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 #72

Issues

This is the July 2025 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: The Jicker Man: This issue's cover is The Jicker Man by Ben Baldwin

  • Lords of Uncreation: Adrian Tchaikovsky's Final Architecture trilogy comes to its dramatic conclusion

  • Mythica: Emily Hauser takes a fresh new look at Bronze Age Greece through the lens of the women in Homer's poems

  • Murderbot – Season 1: What happens when one of your favourite book series gets adapted for TV? Cheryl gets to find out.

  • Ironheart: Riri Williams gets her own TV series. Can a teenage Black girl be a superhero? Well...

  • The Fantastic Four – First Steps: Every previous Fantastic Four movie has been a flop. Can the MCU save Marvel's First Family?

  • Archipelacon 2: This year the Eurocon returns to Finland, and we all get an excuse to spend several days in beautiful Åland

  • Introducing Turku: To get to Åland from Finland you will probably go through Turku. This year Cheryl got to spend a bit more time in the city.

  • Doctor in the House: In which Cheryl becomes a Doctor, but does not get a TARDIS

  • Editorial – July 2025: Cheryl needs more reading time.

Cover: The Jicker Man

072, Art, Ben Baldwin

The cover for this issue is the art produced by Ben Baldwin for the Ben Mears novel, The Jicker Man. It shows the hero of the book, Ebadiah, and various other elements from the story. The central inset shows the steampunk van, Clansly, in which Ebadiah and his friends travel north.

The Jicker Man is currently available for pre-order from the usual venues.

A larger and unadorned version of Ben’s art is available below.


Lords of Uncreation

072, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Book Review

Reviewing the last in a trilogy of massive space opera books is a bit of a challenge. It is hard to say anything about the book to hand without giving spoilers for the previous volumes. I shall talk mostly about how Adrian Tchaikovsky has structured the book, which I think is seriously impressive.

Looking back at my review of Eyes of the Void, I see that I left the story at the point where Idris Telemier, with the help of the mad Naeromathi who calls himself Ahab, has found a way to navigate Unspace, the parallel dimension through which interstellar travel takes place, and in which the monstrous Architects live. Idris, as an Intermediary, is still hoping to do his job and persuade the Architects to stop their campaign of genocide against intelligent life. Everyone else wants Idris to guide them to the Architect homeworld (such as it is, there being no ‘words’ as such in Unspace) and help them destroy it.

It is a small but important spoiler to note that Idris is aware that the Architects do not do as they do willingly. They are unwilling and sorrowful slaves of a greater power that also lives in Unspace. Hence the title of the book, Lords of Uncreation. The artistic shapes that the Architects make from the planets that they destroy are somehow an expression of their grief for the lives they have been forced to snuff out. Idris, and Idris alone, wants to save the Architects too.

In order to pull this off, Tchaikovsky has to provide an explanation as to who these Lords of Uncreation are, and why they want to destroy all intelligent life in the universe that is not them. And he has to do so without waving his hands and calling them ‘gods’. I’m pleased to say that he provides a rational explanation for them. The physics is doubtless a little hand-wavy, but it is physics. And this despite the fact that his explanation has a distinct similarity to the reason why the god Enlil decides to destroy mankind in the original Sumerian flood myth.

There is also some similarity to this:

In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

Idris, however, is determined to take himself off to R’lyeh and give Cthulhu a good talking-to.

The other thing that Tchaikovsky does , and could probably have gotten away without doing, is choreography the ending so that all of the major characters in his story have a role to play. Olli and Kit in the Vulture God, Kris; the knife-fighting lawyer; Solace, the Parthenon warrior; Havaer Mundy, the secret agent; all of them have their role to play. Idris could not succeed without the skills that each of them brings to the party. Even The Presence, the monstrous shadowy being that haunts Unspace, has a key part in the denouement.
Along the way we get to learn a bit more about the mysterious and powerful aliens known as the Essiel. In particular, The Unspeakable Aklu, the Razor and the Hook, has an important role to play in the story. We also meet a second, and much less renegade Essiel called The Resplendent Utir, the Prophet and the Judge.

The Essiel are quite clearly grown-ups as far as civilisations go, albeit rather too fond of cosplay. The humans, sadly, are anything but. As I noted in my review of Eyes of the Void, this series is in part an allegory for Climate Change. The universe is beset by an implacable threat that will wipe out intelligent life, and all that the various human, and human-adjacent, factions want to do is make sure that their little group is the last group standing. They might be all going to die, but they will have killed everyone else first.

Of course some of them are convinced that they, and only they, are the Master Race subset of humanity that will survive the apocalypse and end up rulers of the universe.

It was doubtless depressing when Tchaikovsky wrote it. It is far more depressing right now when so many of the more powerful nations on Earth are doing exactly as he foretold. Nor are there any Essiel around the knock sense into us.

To summarise, Tchaikovsky set himself the challenge of writing an epic space opera trilogy with a very important message for the present day, and he executed that task quite brilliantly. With all due respect to Ann Leckie (whose work I also love), this trilogy deserved that Best Series Hugo.

The good news is that the series may become newly eligible because Tchaikovsky is writing a graphic novel prequel for Paul Cornell’s new comics company.

book cover
Title: Lords of Uncreation
By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Mythica

072, Book Review, Emily Hauser

It is commonly said of writers these days that you have to have more than one string to your bow. As well as being a novelist you might work on comics, or games, or run creative writing courses, or be a journalist. Whatever pays the bills. These days the same seems to be true of academics. For example, if you are an historian, you might start a podcast, or write historical novels.

Someone who has done the latter very successfully is Emily Hauser. She has Classics degrees from Cambridge and Yale, but she has also written a popular trilogy of novels based on the Trojan War. And of you are a highly competent Classicist who can also write novels, doing a popular history book is an obvious thing to do.

Mythica seems to have begin life as something a little more academic. Hauser’s Wikipedia entry mentions a book called Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World through the Women Written Out of It published by Chicago University Press. Someone clearly thought the book deserved a bigger audience. With a new title, but the same subtitle, it has been published by Doubleday and is all over Waterstones of late. And deservedly so.

The approach that Hauser takes is to pick women out of the Iliad and Odyssey, and use each one to explore a facet of Bronze Age history so as to guide her readers through the latest academic research on the presumed time of Achilles and Hector. Being a novelist, Hauser opens each chapter with a short fictional section introducing us to the woman whose (presumed fictional) life she will next cover.

Some of these women are well known, such as Helen, Circe and Penelope. Some are goddesses. Others are less well known. There is a chapter on Briseis, the slave girl over whose ownership Achilles and Agamemnon quarrel. Here we get to see how taking women as slaves was a common feature of Bronze Age warfare, not just for use in bed, but also to power the winning king’s textile industry. Hauser returns to this subject in the chapter on Calypso, pointing out that Odysseus’s long stay on her island was not so much a result of his lust, or her sorcery, but the enormous amount of time it would take one woman so make a sail for a ship on which he could leave.

Much of the research that Hauser highlights was well known to me. The chapter on Penthesilia, Queen of the Amazons, covered very familiar ground. I was also aware that Troy is now considered to be the city known as Wilusa to the Hittites. But the chapter on Hecuba, Priam’s queen, opened my eyes to the importance of queens in Hittite society. I was delighted to discover that Puduhepa, the wife of King Hattusili III, was considered so important that her seal appears alongside his on the treaty signed with Ramesses II after the Battle of Qadesh (famous as being the world’s first written peace treaty between nations).

In other places Hauser points out things in Homer’s texts that we really should have noticed. For example, when Odysseus winds up on the island of the Phaeacians it is not King Alcinous whom he has to beg for help, but Queen Arete. Quite what the Iron Age Athenians who so loved Homer’s work would have made of this is a mystery to me, given how awful they were to their own women. She also notes that Menelaus is King of Sparta only by right of his marriage to Helen, which hints of some sort of matrilineal descent such as we see in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion.

Hauser’s knowledge of Bronze Age Greece, and of Cretan civilisation, is superb, and I have to bow to her knowledge of the Hittites as I know no better. When it come to Egypt and Mesopotamia she is perhaps not quite as well read on the latest research as she might be, but her audience is not going to notice.

This does, however, bring me to one small quibble. Hauser is, in general, trans positive. The chapter on Athena points out how gender-fluid that goddess appears in myth (not to mention her being born of Zeus rather than of anyone female). This leads her to discussion of the gender-variant followers of Inana/Ishtar is Mesopotamia, and a character known as Silimabzuta who appears to self-identify as a ‘man-woman’. There are, as far as I know, only two references to this person in the literature. One is in a paper by Julian Reade in a 2002 edition of the German journal, Archäologie Zeitschriften. The other, somewhat more accessible and detailed, is my essay trans people in Mesopotamia on the Notches website. It is great that Silimabzuta is getting noticed but, if you are going to write about them, is it really too much to ask to cite the trans woman historian who brought their story to the world? Apparently it is.

Anyway, matters of academic pride aside, Mythica is a wonderful book that taught me a lot, and I think of myself as someone who has good knowledge of the subject matter. Although it does contain a lot of very good history, it is also very readable and can certainly be enjoyed by anyone with a passing interest in Homer (whoever he, or she, or they, might have been).

book cover
Title: Mythica
By: Emily Hauser
Publisher: Doubleday
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Murderbot – Season 1

072, TV Review

It is no secret that I am a big fan of Murderbot. Having one’s favourite fiction translated to screen is always a bit nerve-wracking, but I am pleased to say that this all turned out very well indeed.

One of the big questions in such an exercise will be, do the characters look like you expected? I gather than some people had envisaged Murderbot as more feminine, or as darker-skinned, and I don’t recall its appearance ever being defined. But in this case Alexander Skarsgård was producing the series and wanted to star in it, so a white man is what we got. True to the book, that was white man with Barbie genitals.

Most of the rest of the cast was fine, but weirdly I had a problem with Pin-Lee. I had been expecting someone slim, sharply dressed, and with long hair in a pony tail. That’s what Asian women lawyers look like, right? What we got was something very different, but I got used to it.

It has become fashionable online to describe the people from Preservation Alliance as ‘hippies’. Those of us old enough to remember the 1960s will beg to disagree, but I think it is fair to describe them as what hippies would be with an extra 60 years of social development behind them. Science fiction is always about today, after all.

Because the books are told from Murderbot’s point of view, they only show the humans through its eyes. With the TV series, we can see them for ourselves. This required giving them more depth and presence than they have in the books. Mensah and Gurathin both have quite a bit extra to them, and I particularly appreciated what was done with Gurathin.

The half hour format for each episode has come in for quite a bit of criticism, and I can see why. The shows did feel a bit thin. But they were also enjoyable and the narrative breaks between episodes worked well. I enjoyed the series so much that I would like to make time to re-watch it. I will be interested to see how it feels in longer chunks.

A major deviation from the books is the inclusion of excerpts from The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. It is every bit as cheesy as I expected. I was reminded in places of Galaxy Quest. Of course the point of including it was to throw light on what Murderbot is thinking, and from that point of view it worked quite well. Heaven help us if anyone actually tries to make a spin-off series from it.

There are other deviations from the book. I have not gone back and read it to see what they are because I don’t care. Murderbot works as a TV series, and it definitely needs a second season (if only so we can get ART in the cast. I understand that it has been renewed, so we have much to look forward to.

Ironheart

072, TV Review

Riri Williams is a Marvel character who is so new that I have not read any comics that feature her. I did see her guest appearance in Wakanda Forever, but that didn’t tell me much. Ironheart is a 6-episode series that focuses just on Riri, so we get to know her much better.

The basic story is that Riri is a girl genius who can build iron man style suits as well or better than Tony Stark. However, due to being a) a teenager, b) Black, and c) not a neo-baby, she has to finance her work herself. The film opens with her getting expelled from MIT for charging her fellow students to write their essays for them, and she has to go back to Chicago to live with her mom, Ronnie.

The backstory is that, when Riri was a kid, she was caught in a random drive-by shooting. She survived, but her step-father, Gary, and best friend, Natalie, were both killed. All very Batman. When Riri tries to use her own memories to train an AI for her suit, she ends up accidentally creating an AI version of Natalie, which does not go down well with the family.

