ends up investigating involves the deaths of two young people from rival wealthy families. The client, Ruby Blue, is from the ship’s Ministry of Works. She explains to Gagarin that there is a concern that these are tit for tat killings, though the police are happy that both deaths were accidental. If I tell you that the name of these young people were Randall and Julianna, you might spot the clue that tells you that there is far more going on here than meets the eye.

There is another clue that those of you who know your history of space flight will pick up on. Yuri Gagarin died in a plane crash, and what remains could be salvaged from the wreckage were cremated. There is no way he could be resurrected from that. But the character in the book is convinced that he is indeed Yuri Gagarin. He has a notable Russian accent.

As is inevitable in gumshoe stories, poor Yuri spends a lot of time being beaten up. He ends up working with a drunken ex-cop by the name of Lemmy Litz, who talks like he is fresh out of Noo Yoick. Ruby, for reasons that will become obvious when you read the book, is not The Dame. Reynolds does provide something of a romance for Yuri, but his heart isn’t really in it. My guess is that the hearts of most of his regular readers would not be in it either, so that doesn’t matter much.

Quite a bit of the story is dependent on understanding stuff about space flight, which I am too busy and lazy to check out, but that did not spoil my enjoyment of the plot. I was pleased to see what I assume is a nod to Ken MacLeod’s Lightspeed Trilogy. But most of all I was just gripped by the pace of the thing. It is rare that I find a book unputdownable these days, but this is one I would have stayed up all night to finish if I had the stamina (which I don’t these days). It is a lot of fun, and full of interesting twists.

Of course there is another aspect to the book as well. It is a story set in a world that is run by wealthy families that do hate each other, but who are very happy to work together to keep the proles in their place. I am reminded of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the Long Sun, in which the ultra-rich of Earth have had themselves uploaded into the mainframe of The Whorl and end up being worshipped as gods by the passengers.

It may even have a suggestion as to one reason why the billionaire class is so keen to enshittify our technology. As one character puts it:

“The problem, though, is that when people have equality and ease-of-living and too much time on their hands for intellectual pursuits, they feel empowered to start asking the wrong questions […]. Well that simply wouldn’t do.”

In other words, this is also a book about modern America.

book cover
Title: Halcyon Years
By: Al Reynolds
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Blue Book of Nebo

083, Book Review, Manon Steffan Ros

In my review of the Eisteddfod I mention getting to see Manon Steffan Ros, whose The Blue Book of Nebo is probably the most successful Welsh language book ever. As Ros has produced an English language version of it, and this is Women in Translation Month, I figured that I should review it here.

The Blue Book of Nebo is a post-Apocalyptic fantasy set in North Wales. The title refers back to such legendary tomes as the Red Book of Hergest, the White Book of Rhydderch and the Black Book of Carmarthen, which provided inspiration for Tolkien’s Red Book of Westermarch. The books are named for the colour of the leather in which they are bound. The Blue Book of Nebo is not bound in leather. It is a notebook owned by a boy called Dylan in which he and his mother, Rowenna, write their recollections of the world that was, and their lives as, as far as they know, the only living people left on Earth.

Nebo, by the way, is a real place. It is a small village in the foothills of Eryri just south of Caernarvon.

Being told largely from Dylan’s point of view, The Blue Book is marketed as YA. However, it is not a coming of age story, and there is not much message in there given that there is no society for Dylan to be growing up into. He was a child when the world ended. He is a teenager now.

The thing that hits you most about the book is the very different views of the two characters. Rowenna, having been an adult in the world before the End, misses it much more, and is also much more fearful of what might still happen to her and her son. She tries to shield Dylan from much of the nastiness of the world.

Dylan, in contrast, can remember little of his life before the End. He takes great joy in learning to grow food and build things in and around their house. He knows that he has a lot to learn, and he knows that his mother has been keeping things from him. For example, she won’t talk about his father, though he knows he must have had one. Then there is the question of his baby sister, Mona, who was born after the End. Where did she come from?

The Blue Book of Nebo is, in many ways, the book that Station 11 could have been, had it not wanted to be so relentlessly cosy. Ros doesn’t sugar-coat the dangers of a post-Apocalyptic world, nor does she have her characters descend into barbarism. Rowenna has salvaged a lot of books from a local library—fiction as well as ‘how to’ volumes—and Dylan is an avid reader. But equally there is no suggestion that culture will save them.

I should note also that Nebo is not far from Anglesey, and therefore from Wylfa atomic power station. That plays a significant part in the book, because if the world ends the systems that safeguard the operation of such places also end.

I really loved this book, and I can see why it has become so popular. It really brings home the stark reality of having to exist without any modern conveniences. It also has interesting things to say about Welshness, and the people of Wales’ connection to their cultural heritage. Which is why I now want to read the book in the original Welsh. Ros wrote the English version, but she calls it an ‘adaptation’ rather than a translation. I’m interested to know what she has done differently, and what she might be shielding English readers from.

book cover
Title: The Blue Book of Nebo
By: Manon Steffan Ros
Publisher: Firefly Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

National Eisteddfod 2026

083, Convention Report

What do you think of when someone mentions the Welsh National Eisteddfod? If you have heard of it at all, you will probably be imagining a bunch of old folks in druid robes droning on about poetry while a male voice choir sings hymns in the background. And, to be fair, those things do happen. But the Eisteddfod is much more than that, as Jo Hall and I found out when we spent a day there this year.

Probably the best analogy I have is Worldcon. It is huge, it goes on for days, and it is very much a big tent event. The Eisteddfod lasts for seven days. And because there are no convention centres that could host such an event in Wales, it takes place in fields, in a bunch of actual big tents.

Like Worldcon, the Eisteddfod is very literary, but it covers all types of books, and music and theatre/film/TV as well. There’s no masquerade, but we do have the aforementioned silly druid costumes, and there are lots of competitions for poetry, prose and singing.

Naturally there are dealers, and the equivalent of fan tables. There are people selling books, clothing, jewellery and so on, plus a whole bunch of societies looking for members. I was particularly pleased to run across a stall for Heneb, the Welsh archaeology trust, and to discover that they run coffee mornings once a month at their offices in Llandeilo. They also had material on display from an absolutely amazing chariot burial from near the Eisteddfod site.

There is programming. Jo and I attended an exhibition on LGBTQ+ lives in Wales, and a discussion on community building. We also went to a cooking demonstration, which turned out to be crab cakes because we were in Sir Benfro (Pembrokeshire). The new Plaid Cymru government is very keen to engage with Welsh culture and the Minister for Culture, Heledd Fychan, was on hand to give a speech. That covered a whole bunch of things, including Wales’s success in the recent Commonwealth Games, but the thing that interested me was hearing Heledd talk abut the importance of literature to Welsh culture and her desire to help promote it as much as possible.

The programme sessions were mostly on the hour and lasted for 45 minutes, giving people time to walk to the next event that interested them. As the venue was spread across multiple fields, there were choke points at the gates between them. It was so like a Worldcon. Nothing much visibly happening for 45 minutes, then everyone rushing from one venue to another.

There was street food, obviously. Lots of choice. The jalapeno burgers were surprisingly good.

Thanks to Cyhoeddi Cymru (Publishing Wales), Jo and I had an invitation to an evening event in the Welsh Government tent. That was partly to give Heledd a chance to make another, and very book-focussed, speech, but also to recognise the fact that Aberystwyth and the county of Ceredigion has been recognised by UNESCO as a World City of Literature. The Archdruid of Wales, Mereid Hopwood, was on hand to talk about the project. With any luck, Wizard’s Tower will have a small part to play in the project in due course.

Part of the event was an interview with one of Wales’s most successful writers, Manon Steffan Ros. Her children’s book, The Blue Book of Nebo, has won multiple awards and been translated into many languages, including English. During the interview Manon was asked what it was like being invited to places such as France, Spain and even China to talk about her book. She said it was a complete shock, because no one in England had shown much interest in it, until the rest of the world started making a fuss about it. The folk singer, Cynefin, and the Town Poet of Aberystwyth, were on hand to add a little music and poetry to the occasion.

Jo and I finished the evening at the big music stage. During the day it had been running entries in a Battle of the Bands contest, in which eager groups of teenagers vied to be recognised as the next Catatonia or Manic Street Preachers. In the evening it hosted big names in Welsh music. We were there to see Bwncath.

The name means ‘buzzard’, if you were wondering about the bird symbolism on their website. They are an excellent band, but largely unknown outside of Wales because they only sing in Welsh. They remind me quite a bit of Runrig, and not just because of the non-English lyrics. Both bands have their roots in Celtic folk music: Scottish for Runrig and Welsh for Bwncath. Do check them out. I think they are great.

By the way, while the first modern Eisteddfod was held in 1819, and the first National Eisteddfod in 1861, there was a meeting of bards at Ceredigion Castle in 1176. It was held on the orders of Lord Rhys, the Prince of Deheubarth (south Wales). This year’s Eisteddfod was held near Ceredigion to mark the 850th anniversary of that event.

Oath of Fire

083, Book Review, K Arsenault Rivera

As promised, I have now read the first book in K Arsenault Rivera’s sapphic Greek myth books. I have solved some of the conundrums that Daughter of the Hunt left me with, but some still remain.

Oath of Fire is a Cupid and Psyche re-telling, and that is a ‘god falls in love with a mortal’ story. If first appears in books 4 to 6 of The Golden Ass by Apuleius, so it happens after Lucius is transformed into a donkey, but before he gets sold to the troop of Galli. The basic plot is that Psyche’s royal parents are guilty of hubris with regard to their daughter’s beauty, thus angering Aphrodite. Cupid/Eros is sent to punish the poor girl, but falls in love with her instead. Aphrodite is even more angry, but thanks to Psyche’s courage and persistence, and with a little help from some friendly gods, love conquers all. There are not many stories in Greek myth that have a happy ending, but this is one. (Dionysius and Ariadne is another, which is one reason I am so sad about KAOS having been cancelled.)

In the world of Rivera’s books, the Greek gods have somehow been melded with the Fae. This makes them even more inscrutable and unpredictable than ever. And possibly more dangerous, because they are obsessed with bargains in a very Fae-like manner.

Also, because this is Rivera, and the story has to be Sapphic, Eros has to be female. Well, female-presenting anyway. Gender doesn’t appear to be a thing with the gods, except in that they use it when communicating with mortals. Or at least they do when it suits then. Zeus presents as male, and is called Father by the gods he is supposed to have fathered in the myths, but he uses female pronouns. Whether this is some strange tradition amongst the gods, or just Zeus messing with people’s heads, is not clear to me.

Rivera follows the plot of the original fairly closely, though her Eros is much more a god of fiery passion than the cute arrow-of-love wielding kid that we are used to today. Her Psyche is a human woman, living in New York who, in a fit of nominative determinism, works as a therapist. She’s not very good at it, and early on in the book she’s fired from her job.

I should do an out-take at this point. Specifically Psyche is fired for a breach of client confidentiality. The client in question is a young trans woman, and Psyche is accused of outing her to her parents. This is not a good introduction for a character we are supposed to be sympathizing with. However, what appears to have happened is that Psyche knows that the parents are aware of their child’s gender issues, and seem supportive. She’s trying to get them to tell the girl that, but the client comes across an email and jumps to the wrong conclusion. Knowing how sensitive and frightened trans people can be, this seems entirely plausible to me. Your mileage may differ.

Anyway, the newly unemployed Psyche comes to the attention of Eros, and love ensues, albeit with a lot of trials to overcome before Psyche can ascend to godhood and marry her beloved. She is helped along the way by an online friend known as Bondi, who lives in Australia, and this is Iphigenia from Daughter of the Hunt.