Having no money, Riri falls for the same trap as many other Black kids in Chicago: she gets involved in a criminal gang. As gangs go, they are pretty ethical. They major in robbing techbro oligarchs. But their leader, Parker, is altogether more sinister. It is clear that he is mixed up I some bad sorcery shit. Before long, Riri is in deep trouble.

Something that I noticed early on in the series is that Ironheart gives off a similar vibe to reading a Nalo Hopkinson novel. That is, it is clearly set in a culture that I have little experience and knowledge of. People are sometimes going to behave in ways that seem odd to me, but it have to take it as read that this is an authentic portrayal of Black Chicago culture. I’m certainly not in a position to notice if it isn’t.

A much more serious issue is that Riri is clearly not well suited to the superhero life. She’s very young, has an inflated view of her own competence, routinely lies to adults because they are adults, and generally gets herself into terrible situations. Frankly she’s lucky to get out of the series without either ending up in goal or getting killed. On the one hand, that’s probably a fair representation of a teenage genius with little life experience. On the other, there’s no way that would have been done to a male character in the same situation. Miles Morales is the closest parallel, and he gets a much softer ride in his movies.

There are two things I really like about the series. The first is Ronnie. As moms of superheroes go, she is absolutely ace. There should be more moms like that in the world. The other is Zelma Stanton.

As I understand it, Zelma is another example of the MCU taking a minor character and doing something great with her. In the comics she has a role as a sometime pupil of Doctor Strange who is based in New Orleans. Ironheart moves her to Chicago and makes her a genius teen sorceress – a magical counterpart to Riri’s technical ability.

The mixture of high tech and sorcery is a bold one, and it is unclear as yet just how well it will work. However, Regan Aliyah as Zelma has undeniable screen presence. I’m pleased that the final episode made it clear that Riri’s story is far from being done, and that Zelma will have a major part in it going forward.

Structurally the series makes some contestable choices. I understand why the script-writers chose to keep Parker’s backstory secret until late on in the series, but he is such an uninteresting character before that. It could have done with more teasing, I think.

The other thing that is kept secret right until the end is the nature of the Big Bad who is using Parker as a tool. That worked much better. And the choice of Sacha Baron Cohen to play the part is another of those genius pieces of casting for which the MCU is deservedly famous.

The Fantastic Four – First Steps

072, Movie Review

Several attempts have been made at a Fantastic Four movie. All of them have been reported to be flops of some sort or another. I haven’t bothered to watch any of them. As superheroes go, the FF are just not that interesting.

But the new movie, First Steps, is the first to be properly integrated into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Also it stars Pedro Pascal who is a staunch trans ally and currently high on the list of people whom the TERFs want to destroy, so I figured I show support his new film.

The title is a bit of a pun, in that it is something of an origin story for the team, and also an indication that the story is, to a large extent, about the birth of Franklin Richards, the most powerful kid in the MCU. The film also leads into the next phase of MCU story-telling (don’t ask me which one, I have lost count) in that the immediate story will be continued in the next Avengers movie. As we all know, the next Big Bad for the Avengers will be Doctor Doom and he, famously, is a principal antagonist of The Fantastic Four.

There has been some complaint online that Sue Storm’s role in the film has been restricted to baby-making. I think this is a little unfair. To start with, the film uses a modern version of Sue’s powers. Back in the day, all she could do was turn invisible, which seemed the perfect metaphor for the superhero housewife. In the film she is the only member of the team who can match Galactus for raw power. She’s also shown to be a competent politician, and is in many ways the adult of the team. Admittedly there is the whole giving birth in the middle of fighting Galactus thing, but I know what I did in my story for Fight Like A Girl #2 so I am in no position to complain.

But I am getting ahead of myself. There are a number of things that the film does well. The first is to set the story in a parallel universe that has retro 1960s technology and fashion, and a feel of public confidence in the power of science. That perfectly suits the Marvel’s Most Wholesome Family vibe that the FF give off. They are going to have a rude awakening when they end up in Earth 616 (our reality).

Second, they did not waste time on the actual origin story. Anyone who is familiar with the characters knows it already, and it isn’t that exciting. So the film has it told in flashback as the introduction to a TV chat show (suitably cheesy and 1960s-looking) on which the team is due to be interviewed.

Third, they have made a determined attempt to give each of the four characters a bit of depth. Reed in particular can be a bit dull. He’s an obsessive science geek who is never happier than when he is scribbling equations on a blackboard. But in the film he is aware of that, can occasionally joke about it, and worries about how it affects his relationship with Sue.

Ben Grimm gets to showcase his connection to New York, his Jewish heritage, and his depression over his appearance. Jonny is always eating (that flaming takes a lot of energy) and gets to show that he’s not just some crazy kid who does the action stuff. And HERBIE the robot is delightfully retro. (He uses tape drives!)

Sue’s political skills are showcased in another piece of backstory. Although the Mole Man is one of the first villains that the FF faced, this is all in the past. Sue has negotiated a peace treaty between the UN and Subterranea, and this allows the underground world to play a significant role in the fight with Galactus. Very little about who the Mole Man is gets explained, and we never get a good look at the Subterraneans, so I did worry that people not familiar with the comics might be a bit lost. However, Jo Hall, who knew almost nothing about the FF going in, said she had no trouble following what was happening.

Galactus is the obvious villain for a Fantastic Four movie, and indeed this is not the first such film to feature him. This film does something interesting with the Silver Surfer, giving the role to Shala-Bal who, in the comics, was Norrin Radd’s girlfriend. I’m not sure that it added a lot, but it did show once again that the MCU is not afraid to do something different.

The mid-credits scene gives us a teaser for where the story will go next, and confirms that we can expect an Avengers movie featuring Doctor Doom. There is a end-credits scene as well. It isn’t important, but it is fun.

Overall I think the film does a decent job. It isn’t a great movie, but it is a competent one. With a project like the MCU, which occasionally has just get the story moved along, that is sometimes all we are going to get.

Archipelacon 2

072, Convention Report

As some of you may remember, the first Archipelacon was a Eurocon hosted by Finland with George RR Martin as the top billed Guest of Honour. It was by far the biggest thing that happened in Åland outside of a Tall Ships race. The repeat event wasn’t going to match up to that, despite having Jeff & Ann VanderMeer on board, but it was equally brilliantly run.

This being a Finnish con, I was kept very busy. I started out doing the On Writing panel that is traditional at Finncon. That provided an additional challenge because a family emergency meant that Mats Strandberg was unable to join us in person. While the con did re-arrange his solo panels to allow him to attend in person, they didn’t have enough time to organize hybrid panels so I had to work around the issue. Thankfully Mats was keen to make something work, so I was able to chair the panel armed with a bunch of responses from Mats to set questions. Jeff and Emmi Itäranta were their usual fabulous selves, so it all went very well. My thanks to the people who posted kind comments about my chairing on social media.

Before I get back to the con, a few words on the state of translation in SF&F. Emmi has a new book out that is a feminist take on the Kalevala (though sadly not starting the Golden Maiden, the android made by the smith, Ilmarinen, as he’s been unable to persuade a human woman to marry him. Emmi normally translates her own work into English, but she has no plans to do that for this book as yet as she doesn’t think she will be able to sell it. I also made time to chat to Maria Turtschaninoff because I very much want to read her Underfors, an urban fantasy set in Helsinki. The book was published in Swedish (Maria’s native language) in 2010, but there’s still no sign of an English edition.

The point here is that mainstream publishers are cutting costs wherever they can. Translation costs run into many thousands of pounds, so not doing translations is an obvious money saver. Also the big companies are holding out for using LLMs for translation so they don’t have to pay anything at all. Currently these software systems are nowhere near good enough to produce a decent translation of a novel, but the management at the publishers don’t want to hear that.

Personally I would love to publish both of those books, but there is no way anything that I publish could recoup the thousands of pounds I would need to pay a professional translator. So we are stuck. Big publishers don’t want to pay for translations. Smaller ones cannot afford them. So fewer books get translated. It is hard to see what we can do about this.

There was a small panel later in the con discussing what European fandom can do to encourage translations. I was invited to join it. The only viable option appeared to be EU grants. Of course, as a non-EU company, Wizard’s Tower cannot apply for them.

Back at the con, I did two presentations. One was an academic paper about lake ladies. Not just the famous one who gives Arthur a sword in Malory, but the many others that you find in Welsh folklore, and adaptions thereof. The other was an updated version of my queer animals talk that started life as a keynote for an academic conference in Graz. Both of them were packed out and had to turn people away. I’m told that there were queues outside the rooms. It would have been nice to have more space, but the auditoriums were largely reserved for GoH events and the only other option would have been to put me over the road in the hotel, which would have greatly reduced the audience because people are easily put off by minor hurdles. (The translation panel was in the hotel and had an audience of four.)

Anyway, if anyone wants me to do those talks at another con, I would be happy to do so.

The one traditional panel that I had was about the use of Scandinavian mythology in popular culture. Naturally there was a lot (and a Loki) to talk about. I brought along Fenris Puppy, the cute plushie world-eating wolf that I had bought in Copenhagen. He was a very good dog, and did not eat any of the panel, or the audience.

Ada Palmer was also on the panel. She entered into the spirit of things by bringing a plushie salmon. (Loki transformed himself into a salmon to escape after the death of Baldr). She also had some really interesting things to say about current academic research on Norse myths. I am very much looking forward to her new novel, Hearthfire.

My final panel was supposed to be an interview with Ann VanderMeer about publishing, but Ann was unwell on the final day of the con so that one did not happen. Ann and Jeff both looked very tired. Obviously there was jet lag, but I suspect that the stress of living under a nascent Fascist regime is starting to get to many of my American friends.

With all that program to do, I didn’t manage to get to any other aspects of the con. I was even excused the masquerade because Kevin Roche was on hand to take control of that. I was very happy to step aside for an experienced professional.

In summary, Åland is still lovely, and I was very happy to be able to share it with more fans from around Europe. There will be an Åcon next year. Emily Tesh will be the Guest of Honour. I very much hope to be there.

Introducing Turku

072, Travel Report

Whenever I go to a convention in Åland I have to pass through Turku. Normally that is all I do. My friend Otto drives me from Helsinki to Turku to catch the ferry, and drives me back again after the con. But this year was different, and I got to see a bit more of the city.

I had spent midsummer up in Jyväskylä as a guest of my friend Irma. From there I took a train to Turku, and stayed in town overnight before catching the ferry the next morning. At the suggestion of friend Tero, who lives in Turku, I booked a room on the SS Bore.

Yes, that’s right, I stayed overnight on a ship. The Bore has a long and distinguished history, and for a major part of its life it was a cruise ship. She is much too small for such work these days (the ferries to Åland are much bigger), but it does mean that she has a lot of rooms. And all of those rooms are en suite.

Obviously the rooms are not big, and the beds are a long way from being luxury. But they are cheap. I paid €60 for the night. It is also very convenient, being just a short walk from the ferry terminal. I don’t recommend it if you have lots of luggage and/or are not good with stairs, and the signage could be better, but for young folks it is a very good option. And then there is the river to explore.

Turku is a maritime city at the mouth of the River Aura. These days even the ferries are too big to get up the river, but in the past all manner of ships could be found going to and fro. As is the way of such things, the riverfront has been converted into a tourist attraction.

The Bore is part of a collection of elderly ships put out to pasture as part of a maritime museum. The others, being much less human-friendly, are just there to be looked at. There are retired military ships such as the Karjala (a gunboat) and the Keihässalmi (a minesweeper). There is a rare steel-hulled triple-masted sailing ship, the Suomen Joutsen. And there is the magnificent barque, Sigyn, which was sadly under renovation while I was there. In addition there are a museum and a restaurant.

Speaking of restaurants, the entire riverbank is lined with interesting places to eat. Tero gave me some recommendations and I ended up dining very well. The good food is expensive, of course, but think of all the money you have saved by lodging on the Bore.

By the way, you may be wondering about the name of the ship. It is nothing to do with the vessel being boring, not is it Welsh for morning. It is the name of the company that originally built the ship. As she was their first ever ship, they named her after themselves. However, when she was a cruise ship, she needed a much more elegant name. Signs in the cabin remind visitors that they are staying on the Regina Kristina. Yes, that Queen Chrstina. I spent the night on a ship named after a trans person.

At the end of the riverwalk, almost next door to the maritime museum, there is a castle. It isn’t a very impressive castle by Welsh standards, but at least it is still standing. Also it was allegedly a pirate fortress for a while, which is an impressive claim to fame.

(I am reminded that the maritime museum in Mariehamn, the capital of Åland, has an actual pirate flag captured from an actual pirate ship. There are not many of those in the world.)

Why am I telling you all this? Not just because I loved the place. Next year’s Finncon will be in Turku, and one of the Guests of Honour will be Adrian Tchaikovsky. The con will be a bit of a way from the waterfront, but Turku is a small city so you should be able to pop over and sample its maritime history should you wish to do so.

Doctor in the House

072, Personal

Earlier this month I got endoctorfied. That is, the kind people at the University of Exeter bestowed upon me an honorary Doctorate of Laws (that’s an LLD, not a PhD). I wrote about it briefly on my blog, but I was still a bit gobsmacked then so I figured I owed you a longer report on the day.

I first found out about this in October last year, and my first reaction was to ask them if they had the right person. They seemed to think that they did, so I accepted, firm in the expectation that, long before the graduation day, someone high up in the university hierarchy would get cold feet and withdraw the offer. People don’t get honorary doctorates for doing trans activism, especially not on TERF Island, right?

I needed to keep quiet about it anyway. One thing that I and the university were keenly aware of was that any advance publicity risked a campaign in the press to have the honour revoked. If it could be kept quiet until it was all done and dusted we would probably be OK. And so it seems to have proved.

Anyway, I couldn’t tell anyone, and didn’t want to because I would look very stupid if it did get withdrawn.

Part of that was that I was limited with respect to guests. I invited Kevin, and he was delighted at the prospect. This was, of course, long before he made the decision to embark on gender transition. We talked about this in the coming months, and decided that this would be a final Kevin visit. It is very hard these days for a trans person to travel internationally in the early stages of transition, but for the most part it will be Kayla who is here for BristolCon and World Fantasy.

Come June I was having to do things such as write an acceptance speech and I started to believe that it was actually going to happen. Thankfully it did, otherwise we would have wasted a lot of money on air fares.

Exeter kindly paid for us to have first class rail travel to and from the event. This made Kevin very happy. They also put us up in a hotel for a couple of nights. We had the Sunday free to explore the city and recover from the travel before the big day on the Monday.

Exeter is a lovely city, and the weather was fabulous, all of which helped with the relaxation. There is a flea market on Fore Street on Sundays and I managed to find a bangle that would go well with my dress so I had something from the city for the occasion.

I took Kevin to the Royal Albert Museum, because if you have an American in tow showing off depth of history is a cool thing to do. Sadly there is very little Celtic or Roman material on display. I’m guessing that a lot of the legionary fortress is buried under the modern city and can’t be excavated, but it is quite disappointing compared to Chester or Caerleon.

Graduation at a modern university is a major operation. It lasts for several days, and there are several ceremonies each day. Otherwise there would not be seating room for everyone. There is only one honorary doctorate in each ceremony. But there were two other ceremonies on the day so I got to meet two of my fellow honorees.

Before that there was a meeting with some of the academics. Sadly neither Jana Funke nor Rebecca Langlands could be there on the day. They are both professors at Exeter whom I have worked with in the past. I suspect that they may have had a part in suggesting me of the honour. But I did get to talk to some people from Classics, History and Languages.

Then there was lunch, where I got to meet my fellow honorees. One of them was Caroline Lucas, the former Green Party MP. I had met her before at the first ever Brighton Trans Pride, so we had something to talk about. The other was a woman called Pippa Warin who has done some amazing work in theatre and literature in the South-West. I wish I had had more time to talk with her as we seemed to have a lot of interests in common.

Each honoree was placed on a different table for lunch, so I ended up with a bunch of university people. Much to my surprise, one was a keen Iain M Banks fan, and another was working on SF&F by African and Caribbean authors. We truly have won the literary culture war.

After lunch Kevin was taken off to the audience while I got dressed up in academic robes and briefed on the ceremony. It was a little more complicated than accepting a Hugo, but not much, and I was provided with a lovely chap called Roscoe whose job it was to sit next to me and tell me what to do next. Mostly that entailed sitting quietly and applauding every one of the young people graduating in the session.

The actual presentation process begins with an ‘oration’, that is a speech by the university explaining why I was being honoured. That was given by professor Rajani Naidoo who is a Deputy Vice-Chancellor and also responsible for DEI work. She’s an amazing South African woman, just the sort of forthright feminist that I enjoy hanging out with.

I may have had a bit of a feminist rant in my acceptance speech.

Having been endoctored, I then had to process out through the audience. I did get a couple of very unpleasant looks from older white men, but that was more than made up for by the happy, smiling faces of many of the mothers and women graduates. After that it was official photographs and back to St. David’s station to catch the train back to Wales.




Left to right: Provost Professor Dan Charman, me, Vice Chancellor Professor Lisa Roberts and Deputy Vice Chancellor Professor Rajani Naidoo

My thanks are due to Helen and Megan from the university staff who planned the whole day and guided me through it, to Roscoe for keeping me on the right track during the ceremony, to Professor Naidoo for the oration and help with my speech, and to Vice Chancellor Professor Lisa Roberts and all of her staff for the incredible honour.

I won’t be using my new title very often. I still feel a bit of an imposter compared to people who have actually slogged through a 3 or more year university course. But I will most definitely use it when I am haranguing government over trans rights issues.

Editorial – July 2025

072, Editorial

It is amazing how much difference having travel time makes to my reading. When I am on trains or aircraft I can often race through novels. When I am not going anywhere, or only going places by car, or going places but with a companion, no reading gets done. Thankfully this issue benefitted from a bunch of other things to talk about. But I do need to finish some of the books I am reading before next issue.

I did at least manage to get this one out on time. I am not actually going anywhere much in August, which is a bit of a relief. I haven’t even got Worldcon in my diary. Maybe the reading time will come.

I’m putting the finishing touches to this issue while (virtually) attending the Science Fiction Research Association’s annual conference. The title of the event is Trans People are (in) the Future. I have heard lots of great papers already. It is good to see how much scholarship there is on trans-themed SF&F these days, and how many trans scholars are doing it. Despite the massive social backlash against trans folks that is currently taking place, I like to think that we have made a big enough impact on society that it will be impossible for the likes of (t)Rump and Starmer to erase us entirely.

Issue #71

Issues

This is the June 2025 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: Radhika Rages at the Crater School: This issue's cover is by Ben Baldwin. It also graces the cover of the new Crater School book from Chaz Brenchley.

  • Blackheart Man: It has been a long time coming, but the new Nalo Hopkinson novel has finally arrived

  • The Folded Sky: The latest book in Elizabeth Bear's White Space universe has pirates, some intriguing aliens, and cats

  • The Ministry of Time: It is one of the most talked-about SF books of 2025, but is it any good?

  • The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses: The new Pleiti and Mossa book is out, and Cheryl has pounced on it immediately

  • Immaculate Forms: Are men and women different, and how could we tell? Helen King takes a trip into the history of body-sexing.

  • Urban Fantasy: Stefan Ekman looks deeply into what Urban Fantasy fiction is all about

  • Hay Literary Festival, 2025: In which Cheryl pays a visit to this year's Hay Literary Festival and gets a compliment from one of her feminist heroes

  • Testosterone Rex: Cheryl's trip to Hay reminded her of this blast from the past

  • Doctor Who 15.2: Another series of Doctor Who comes to an end. Which provides greater drama, the actual shows, or the online controversy about them?

  • Editorial – June 2025: Cheryl is back from Finland and looking forward to doing less travel for a while

Blackheart Man

071, Book Review, Nalo Hopkinson

A new Nalo Hopkinson novel is always a treat to look forward to. I’ve known that Hopkinson has been working on this one for many years. Sadly life has got in the way and slowed her production, but the book is now available and already picking up accolades. It is a finalist for this year’s Ursula K Le Guin Prize, which should give you some idea of what to expect.

The action takes place on the island of Chynchin which exists in an alternate world analogue of the Caribbean. The inhabitants are all brown-skinned. However, we learn that some 200 years ago they were enslaved by pale-skinned people called Ymisen who live far away across the sea. The people of Chynchin rebelled and, thanks to the intervention of three witches, the Ymisen army was drowned in one of the tar pits for which the island is famed. These days no one quite knows how the witches managed to make a tar pit appear suddenly under the enemy army, and make it solidify as soon and they have been subsumed, but everyone knows it happened, and the island has been free ever since. Now a Ymisen fleet has been spotted off the coast, and the island is in danger once again.

This being Hopkinson, things are not quite that simple. To start with, there are two distinct ethnic groups on Chynchin. There are the darker skinned people, who are in charge, and the Mirmeki, known as ‘Deserters’, who are very much second class citizens.

Our main character, Veycosi, is a young man from a wealthy family. He is training to be an academic, and once he graduates he is due to marry Thandiwe, who owns a fish farming business. However, Veycosi has many of the less attractive qualities of elite men. He is convinced of his own brilliance, and consequently prone to doing things on a whim without thinking of the consequences. Nor does he pay much attention to anyone else. And he is totally blind to his own privilege.

Fortunately for Thandiwe, the custom on Chynchin is for women to take two husbands. Her other betrothed, Gombey, is a much more sensible fellow. But Thandiwe already has a child, a girl about to become a teenager. This is not the result of a youthful dalliance. Kaïra was conceived by parthenogenesis, which is rare on the island but not unknown. Any girl child born in this way is destined to become a priestess in the service of the island’s twin cayman goddesses, Mamapiche and Mamagua.

So there is a lot going on, and that’s without a fleet of ships full of pale-faced soldiers in too-warm woolen uniforms showing up and attempting to annex the island. Really, Veycosi can cause enough trouble all by himself, without these foreigners making matters worse.

Meanwhile, in the tar pit, some of the dead soldiers are beginning to stir.

The title, Blackheart Man, is a reference to an island folktale of a demonic figure who emerges from the tar pits to kidnap badly behaved children.

The core of the story is Veycosi’s journey to self-knowledge, with the invasion being dealt with along the way. But a lot more has to happen to obtain that result in addition to having Veycosi learn to think before he acts, and to care about other people. A second theme running through the book is one of sexual and gender diversity. I’ve already mentioned the polyandry. The people of Chynchin have a very relaxed and sensible attitude to sexuality and gender. As with Hopkinson’s other work, this is a very thoughtful book. I can quite see what the Le Guin Prize jury picked it.

Oh, and there is a camel called Goat, who also has an important role to play in the story.

book cover
Title: Blackheart Man
By: Nalo Hopkinson
Publisher: Saga Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Folded Sky

071, Book Review, Elizabeth Bear

This is the third book set in Elizabeth Bear’s White Space universe. Unlike her fantasy work, which seems to come neatly packages in trilogies, these books more or less stand on their own. I’m pretty sure that you could read The Folded Sky without having read the other two books. You’d soon pick up on how the universe works and the various bits of futuristic technology involved. At least I hope that’s the case, because I want Bear to produce more of these books. They are very fine Space Opera.

As is often the case with Space Opera, The Folded Sky is a first contact story. It also has a murder mystery. And of course there is a Big Dumb Object. Well, not so dumb in this case.

The central character in the book is Dr. Sunyata Song (Sunya to her friends). She is an archinformist – someone who studies ancient archives – and she has embarked on a mission to study the Baomind, a vast swarm of computing structures created by the now vanished Koregoi civilization. The Baomind is almost certainly intelligent, but it communicates only in mathematics and music. Sunya hopes to establish contact with it and thereby reignite her flagging academic career.

Naturally things are not that easy. To start with the Orbital on which she is going to have to live is old and ramshackle. Also the star around which the Baomind orbits is becoming increasingly unstable. Sunya’s mission is combined with an urgent need to rescue as much of the Baomind as possible before it is too late. And then there are the Freebooters.

If you have read the other White Space novels you will know that the Freebooters are fanatically xenophobic human pirates. As well as hating aliens, they also hate all forms of artificial intelligence. And the star around which the Baomind orbits is far from the usual shipping lanes. It is an easy target.