This book does not go full-on BDSM the way Iphigenia’s story does, but it is still very much a tale about a lesbian couple, one of whom very much enjoys the tall, strong and dominant nature of her partner. The nature of the pairing is important in romance novels, so you need to be aware of this in case you are squicked by that sort of relationship.

Overall it was a fun book, if highly unlikely in many parts. I think I would have enjoyed it more had I recently read the original, or at least a summary thereof, before diving in, because then I would have been much better placed to appreciate how Rivera has adapted the source material.

I can’t find any evidence of any more sequels being planned, but I’m sure that there are plenty of suitable myths left to be mined for this sort of treatment. I want a Medusa story.

book cover
Title: Oath of Fire
By: K Arsenault Rivera
Publisher: Forever
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Spider-Man: Brand New Day

083, Movie Review

We are in a period in which all the people who hate superheroes have been gleefully proclaiming that the time of superhero movies is over, because the MCU has produced a number of duds of late. The truth is, of course that, just like any other artistic endeavour, some superhero movies are good and some are bad. DC ones, sadly, are almost always bad. Kevin Feige and his team have a better track record, but before the MCU was set up a lot of Marvel movies were really bad too. Then again, if people want to hold that the time of superhero movies is over, maybe they can just stay away, and allow those of us who enjoy such things to do so without dragging us into some sort of culture war.

Except, Spider-Man: Brand New Day is good. Very good. Part of that is, I suspect, because this is the fourth movie in the latest Spidey sequence and the team know what they are doing. Part of it is undoubtedly because the husband and wife team of Tom Holland and Zendaya work very well together on screen. But a lot of it is just Spidey himself.

I saw one review that claimed that this film was good (as opposed to all other superhero films which were bad) because it was centred on the lives of the protagonists as people, rather than on superheroes. Mate, how do you think Stan Lee made such a success of Marvel in the first place? The whole point was that Marvel heroes had lives outside of their costumes, and their struggles there were as much a part of the story as the crime fighting.

Spider-Man, the nerdy New York teenager who lucks into super powers and has to struggle with school, his aged aunt, and girlfriend problems when he’s not in costume is the epitome of the Marvel hero, which is why he is so popular.

With Brand New Day the MCU folks have built on that. They have taken their story arc and run with it. In the previous film, following the tragic death of Aunt May, Spidey decides that he must protect his loved ones from danger. The only way he could do that was by getting Doctor Strange to cast a spell that erased his alter ego, Peter Parker, from memory. As a result, his girlfriend, MJ, and best mate Ned, go off to Yale and Peter is left hiding from the world and spending his time mostly in costume.

Brand New Day is set four years in the future. MJ and Ned have both graduated, and have moved back to New York. Peter is finding it increasingly harder to cope with his reclusive lifestyle, and discovering that MJ now has a boyfriend tips him over the edge. But, of course, there are villains to fight.

The big bad in this movie was a total surprise. How I managed to get to the cinema without being spoiled is a mystery to me, so well done everyone I follow on social media who saw the film before me. This is a character that I have been waiting on tenterhooks to see ever since I saw the post-credits scene from The Marvels. And now Avengers: Doomsday cannot come soon enough. Job well done, MCU people.

Back with Spidey, the film also teams our favourite webslinger up with Frank Castle, The Punisher. I have never been fan of that character, at least in part because he is so beloved of right wing gun nuts. Brand New Day uses him very well, both interrogating his outlook on life, and using him for comedy.

The film also makes brief use of Yelena Belova, and frankly adding Florence Pugh to any film automatically makes it better.

All in all it looks like the MCU team are getting their act together again. I hope so. I enjoy this stuff, and I don’t care that lots of you don’t.

All That is in the Earth

083, Andrew Knighton, Book Review

Having very much enjoyed the works by Andrew Knighton that we are publishing through Wizard’s Tower, I decided to catch up on some of his other work. All That Is In The Earth is a stand-along novella from Luna Press Publishing. It showcases something that I think Knighton does really well: massive amounts of worldbuilding from minimal amounts of detail.

The book is a science fiction story. The main character crash lands on an alien planet which is, in theory, quarantined due to a deadly plague that is found there. He doesn’t expect to live long, but to his surprise he finds a thriving colony of fellow marooned travellers. Clifford (not Cliff) starts off as a bit of an arse, but he slowly becomes a better person as he learns the necessary skills for survival, which of course includes collaboration. No one is going to survive on this planet alone.

I said that Abaddon, the planet, is only theoretically quarantined. That’s because there are a whole lot of political factions in the galaxy who are keen to learn its secrets. Clifford himself is a expert on soils who was sent to Abaddon to study it. In theory he would get samples fetched for him by drones, but life happened.

The other people on Abaddon are also there for political reasons. Some have been sent there to study it, like Clifford. Others are soldiers on a (possibly doomed) survey and extraction mission. So although they all have to work together while on the surface, they are all also competing to bring the planet’s secrets to their employers.

Knighton tells us almost nothing about the universe beyond Abaddon, but he peppers the narrative with sufficient snippets of detail to lead us to believe that he has a whole political system worked out. Maybe he does, and there will be a novel or two one day. But maybe he’s just very good at faking it.

There are also some very nice supporting characters. I particularly liked Private Marel, a man who has totally bought into the idea that if you work hard in a dangerous job then you will be well rewarded and be able to retire to a life of luxury before long. But then again, Clifford comes from some sort of feudal society, and he’s absolutely scandalised that Marel treats Captain Tork as a boss, not as a social superior to whom he should kow tow at all times.

Finally there is a genuine scientific mystery to be solved, in the fine tradition of science fiction. The title of the story and the fact that Clifford is a soil scientist give us some clues.

Knighton packs a lot into this fairly short story. If I wasn’t already publishing him, I would want to having read this.

book cover
Title: All That is in the Earth
By: Andrew Knighton
Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Tolkien and Wales

083, Book Review, Carl Phelpstead

The University of Wales Press had a big sale over the summer. Tolkien and Wales was on the list. How could I resist a title like that? Of course I then discovered that the book won a Mythopoeic Award back in 2012, so clearly I should have read it before now. Oh well, better late than never.

Carl Phelpstead is a professor of English Literature at the University of Cardiff. At least I hope he still is. That institution has been taken over by a bunch of idiots with MBAs who are busy asset stripping, which means firing anyone whose specialism they deem too woke. I don’t think I have encountered him at conferences before, which is odd because he cites Dmitra Fimi, Tom Shippey and David Bratman quite a bit. We will doubtless meet at some point.

And now the book. How much of Wales is there in the work of Tolkien? You might think that, given his devotion to the ancient people of England, he would take a dim view of their ancient enemies. This book, however, proves that assumption wrong.

You are probably aware that Tolkien’s Elvish languages, Sindarin and Quenya, were based on Welsh and Finnish. Though in Tolkien’s case, because he was a philologist, ‘based’ means having a similar grammar, not borrowing words. Of course that means that the poor elves have mutations, but apparently only two whereas Welsh has three, and for some goddess-forsaken reason the Cornish have five.

Tolkien was very much enamoured of Welsh as a language, though his attempts to explain what he means when he says that one language is more beautiful than another don’t make much sense to anyone who is not a philologist, and maybe don’t make sense to them either.

Weirdly Tolkien strongly disliked Gaelic, which is not that far removed on the language family tree. Sorry, Irish pals.

So where did this love of Wales come from? We hear stories about the young Tolkien seeing the names of Welsh towns on the side of coal wagons as they rolled through Birmingham. But in 1920 he and his family holidayed in Wales in the small seaside town of Llanbedrog on the Llŷn Peninsula. In those days the town would have been very Welsh-speaking, and it quite possibly still is.

As an academic, Tolkien spent his time studying ancient works of literature from the British Isles. While he is well known for his work on Beowulf, he also worked on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and was very conversant with The Mabinogion, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Gerald of Wales. Phelpstead traces the influences of Welsh mythology on The Lord of the Rings.

Along the way he gave me the answer to something that I’d been wondering about. Why the heck is the Red Book of Hergest, one of the primary sources of ancient Welsh literature, named after a famous Saxon king? It turns out that, before being sequestered by Oxford University, the book had been kept in a place called Hergest Court in Herefordshire. Hence the name. Herefordshire, as Phelpstead notes, is in the Welsh Marches, which are to the south and east of Wales, but if you are English and live in Birmingham they are fairly obviously Westermarch.

Although this is an academic tome, the language is quite approachable and Phelpstead is not above sneaking in the odd joke. I was particularly amused by this passage:

There was once a writer living in Oxford, though he had been born outside England. His most famous work was an enormously popular piece of fantasy fiction that presented itself as a true history, claiming to be based on an ancient manuscript source. The book dealt with kings, heroes and a wizard. It became a best seller not only in England, but internationally; it was translated into many languages, was widely illustrated and was adapted in other media. That writer was, of course, Geoffrey of Monmouth…

More seriously Phelpstead has interesting things to say on Tolkien’s view of Celticness, and on Welsh, English and British identity. I could write a lot more on that, but I think I’d need to be a Tolkien scholar to do so. I will therefore stop here and give this book a warm recommendation to anyone interested in Tolkien and his work.

book cover
Title: Tolkien and Wales
By: Carl Phelpstead
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Purchase links:
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

X-Men ’97 – Season 2

083, TV Review

There is a sense in which X-Men ’97 is pure fan service. It brings a bunch of beloved characters back together, and tells stories about them that are mostly familiar. We are happy to see them again. We get to see Jean and Scott functioning as a happily married couple, the only dysfunction in their lives being their relationship with their son, Nathan, who has time-travelled and come back a grumpy adult. I was personally very happy to see Polaris getting a major role. Jean and Lorna were besties back in the Neal Adams days, when they were believably twenty-somethings and I was teenager looking up to them.

Of course there is also huge drama going on in the superhero sides of their lives, and in the mutant rights sphere. Season 1 saw the destruction of Genosha, the mutant nation, so things are going to be fraught. And this season sees the return of Apocalypse. There is a whole, coherent story arc around that.

What the scriptwriters appear to be trying to do is tell a few decades of X-Men history in a few short animated seasons. Inevitably that means that things feel very rushed. There is also a ridiculous ensemble cast. We have the X-Men themselves, plus X-Force and X-Factor. X-Force is a more militant mutant team headed by Cable (Nathan Summers) who want to kill Apocalypse. X-Force is a government-sponsored mutant team led by Havok (Alex Summers) and Valerie Cooper, a government agent. They want to round up unauthorized mutants to ‘keep the public safe’. I found it hard to keep track of all this at times. Goodness only knows how people not steeped in X-Men continuity are coping.

The one thing you can guarantee about the X-Men is that no one is ever Really, Most Sincerely Dead. They are only temporarily dead, until such time as someone decides to bring them back. In Season 1 we saw the death of Gambit. Season 2 brings him back as one of Apocalypse’s Horsemen. Cue much anguish for poor Rogue. Of course we know we will get him back in the end. Two other major characters appear to die in the process. My guess is that at least one of them will come back in Season 3. In the meantime we get some nice tear-jerk moments.

It is all a bit silly, but do we care? Of course not. These are the X-Men, they are our friends, and we love them. Your mileage may vary.

Editorial – August 2026

083, Editorial

It is all go here. If everything goes according to plan we will have seven new books available at FantasyCon. Chaz Brenchley’s His Martian Apprentice is already out in the world. The Green Man’s Debt from Juliet McKenna is due out very soon. And I am busy working on the rest of them, along with Roz & Jo on the ones they are editing.

There is also the small matter of a Worldcon being in progress. I have been on a few panels, and watched a few more. Kayla is there in person. There will be a report in the next issue.