So poor Sunya is going to be stuck on a rickety space station orbiting a star that might be about to explode while being attacked by pirates, and with a murderer amongst the crew. And yes, Bear does ramp up and tension from there. An important thing about Space Opera is that it should be a thrilling ride. Bear absolutely knows how to achieve that.

Another reason that I love these books is the aliens. Those of you familiar with my presentations on worldbuilding with sex and gender (or the article in the Luna Press book, Worlds Apart), will know that I despair of the tendency of science fiction writers (and fantasy writers) to create new species that are just humans with a few superficial modifications. Why do lizard women have two breasts, when they presumably lay eggs? I don’t know if Bear has seen or read any of my work on this, but she has absolutely got the message. There’s an alien in The Folded Sky whose species has multiple biological genders, and one whose species dies when they give birth to provide their offspring with food.

Towards the end, The Folded Sky gets deep into the weeds about the nature of the universe and the origins of intelligent life. It is fairly abstruse stuff at times, which may be off-putting to some readers. I’m also unsure of the wisdom of Bear nailing her colours to the twin masts of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. The more I think about them, the more I conclude that they are sticking plasters over the broken equations of astrophysics and that one day some clever physicist will render the need for them moot. But they are, of course, what science fiction writers are stuck with these days.

In summary, this is a very intelligent, and very big-hearted, book that rushes headlong from one extreme peril to a succession of ever greater ones. Also there are cats. They are mostly very unhappy cats, as they spend much of the book stuffed into spacesuits, but books are always better with cats.

book cover
Title: The Folded Sky
By: Elizabeth Bear
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Ministry of Time

071, Book Review, Kaliane Bradley

This one is clearly very popular. It is being promoted heavily by Waterstones, and is a Hugo and Clarke finalist. I can see why. But, as sometimes happens, it also irritated me quite a bit. Let me explain why.

One of the things that you need to do as a publisher is catch internal inconsistencies in novels. Writers, bless them, are forever doing weird stuff like killing off a minor character in one chapter, and having them alive again a few chapters later. Or having characters walk eastward into the setting sun. Novels are hard, so it is not surprising that such mistakes happen. Our job, as publishers, is to help the authors catch as many of them as they can before they go to print.

Or perhaps it used to be, because whoever had that job for The Ministry of Time seems to have been dozing at the wheel.

In chapter 5, Margaret, one of the time-travelled ‘ex-pats’, asks, “what is Hollywood?” Yet in chapter 4 she gives a presentation on the work of Charlie Chaplin. (And yes, I know about Niles, but he moved to LA soon after. He was one of the founders of United Artists, for heaven’s sake.)

In chapter 5 Graham Gore asks, “what is Guinness?” Yet in chapter two he and the narrator go to a London pub together.

I find it really hard to believe that the ‘ex-pats’ are given access to the internet and television, and yet they are kept unaware of the Holocaust.

There’s probably more of this stuff, those are just the issues that leapt off the page at me.

I don’t blame Kaliane Bradley for this. Like I said, writing novels is hard. It is the job of the publisher to help catch such things. But, with the increasing emphasis on profit margins, I suspect that mainstream publishers are becoming increasingly lax with regard to quality control, even for a book that is getting such a big publicity push as this one.

What I am less happy with Bradley about is the portrayal of the ‘ex-pats’ – people pulled out of their own time as experiments by the eponymous Ministry. Graham Gore is obviously a very well rounded, and researched, character. The others seem much more like caricatures of their periods. What’s more, I am not sure that, after a year of training to fit in to 21st Century Britain, some of them should be unable to shake a small number of obvious language habits that mark them out as having lived several centuries ago. I’m sorry, I’m an historian, I care about this sort of stuff.

Quibbles apart, this is a fun mystery novel. I spotted some of the twists in advance, but not all of them. The book is also deeply sceptical of the morality of Whitehall and the British political machine. That I very much approve of.

Something else I liked is that, with the story being set only a few years into the future, the weather in London has become terrible and unpredictable thanks to the unfolding climate disaster. More near future SF will have to deal with this.

Finally, because I am currently reading Absolution, it occurred to me that The Ministry of Time probably draws a lot on Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series. Both books involve agents of a shadowy, quite powerful and seemingly incompetent government department struggling to deal with something totally out of the ordinary. If you are going to be looking for inspiration, Area X is as good a place as any to start.

book cover
Title: The Ministry of Time
By: Kaliane Bradley
Publisher: Sceptre
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses

071, Book Review, Malka Older

Pleiti and Mossa are back. Hooray! I had The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses on pre-order and read it immediately it arrived. Didn’t you?

As we are now three books into the series, it is worth taking a step back and looking at the world that Malka Older is constructing.

For the benefit of those of you who have not read the books, they are mysteries set in universities that are in human colonies in the skies of Jupiter. Earth has become uninhabitable and, after a period of desperate survival in space stations, humanity has started to build a new life for itself. The main characters are loosely based on Holmes and Watson, with the main viewpoint character being Pleiti, an academic who tries to study life on Earth through the medium of novels written by people who lived there. Her on-off girlfriend, Mossa, is a professional if somewhat unorthodox detective.

A major theme of the books is the conflict between Classicists such as Pleiti (people who study Earth) and Modernists (people who study Jupiter). This book brings that conflict much more into focus as Pleiti is recruited to help a Modernist scientist at another university whose career is being threated by a jealous rival. That the rivalry is often silly is made very clear.

Of course the overriding theme of the books is the awfulness of so much of academic life. Older clearly has an axe to grind, but from my limited experience it is one that desperately needs use. Politics in academia can be even worse than in fandom.

Meanwhile Older is working on building up a vision of the new world she has created. Novellas don’t give you much space for worldbuilding, but over the course of a series more can be done. One of the things Older does very effectively is note a shift in language. She uses new words such as ‘graduents’ (graduate students) and ‘dafuq’ (a swear word). There’s just enough of it to show the reader that we are not in Kansas without the text becoming hard to decipher.

The plot of the new book is also tied in to the worldbuilding. On Jupiter (Giant, as it is called in the books) humanity lives on artificial platforms that float in the upper atmosphere of the gas giant. Each platform is covered by an atmoshield which keeps the breathable air in. However, the air quality is not good, and when outside everyone wears an atmoscarf to provide further filtering. Vilette, the scientist to whose aid Pleiti comes, has invented a miniaturized version of this technology that is a threat to the existing atmoscarf industry.

A common theme of the books is the difficult relationship between Pleiti and Mossa. It seems that Mossa is highly neurodivergent and mostly incapable of rationally understanding her feelings for Pleiti. In the new book this spills over into fully-fledged depression. It is an interesting setup, but one that I think could become dull if it is repeated in every book, which I fear it might be because of the straightjacket requirements of the romance genre.

Finally we are seeing the beginnings of an overarching story arc. Academic rivalry notwithstanding, the key issue facing Giant society is whether to devote their efforts to the eventual re-colonisation of Earth (the Classicist position) or to make the best of their new world and forget the old. Pleiti, as a Classicist, has obviously devoted her career to the former position, but she is beginning to fear that she might be wrong. I look forward to seeing how that develops.

Which is another way of saying, “more please!”

book cover
Title: The Potency of Ungovernable Impulses
By: Malka Older
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Immaculate Forms

071, Book Review, Helen King

The question of what defines a woman is very much on people’s lips right now, especially in the UK where the Supreme Court has taken it upon itself to appeal to biology. No matter that no actual biologists were consulted, or that members of the British Medical Association have described the ruling as “scientifically illiterate”; the concept of a “biological woman” has now apparently been enshrined in UK law (if not yet in the Equality Act, over-enthusiastic compliers in advance please note).

Much of the commentary around the issue also maintains that we (that is humans) have always known the difference between men and women. It also maintains that the definitive test for femininity is the possession of XX chromosomes, as opposed to XY for men. This is despite the fact that sex chromosomes have only been known to science since 1905, and that many humans are known to have chromosome patterns that are neither XX nor XY.

Of course if you are an historian who specializes in gender diversity (which I am) it is important to understand how people in the past understood sex and gender. There is no greater expert on such issues than Helen King. She’s a Classicist by training, and Professor Emerita at the Open University. Her particular specialty is the history of medicine, and her latest book, Immaculate Forms, takes her on a quest to understand how the female body was understood from ancient times until now.

King has structured the book in four main sections, each of which looks at four supposedly feminine body parts: the breasts, the hymen, the clitoris and the womb. I’ll follow her structure here.

Breasts are, of course, the most obvious signifier of womanhood, being both large and visible. It is significant, therefore, that the anti-trans movement has made it an article of faith that only cis women can have them. Trans women, they claim, can only gain breasts through having implants. King knows better. Breast tissue is common to both men and women, and with appropriate doses of hormones trans women not only grow breasts, but can lactate. I have been roundly ridiculed on social media by TERFs for stating this, so it is something of a pleasure to have support from Professor King.

Men are also deeply obsessed with breasts, for entirely different reasons. King does a fine job of showing how, down the centuries, male doctors found excuses to fondle women’s breasts, and even sample their milk, all in the name of ‘science’. The clergy have had a harder time of it. Did the Virgin Mary have breasts? If so, did she lactate, and did baby Jesus suckle? For some that was just too icky to contemplate.

Whereas breasts are famed for their visibility, the hymen may not exist at all. King refrains from coming down on either side of the debate, if only because hymen-replacement surgery for divorced women is now apparently big business in certain parts of America. If the hymen did not exist in the past, it certainly does now. And, whether or not it did exist, the concept of the hymen has had a massive influence on women’s lives through history.

In contrast, we can be certain that the clitoris exists now, because so many male doctors claim to have been the first person to discover it, rather in the manner that Columbus claimed to have discovered the Americas. Women, like the indigenous Americans, have known where it is all the time.

Of all the female organs, the womb is undoubtedly the most powerful. Not only is it responsible for nurturing new life, it has also been accused of being the source of all manner of female ailments down the years. Hysteria, anyone?

Well actually no. The ancients were big on how the womb might wander around the body, and how it might get hungry and angry if it were not made pregnant on a regular basis. However, the mental illness of hysteria, which we now associate solely with women, was once a more general condition.

King reveals that the term was coined as a mental illness in 18th Century France. Frightened aristocrats found that, if they were diagnosed with a mental illness and confined to a nursing home, they might be spared the guillotine. Hysteria only became a women-only condition after WWI because it was felt that diagnosing soldiers with such a term impugned their masculinity; so ‘shell-shock’ was coined as an alternative.

While a certain type of man only values women as long as he can make them pregnant, we now know that even possessing a womb is not a definitive indicator of womanhood. King notes:

Of course, not all women have a womb; some are born without one, others lose it to surgery, and others have transitioned to being women.

For those wanting more background, the intersex variation that results in a woman being born without a womb is called Mayer-Rotikansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome. King notes that at least one such woman has successfully received a womb transplant and become pregnant using her own eggs.

So it is complicated. How one defines a ‘biological woman’ is open to debate, has changed regularly with changes in medical knowledge, and will always end up excluding some people who were assigned female at birth. King notes:

These modern methods of appealing to chromosomes and hormones, features of our embodiment that others can’t easily see and of which we are entirely unaware, can still prove far from conclusive in deciding whether someone is a man or a woman, and we rapidly revert to the evidence of our eyes. Culturally, we continue to crave binaries.

And yet…

Men and women have been set up as entirely different, with their bodies claimed as bearing clear witness to this. But one of the messages from studying bodies across history is that, while the dance between describing difference and acknowledging similarity has been going on for centuries, binaries simply don’t work.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the Supreme Court and the government continue to refuse to listen, either to history or to science.

book cover
Title: Immaculate Forms
By: Helen King
Publisher: Wellcome Collection
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Urban Fantasy

071, Book Review, Stefan Ekman

One of the things that often infuriates me about academic books on SF is the insistence that so many academics (usually men) have on rigidly defining genres, and then tying themselves in increasingly convoluted knots trying to make actual books fit the tiny pigeonholes that they have constructed for them. It is therefore a delight to read an academic book that calmly accepts the fact that authors will continually seek to create new approaches to their fiction.