Consequently I have no time to write an editorial. Sorry, see you next month.

Issue 82

Issues

This is the July 2026 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Art: The Herring Fishers Pursued by the Bhodry-More: This issue's cover art is by GP Jacomb-Hood and features a strange piece of Scottish folklore

  • Green City Wars: Adrian Tchaikovsky has ridiculous amounts of fun with this charming tale of uplifted animals running a city, and much besides

  • Outlaw Planet: This science fiction novel from Mike Carey reminds Cheryl a lot of one of her favourite Culture novels

  • Daughter of the Hunt: Did Iphigenia die at Aulis? K Arsenault Rivera is firmly in the "Hell, NO!" camp.

  • MetropolCon: This year's Eurocon was in Berlin, a city that Cheryl has long wanted to visit

  • The Mabinogion Set: What does ancient Welsh poetry have to do with mathematical theory? More than you would think. They were sharp cookies, those bards.

  • Finncon 2026: If it is July it must be Finncon. Cheryl has been for her annual sauna.

  • The Queer Bookshelf: Layla McCay has set out to catalogue the world of queer fiction. It is an Herculean undertaking. Cheryl is impressed.

  • The Black Cauldron: Does Lloyd Alexander's book have anything to do with the Disney movie of the same name? Of course not.

  • Editorial: July 2026: Cheryl shares her Worldcon schedule.

Art: The Herring Fishers Pursued by the Bhodry-More

082, Art, GP Jacomb-Hood

This month’s cover is once again from the archives of the British Library. It is an internal illustration from a series of books called The Casquet of Literature, edited by Charles Gibbon and Mary Elizabeth Christie and first published in 1888. There were six volumes in all, and it is not clear which book this illustration came from.

The artist is George Percy Jacomb-Hood. A variety of artists were used for the illustrations.

The book set is subtitled: Being a Selection in Poetry and Prose from the Works of the Most Admired Authors. That included Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Lord Byron and Robert Burns. The British Library doesn’t explain which story the illustration belongs to, but I believe it is “A Night at the Herring Fishing” by Scottish author, Hugh Miller, which you can read here.

I assumed that the Bhodry-More is a genuine piece of Scottish folklore, but I knew nothing more about it. So I talked to my friend Meg Hyland who is doing a PhD in Edinburgh on the songs of women in the Scottish herring industry. You would have thought that someone would have made a song about this terrible beastie. But Meg had not heard of it either, nor has she been able to find any references to it other than Miller’s story. Right now we are leaning towards the conclusion that Miller made the whole thing up, but if we find out more I will let you know.

As usual, a larger and unadorned version of the art is available below.

Green City Wars

082, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Book Review

In the acknowledgements for this book, Adrian Tchaikovsky thanks his editor, Lee Harris, “for actually allowing me to get away with any of this incredible nonsense”. He does so because, unlike most of his novels (that I have read), Green City Wars is mostly played for laughs.

We are in near-future Europe. Mankind has finally cracked the sustainability thing, and us humans now live in beautiful garden cities that are totally recyclable and have zero impact on the environment. Of course it has taken a lot of biotechnology to get to this point, but us humans are good at the sciency stuff. We have learned to make houses that are grown rather than built. We have learned to be part of an ecosystem rather than ruining it. And most importantly we have learned how to make other species do all of the work that we don’t want to.

Wait, what???

You heard me. In ancient times we have slaves to do our dirty work for us. These days we have the working class. Science fiction writers speculate that one day all of that work will be done by robots. But Tchaikovsky suggests that it will be better done by uplifted animals.

Mostly these are small creatures: rats, mice, squirrels and so on. After all, the whole point is that they should scurry around getting things done and not being noticed. We wouldn’t want people getting all sentimental about this arrangement, after all. And so, mostly, they are not noticed. Which is how most humans are entirely unaware that these newly intelligent creatures have developed a whole bunch of human social habits such as politics, war, and organised crime.

Green City Wars is (mostly) not about war. It is a hard boiled detective novel. Our hero is Skotch, an American raccoon who used to work for a multi-national company here in New Vienna, but who has since gone freelance. His old bosses want to hire him to track down a missing mouse and, like any gumshoe in any novel, Skotch has to take the job because he is down on his luck.

He’s also down on his brains. To stay intelligent, the animals must take regular doses of a drug called Plangent. If they don’t get it, they start to revert to dumbness. Regular supplies of Plangent are a standard part of a salaried job, but for freelancers life is not so easy.

Skotch soon finds out that Herr Doktor Meece is a very popular rodent, and a genius chemist. Everyone wants a piece of him. Some organisations, like Skotch’s old bosses, want his research notes. Other people just want him dead so that no one can ever replicate his work. Skotch has a sinking feeling that the fate of the city is at stake, especially when the local anarchist commune gets involved. They’d think nothing of killing all the humans.

But wait, where is the dame? There has to be a dame, right? And so there is. Her name is Lulu and she’s a pigeon, and a journalist of sorts. She works for a human called Herr Schreiber who writes children’s stories about the lives of the cute animals who keep the city running. But, like all good journalists, Lulu has a nose (or a beak) for a story, and the missing meesus is the biggest story in the city in years.

There are also a couple of femme fatals. There’s Szerky the stoat, a corporate security operative who has been chasing Meece since he fled the countryside agribusiness for whom they worked. And there is Tybelle the cat, a killer for hire who has been employed by some of the city’s less scrupulous animal inhabitants. (Yes, organised crime is run by the rats. Why did you have to ask?)

Also, all of this takes place against a background of an actual war for control of the city. Two armies are fighting it out: the red squirrels, and the grays.

Yes, Tchaikovsky has had a ridiculous amount of fun writing this book. He even introduced a human nun who has taken it upon herself to bring the Word of God to the animal masses. Inevitably her name is Saint Frances.

Of course there is a plot in amongst all of this silliness. Skotch and Lulu have to find Doktor Meece before the various competing factions do, and before they get killed by Szerky, Tybelle or one of the squirrel armies. Then they have to decide whether to protect him, or kill him before he can destroy the city.

This being Tchaikovsky, there is also a serious point to the book. The way in which humans treat their uplifted animal servants is very much how we have treated slaves, and would treat robots, when we can get away with it. Capitalism has not gone away in the world of the book, it has just found new things to exploit.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is great fun, very clever, and making a serious point all at the same time. At Finncon I asked Tchaikovsky if he was riffing off China Mièville’s King Rat, but having finished the book I have realised that it also has a lot in common with The City and The City, because the animals have their own world that runs in parallel to, but entirely hidden from, the human world.

There is one thing about the book that I didn’t understand. The animals have a religion known as Jeffism, worshipping a human called Jeff. This is never explained in the book. I assumed that the story was probably set in the same world as Tchaikovsky’s Dogs of War and its sequels, which I have not read. But I bought an ebook of Dogs of War and I can’t see any mention of Jeff in it. Google, of course, is utterly useless these days. So, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary I am going to assume that the animals are actually worshipping Jeff VanderMeer. It makes as much sense as anything else.

book cover
Title: Green City Wars
By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Outlaw Planet

082, Book Review, Mike Carey

Looking at the PR for Mike Carey’s latest SF novel, you could be mistaken for thinking that it is a space Western in the style of Stark Holborn. And to some extent it is, but only to the extent that Iain Banks’ Inversions is a fantasy novel.

So no, Outlaw Planet is a Pandominium novel. It is set some time after the revolution engendered by Topaz Tourmaline FiveHills and her friends, and there is a back story which explains how the world of the book got to be the way it is. The front story, however, is of a world with 19th century technology that is fighting a version of the US Civil War, except with Pandominium people. Most people are treated fairly equally, and the main character is of Labrador extraction. But there are some species that are frequently enslaved. And then there are the hairless apes, known as ‘pugfaces’ who claim to be the original inhabitants of the planet.

Our main character, Dog-Bitch Bess, was once the youngest child of a well-to-do Northern family. Guessing how bad her father was with money, and how little would be left for her once her elder siblings had wasted their share, young Elizabeth took herself off South in search of a job as a schoolmistress. She did OK too, until the war came, and Bess was left with nothing but a burning desire for revenge.

She achieves this with the help of her pistol, Sam. Whereas Banks had a knife missile or two hanging around in the mediaeval world of Inversions, Carey has a Pandominium AI pistol that is way beyond anything that Bess’s people can produce in terms of military technology.

After the War there is a general amnesty for regular soldiers from the South, but Bess served with an irregular unit and the legend that has grown up around her has ensured that she’s a wanted woman. She and Sam have to go on the run. And that leads them to investigate the giant white towers that dot the landscape, and the mysterious Mindless Plague that occasionally afflicts townships.

Carey is having a lot of fun with this, and also having a good go at the idiocy of Fascists. You will understand that a lot better when you have read the book. I can’t say a huge amount more without getting deep into spoiler territory. Just read it, OK. It is very clever.

book cover
Title: Outlaw Planet
By: M R Carey
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Daughter of the Hunt

082, Book Review, K Arsenault Rivera

I found this is a very strange book. Partly that is my fault, for reasons that I will explain. But it still goes places that the reader probably won’t expect.

Given that I loved the stories of Shizuka and Shefali that began with The Tiger’s Daughter, I have been wanting to catch up with what K Arsenault Rivera is doing now. When I saw a book that was billed as a romance between Artemis and a girl who has been sacrificed to her I could scent another disaster lesbians story, so I checked it out.

Shock number one: the story begins in modern day Sydney. Our heroine is the heir to a vast multinational corporation. But there is this weird superstition that they are under a curse which means that the CEO (father) and heir (heroine) cannot ever leave the corporate HQ.

But wait, our heroine is called Iphigenia. Her parents are called Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. We know where this is going, right?

Sure enough, things happen. Aunt Helen runs off with a chap from a rival corporation. Uncle Menelaus is furious. There is talk of war. And poor Iphy ends up getting sacrificed.

Which would be the end of things, and a very short book, or an intro to a re-telling of the Trojan War. This book is not that, because Artemis, being very much That Sort of goddess, does not approve of fathers killing their daughters. So she spares Iphigenia, but to maintain the illusion of a sacrifice she has to hide her away.

Much of Daughter of the Hunt therefore takes place in the Domain of Artemis, which of course is woodland. Iphigenia is to become a handmaiden of Artemis, which means that she needs to learn wilderness survival, hunting and so on. For a modern day Aussie girl who has never left the safety of her father’s high rise office, and has no skills beyond playing with computers, this is something of a challenge.

Rivera clearly knows a lot about wilderness survival. She goes on about it in a very Kim Stanley Robinson way, because she has done all of that research and she is absolutely going to put it all into the book.

Of course the book is also about the terrible injustice done to Iphigenia. As such it has more to do with Euripides’ play, Iphigenia at Aulis, than with the Iliad, and with the versions in which Artemis takes pity on the girl and replaces her with a deer.

The book is also about being the submissive partner in a BDSM relationship. You were not expecting that one, I suspect. But Artemis is famously virginal so her relationship with Iphy cannot be too conventional. Rivera seems to know a lot about BDSM, and the sex scenes in the book are a whole lot more sexy than many conventional sex scenes that I have read.

But of course the other reason why the relationship has to be like that is because Artemis is a goddess and Iphigenia is not. That’s not just a power differential. In this book the gods appear to be some sort of alien beings from another dimension. They are ten feet tall and are so scary that they have to wear masks when in the company of humans least we feeble creatures die of shock. Oh, and they eat humans.

Now I am intrigued. But does the book tell me any more about these strange creatures? No, it does not. Does it tell me why Eros is now a woman? Does it tell me why Zeus is referred to as ‘father’ but has female pronouns? No, reader, it does not.