Having said that, Stefan Ekman does have a definition for urban fantasy as a genre, and it is one that is much wider than most people would expect. It certainly took me by surprise, but I ended up liking it a lot.

The subtitle of the book (it is an academic book, of course it has a subtitle) is Exploring Modernity Through Magic. That requires some explanation. ‘Modernity’ is a specific term in the study of history, and as such has a more limited temporal scope than Ekman gives it (we are now, apparently, deep into the Post-Modern era). However, over the course of a short chapter discussing various definitions of Modernity, Ekman makes a convincing case for dividing fantasy into two camps: one in which it happens in the deep past and is primarily a function of the supernatural; and one in which it takes place in the modern world and is firmly in the realm of the rational.

By this definition, urban fantasy becomes that subset of fantasy in which magic can be understood by logical, rational means. This doesn’t necessarily result in a neat time-based split. I can see a justification for writing urban fantasy in the Roman Empire, and indeed much supposedly mediaeval fantasy has a very rationalist approach to magic systems (usually the result of the author having played too much Dungeons & Dragons). But urban fantasy works best in the modern world where it exists in concert with things like police forces, computers, television and social media.

I usually describe Juliet McKenna’s Green Man books as Contemporary Rural Fantasy, but by Ekman’s definition they are very clearly Urban. Dan Mackmain and his friends have a very rationalist approach to the supernatural, and are regular users of computer technology. They are constantly concerned about being exposed in the media.

Ekman seems unfamiliar with Juliet’s work (something I would be keen to remedy, save that I know academics, having published a book on a particular subject, can’t wait to read something different for a change), but some of the examples he gives are very similar. While he does spend some time on legendary forebears of the genre such as the work of Charles de Lint, and Megan Lindholm’s Wizard of the Pigeons, he also focuses on things like Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series and Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files. Less obvious is the inclusion of Max Gladstone’s Craft Sequence, which proves that you can write urban fantasy as science fiction.

One of the more interesting sections of the book focuses on Kevin Hearne’s Iron Druid Chronicles, books with which I am unfamiliar. Ekman is interested in the books because the hero, Atticus, is thousands of years old and therefore has a very different worldview to those of the contemporary Americans amongst whom he lives. While he styles himself as a champion of nature, Atticus has little interest in doing anything about human environmental destruction because Gaia will sort that out in her own way (presumably to the extreme detriment of the humans). He is more interested in the danger of the god-like powers who have the capacity to destroy the environment entirely. It is an interesting perspective.

Obviously academic books are not for everyone. However, for anyone writing contemporary fantasy, I think that Ekman’s Urban Fantasy provides an excellent overview of the field and plenty of food for thought as to how to approach it. For young academics it provides a welcome and necessary example of how to do your work without getting trapped in the weeds of definitions. And for me it is a reminder that I need to sit down and read my way through the Craft Sequence, because it is very clever writing.

book cover
Title: Urban Fantasy
By: Stefan Ekman
Publisher: Lever Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Hay Literary Festival, 2025

071, Convention Report

The chances of getting good SF&F writers at Hay are very slim, but you do get good history and feminism writers, and anyway it is just over the mountains from me, so I figured I should go and support the general idea of books.

Much to my surprise and delight, I managed to pick a day on which there were four writers I was interested in seeing, and one of whom was a friend. So off I went.

The first session I attended was with Edith Hall. She’s a well-known Classicist, but the book she was promoting is a bit of a departure. It is an book about The Iliad seen from an environmentalist perspective. That may seem a little odd, but actually there is a substantial amount of environmental destruction that takes place in the book. Have you any idea how many trees you have to fell to build a thousand ships? And then the Greeks are camped outside of Troy for 10 years, meaning that a lot more wood is required for building camps, repairing ships, cooking meals, raising funeral pyres, and of course building a wooden horse.

There’s also the question of weapons. The Trojan War took place in the Mediterranean’s Bronze Age. Smelting metal requires a very hot fire which means, you guessed it, more wood. Hall is of the opinion that we should date the start of the Anthropocene from the birth of metallurgy. I can see her point.

What you may not know is that the area around Mount Ida, the mountainous country to the south of the plain on which Troy stands, is an area of outstanding natural beauty. In times past it was sacred to the goddess Cybele. However, Hall revealed that a mining company has been busily felling many of the trees in the area. The Turkish government is now supposedly taking action, but the damage has been extreme and it is unclear whether the govenrment has sufficient will to do anything effective. I was so appalled that I went straight to the Woodland Trust tent at the festival and signed up. Not that that will have any direct effect in Turkey, but I’m assuming that Cybele will notice. I’m sure she can think of a suitable punlishment for the miners.

Anyway, the book is called Epic of the Earth, and I am looking forward to reading it.

Next up was Amy Jeffs and her new book, Saints. This is a collection of stories about saints, some of whom have remarkably interesting lives. Jeffs seems to have constrained herself to writing about people whose sainthood has actually been approved by the Catholic Church, which is a shame because many of the Welsh saints have even more bizarre lives. I might have to write a companion book.

Jeffs is a remarkably talented young woman. She does all the art for the books as well as write them. The content is a combination of fiction and history. And in the session she showed that she has a fabulous singing voice as well. Fortunately I am too old to be jealous.

Session three was with one of my feminist heroes: Cordelia Fine. She’s a psychologist and feminist philosopher from Australia who has written some wonderfully insightful and entertaining feminist books. I did a review of her previous book, Testosterone Rex, on my blog back in 2017 and have included it in this issue.

The new book, Patriarchy Inc., is all about the Diversity & Inclusion industry, and why Fine thinks it fails at what it sets out to do. As a former diversity trainer, this is of considerable interest to me. Fiona Moore, if you are reading this, you should get the book too.

I got to ask a question at the end of the session. Fine said that it was “very insightful”. I can die happy now.

Mid afternoon my friend Jo Lambert arrived and we did a bit of shopping. Then there was the food hall. Pizza!

The final session that I had booked was with Sion Faye, whom I knew from Bristol (where she grew up). Her new book, Love in Exile, is not specifically about trans issues, but it is of course deeply informed by the difficulties and dangers of dating while trans. It is also informed by her time as an agony aunt for Vogue. Sion is very smart, and I’m looking forward to seeing what she has to say.

I stayed over in a nearby hotel because I couldn’t face a 2 hour drive home late at night. I highly recommend the Castle Hotel in Brecon, should you ever be around these parts. And I spent Saturday morning checking out the Roman remains in the area. Brecon was home to a unit of cavalry from Hispania. That makes it hugely important to the post-Roman history of Wales.

Testosterone Rex

071, Book Review, Cordelia Fine

Originally published on Cheryl’s Mewsings in April 2017

While most of the reading I am doing at the moment is either history research or Tiptree-related, occasionally I have to read books because they are relevant to doing trans awareness training. This means that I get to read Cordelia Fine for work. Result!

The latest book by my favorite Australian feminist is Testosterone Rex, a scathing excoriation of the idea that everything about Patriarchy; from the supposed superiority of men over women, to the supposed innately violent nature of men; from the idea that men can’t look after children to the idea that trans women can never be women; all of this is explainable by one central fact: that men’s bodies are suffused with testosterone and women’s are not. The subtitle of Testosterone Rex is, “Unmaking the myths of our gendered minds,” and the book aims to deconstruct the idea of men being from Mars and women from Venus with the same ruthless efficiency that Fine’s previous best-seller, Delusions of Gender, destroyed foolish ideas about gendered bodies.

But wait, Cheryl, I hear you say, surely this does you no good. Surely the cause of trans people is crucially dependent on their being actual, fundamental differences between men and women. Shouldn’t you and Ms. Fine be enemies?

Well, no. Firstly there is the entirely practical point that I can’t think of anyone I’d less like to get into a philosophical debate with than Professor Fine. She has a mind like a laser cutter and I know I’d end up in tiny pieces. Besides, she doesn’t argue that men and women are identical; that would be foolish. What she does argue is that the differences between men and women are by no means as all-encompassing as is generally claimed, and what differences that do exist are rarely explained solely by chromosomes and/or hormones.

What Fine argues against is biological essentialism. And it so happens that biological essentialism is also at the root of the TERF argument against trans women. Because we have Y chromosomes, they argue, and because our bodies have, at least for a while, been suffused with testosterone, we have an innate and inescapable violent nature that we can never shake off. That, they say, makes us a danger to women, and makes it important that we be excluded from women-only spaces. It is rather ironic that the arguments TERFs use to claim superiority over trans women are rooted in the same fallacy that men use to claim superiority over women.

So I see Fine as being on my side. She’s arguing that the biology of gender is much more complicated than most people think it is, and that’s fine by me.

She’s also not averse to poking fun at the whole nonsense edifice of gender mythology. Here’s an example:

Over the past eight years or so, I’ve taken part in a lot of discussions about how to increase sex equality in the workplace. Here, I would like to clearly state for the record that castration has never been mentioned as a possible solution. (Not even in the Top Secret Feminist Meetings where we plot our global military coup.)

Elsewhere in the book she explains how a biological catalyst called aromatase that exists in human cells is capable of turning testosterone into estrogen. She notes, “even the ‘sex hormones’ defy the gender binary.”

Talking of which, did you know that female gonads make testosterone as well as estrogen? Most women do have testosterone in their bodies, just at a much lower level than men. No one is entirely sure why. It occurs to me, however, that trans women are different. Those of us who no longer have testes are on hormone replacement regimes that only supply estrogen. Trans women thus eventually end up have less testosterone in their bodies than cis women.

The book is full of fascinating and very accessible explanations of cutting edge scientific research that blows gaping holes in the nonsense ideas of evolutionary psychologists and shows us just how weird the natural world can be. My favorite set of stories involves an East African fish called Haplochromis burtoni, a species of chiclid. In a series of elegant experiments various biologists have shown that large body size and high levels of testosterone are a product of, not the cause of, social dominance. You can take a “submissive” male chiclid from one colony, put it in a different tank where it has more chance of winning fights against the local males, and it will magically take on all of the biological characteristics of a “dominant” male.

Even better, one experiment identified a lone male chiclid who, despite the fact that he won fights more often than not, did not establish a territory or a dominant social position among the other fish. His testosterone levels were way down compared to his fellow bruisers. The scientist who discovered this fish suggested that he didn’t have sufficient self-confidence to believe that he was a winner, even though his fighting record was good. I suggest a possible alternative explanation: that they simply didn’t identify as that sort of fish.

There’s nothing in Testosterone Rex that specifically supports the validity of trans identities. However, the more evidence we have that biology, and in particular human biology, is way more complicated than tabloid newspapers pretend that it is, the better, as far as I’m concerned. Social inequality is based on the idea that certain groups of people are fundamentally superior to other groups of people. If such differences don’t really exist, and no one is better than Professor Fine as dispelling them, then the cause of equality is advanced.

I’d like to end with one more scientific anecdote. It is about the idea of “failure-as-an-asset”. Here’s Fine:

It turns out that presenting men with evidence that they have done poorly at something at which women tend to excel provides a little boost to their self-esteem, because incompetence in low-status femininity helps establish high-status masculinity.

Fine goes on to explain that men can increase their chances of getting a job by talking about how bad they are at “feminine” activities in their resumes and interviews.

Which is all very well if you are actually hunting for a job, but it just goes to show that sexist nonsense means that there are activities that men are effectively barred from because of sexism. If we get rid of the nonsense, the barriers go away. Equality: it is better for everyone.

book cover
Title: Testosterone Rex
By: Cordelia Fine
Publisher: Icon Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Doctor Who 15.2

071, TV Review

Oh dear, all Doctor Who fandom is plunged into war once again.

What I can say about the past two seasons is that I am not in the least surprised by this outcome. Russell T Davis has not been in any way cautious about what he is doing. There have been highly unusual episodes such as ‘73 Yards’ and ‘The Story and the Engine’. There have been episodes that dealt with Culture War themes head-on. There was a magnificent guest-star performance by Jinx Monsoon in ‘The Devil’s Chord’. And there was the totally gonzo idea of doing a Eurovision-themed episode that aired just before the actual Eurovision final.

Inevitably the right wing media has been calling for Davis’s head throughout. It is almost as if he knew this would happen and decided to go all out on the ‘woke’ content for as long as he could.