And this is the point where I discover that I am reading book two of a series. I prompt curse myself for an idiot and go off to buy book 1, which is an Eros and Psyche re-telling. Hopefully that will help with my confusion. I will report back next month.

Update: the ‘gods’ of this series appear to be something of a combination of actual Greek gods and the Tylwyth Teg, but I’m still not a lot the wiser.

book cover
Title: Daughter of the Hunt
By: K Arsenault Rivera
Publisher: Forever
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

MetropolCon

082, Convention Report

Berlin is a city that I have wanted to visit for some time. Of course the main reason I wanted to go was to see the Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum, but that is currently closed for renovation. I did manage to get a morning in the Nuwes Museum, which houses exhibits from Egypt and Troy, including the famous bust of Nerfertiti. That was well worth the trip. But I very much liked the city and want to go back when the Pergamon re-opens.

The convention was held in a place called the Silent Green Kulturquartier which is to the north of the city centre. The area looks very counter-culture, and also has a large number of Turkish kebab shops. It is light on big hotels and restaurants. However, the Berlin Metro (the U-Bahn) is excellent. I chose to stay at the travel hub of Alexanderplatz. It was dead easy to get to from the airport, and only one change for the trip to the convention (the nearest station to which was called Wedding). I didn’t need to be rushing back and fore to my hotel room, so that worked fine.

The venue itself was fascinating. It was part park, part modern conference centre, and part old crematorium. Much of the action took place underground, in what might once have been a car park given the ramp you had to walk down to get there. There was plenty of space for the dealers, fan tables and art show, plus a large room with a big stage that was used for things like opening and closing ceremonies. There was also a room set aside as a fan lounge.

However, as the weather was mostly good, hanging out tended to happen at ground level in the park, where you could also get cheap food and beer. To one side and up a level was a collection of meeting rooms where some of the programme was held. And finally there was the main hall of the old crematorium building, which held larger program items.

Eurocons are always a challenge for programming. They are one-off events, and in addition to the usual problem of guessing how popular each item will be, you also have to guess how many people will want programming in the local language, and how many will head for the English streams instead. It was inevitable that there would be some issues, but the convention coped very well with it on the fly. My talk got moved, which prevented it from being maxed out. I was amused that someone thought the ESFS Business Meeting would be OK in a room that sat 28 people, but that got moved too.

In terms of programming, it was good to catch up with Francesco Verso, who is still enthusiastically promoting translated SF&F. It was also good to hear Neil Clarke sharing his experiences of being one of the first people hit by the tsunami of AI slop. Sarah Rees Brennan on the Gothic Revival was highly entertaining, though she has so much personality that I felt a bit sorry for her fellow panellists. Al Reynolds and Peter Hamilton did what looks to be a regular buddy act. And some Finnish writers bemoaned the necessity of having to choose a gender for their characters before their books can be translated into other languages.

Of particular interest to me was an academic presentation on the Dual Path story structure in Arthurian romances. As you’ll see from the review of The Mabinogion Set, in this issue, Welsh Arthuriana has a fractal structure, but the French stories have a very different structure. In a Dual Path story the hero (and it is usually a he) sets out on a journey, gets to where he thinks he wants to be, discovers that he hadn’t understood things properly, and has to do a second journey to get where he really needs to be. Often the second journey is a mirror of the first in some way. And often the first journey is in search of worldly success, whereas the second is in search of personal happiness.

I’m very pleased to see a growing interest in alternate story structures. It should help wean people off the idea that there is only one correct way to structure a story.

I skipped Sunday’s programme as there was not a lot of interest to me, and instead did some work in my hotel room and headed out to see the Schwules Museum, Berlin’s museum of LGBTQ+ life. I remember meeting someone who was involved with it years back at an event in Liverpool. The museum had a difficult time of it at first, but they now seem very well established and are doing good exhibitions. Currently they had a big one about Susan Sontag, and one on queer life in rural Germany. Most of the material was available in English as well as German.

My thanks to Claudia and her team for doing a great job. It was good to catch up with Neil Clarke over dinner to share publishing issues. I also spent a bit of time talking to people about book projects, but I won’t say more about that until it is all more firm. I ended up having coffee with Al Reynolds at the airport on the Monday. His next book sounds like it will be really interesting.

Next year’s Eurocon is in Lisbon. I have a membership, but I can’t go because FantasyCon has been scheduled for the same weekend and that’s one of my best selling opportunities of the year. I owe it to my authors to be there. Hopefully I can get to the Lisbon SMOFcon instead, as Lisbon is another city I have long wanted to visit.

Zagreb has won the right to hold the Eurocon in 2028. Given that I was a Guest of Honour last time they held the convention, and given that I know how good the Croatians are at con running, I am definitely planning to go.

The Mabinogion Set

082, Book Review, Natalia Petrovskaia

One of the things I have learnt since coming to live in Wales is that the Welsh literary establishment really hates The Mabinogion. I think that’s partly because it is seen as fantasy, and Wales is still in the 20th century with regards to academic attitudes to genre fiction. But it is also partly because people have taken on board the English view that the stories in The Mabinogion are “badly written”, and probably are bad copies of stories from elsewhere.

Thankfully the world is not run by scholars of modern literature. There are many other types of academic. In particular, in this case, we have mediaevalists, who try to make sense of the very different way in which mediaeval people thought about the world. And we have people whose focus of study is on mediaeval literature, which is a whole mad thing of its own.

I reviewed Natalia Petrovskyia’s book about ‘Peredur’ in an earlier issue. I was very impressed, particularly by her insights into the triadic structure of the narrative. Her new book, The Mabinogion Set, expands upon this work and looks at the four branches of the Mabinogi. And guess what? They too are based on a triadic structure.

Petrovskyia identifies both triadic and tetradic structures in the stories, but these all relate back to triangles. A triangle has three sides, but if you divide an equilateral triangle into smaller triangles you will get four of them: one at each corner and one “hidden” in the middle. So a story can either have three components, or three and a fourth that acts as some sort of conclusion.

The title of the book, The Mabinogion Set, is a deliberate reference to the famous Mandelbrot Set of fractal theory. This is because the structure of the stories is fractal. A given story may have a beginning, a middle and an end, but within each of those there will be three sections, made up of three encounters, each told in three paragraphs. It seems fairly obvious that this was some sort of memory aid for oral storytellers. If the bard knows that everything comes in threes, it is easier for him (or her) to remember what comes next.

The fractal structure may also give some clues as to how the stories were told in an actual performance. As with Homer, the stories in the Mabinogi are too long to be told in one go. They sometimes have things that are weird and unexplained, and occasionally the bard will tell us about how a particular event is one of the Three such-and-such of Wales. Both of these things may be hooks that can lead us down to a deeper fractal layer, if the audience wants to go there, or can be passed over if the audience is already very familiar with the tales that would result.

Being an academic, Petrovskyia has to demonstrate all of this in considerable detail. (And even so I am sure that there are older academics who will dismiss her work as nonsense because it undermines their work.) So the book can drag a bit. But I found it well worth a read and it gave me a lot to think about. Also, of course, it makes it clear that the ancient Celtic bards were a lot smarter than modern scholars have given them credit for.

Petrovskyia is now planning to extend her analysis. I’d be very interested to think more about the Fourth Branch as possibly being a deliberate conclusion to the other three. But I think Petrovskyia will be looking at the other tales that make up The Mabinogion to see if any of those have the same triadic structure. I will be particularly interested in her analysis of ‘The Lady of the Well’ because it shares a lot of thematic elements with the French romance, ‘Yvain, the Knight of the Lion’. ‘Yvain’, very clearly, has the Dual Path structure that I talked about in my report on Metropolcon. If the Welsh version has a triadic structure, that would suggest that they both derive from a common ancestor, rather than the Welsh version being a poor copy of the French as English critics tend to claim.

book cover
Title: The Mabinogion Set
By: Natalia Petrovskyia
Publisher: University of Wales Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Finncon 2026

082, Convention Report

It has been a while since there was a Finncon in Turku. The last one was in 2018. But it is a very lovely city so I was pleased to be able to go back for a few days.

First, however, there was some travel. I flew into Helsinki direct from the Eurocon in Berlin. That gave me a few days in Finland before the con started, which meant visiting friends, starting with Otto and Paula.

On the Tuesday Otto and I visited Kiasma, the modern art museum in Helsinki. There was an exhibition of Sámi art which I had high hopes for on the grounds that the Inuit art I had seen in Toronto was superb. Sadly this did not live up to expectations, though it was very poignant. I’m not sure whether the Sámi don’t have carving traditions similar to the Inuit, of whether they are just so angry about what has been done to them that they don’t want to show anything beautiful. They were angry, and justifiably so.

What I wasn’t expecting was an exhibition of work by the Estonian sculptor, Edith Karlson. She’s very good. I was glad I got to see some of her work, much of which has strongly mythological themes.

On Wednesday I took the train up to Jyväskylä so spend a day or so with Irma and Jussi. And then on Friday morning Irma and I drove down to Turku. Jussi had to work, but he joined us by train later in the day. The hotels in town were quite expensive, so we had booked an apartment that I found on Booking.com that turned out to be really nice (though I’m not sure how I would have managed if I was not travelling with two Finnish-speakers).

Friday afternoon saw me doing my traditional job of interviewing the writer Guests of Honour about their work. Adrian Tchaikovsky was, of course, lovely, and I was pleasantly surprised by Reetta Vuokko-Syrjänen. She’s not a Finnish author that I knew much about, and she does a lot of writing for younger readers, but she’s very smart and totally held her own alongside Adrian. Sadly she has only one work in English translation, a short story in the anthology, The Lion and the Lynx, available from the lovely people at Osuuskumma.

Turku Finncons are held in the university. That means no accommodation on site, though for me there was a just a pleasant 20 minute walk along the river to a bridge and back up again. It also means no big hall for the dealers, which made it hard to work out how many there were. What I will say is that there were a lot. They are spread over two floors in three university buildings, and I’m pretty sure there were more dealers than we had at this year’s Eastercon. Also the good folks from Rosebud had a huge presence, which meant that most of the best recent English language releases were available, along with one table groaning under the weight of Adrian’s very many books.

One programme item that I made a point of attending was the introduction to the Sauútiverse from Xan Van Royen. This is a really interesting project, and not just because it is entirely African. The way in which collaborative worldbuilding is done seems very innovative, and may be useful to me in future projects. Xan is doing a similar programme item for Worldcon, but this time in collaboration with Wole Talabi and Stephen Embleton, who are also members of the Sauútiverse collective. Catch it if you can.

Saturday evening was the Masquerade, and once again I got roped in to chair the jury. Adrian, his wife Annie, and Reeta proved to be very able judges, and the convention provided us with a professional cosplayer who gave valuable insights into the quality of workmanship. We had a really good bunch of contestants as well.

As Finncon regulars will be aware, the Masquerade prizes are normally handed out at the Saturday evening party, held somewhere in town. This is the one thing that did not go well. The venue that the convention had hired did not put on enough staff. By the time that Irma, Jussi and I arrived, there was a massive queue for the bar. So we bailed. Fortunately I had been doing some research and I knew that Turku’s legendary whisky bar was just over the road. They didn’t have any Welsh whisky, but there was plenty of good Scottish stuff on offer.

Sunday saw me on the Eurofandom panel. I didn’t know that I was on it until that morning, and I didn’t know that I was moderating it until I arrived at the panel. Fortunately I had Saija Kyllönen and Carolina Gomez Lagerlöf from ESFS to whom I could just toss questions and get lengthy and authoritative answers. The other panellist was AMP Rodriguez from Portugal who managed to make me even more sad that I can’t go to next year’s Eurocon due to the clash with FantasyCon.