Alongside this there has been some decidedly wobbly plotting the make up for the fact that Disney has paid to get rid of the wobbly sets. On the one hand, I can see where fans are coming from. Some episodes had plot holes that you could drive a Culture GSV through. But what fans tend to forget is that Doctor Who is, above all else, a show for children. The BBC wants it to be suitable to be shown on Saturday in the early evening so that the family can watch it together. What a six-year-old expects from a plot is very different from what a forty-something long-time Whovian expects.

What Davis does for his older Whovian audience is wallow in nostalgia. I’m not sure that this is a good idea. Obviously the kids won’t have any idea who Omega was. I didn’t either. The whole thing was a bit embarrassing. And, as others have pointed out, very wasteful of the character. But it seems that the nostalgia box needs to be ticked every now and then to keep someone in the production crew happy.

I wasn’t in the least bit surprised that Ncuti Gatwa is moving on. After all, the Daily Malice had claimed victory the week before. They had presumably been tipped off by their allies inside the BBC hierarchy. But hey, Who got away with being outrageously progressive for a whole two seasons and, given how right-wing the BBC management has become, that’s a major victory.

I was not expecting Billy Piper to pop up. I’ll be interested to see what Davis does with her. It may be more wallowing in nostalgia. I hope not.

Next up is the spin-off mini series, The War Between the Land and the Sea. That has already been filmed, so it seems unlikely that the BBC will refuse to show it, no matter how much the gutter press complains. It would probably be a breach of their contract with Disney if they didn’t show it.

Where things go from here is uncertain. There has been much talk of a ‘hiatus’, which is a polite way of saying that the show will be cancelled until there is a significant change in management at the BBC. I hope not, because it is a major source of revenue and employment for Wales. Meanwhile the BBC has promised to produce more drama that will appeal to Reform voters. So look out for a space opera series that features brave troopers whose job it is to kill alien Muslim boat people and queers.

Editorial – June 2025

071, Editorial

Well, only a day late. That’s not too bad. I was hoping that I could get this online yesterday while I was on the train back home from Heathrow, but that didn’t work out. I got to read a significant chunk of Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Lords of Uncreation instead.

As to “Why Heathrow?”, I have been to Archipelacon, this year’s European Science Fiction Convention. More of that next issue, but I certainly had a great time I know a lot of other people did too.

The next few months are going to be much more relaxed. I have a couple of academic conferences to do, and Carmarthen Pride, but things don’t ramp up again until October when there is Octocon, BristolCon and World Fantasy. I do have a virtual membership for Worldcon, but that’s primarily so I can vote in the Hugos and Site Selection.

Hopefully next month’s issue will actually be on time.

Issue #70

Issues

This is the May 2025 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: Belle and the Dragon: This issue's cover is an illustration from Belle and the Dragon, a children's book by A E Waite

  • Alien Clay: Adrian Tchaikovsky uses some decidedly weird biology to ask some very pertinent questions about human politics.

  • Tomb of Dragons: Celahar, Witness for the Dead (temporarily retired) returns in this new book. Can you guess from the title what sort of ghosts he ends up speaking to this time?

  • The Vengeance: Avast there me hearties, here be a new book by the fabulous Emma Newman. It be full of pirates (but they are French so they probably don't talk like this).

  • Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost: Wait, is Cheryl reviewing a Crater School novel? How does that work?

  • Eastercon 2025: This year's Eastercon was in Belfast, which these days is a thoroughly delightful city. A Wizard's Tower book was up for an award.

  • Science Fiction in the Atomic Age: Can television tell the history of science fiction in four hours? Even with the help of John Clute? It is a tall ask, but even so this series did not need to be quite as bad as it was.

  • Llandeilo Lit Fest, 2025: Are there literary festivals in rural Wales (other than That One, of course). Why yes, of course. Cheryl attends her local event.

  • AWWE Conference, 2025: AWWE is the Association for Welsh Writing in English. They have an annual conference. Cheryl attended.

  • Editorial – May 2025: To the surprise of absolutely no one, Cheryl has been busy.

Cover: Belle and the Dragon

070, Art

Continuing our tour of the online archives of the British Library, this issue’s cover is an illustration from Belle and the Dragon: An Elfin Comedy, a children’s book published in 1894 and written by none other than the famous Occultist, A E Waite (he of the Rider-Waite Tarot deck).

The artist is Evelyn Stuart-Menteath, on whom the character of the dragon is also apparently based. Other characters represent Waite’s wife, Ada, and his true love, her sister, Dora.

The title of the story is a play on an apocryphal section of the Book of Daniel, ‘Bel and the Dragon’, in which the prophet tries to convince the King of Babylon of the foolishness of worshipping graven idols.

As usual, an unadulterated version of the image is available below.

Alien Clay

070, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Book Review

Does anyone manage to keep up with Adrian Tchaikovsky? His output is staggering. These days it seems like he’s not just writing with four pairs of hands, he must have a whole nest full of baby spiders writing for him as well.

So no, there are many Tchaikovsky books that I have not read. But Alien Clay looked very interesting, so I made time to have a look at it. I am so glad that I did.

Like many of the best books, Alien Clay is many things at once. To start with, it is a fascinating piece of science fiction. Tchaikovsky (whose knowledge of biology is far better than mine) starts with ideas such as the theory that the mitochondria in our cells (which provide the energy for them to operate) were originally independent, single-cells creatures which chose to live inside other cells. There’s also the fact that our digestive system only works because our guts are home to large numbers of useful bacteria that do most of the digestive work for us. Tchaikovsky dials this up to the max.

On the planet Kiln, all life has evolved through symbiosis on a macro level. Thus every creature is made up of several other creatures. It is nightmare of an ecosystem to study, and also a hard place in which to survive. You might think you have killed the alien creature that was trying to eat you, but actually you only killed one of its component bodies. The others are still very much alive and awaiting their chance to get revenge.

But why, you may ask, are humans on Kiln anyway if it is such a weird and dangerous place? Well, most of them are not there by choice. Kiln is, in effect, a penal planet. Earth is ruled by an authoritarian government known as The Mandate. Dissenters are sent into space where they are put to use as fodder for the exploration of potential colony planets. Kiln, sadly, is the most promising candidate yet discovered.

Which brings us to the second thing about the book: the politics. We see an awful lot of dystopian novels these days. Alien Clay is the first one I have read in quite a while that sounds like the author has thought a lot about how such regimes work, and how hard it can be to rebel against them.

In this respect, Alien Clay is a descendent of 1984. Like Big Brother, The Mandate rules by fear. It succeeds in crushing rebellion because there is always someone in a revolutionary cell who is weak, and can be bullied or bribed into selling their comrades out. Given all the naïve nonsense we see on social media these days (no, baby anarchist, you should not be discussing your plans for revolution on Mastodon where anyone can read them), this is very refreshing, and frankly necessary.

Something else I like about The Mandate is that it has no need for truth. It has an ideology. All academic research must serve that ideology, whether the facts support it or not. Having ideas that challenge the ideology marks you out as a dangerous dissident, and tends to result in a one-way trip to somewhere like Kiln. Anyone who is following the anti-trans movement in the UK will know that Wes Streeting is only one step away from ordering anyone who disagrees with his beliefs to be disappeared.

The third thing about Alien Clay is that it is about the future of mankind. I don’t want to give away too many spoilers, but it seems to me that Tchaikovsky may have read Sheri Tepper’s Raising the Stones, a book that made me very angry indeed. Tepper, of course, grew to hate humans, and would probably have been happy to see most of them exterminated. Raising the Stones provides an alternative solution to her problem. Alien Clay sees Tchaikovsky consider the same question, and find a very different answer.

I note that Alien Clay is one of two Tchaikovsky books on this year’s Best Novel ballot in the Hugos. Looking at the rest of the field, I suspect I shall be giving it my first preference.

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

Tomb of Dragons

070, Book Review, Katherine Addison

I’m a big fan of Katherine Addison’s Witness for the Dead books, so I immediately pounced on the new one when it came out. The title, Tomb of Dragons, is a bit of a spoiler, given that Celahar is always involved with the dead, but there is a lot more going on in the book.

Those of you who remember the previous book in the series, The Grief of Stones, will remember that Celahar has lost his ability to speak to the dead. Obviously he’s going to get it back at some point, because that’s the primary basis for the stories, but I will leave you to find out for yourselves how and why it happens. In the meantime, Celahar is busy.

The book starts with him being rousted out of bed by guardsmen searching for an escaped political prisoner. Then he gets a letter from the Archprelate giving him a mission, given that he can’t be a Witness for the Dead any more. And shortly after that there is a murder of an important person at the opera, which takes us back to the events of Witness for the Dead because the deceased turns out to have been the lover that Tura Olora was trying to protect. All of this happens before we get anywhere near any dead dragons, the story of which begins when Celahar gets kidnapped.

So yes, there is a lot going on. But what is the book about? Primarily it is about capitalist exploitation. Dragons, you see, live in caves in mountains. And these are often places where you also find deposits of valuable minerals. You can’t run a mine if there is a live dragon in it, so if you are a wealthy businessman who owns a mining company you really need any local dragons to be dead. Hence Celahar’s involvement, and in this case a witnessing involving people of such wealth and power that he has to get the Emperor involved.

That’s the basis of the book, which is all very heartwarming and progressive. I’m pleased to say that there is no simplistic resolution. After all, emperors rely on access to gold and the like to run their empires. But there is another aspect to these books that I’m also very pleased about: their treatment of religion.

Those of you who read my essay in Follow Me, the Luna Press Publishing book on religion in fantasy, or who came to the panel on the same topic at Worldcon last year, will know that this is something I tend to rant about. I’m pleased to say that Addison does a fine job of portraying a real religion in a fantasy setting. Celahar is a priest of the god, Ulis. There is no doubt that Ulis exists, and that he has powers with which he influences the lives (and deaths) of mortals. But no one, least of all his clergy, really understands him. They just know that he exists and needs worshipping.

In this book Celahar visits some doctors at the university who hope to be able to restore his ability to speak to the dead. They try a treatment. Nothing happens immediately. Then Celahar gets kidnapped and we get to the point where he gets his abilities back. Is this because the treatment took time to take effect? Is it a miracle? No one knows. It is ineffable.

The other major thing that happens in the book concerns Celahar’s love life, which has been pretty much dead since the terrible events of The Goblin Emperor. He has some good close friends, but none of them seem that way inclined. The new book see Celahar mooning over a handsome guard captain in the service of Prince Orchenis. Imagine our surprise (not) when said soldier is appointed as Celahar’s personal guard because people involved in the dragon case are trying to kill him. It is a very slow burn romance, but it gets there in the end, and it looks like it will be developed more in the next book.

book cover
Title: Tomb of Dragons
By: Katherine Addison
Publisher: Solaris
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Vengeance

070, Book Review, Emma Newman

One of the joys of this year’s Eastercon was finding a new Emma Newman novel in the Dealers’ Room. Newman has been busy doing other stuff for a while, but I’m pleased to see that she hasn’t lost her touch.

The Vengeance is not a book in the Planetfall series. Indeed, it is fantasy. There are werewolves and vampires, and it is set in France in the 17th Century. Newman makes no secret of her love for the works of Alexander Dumas, and this is very much a book inspired by his output.

Morgane is the daughter of the notorious pirate queen known as The Scourge (Anna-Marie to her friends). Or at least she thinks she is. When Anna-Marie is assassinated by a ship deliberately sent to trap her, her dying confession is that Morgane is actually her niece, whom she rescued from her evil sister.

However, amongst her captain’s possessions, Morgane finds letter from her real mother begging her to come home. Who to believe: a pirate captain, or the wife of one of the richest men in France?

We all know, of course, that oligarchs are arseholes, but young Morgane has very little experience in the world and has to learn some lessons the hard way. She hasn’t been in France since she was a baby, and she has no idea how French society works. Fortunately she is contacted by a man who claims to be her father, and he finds her a governess.

Ah, now here is the story. At first Morgane and Lisette despise each other. The former sees no value in learning manners, and the latter is appalled to be put in charge of someone so uncouth who can’t even read. But it is soon very clear that their skills are highly complimentary, and they will grow to like each other. There may even be kissing.