Because Finncon is free to attend, it is always hard to know just how many people were there. Having it spread over three buildings did not help. But Tero reckoned that there were 2 or 3 thousand, which seemed about right. As usual for Finncon, it mostly went very well. We had lovely weather too. Except for one very heavy downpour just as the con was ending. It was almost as if the gods were sad that it was over.

By the way, if you are wondering why there is a platypus in the convention logo, it is all to do with eggs. The convention was the 40th anniversary of Finncon. The theme of the convention was ‘beginnings’. And all of the animals featured in the logo lay eggs. If you want to know more about this, come to my (virtual) panel on creation myths at Worldcon.

Next year Finncon will be in Espoo. I don’t have any details of dates and guests as yet.

The Queer Bookshelf

082, Book Review, Layla McCay

Many years ago, when there was a lot less of it about, I considered writing a book about trans-themed science fiction and fantasy. I did get an academic paper (and a trip to Italy) out of the idea. But by then I had started a publishing company, and soon after the amount of material I would have had to cover grew exponentially. I would not be so daft as to tackle such a big project these days.

Which should explain why my jaw hit the floor when I discovered that someone had written a book about queer-themed fiction, throughout history, and all over the world. The amount of work involved was simply staggering.

Then I was asked if I would interview Layla McCay about her book for my pals at Nofela, the queer bookshop in Swansea. Naturally I said yes. I wanted to find out how the heck she had done it.

Amazingly, McCay has actually read most of the books she writes about, although the foreign language ones she has mostly read in translation. Finding the books to list was a massive research operation involving libraries, dinner parties with queer friends, emails to famous writers and queer bookshops, online surveys, and even a Zoom call with a queer book club in Russia.

The Queer Bookshelf covers around 5000 years of literary history, starting with Gilgamesh and running up to the present day. The vast majority of the books listed were written in English but McCay has made a determined effort to find at least one book from as many countries as she can.

While the book is mostly limited to fiction, McCay’s tastes are very catholic. So yes, there are classics from Oscar Wilde and Radclyffe Hall to Armistead Maupin and Jeanette Winterson. There is a chapter on crime, and one on SF&F. McCay is a big convert to speculative fiction (though like me she’s not a big fan of horror). Impressively she interviewed Chip Delany for the book.

A book like this could easily end up being very dry, but McCay doesn’t take an academic approach. Her prose is very readable, and it is peppered with anecdotes mostly gleaned from interviewing the owners of queer bookshops. Everyone’s favourite is the story of how a bookshop in the USA got an order for a book called Lesbian Nuns from someone whose address was in Vatican City, and who paid with a check drawn on the Bank of the Holy Spirit.

Our interview inevitably touched on the subject of book bans. Encouragingly McCay was very upbeat about the prospects. Back in the days of Wilde and Hall, there were very few queer books around, and almost nowhere where you could buy them. These days there are thousands and, if your local school or library is banned from stocking them by a right wing council, there are plenty of online stores who will happily sell you some. It will be very hard to get the genie back in the bottle.

From an SF&F reader’s point of view, the book isn’t hugely revelatory. You will probably be aware of most of the books that McCay mentions in that chapter. But for those of you with broader tastes there is an absolutely wealth of potential reading material recommended in The Queer Bookshelf. And even if you know about all of them, you will still find McCay’s prose good entertainment.

book cover
Title: The Queer Bookshelf
By: Layla McCay
Publisher: Scribe UK
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Black Cauldron

082, Book Review, Lloyd Alexander

Having watch the Disney movie inspired (loosely) by the first two of Lloyd Alexander’s Prydain books, I figured that I should get on and read book 2. The Black Cauldron is, as I expected, very different from the film. Pretty much the only thing they have in common is the cauldron itself. It does, somewhat to my surprise, have the three witches, but they are never called witches which is how I managed to miss them. They are sorceresses.

While the film is very loosely based on the books, the books are even more loosely based on actual Welsh legend. The cauldron is, of course, the Cauldron of Rebirth from the Second Branch of the Mabinogi. There it belongs to the dastardly Irish, but in Alexander’s book is belongs to Arawn, Lord of Annwn.

The basic plot is that Gwydion and a bunch of other leading nobles decide that they must wrest the cauldron from Arawn’s clutches before he manages to conjure a zombie army and conquer all of Prydain. Naturally they fail dismally (not least because one of them secretly wants to cauldron for himself), and it is left to Taran the Assistant Pig Keeper, and Princess Eilonwy to get the job done.

There is also a very annoying and arrogant young noble called Ellidyr who is there primarily because this is a middle grade book so there has to be some sort of moral lesson for our heroes to learn alongside a quest to be fulfilled.

The outrageously offensive caricaturing of the Tylwyth Teg continues in this book. I do hope that they didn’t manage to get hold of Alexander’s soul when he died, or the poor chap will be having a terrible afterlife.

Carping aside, it is a fun read, if very much geared towards a very youthful audience.

book cover
Title: The Black Cauldron
By: Lloyd Alexander
Publisher: Usborne
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Editorial: July 2026

082, Editorial

Given the amount of travel that I have done this month, I am somewhat surprised that I managed to get an issue together. I guess at least I had a lot of reading time. August will be a lot quieter, though I do have lots of books that I need to get to market.

Of course August is normally Worldcon month, but as the convention is in the USA I can’t go in person. However, LACon V has worked hard to put together a comprehensive virtual programme, with no less than five streams of panels and presentations, plus one of readings and one of table talks. I have two panels. The details are in the graphic below. Hopefully I will see some of you online during the convention.

Issue 81

Issues

This is the June 2026 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Art: You Ought to be Ashamed of Yourself: This issue's cover is a scene from The Wizard of Oz; illustration by W W Denslow.

  • What We Are Seeking: The new novel from Cameron Reed is here at last, and it is fascinating.

  • Shroud: Adrian Tchaikovsky creates yet another ridiculously inventive set of alien lifeforms. A worth Hugo finalist.

  • Radiant Star: A new Imperial Radch book from Ann Leckie? Take my money!

  • Was: Cheryl looks back on Geoff Ryman's legendary AIDs novel, with a Wizard of Oz theme.

  • Yoke of Stars: This Birdverse novella is available in this year's Pride Storybundle. Another good reason to pick it up.

  • Fantasy’s Present Pasts: There is a new annual European convention for scholars of fantastic literature. The inaugural event took place in Glasgow.

  • Finding Albion: Can British folklore have meaning for our multicultural society? Zakia Sewell thinks it can.

  • Magnus Chase and the Ship of the Dead: On no, Loki is planning to bring about Ragnarök! Can a bunch of rag-tag kids stop him? Of course they can. And they cause dudebro tears along the way.

  • The Black Cauldron: Disney have put their animation inspired by the Chronicles of Prydain on streaming. Is it any good?

  • Editorial – June 2026: In which Cheryl manages to avoid most of the UK heat by going to convention in cooler climes.

Art: You Ought to be Ashamed of Yourself

081, Art, W W Denslow

This issue’s cover is one of the iconic illustrations from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, drawn by W W Denslow. This is where Dorothy is berating the Cowardly Lion for his cowardice. He looks a bit orange-faced, which is perhaps appropriate.

But that is not why I have chosen this cover. It is a nod to one of my favourite books of all time: Was by Geoff Ryman. My review from Emerald City is reprinted here, and if you read this in time you will be able to pick up the ebook for a ridiculously low price.

The image is sourced from the Public Domain Image Archive / Library of Congress

An unadulterated version of the image is shown below.


What We Are Seeking

081, Book Review, Cameron Reed

It has been a long time since The Fortune Fall, but we finally have a new novel by Cameron Reed. Was it worth the wait? Oh dear me yes.

Let’s do some background first. This is far-future SF, but not exactly Space Opera. Mankind has colonised the galaxy, but thanks to the tyranny of time and distance, each planet is mostly isolated, and dependent on the Free Ships for contact with the rest of the diaspora. The Ships are a law unto themselves, and individual planets have diverged quite a lot politically.

Scythia (I will talk more about the name of the planet later) is a relatively new colony. Unusually the colonists have come from two different planets. The Zandaheans are fundamentalist Christians, while the Ischnurans are somewhat more liberal but still practice marriage, which is expected to be heterosexual.

John Maraintha had signed up as a doctor on the Ship, Edgar’s Folly, but on a Ship the captain’s word is law. When a request comes from Scythia for two specialists, one of whom is a doctor, John has no choice but to be put off on the colony world. But John is from Essius, a planet where women have considerably more rights, and where marriage is seen as a great evil. Pretty much every other planet regards Essians as a bunch of sex-mad libertines who are likely to want to shag anything that moves. Of course this isn’t true, but it is going to make John’s life hard.

The other specialist dropped off with John is Sudharma, a translator. He is required because the people of Scythia think they might have encountered a race of intelligent aliens. They need someone to try to communicate with these creatures to establish whether they are intelligent.

Why is this important? Well, because of Earth. The people of Earth are no longer fully human. They have entered into a state of symbiosis with an alien race called the aiyi. And the aiyi, being fully aware of the evil of which humans are capable, are very keen to prevent any genocides. By the time that John and Sudharma arrive on Scythia, an Earth woman and her attendant aiyi are already there, and the colonists are very nervous.

Oh, and Sudharma is a Jain, which means that he has strict dietary requirements and religious observances.

The wildlife on Scythia is quite different from anything that humans are used to. Everything is both plant and animal. They begin life as plants, then bud off animals, which then plant the next generation. The colonists assume that the creatures they have names Basket-Men, after the woven bags they always carry, are an animal form, but they have not yet encountered the plant form.

The book is fairly obviously about the European colonisation of North America. The colony on Scythia is small, isolated, at the mercy of the unfamiliar local environment, and runs on gossip and narrow views of correct social behaviour. John, Sudharma and the Earth woman, Vo, are all threats to the colony’s social structure.

But things on Scythia are not as simple as the colonists like to pretend. To start with, humans will be humans despite what sexual mores society tries to impose. Also the Ischnurans have space in their society for non-binary people, who are called jesses. There is one on Scythia. Their name is Iren. Inevitably they become an ally for John.

Which brings us to the other main theme of the story: transition. You may have noticed that they native species on Scythia all transition from plant to animal as part of their natural life-cycle. And plants are often both male and female. John makes friends with Piro and Laura, a Zandahean couple who are not as strictly observant as their fellow Christians. Their child, Tali, wants to become a jess.

Much of the story is explicitly about society’s attitude towards queer people. The way in which John, Iren and Tali are treated by the colonists is very reminiscent of homophobic and transphobic attitudes. But John is not blameless either. To start with he has something of a saviour complex. He sees that the colonists are behaving badly (by his social traditions), and wants to do something about it, even if their victims don’t want him to. Also he will come up against two other types of transition, both of which disturb him greatly.

It is also the case that the role of jesses in Ischnuran society is very much prescribed. You can’t just be non-binary, you have to go through a special ceremony and play a specific role in society. This is true of trans people in many traditional human societies.

I suspect that the name of the planet was chosen because the ancient Scythian people made space in their society for non-binary people.

So What We Are Seeking is very much about being trans and how society reacts to trans people. It is also a clever piece of science fiction with some innovative aliens. I expect that most reviews (and academic papers) will focus on the latter. But do please listen. What was done to Iren, and how they are forced to deal with that, are very much true for trans people in our world.

book cover
Title: What We Are Seeking
By: Cameron Reed
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Shroud

081, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Book Review

I have to interview Adrian Tchaikovsky at Finncon in July. Obviously I haven’t read all of his books, and there is no way I can make a significant dent in that lack before the convention. But I can at least read the novel that he has on this year’s Hugo shortlist. That would be Shroud.

Like What We Are Seeking, reviewed elsewhere in this issue, Shroud is a book about human colonization of alien worlds, and of first contact with said aliens. Both Reed and Tchaikovsky have created very interesting alien worlds, but whereas in Reed’s book the humans have been planet-side for some time, in Tchaikovsky’s they are freshly arrived, which is just as well, because human survival on Shroud is highly unlikely.

Tchaikovsky is well aware of how inimical the universe is to human life, and he delights in creating worlds that make that point very forcibly. Remember the world called Cricceth’s Hell from the Final Architecture series? Well Shroud is almost as nasty, but it also teems with life. Just a very different sort of life.

In the world of the book, humanity has become little more than a bunch of rival corporations, called the Concerns, presumably because they are not concerned about anything except profit. Our heroes work for one such corporation, in the small Special Projects division whose job it is to look into weird stuff, like Shroud.

They called the world Shroud because its atmosphere is so dense and dark that you can’t see more than a few metres ahead with anything but the best headlights. You absolutely cannot be out in it. Even in a spacesuit you probably wouldn’t last long. And yet it has life, which communicates by… well, you need to read the book.

For reasons of sheer bad luck, Juna Ceelander and Mai Ste Etienne end up marooned on Shroud in an escape pod. Mai is an engineer, thank goodness, and can keep their life support in some semblance of working order. Juna is an administrative assistant, which means that her job is keeping all the various tech specialists in her team from killing each other. But that means that she is good at that most important human skill: communication.

Because of the nature of Shroud (and I’m trying hard not to give too much away here), there is no chance of sending a message to their ship. Juna and Mai have to somehow survive alone until their can work out some means of signalling their presence. This involves a long journey across Shroud in which Tchaikovsky gets to show off his remarkably inventive creation. I think a lot of it is based on marine life, but I’m nowhere near good enough at biology to know for sure.

Ultimately, however, it all comes down to one of the core themes of What We Are Seeking: human colonists want to exploit a new world, and the local inhabitants would rather not be exterminated in the process, if you please.

I can totally see why Shroud ended up on the Hugo shortlist. It is a wonderful piece of science fiction, combining both jaw-dropping science with a great story about two people stranded on a deadly world. But I think the things I will remember most about the book are Tchaikovsky’s portrayal of life in corporate culture.

If corporations are lifeforms, they are at least as inimical to humans as Shroud, except that they need us to work for them. These days, of course, many of them think that they can do away with humans and use LLMs instead. What is scary about the book is that humanity appears to have accepted a future of slavery to corporations because it seems to be the only way to survive the mess we have made of our homeworld. I hope that isn’t true.

book cover
Title: Shroud
By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Radiant Star

081, Ann Leckie, Book Review

A new Imperial Radch novel is always a cause for celebration around here, and I am pleased to say that Radiant Star did not disappoint. It is, however, a very complex novel, and I suspect may confuse some readers.

Recently on BlueSky Ann Leckie has come out as a recovering Catholic. Had she not done so, it should have been obvious from this book. Much of it is about the moral traps that lie in wait for those who choose religion for their profession, especially when the reach positions of authority within it.

In the city of Ooioiaa on the planet Aaa you can find the temple of the Radiant Star. It is home to three rival religious sects, all worshiping the same celestial body, and to a large number of mummified saints. The nature of the differences between the sects are largely incomprehensible to outsiders, but the nature of their religion should be obvious from the nature of their world.

You see, Aaa is a rogue planet (some of you may remember Robert Reed’s excellent novel, Marrow. I’m sure that Leckie does). Long ago it left its parent star and began to voyage through space. The people of Aaa have survived by digging a city deep inside the planet where it is warmed by Aaa’s molten core. One day, they believe, they will once again encounter a star to call their home.

Unfortunately for the people of Aaa, they will. In about 2000 years their planet will be captured by a new star. At that time, it will become a site of strategic importance in the galaxy. And so Anaander Mianaai, never one to leave things to chance, ordered that Aaa be added to the Radch Imperium.

Years later, Charak Sov, Captain of the Justice of Albis, has become Governor of Aaa. Her main problems, it appears, arise from the disputatious nature of the religious sects that occupy the Temple of the Radiant Star. Little does she know that Anaander Mianaai’s various selves are about to plunge the Radch into civil war. Aaa, being far from the main spaceways, and now heavily dependent on imports for food, is going to be in deep trouble.

This alone would be plenty of drama, but Leckie adds to it plenty of politics. One of the richest men on Aaa is Serque Tais, owner of the monopoly sewage company that keeps the city of Ooioiaa clean and healthy. He is very old, and needs to plan for succession, but he despises his son whom he thinks, with some justification, is a foolish wastrel. And Tais wants to be remembered fondly by his people, which on Aaa means joining the ranks of mummified saints in the Temple of the Radiant Star. The sect that he chooses to represent will be important.

Throw in a celebrity prophet, some unscrupulous clergy, and a young man who, through no fault of his own, may become the fulcrum on which the world turns, and you have an excellent political drama.

The Radchaai, of course, think that the people of Aaa are deeply foolish. But they do have to govern them, and you can’t govern effectively by despising your population, even if you do have a mighty warship and its attendant army of Ancillaries on call. So the book is also about the difficulty of governing a city during a period of serious civil unrest and potential environmental collapse.

Oh, yes, the book is also about living on a planet with a very fragile ecosystem, and how the selfish rich can put everyone’s survival in jeopardy. I think you can see what that’s about.

So yeah, there is an awful lot going on in this book, and that’s before you start on the gender issues. The Radchaai, as I am sure you remember, refer to everyone as ‘she’. Aaa has at least three genders. Leckie deftly switches between pronouns for characters depending on who is speaking.

I think also that Radiant Star has the best description of Radchaai Ancillaries that Leckie has done. They are genuinely creepy in a way that probably wasn’t possible when she needed us to sympathise with Breq.

There is so much going on in this book that I think I really should have read it through again before reviewing it. But sadly there are too many books and too little time, so I had to move on. I look forward to reading some academic papers about this one.

book cover
Title: Radiant Star
By: Ann Leckie
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Was

081, Book Review, Geoff Ryman

It being Pride season, we have a new Pride Storybundle for you. This one includes Of the Emperor’s Kindness by Chaz Brenchley, which is a fabulous book. And you can also pick up Yoke of Stars by R B Lemberg (reviewed in this issue), and fourteen other great books. One of those is Was by Geoff Ryman which is an absolute classic. Don’t believe me? Here is the review I wrote for Emerald City when the book first came out. Read it, and then buy the bundle, because Was is worth the $30 all by itself.

Oz that Was

Once upon a time there was a little girl called Dorothy. She lived in the big city of St. Louis with her mother and father and baby brother. But the big city was a dangerous place in those days. Dorothy’s mother and brother died of diphtheria, and her father ran off in fear, so she had to go and live with her family in the country.

Uncle Henry and Auntie Em were as dry and poor as the Kansas dirt that they farmed. They had no room in their budgets, and little room in their hearts, for a little girl from St. Louis and her pet dog. For Dorothy and Toto, life was thoroughly miserable.

“On the wall, there was an old sampler, slightly charred in one corner.
‘There’s no place like home’, it said.
And there wasn’t, not anywhere.”

Was, by Geoff Ryman, is a fantasy about a fantasy. Well, more than one fantasy actually. It is about a story called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It is about the film of that book and the legends that surround it. But the book itself is about fantasy, about a child’s view of a magical place that is nothing like dreary old Kansas. And, as Geoff Ryman shows, the book is also about a fantasy known as the Great American Dream. The dream that said that if you worked hard, even in Kansas you could reach a land of milk and honey.

“Now those memories come back to haunt me,
They haunt me like a curse.
Is a dream a lie if it don’t come true
Or is it something worse…”

Bruce Springsteen, ‘The River’

Frances Crumm’s home life was not much better than Dorothy’s. Her parents split when she was young, though no one would tell her why. Her mother was determined to make the girls into stars, and Frances, it seemed, unlike her sisters, had what it takes. She seemed a natural on the movie set, oozing charm, understanding the process, and getting on well with most of the adult actors. For some reason that no one could fathom the little girl seemed particularly drawn to gay men. She could learn her lines too, and delivered them well. All except the ending of The Wizard of Oz, where for some reason something she was required to say caused her to burst into hysterical tears.

“She dreamed it was wartime. There was a war between children and adults. Adults were hunting children across the landscape, on wagons and horseback. The children had to hide under the leaves. If the adults caught you, they made you a slave like in ancient Egypt. But if it was your parents who caught you, then they killed you.”

By far the most powerful message in the book is the one that Baum himself championed. When they were first published, the Oz books were almost universally despised by American society. They were thought, to put it mildly, unsuitable for children, because they encouraged them to dream.

But of course the adults of the time were no less guilty of fantasy than their offspring. Indeed, they indulged in it rather more. Awful things happened in small town America. But no one ever spoke of them, because it was not polite to do so. That sort of thing did not happen in a proper, God-fearing town. So no one saw the bad things happening around them, because that would mean that they themselves might not be good, God-fearing folk.

“Bill took all of this home to Carol, and Carol was disturbed. What she loved in Bill was his normality. She had been trained to confuse that with virtue.”

When he was very small Jonathan’s favourite colour was red. He would paint it everywhere: jam, lipstick, any source he could get his hands on. His parents were relieved when he appeared to grow out of his obsession. What he had actually done was grow into colour blindness. This was Jonathan’s first experience of growing up.

Now Jonathan is fully an adult, and coming to terms with adult problems. To be precise, he is dying. But his counsellor, Bill, had once met this crazy old lady in Kansas whose name was Dorothy and who claimed to have had a dog called Toto. Jonathan had always loved that film. The real Dorothy, if what was who she had been, was long dead, but if she had really existed, perhaps Oz did too. Jonathan was determined to find out before he died.

“Jonathan sat in the back, where he always did. He tried to pretend the bus was full of Munchkins, all of them talking in speeded-up voices. The bus was full of Angelinos instead. Angelinos have never met each other and cannot trust each other. They suspect each other of carrying murder weapons, possibly with some reason. Angelinos sit alone, in silence, no one next to them.”

Was is not a comfortable book. Indeed, the Daily Mail, in a rare moment of perspicacity, commented, “The book and the characters will haunt you”. And so they should. We have all been children. Most of us have seen Oz. And we all long for the day when once again we are not in Kansas any more.

book cover
Title: Was
By: Geoff Ryman
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Yoke of Stars

081, Book Review, R B Lemberg

R B Lemberg’s Birdverse stories are justifiably famous. You can find my review of The Four Profound Weaves elsewhere in Salon Futura. Yoke of Stars is more recent, and won Best Novella in the World Fantasy Awards last year. It is also available as part of the Pride Storybundle, which you should all go out and by before it closes.

Yoke of Stars concerns two people who are exiles in very different ways. Stone Orphan comes from a very communitarian society called the Shoal. Everyone in the Shoal is expected to behave exactly like everyone else. Then everyone will be safe. Thing of it as a shoal of fish, and indeed Stone Orphan has some piscine characteristics. In contrast, Ulín is a princess. She comes from a much more liberal society, but because of her social status everyone has ideas about how they can use her to further their political ambitions.

Stone Orphan has been expelled from the Shoal for being too curious. She (I think that’s the right pronoun, though it is hard to tell as she’s the narrator, but also there are no genders in the Shoal) has ended up at a school for assassins. She has just graduated and is awaiting her first client. Ulín has run away. She has been deeply wronged by people close to her. Given how the two meet, it seems that she wants one of them dead.