I thought there was something of a Xena and Gabrielle vibe to the relationship, though it is a long time since I saw any of that show so I could be wrong.

If I have one complaint about the book it is that I waited patiently through 330-odd pages waiting for D’Artagnan to turn up, and he never did. This is sad because, regardless of what may have happened in any TV shows or movies, I am convinced that his part should be played by Charles LeClerc. I want that version.

The good news is that, while The Vengeance is complete in itself, the book is subtitled The Vampires of Dumas – Book I. Which means that Newman has future books in which to put right this egregious omission. Get with it, Em, please…

book cover
Title: The Vengeance
By: Emma Newman
Publisher: Solaris
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost

070, Book Review, Chaz Brenchley

It is, perhaps, a little dodgy for me to be reviewing a Chaz Brenchley book featuring Rowany de Vere. However, this is not a Crater School book. It is a novella published by NewCon press. Some explanation is in order.

When Chaz approached me about this book I had no plans to publish novellas. Indeed, I didn’t want to. The Wiz Duos series only came about because of the collapse of Kristell Ink, and the need to rescue the novellas that Roz & Jo had edited for them. So I suggested to Chaz (and his agent, John Jarrold) that they talk to Ian Whates instead. I knew Ian did novellas, and that Chaz and John would trust him to do a good job. As indeed he has done.

This being a Rowany book, I splashed out and got the limited edition hardcover edition. It is very nice. But you don’t have to pay that much for a copy.

So what is it about? Well, as Crater School fans will remember, Rowany’s acceptance at Oxford was delayed for mysterious reasons, causing her to spend an extra year on Mars and be available to feature in three more novels.

Rowany is the daughter of the famous General de Vere. She has three brothers, all of whom are in the army. Dealing with such annoyances are part and parcel of what has made Rowany the highly competent young woman that she is. Brothers are a pain in the arse.

Rowany is not in the army. She has been tapped for something much more prestigious. Having graduated from Oxford (one assumes with a First), Rowany now works for the Colonial Service. This is a euphemism of sorts. Yes, she is a civil servant. Were this our world rather than Benchley’s Imperial Mars, we would probably say that she works for MI6.

Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost tells of her first serious mission in her new job. An important Russian gentleman is on Mars for a chess tournament. He has been in secret contact with the Colonial Office and has expressed a wish to defect. Rowany has been tasked with collecting him and bringing him in, before the Russians can manage to assassinate him.

This, then, is a very different Rowany. She is still, of course, highly competent. She still has that poor opinion of men that only a girl who grew up with Too Many Brothers can have. She certainly has no truck with the sexist views of her Russian charge, who is outraged that his personal safety has been entrusted to a mere girl. But Rowany too is a valuable asset. The Colonial Office would not have sent her on this mission were she not thoroughly well prepared. And that is the difference.

Yes, this book is about Rowany de Vere, much loved former Head Girl of the Crater School and the sort of person who can be relied upon to keep a cool head and think her way out of the most dreadful scrapes. Because of the nature of her new job, getting out of scrapes can include the use of extreme measures. This is a new Rowany: one who is Licensed to Kill.

book cover
Title: Rowany de Vere and a Fair Degree of Frost
By: Chaz Brenchley
Publisher: NewCon Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Eastercon 2025

070, Convention Report

This year’s Eastercon took us back to Belfast and the site of the 2019 Eurocon. I’ve come to love Belfast as a city, so I was keen to go, even though the post-Brexit bureaucracy surrounding getting goods in and out of Northern Ireland made having a dealer’s table impossible.

For the Eastercon we had space in the convention centre attached to the Hilton. I’m not sure if this is new, but it is certainly excellent space. We didn’t use all of it, so it could have handled a much bigger event. Getting around is a bit of a challenge, but once you got your bearings it was easy enough. The only weird thing was that to get from the hotel to the convention centre you had to walk along a passageway that was airwalled off from the biggest programming room. Quite why the builders did that is a mystery to me.

Something that is new is Belfast Grand Central Station. The old Victoria station is in the process of being torn down and replaced by a shiny, new modern facility just to the north-west. It is very impressive. There is still a lot of work to be done, but it is already sporting a sign claiming that it is Belfast’s premier shopping destination despite the fact that the only shop it has right now is an M&S food hall. Doubtless more will come.

One thing that concerned me about the event was getting food. Belfast has a reputation of being a rather religious city, and regardless of their sectarian beliefs no committed Christian is going to be working over Easter. I needn’t have worried. Belfast is a tourist destination these days. The lovely St. George’s Market was only open on Saturday, but there were plenty of places open through the weekend. The M&S in Grand Central Station seemed to be open any time I passed through.

I didn’t attend a lot of programming, but I was very pleased to get to meet Emily Tesh and chat to her about The Female Man, a book which manages to be fiercely feminist and appallingly TERFy by turns. I’m looking forward to reading Farah Mendlesohn’s new book, Considering The Female Man, which is due out from Luna Press Publishing in the summer.

On the subject of feminism, the shouty feminist panel that Juliet McKenna and I were on got put in the main hall. The room was less than half full, but I think that is because there were not that many people at the convention. Some of the other panel rooms filled up and had to turn people away. We had a good rant anyway, but it is rather depressing to keep having to say the same things decade after decade and see nothing much change.

The Dealers’ Room was fairly sparse, primarily due to the aforementioned bureaucracy. A few people from the UK smuggled books in via suitcases and car boots, but the main book dealer was a shop from Cork. They had a pre-release copy of the new Emma Newman novel, which I was very pleased about. They did not have anything by Everina Maxwell, which was sad because she was getting praised highly on several panels. Must catch up with her work.

Some kind folks (who might not want to be named due to the aforementioned book smuggling) volunteered to put the few copies of Fight Like A Girl 2 I had with me on their table. They all sold. We didn’t win the BSFA Award, but the Punks for Palestine anthology did, and I cannot complain about that.

The art show was much more full of stuff from the rest of the UK. Goodness only knows why. Much of it was for sale, after all. There was some lovely Fangorn art on show.

Overall I think the weekend went very well, despite numbers being somewhat down on an English or Scottish Eastercon. I’m delighted that Northern Ireland has got to host the convention at last, and it now seems even more egregious that Wales has never done so. Facilities are, of course, a major issue. I’ve looked at hotels in Swansea and there is nowhere I would even try to host something like BristolCon. Sigh.

Science Fiction in the Atomic Age

070, TV Review

I have enjoyed Adrian Munsey’s two previous forays into SF&F documentaries. The original series looked in some detail at British writers of children’s fiction in the 19th Century. It covered famous names such as JM Barrie, AA Milne, Beatrix Potter and, of course, Tolkien, but also some less well-known writers. Unusually it looked at the lives of the writers, to see how their particular circumstances might have influence what they wrote.

Series two looked at The Gothic. Again the focus was quite tight, though it did wander all the way from The Castle of Otranto to Wuthering Heights, and from Dracula to Dorian Gray. It also brought in Freud’s theory of the Uncanny, which seemed reasonable because Freud was popular and taken seriously when many of the books being examined were written. And in any case, Gothic fiction relies on psychological horror for effect.

The new series, which is on Sky Arts rather than the BBC, is called Science Fiction In The Atomic Age. Like its predecessors, it is four one-hour episodes. And reader, it is a mess.

The title is somewhat clickbaity. The series begins with Mary Shelley and includes Verne and Wells, all of whom were active before the atom bomb was invented. Wells did predict such a device, but he massively underestimated its destructive power. Then there is WWII, and from there the series tries to cover the whole history of science fiction. In four hours. That would be a challenge to anyone.

I should note that the series has some excellent contributory talking heads, including John Clute, Farah Mendlesohn, Adam Roberts, Mark Bould, and even a brief appearance by Tade Thompson. I do not hold any of these people responsible for the final product. I know how these things go. You get interviewed, and do your best to give coherent answers to a bunch of leading questions. You have no control over how those answers are edited into the documentary, and in this case all the responses are devoid of context, in that we are never told what they question was.

The series starts well enough, looking at the origins of science fiction in a time of heady scientific progress and American exceptionalism. It then looks at how things like the demise of the space programme have punctured the optimism of the science fiction project. By episode 3 it has got on to Le Guin and Butler, and the rise of social SF. And it goes straight from there to Ted Chiang and Arrival.

There are lots of things you can get wrong about telling the history of science fiction, but skipping over the whole of cyberpunk seems pretty high on the list of potential faux pas. Except that it does get a mention in episode 4, when the series is talking primarily about AI. There is even a supposed quote from Neuromancer used as voiceover for a piece about robots. I don’t know the book well enough to recognise the text used, but I suspect it was the caption that was wrong.

What episode 3 does do is engage in what can only be describe as psychoanalytical bollocks. Freud, and Joseph Cambell, do get a proper airing when it comes to discussion of Star Wars in episode 4, but Cambell is mentioned in episode 3 without any explanation. It is sloppy narrative structure. And as for the Freudian stuff…

Instead of looking at cyberpunk in its proper place in history, episode 3 goes on an extended rant about The Matrix. Apparently it is bad because it says the wrong sort of thing about superheroes, or doesn’t, the narration wasn’t clear. Also it is bad because gender transition means that you can no longer have a Oedipus Complex, which means that Freud’s theories no longer work.

Munsey returns to the Wachowskis in episode 4 and shows what I think are a couple of pictures of them pre-transition. That’s the video-equivalent of deadnaming, and completely unnecessary. I was very unimpressed.

I should also add that there are times when it is not at all clear whether the voice-over is from one of the talking heads, a quote from a book, or editorialising by Munsey. And some of the choices of images used are very odd, and seem to have nothing to do with the narrative.

This is very disappointing, given how interesting the previous two series were.

Llandeilo Lit Fest, 2025

070, Convention Report

Here in rural Carmarthenshire we have our own little literary festival. It is very Welsh, and there is little in the way of speculative literature at the moment. I plan to change that, but for now I’m just attending to hear interesting stuff, and to sell books.

The selling books thing wasn’t exactly official. Sarah, my hairdresser, offered to let me run a pop-up stall in her shop. It wasn’t hugely well advertised, but I sold five books over the weekend and didn’t have to pay for a dealer table. I’m happy with that. It also meant that I had three days very close to Llandeilo’s amazing donut shop.

My main reason for going to the festival was to support my friend Jo Lambert. She has a book out, Found Wanting, which is a YA queer romance set against the backdrop of the County Lines drug dealing network. It sounds really great when Jo talks about it.

Also appearing at the event was my local Senedd Member, Adam Price. He was interviewing Richard Wyn Jones, a professor of politics from Cardiff University who has a new book out on the political thought of Plaid Cymru (Putting Wales First). Like all political parties, Plaid has mutated through the years. Listening to Richard threw a lot of light on why my parents, so proudly Welsh, were so antipathetic towards Plaid.

Finally on my list of things to attend was a talk by my friend Kirsti Bohata from Swansea University. She has been editing the diaries of Amy Dillwyn, a successful woman novelist from the late 19th Century. After the death of her MP father in 1892, Amy inherited his spelter works and became a successful businesswoman. She was also active as a Suffragist.

Despite the tomboyish nature of many of her heroines, and her very masculine style of dress, no questions had previously been asked about Dillwyn’s sexuality. On reading the diaries, it was immediately obvious to Kirsti that this was because the matter had been deliberately suppressed. In fact Amy nurtured a lifelong crush on her childhood friend, Olive Talbot (yes, those Talbots, Kingmaker players). What’s more there are passages in which Amy dreams of being a mediaeval knight. As Kirsti explained, Dillwyn’s novel set in the Rebecca Riots (The Rebecca Rioter) can now be read as a very complex meditation on gender.

One session that I missed and am kicking myself about featured the new Manawydan Jones novel from Alun Davies. The books are written in Welsh, which is how come I hadn’t noticed the content. As far as I can make out, they are a Welsh version of Percy Jackson. Manawydan Fab Llyr is generally accepted to be an ancient Welsh sea god, and Percy is (spoiler for book 1) the son of Neptune. My Welsh isn’t up to reading these yet, but I’m working on it. One day I would love to publish English translations of them.