This is not a story about assassination. If you are familiar with Lemberg’s work you would be deeply disappointed if it was. The story proceeds with the two central characters telling each other their life stories, and discovering that they have far more in common that they thought when they first met.

If that was all that there was to the book, it would be a fine piece of literary fantasy, but this is Lemberg so inevitably there is more. Firstly there is the author as poet. The prose is as lush as we have cone to expect. But also there is the author as linguist. And the author as exiled Ukrainian Jew living in the increasingly Fascistic USA.

The linguistic angle is particularly fascinating, though way beyond my level of expertise. Lemberg has become interested in the possibility of constructing a language without verbs. She has even found someone who tried to do it. This has become Stone Orphan’s native tongue. Ulín, in contrast, is a language scholar, keen to learn as many different tongues as she can.

So while this might be a relatively short book, it is packed with ideas. I will be particularly recommending it to my friends who know a lot more about languages and linguistics than I do.

Oh, and it is a Lemberg Birdverse book. Of course it is full of queer people.

book cover
Title: Yoke of Stars
By: R B Lemberg
Publisher: Tachyon
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Fantasy’s Present Pasts

081, Convention Report

One of the things I miss most about not being able to travel to the USA is the International Convention on the Fantastic and the Arts (ICFA to its friends). Being American-run, the “International” bit means being held in Florida every year and furriners being invited to attend. I believe that these days they are starting to look further afield, but in the meantime Europe has decided to do something.

The European Conference on the Fantastic is a very similar event: an academic conference, but it is run by a consortium of academic organisations from around Europe. This was the inaugural event, and it was hosted by the Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic at the University of Glasgow. Next year it will be in Sweden, and there are already expressions of interest from Germany, Poland and Denmark. I fully expect Finland to join that list soon, and I hope that some more southerly countries will also join up (though as the event is held in mid-summer that might present problems).

The attendance was very encouraging. There were scholars there from the USA, Canada, Australia and India, in addition to a wide variety of European countries.

Glasgow University is not blessed with a lot of on-site hotels. The SEC is not that far away, and the University is on the Clockwork Orange (the Glasgow metro), but mostly we stayed in student accommodation. It was basic, but very cheap (£40/night). Fortunately there were plenty of food outlets catering for people on a student budget nearby.

There were three plenary sessions, all hosted in the Sir Charles Wilson building which is a converted church. It makes for an impressive lecture theatre, and was appropriately gothic for the event. The first speaker was Helen Young from Deakin University in Melbourne who is an expert in the appropriation of fantasy literature by the far right. The second was Sophia Samatar, whom you should all be familiar with. And the third was Stefan Ekman, whose book on Urban Fantasy I reviewed here.

Because of the size of the event, there were six parallel programme streams. This led to a few difficult choices, but everything I attended was good. Here are a few highlights.

My friend Nick Hubble (newly appointed the editor of Foundation) did a paper on Scottish SF, primarily focused on Banks, MacLeod and Naomi Mitchison. In the same panel was MJ Naylor, looking at SF in Scots (and Orcadian). Feersum Endjinn and Deep Wheel Orcadia are favourite books of mine, and I was delighted to see them getting critical attention.

My Finnish friend, Esko Suoranta, had a magnificent paper explaining how the golem magic used by Judah Low in China Miéville’s Iron Council is based on the literary theories of a Russian poet called Velimir Khlebnikov.

My own paper (on the use of trans history in fantasy) was in the same panel as Taylor Driggers’ piece on Le Guin and Tiptree, and a fascinating comparison of the work of Vernon Lee and Angela Carter by Elizabeth Howard.

Inevitably I ended up in the panel on gender politics. That featured great paper by Grace Worm about the difference between Revising your work (as Le Guin and Tamora Pierce have done) and Retconning it. The key difference is that Revising means being open and transparent about what you have done, whereas Retconning means trying to pretend that you haven’t changed anything, which brings the wrath of your fandom down upon your head.

There was also a fascinating paper about the attitudes of feminist philosophers to fantasy fiction. As the young woman given the paper was French, this was full of references to French feminists whom I had never heard of, and who seem mostly to have been Marxists. You can guess how condescending they were about fantasy. Thankfully Manon Berthier had Stéphanie Nicot, and rather delightfully Helen Merrick, to draw upon as counter examples.

I bunked off on one day because I needed to visit Category Is Books, and catch up with my Czech translator friend, Isabel Stainsby. I also discovered that Glasgow now has a specialist SF bookshop called Sector 7, though I didn’t have time to visit.

I was mostly left to my own devices with regard to food, but I noticed that one of the Glasgow people was Mexican so I asked her for recommendations. I ended up at a restaurant called Mezcal, which I will definitely visit again. Rather delightfully they had a cocktail called Priory of the Orange Tree.

I had a great time at this event. I recognise that academic conferences are not for everyone, but if you do like that sort of thing then please consider a trip to Sweden next year. The venue will be in Karlstad and the dates are June 15-17.

Finding Albion

081, Book Review, Zakia Sewell

This is not the sort of book that I normally review. However, it does have what I assume to be a picture of the Holy Grail on the cover. Also, in a time when the break-up of the UK is very much on the cards, and someone waving a St. George’s Cross flag is as likely to be a Fascist as a sports fan, issues of how we understand nationalism are very much to the fore.

Finding Albion comes with enthusiastic recommendations from musician Florence Welsh, and former Green Party leader, Caroline Lucas, amongst others. Also Zakia Sewell was interviewed on a podcast by Zack Polanski, the current leader of the England & Wales Green Party. The book was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for non-fiction. I’m guessing that it has sold pretty well.

But what, exactly, is a mixed-race BBC DJ doing writing about British folklore? Well, why not? Sewell admits to having had an interest in paganism from an early age. Being far away from most of the Caribbean branch of her family, the only traditions she had to hand were British. And spending summers with the other grandparents in Laugharne in South Wales (once the home of Dylan Thomas) provided a much closer connection to history than living in London.

Sewell admits that it took her a while to come to terms with her interest in British folklore, but having done so she has found comfort in finding correspondences between her family’s Caribbean traditions and those of the land she has made her home. It is a very neo-pagan project that she has embarked on: taking the bits of tradition that she finds useful and comforting, and making something new from then.

Whenever a celebrity writes such a book, I worry about them being guilty of poor research. Sewell appears to have done the work herself, rather than farming it out to interns (or AI as would be done these days), and she is wise enough not to be taken in by people who claim to have ‘discovered’ ancient traditions. Thus she treats Geoffrey of Monmouth, Iolo Morganwg and James Macpherson with the skepticism that they deserve. Silvia Federici, being rather more modern, has slipped through the net, but she’s only mentioned briefly.

Something that surprised me about the book is how few degrees of separation I am away from it. The chapter set in Glastonbury sees Sewell head to the George & Pilgrim to meet with Liz Williams and Trevor. Laugharne is just down the road from me, and that chapter includes input from Angharad Wynne, the storyteller who helps run the Winter Solstice events at Dinefwr that I have written about before. The Scottish chapter is focussed on Findhorn rather than my friends in the Scottish Pagan Federation, but that’s fair enough.

The book is structured around the Celtic yearly cycle, beginning and ending with the Spring Equinox. It includes visits to Oxford for May Day, Notting Hill Carnival for Lammas, and Penzance for Winter Solstice. It starts in Glastonbury, and ends in Stonehenge. Along the way Sewell confronts the ghosts of Britain’s slave-trading past at Samhain in York, and researches the rural working class fight against enclosure near Sherwood Forest.

It would be very easy for such a book to descend into New Age woo-woo, extoling the virtues of the simple life and getting back to nature. But Sewell has mostly dispensed with the rose-tinted spectacles. Her visit to a small offshoot of Findhorn on a remote island in the Outer Hebrides in February put paid to any of that sort of thing.

One of my favourite chapters was the one set in Penzance where Sewell finds local people openly admitting to inventing new ‘traditions’. These might be used to milk the tourists in the summer, but they are also celebrated much more privately in the winter.

You won’t find any political call to action in this book. Nor is there any deep philosophy to be found. Rather Sewell appears to want us all to find our own Albion, one that reflects our own ancestry, and the part of Prydain in which we live. That does, of course, mean that it is Mostly Harmless, but equally it may inspire a whole lot of creativity. I think that William Blake would approve.

book cover
Title: Finding Albion
By: Zakia Sewell
Publisher: Hodder Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Magnus Chase and the Ship of the Dead

081, Book Review, Rick Riordan

Because my paper for the conference in Glasgow was about the use of trans history in fantasy, I figured that I should read the third book in Rick Riordan’s Magnus Chase series, Magnus Chase and the Ship of the Dead. As some of you may remember, this is essentially Percy Jackson but with Norse gods. Magnus is a child of Frey, and also a cousin of Annabeth from the Percy Jackson books.

Anyway, the reason that I wanted to read this book is because the series features a character called Alex Fierro who is a child of Loki, and is gender fluid. I was pretty sure that Alex ended up as a love interest for Magnus, but I needed to read the book to check before I actually said so in front of an audience. I was right.

But the book. As you might expect, the main story arc is about Ragnarök. Magnus and his friends, who also include a Muslim Valkyrie, a deaf elf magician and a fashion-conscious dwarf, have to foil Loki’s evil plans and put off the end of the world for a few millennia. The ship in question is Naglfar, and those of you familiar with the story of Ragnarök will immediately know why it is in the book.

Aside from Alex, what I like most about this series is how the gods have moved with the times. Magus is dead, and has ascended to Hotel Valhalla, an ever-expanding home to the glorious dead kept in good shape by its own, on-site branch of IKEA. Odin is a dab hand at inspirational management-speak (though not much else). Being adults in a book aimed at middle-grade kids, the gods are a pretty useless lot who need kids to get them out of the mess of their own making.

I gather that the Magnus Chase books are the object of particular ire from the denizens of Xitter, primarily because of the existence of Alex. Well, they can cry over their keyboards. Trans people have always been here, and always will be here. My thanks to Mr Riordan for making this point in a way that is accessible to young readers, and a lot of fun.

book cover
Title: Magnus Chase and the Ship of the Dead
By: Rick Riordan
Publisher: Puffin
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Black Cauldron

081, Movie Review

I haven’t got around to reading more of Lloyd Alexander’s Chronicles of Prydain yet, but Disney have put their Prydain-inspired animation online and it is getting quite a bit of attention. It even found its way into the news here in Wales. I figured that I should take a look.

The film is loosely based on books 1 and 2 of the Chronicles. Well, ‘very loosely’ might be a better description. Certainly there are themes and characters from the books. Taran, Eilonwy, Ffewddur and Gurgi are pretty much as Alexander wrote them, if all rather flat. Hen Wen does not look very hen (her name means Old White). But there is no Achren, and even more surprisingly no Gwydion. Sadly they kept the ridiculous insult to the Tylwyth Teg.

It is pointless complaining about how badly the film mangles the original Welsh legends, because the books it is based on did too. The question is, have they made a decent film? Well, sort of.

The scriptwriters have clearly tried hard to construct a coherent narrative from the books that is short enough to fit into their 80 minute running time. They had some good ideas. Making the fall of the Spiral Castle the big endpiece was a good idea. But they couldn’t resist being Disney. There are some witches in a later book, so they had to go into the film. And the gave they Horned King a comedy goblin sidekick, and then let him steal much of the show.

Interestingly, both Gurgi and Creeper the Goblin are very Gollum-like. They are almost good-Gollum and bad-Gollum. The film was released in 1985 and Peter Jackson probably saw it.

Apparently The Black Cauldron flopped when it was first released. According to Wikipedia it was heavily cut before release because it was deemed too scary for children. I can see why. It does get pretty dark towards the end. But the characters are largely uninspired and the last few minutes seem tacked on because the scriptwriters couldn’t figure out a decent dramatic ending.

Creeper does rescue the film a bit, but the genius piece of casting was giving Skeletor the role of the Horned King. The credits say that it was John Hurt, but there’s no doubt from the film who that character is. It is a shame that they could not have found a role for Panthor as well. And Evil-Lyn could have played Achren. Oh well…

Editorial – June 2026

081, Editorial

This is all a bit of a rush. I’m just back from Glasgow and the Fantasy’s Present Pasts conference. And I will shortly be leaving for Eurocon and Finncon. My review of the conference is in this issue, and I will have two con reports for you next time. And there is a lot of travel involved, so hopefully I will have read a few more books.

The travel is rather tiring, but I am managing to avoid the worst of the heat. It was only warm-ish in Glasgow, and while another heatwave is forecast for July, I should be in Finland at the time. Not that Wales ever gets as hot as London.

I don’t have a lot else to report because I have been busy. There will be new books from Wizard’s Tower soon.

Issue 80

Issues

This is the May 2026 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Art: The Alcázar of Segovia: This issue's cover is a drawing of the Alcázar of Segovia, by Gustave Doré

  • Platform Decay: Everyone's favourite SecUnit is back in a new adventure. It is a good job no soft and squishy humans are involved. Oh, wait... Children?!!

  • Oathbound: Tracy Deonn's Arthurian-themed YA fantasy trilogy has reached its conclusion.

  • Cynefin: What does Welsh nature poetry have to teach us about the world? Quite a bit, actually.

  • The Prince of Annwn: Cheryl embarks on reading the most famous adaptation of The Mabinogi: that by Evangeline Walton

  • Salvation’s Child: The first book from Paul Cornell's comics company is from Adrian Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture series

  • Celtic Magic: A Practitioner’s Guide: Do you want to cast spells like an actual druid? Sadly historical sources tell us little, but Brigid Ehrmantraut does her best with what we have.

  • The Monster and the Clown: The second book in Mats Strandberg's children's series pits little Frank Steen against a deadly foe: A CLOWN!

  • Human Voices, Alien Conversations: A book of interviews from across the SF&F community. Lots of famous subjects, and also Cheryl

  • Hay Festival 2026: If it May is must be Hay. Once again Cheryl has been taking in the famous book festival.

  • Åcon 2026: As is traditional at this time of year, Cheryl has been off to the Åland Islands to meet her Nordic friends. This year's Guest of Honour was Emily Tesh.

  • Editorial – May 2026: Cheryl has no idea what happened to May. It was a whole month, right?

Art: The Alcázar of Segovia

080, Art

This issue’s cover is once again from the British Library’s free collection. It is a drawing of the Alcázar of Segovia in Spain. The castle began life as a Roman fort, then became a Muslim base under the Berber Almoravid dynasty, and reached its final form under the Christian Castilians. Much of the final form can be credited to King Alfonso VIII and his English wife, Eleanor, who was a sister of Richard the Lionheart (and therefore a daughter of the brilliant Eleanor of Aquitaine).

The art is by Gustave Doré who, amongst other achievements, was apparently a favourite artist of HP Lovecraft. You can see why. There is a definite Cyclopean air to the image. You can find more about the image and the book it comes from here.

As usual, there is a larger image of the unadorned art below.

Platform Decay

080, Book Review, Martha Wells

A new Murderbot book is always a reason for celebration, and one of the reasons for that is that Martha Wells tries hard to make them very different. Platform Decay is very much in the condensed thriller mode. It is also a book about airports.

The story opens very much in media res with Murderbot and his new SecUnit pal, Three, breaking their way through the security of a giant orbital platform. This is not quite Ringworld. It is only a ring surrounding a planet, not a ring surrounding a star, but it is impressively huge for all that. And Wells makes it obvious that she has read Larry Niven’s classic work and adapted it for her own purposes.

It takes a while before we are given the full plot, but it is not too spoilerific to mention the key point because it is in the sales blurb. Murderbot is on rescue mission. Some people that Murderbot cares about (yes, it can and does care about humans, how did that happen?) have been kidnapped. As it happens, this is the doing of our old enemies, Barish-Estranza. Someone has to bring them home.

Inevitably complications arise, and this requires our hero and his rescuees to travel through what is essentially a giant space station, parts of which are much less well adapted to human habitation than others. People want them dead, and it is only a matter of time before they are caught, unless they can get out before then.

The orbital is divided up into many separate zones, each controlled by a different corporation, or alliance of smaller corporations. It is like an artificial planet made up of many separate fiefdoms arranged in a big ring.

Which is where the whole airports thing comes in. Wells, being a famous author, has doubtless spent a lot of time in them over the past few years. They are, for the most part, horrible places. Some airports do make more of an attempt at being habitable than others, but they are all dedicated to precisely two things: Security and Shopping. It is an airport’s job to get you on the right flight with a minimum of danger, and to delay that process for sufficiently long to deprive you of large quantities of money while you wait.

The orbital, then, is a giant ring of interconnected airports, with living and office space attached. Wells is, I suspect, venting her dislike of such spaces. More power to her!

Except that Murderbot is quite at home in an airport. Indeed, the more anodyne and anonymous the better. Firstly, all the messy detail added to make humans feel comfortable is just another source of security risk. And secondly, if there is nothing going on for hours on end, it can just sit back and watch media.

Along the way there is also a story about how children, manipulated by an adult that they trust, can be persuaded to do terrible things.

Yeah, Murderbot, children are a pain in the butt. But adults, adults are Evil.

book cover
Title: Platform Decay
By: Martha Wells
Publisher: Tot
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Oathbound

080, Book Review, Tracy Deonn

I have at last got around to the final(?) volume in my favourite YA fantasy series. Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn Cycle plays absolutely fast and loose with Arthuriana. But, unusually for such things, it does so with great respect for the legend’s Welsh heritage. Oathbound is no exception.

Let’s recap. The Legendborn Order is a magical secret society set up after the Fall of Camelot to preserve the Round Table and continue its mission to protect the world from evil, specifically from demons. It does this in large part by selective breeding whereby certain families can effectively channel the spirits of the various key players and assume their power.

Except that, over the centuries, humanity has won out over the mission and the Order is now based in the USA and deeply corrupt. Not to mention misogynistic and racist. The heirs of Morgaine quit long ago and set up their own, rival organisation. What’s left is essentially a club for old, white men who happen to have rather a lot of magical power and no morals.

But, a few hundred years ago, an act of greed and lust by a leader of the Order resulted in the actual genetic heritage of Arthur going into a line descended from a female slave. And thus we have the Order’s greatest secret: the Scion of Arthur, the supposed leader of the Order, is actually a teenage Black girl called Briana Matthews.

Our heroes are the younger generation. We have Bree, her love interest Nick (Lancelot), their wild and unpredictable best friend Selwyn (Merlin) and so on. All this Arthurian stuff is tempered by the fact that Black people also have magic. Bree, of course, has both, which, makes her extra powerful.

When we last left them, Bree had just been kidnapped (semi-willingly) by the demon king Erebus (Annwn), who has been impersonating a leading member of the Order for many years to infiltrate and control them. He is trying to recover a magical crown, stolen from him by the original Merlin, and kept safe by the Morgaines, but has recently been stolen again. Bree, for her part, believes that she needs to learn from Erebus so as to be better able to face down both him and the Order, so she agrees to become his pupil. Making a deal with a demon king is, of course, a very risky business.

Meanwhile Nick is desperately searching for Bree and Selwyn, being Merlin, has gone mad. Well, he’s becoming a demon, which is kind of the same thing.

Of course there is also a romance to sort out. Bree and Nick went through the whole not trusting each other a long time ago, so now it is time for some serious Arthur/Lancelot fic, but with a gender-swapped Arthur. Much of this is managed through the cunning stratagem of having the pair of them trapped in the home of a powerful demon, at a society event for rich bastards (Deonn is thinking Gatsby but I am thinking Epstein Island) at which they end up having to be engaged. And for complex magical reasons Bree has forgotten who Nick is, and Nick is worried that he should not physically touch Bree. Cue relationship trauma.

There’s very little in the way of actual sex scenes, but Deonn does a magnificent job of describing how aroused Bree is by the handsome, muscular Nick. I think Nick is probably way too good to be true, but that’s because he is Lancelot. Anyway, Deonn had me lusting after him too, so I guess she’s done a good job.

This is the final book in a trilogy, so things mostly come out right in the end. But I’m not certain that this is the end for the characters as there is a lot more that could be done with the story. If there are more books, I will buy them,

book cover
Title: Oathbound
By: Tracy Deonn
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Cynefin

080, Book Review, Carwyn Graves

Cynefin is one of those strange Welsh words, like hierath, that is very hard to translate. The simplest explanation is that it means a natural environment. So, for example, you might say that a camel is in its cynefin in the desert, or a koala up a gum tree. But cynefin can also be applied to humans to mean the place where you are most comfortable. It can even be turned into a verb to mean the act of settling into a new home or job.

It also means a sheep track.

And none of this is quite what Carwyn Graves means when he chose the word as the title of his new book.

Graves, for those of you not familiar with his work, is first and foremost and agriculturalist. He is an expert on Welsh apple varieties (of which there are many, he has written a book). But he has become more and more interested in the relationship between the Welsh people and their land, and in this book he explores how they have expressed that connection through poetry.

Diversion: Welsh poetry. You are probably familiar with the concept of haiku—a Japanese poetry form with a very strict structure. That, dear reader, is nothing compared to Welsh poetry. The englyn (pl. englynion) is a form of Welsh poem that has enough rules to require a lifetime of study from the budding bard. So yes, syllables must be counted. But rhyme is also important, and stress and alliteration. It is all to do with cynghanedd. I won’t pretend to understand how it all works.

In his book, which is subtitled Wisdom from a Thousand Years of Welsh Nature Poetry, Graves takes us on a tour of poets from Taliesin through Dafydd ap Gwilym to R S Thomas, interrogating how their poetry is informed by a connection to the land and stands in opposition to, you guessed it, the English, who manage to get it all wrong.

The trouble with English nature poetry (not just you, Wordsworth, but you are a fine example) is that it is all about the poet as observer. There is a sort of Cartesian dualism to it that abstracts the poet from the subject and lays claim to a position of intellectual observation. In Welsh nature poetry, Graves argues, poet and nature are one. The poet lives in nature, works in nature, and is in communion with nature.

Eventually this takes us all the way to technology and smart phones and the utter disconnect that people these days have from the natural world. If we want to save the planet, Graves is arguing, we need to be more Welsh. Or at least get in touch with nature the way that a Welsh poet would.

He’s not entirely correct in his arguments. Graves puts a lot of the blame on the Enlightenment, and certainly this is where our current obsession with neutral standpoints, objective observation and so on derives from. But the Enlightenment was the way it was because of a rediscovery of the philosophical and scientific thought of the ancient world, in particular Classical Athens. In other words, it is all your fault, Aristotle, you misogynist creep.

But having said that, Graves is pretty much spot on with his conclusion. We do need to live more in contact with our environment. You can’t have a cynefin that is a sterile, chrome-and-plastic-walled space station in which everyone eats nutrient bars 3D-printed by machines and remain human. Also Graves writes beautifully, and the window he opens onto the complexities of Welsh poetry provides a view on a deep and tempting rabbit hole of research. Cynefin: you’ll feel at home with it.

book cover
Title: Cynefin
By: Carwyn Graves
Publisher: Calon
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura
1 2 3 … 26