AWWE Conference, 2025

070, Convention Report

I was somewhat surprised, last year, to discover that there was such a thing as the Association for Welsh Writing in English. Jo Lambert told me about it. People at Aberystwyth University were encouraging her to go. It looked like a serious literary event, but I offered them a paper on Nicola Griffith’s Spear and it got accepted, so I went.

I think I had four people in my audience. There were two parallel sessions and the other one had papers about poetry.

On the other hand, the conference takes place in a fabulous location, Gregynog Hall in central Wales. Also I made friends. It turns out that Matt Jarvis, one of the then co-chairs of the Association, knew Farah and Edward well. His fellow co-chair, Kirsti Bohata, gets featured in my report on the Llandeilo Lit Fest. She talked a bit more about Amy Dillwyn at the conference as well.

This year I offered them a paper on the figure of the Lady of the Lake. That was a lot of fun to research, and led me down all sorts of avenues of Welsh folklore. It turns out that lakes in Wales are often inhabited by moistened bints, but rather than handing out magic swords they are far more likely to gift people herds of magic white cows. Which, if you think about it, are probably a lot more useful. If you are going to be at Archipelacon 2 you will have a chance to hear an expanded version of that paper.

The paper seemed to go down very well, and I got some good questions. One in particular came from a Celticist friend, Rhys Kaminsky-Jones. He asked me why it is the Lady of THE Lake. Which Lake? Why does it have a definite article?

I had to admit that I had never thought of that before. Being brought up in Y Gwlad Haf tends to result in your assuming that there is only one Lake, and it is the one that surrounds Glastonbury in the winter. But Rhys asked the question, and the answer came to me in a flash of inspiration. It is a translation from Welsh.

Welsh does not have an indefinite article. There is no ‘a lake’, there is just ‘lake’, but Welsh also puts in a definite article when an English speaker might not expect it. For example, a street which, in English, is called Park Lane, would in Welsh be rendered Lôn y Parc — Lane of the Park. So our mythical woman might be Dynes y LLyn – Woman of the Lake. Or perhaps, as my Welsh tutor suggested, Morwyn y Llyn, if these women were supposed to be virgin priestesses.

There were plenty of interesting papers this year. There was an entire panel on coal mining horror stories. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘underscapes’ so a lot of underground (and underwater) stuff happened. But the other paper I wanted to mention was the one by Aidan Byrne from Wolverhampton University. It was titled ‘Among Others’, and if you guessed that it featured the Jo Walton of that name you would be dead right. It also featured stories of Welsh girls in English boarding schools, which led me to talk to Aidan about the Crater School books.

Slowly but surely we are getting more spec fic content at AWWE. Hopefully I can continue the progress next year, though May 2026 is very busy what with the Senedd elections, Satellite in Glasgow, and Åcon.

Editorial – May 2025

070, Editorial

OK, that’s been a busy two months. Sorry about the lack of issue in May, but I was very busy with day job stuff and had no time. There has been more in May, plus a bunch of academic conferences. That at least has given me time on trains and aircraft to read.

June should not be quite as hectic, but I will be in Finland for a couple of weeks. Irma has invited me up to Jyväskylä for mid-summer, and then it is off to Mariehamn for Archipelacon 2.

During May I also did an interview for the British Fantasy Society’s website, which you can read here.

And I had a story published! It is in the latest issue of Gwyllion magazine, which you can buy here.

There is a whole lot of Wizard’s Tower news going on, but I have just sent out a new edition of the company newsletter and don’t want to repeat myself. Ya’ll should sign up for the newsletter, right?

Issue #69

Issues

This is the March 2025 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: Fifteen Hundred Miles an Hour: This issue's cover is from Fifteen Hundred Miles an Hour (The story of a visit to the planet Mars.) by Charles Dixon (Bliss, Sands & Co , 1895). The artist is Arthur Layard.

  • Written on the Dark: A new Guy Gavriel Kay book is on the way. Does Cheryl love it? Of course she does.

  • Loka: S B Divya's follow-up to Meru is every bit as thoughtful as its predecessor

  • Future’s Edge: Gareth L Powell's latest novel is fast-paced and full of ideas

  • Mediaeval Women: Having been to the exhibition, Cheryl reviews the book of the exhibition

  • Navigational Entanglements: This novella from Aliette de Bodard is all about love between women, and so much more

  • The Tusks of Extinction: Ray Nayler brings the mammoth back from extinction, but this book is not just about people being chased by dangerous prehistoric animals.

  • The Many Selves of Katherine North: A review from a few years back that nicely compliments to Ray Nayler book

  • The Wild Robot: Lots of air travel, so much media, so little worth watching...

  • The War of the Rohirrim: Despite its feminist themes, Cheryl is less than impressed with the latest Lord of the Rings movie

  • Editorial – March 2025: Yes, this is a bit late. Cheryl was away in Canada.

Cover: Fifteen Hundred Miles an Hour

069, Art, Arthur Layard

This issue’s cover from the British Library’s online collection is an illustration for a novel called Fifteen Hundred Miles an Hour (The story of a visit to the planet Mars.) by Charles Dixon. It was published by Bliss, Sands & Co in 1895. The artist is Arthur Layard.

I note that 1500 mph is not a great speed for a spacecraft, though obviously far in excess of anything achieved on Earth in the 19th Century. At that speed it would take over 2.5 years to reach Mars, at closest approach.

As usual, an unadulterated version of the image is available below.

Written on the Dark

069, Book Review, Guy Gavriel Kay

A new Guy Gavriel Kay novel is always a cause for excitement in these parts. I love history, and I love the way that Kay makes use of it in constructing not-quite-historical novels. Kay’s last few books have been set in the Mediterranean, originally inspired by a visit to Croatia and learning about that country’s history. The cycle also encompassed the war between Venice and the Ottoman Empire, and the condottiere of Renaissance Italy. I will miss Folco d’Acorsi, but there are other stories to be told.

Written on the Dark is set in Ferrieres, Kay’s version of France, in mediaeval times. The central character, Thierry Villar, is a poet well known in the taverns of the capital city of Orane. If he reminds you a little of Jaskier, well, Kay is allowed to watch TV as well, but he is also based on a real-life French poet who had an equally adventurous life.

Villar did not want fame, though he would not have said no to fortune had it fallen in his lap. Indeed, he was not above trying to acquire it by less than honest means. Fame, however, found him first. Loose lips owned by one of his confederates have brought him to the attention of the Provost of Orane – a sort of mediaeval police commissioner – who just happens to have a difficult and deeply political murder to solve. An intelligent lad who is well known in the taverns of the city is just the sort of agent that Robbin de Vaux needs. Which is how Tierry will come to the attention of the King and Queen, and spend much of the rest of his life trying to avoid being murdered on the orders of the Duke of Barratin (Burgundy).

Those of you familiar with the history of mediaeval France will now be wondering which other notable characters from the real world will find their way into Kay’s narrative. There is, for example, a king from a country to the north of Ferrieres, separated from it by a narrow sea. That king, the fifth of his name, won a legendary victory against overwhelming odds.

Then there is the matter of the humble peasant girl who, having seen a vision from God, dons armour and seeks out the French army so that she can lead it against the perfidious English.

Not all of the characters that Kay uses in the book are quite as well known. However, anyone who visited the Mediaeval Women exhibition at the British Library will be expecting one other person to make an appearance. Like Thierry, she is a poet. Of noble birth, following the death of her husband she was able to make a living writing for the Court. Much of her work has strongly feminist themes. I am, of course, talking about Christine de Pizan, or Marina di Seressa. Of course her path and Thierry’s have to cross.

If you are trying to work out actual timelines, you will get into something of a mess. This book, possibly more than anything else Kay has written, plays fast and loose with our world’s history. He has characters he wants to use and, because this is not an historical novel, he doesn’t have to worry about when they actually lived. I’m OK with that. After all, Kay has been very clear that this is his world, not ours.

That, of course, means that other things can and do diverge from what the reader might expect. They do so in quite dramatic ways. The English may be a little upset as a result.

The other thing I should note about this book is that it is rather more literary than genre. What I mean by that is that there isn’t exactly a unifying plot. Yes, the book tells the story of Thierry Villar’s life. Yes, his conflict with Laurent The Bold, Duke of Barratin, bookends the story. But beyond that what we get is a series of vignettes – key moments from Thierry’s life that are not particularly connected except that he lived them, and many of them are important to the history of Ferrieres.

This again did not worry me. Kay writes beautifully and I was more than entertained seeing how he made use of the various human and historical pieces he had chosen to weave his narrative.

I note that Guy sent me a PDF of the book in advance of publication. I will be buying the hardcover as soon as it comes out.

book cover
Title: Written on the Dark
By: Guy Gavriel Kay
Publisher: Hodderscape
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Loka

069, Book Review, S B Divya

This book is a more-or-less direct sequel to Meru, though set some 16 years into the future. Some spoilers are inevitable, so if you have not read Meru yet you may want to look away.

By the end of Meru, Jayanthri has succeeded in her quest to be allowed to open a colony on the planet for which the book is named. Jaya’s sickle cell condition makes her ideally suited for life on Meru, whereas baseline humans would struggle there. She and her partner, Vaha (an ‘alloy’, a type of sentient spaceship evolved from humans) have created a human child who shares Jaya’s unique genetics. Controversially, Jaya has also given her daughter some alloy genes which provide the child with chromatophores on her arm to allow her to speak the alloys’ sign language.

The new book, Loka, opens with young Akshaya on the cusp of adulthood. She has spent most of her life on a transport alloy called Chedi so that she could have human friends growing up. Her alloy genes are still a closely guarded secret. Being a typically rebellious teenager, Aks is furious that her mother designed her to live on Meru, a planet largely devoid of animal life. She desperately wants to see Earth, and all the amazing creatures that are reclaiming the planet now that the human population is under control.

Aks and her childhood best friend, Somya, discover something called the Anthro Challenge in which humans attempt to circumnavigate Earth using only human-era technology. Aks strikes a deal with her parents to the effect that, if she is able to complete the challenge, she will have proved her ability to survive on Earth and not have to go to Meru.

Being parents, Jaya and Vaha have entirely forgotten their own rebellious youth, and are terrified for their child. Seeking a way to keep tabs on the two teenagers during their journey, they strike a deal with a documentary film-maker, and allow called Nara. He agrees to provide regular updates to the worried parents in return for being allowed to make show about the youngsters’ travels. Parents can be very foolish.

On the face of it, Loka is a science fiction re-telling of Around the World in 80 Days, with Aks and Somya facing peril (both natural and human) as they race to complete the challenge before Chedi is due back at Earth to pick them up. But, as I mentioned in my review of Meru, SB Divya is an author who uses science fiction to examine interesting questions. The new book is no exception, and it is those questions that I would like to focus on.

By the way, Loka is the name given to the alloy-managed part of Earth where most humans live. There are also areas known as OOB – Out of Bounds – which are not alloy-managed and which have become home to humans who resent the benevolent dictatorship of the alloys. The Anthro Challenge requires travel to include time in the OOB.

Loka is a book that is primarily about personal autonomy in three different ways. Firstly there is the right of Aks to determine her own path through life and not be bound by her parents’ ambitions for her. Secondly there is the right of humans to have adventures such as the Anthro Challenge, even though this might pose a cost to society and cause a small amount of environmental damage. Finally there is the right of humans to evolve by acquiring alloy genes.

While Aks and Somya initially admire the people of Earth, especially the Out of Bounders, for living on an actual planet rather than in a very safe environment such as travelling on Chedi, they soon find out that the Earthlings are deeply conservative. While their travels are done in a very environmentally conscious way (primarily by solar-powered bikes and sailboats), they are seen as unnecessary adventurism and probable evidence of Aspiration and Avarice Disorder, the mental illness that almost led to the destruction of Earth’s environment in times past.

As for the alloy genes, it is inevitable that a media-savvy operator like Nara will discover Aks’ secret, and reveal it to the public at a time intended to cause maximum outrage.

Before this, however, the documentary series results in two other major political movements. Firstly the humans of Earth decide that the Anthro Challenge needs to be banned before any other reckless teenagers can get daft ideas. In addition, because Nara grounds the narrative in the story of Jaya and Vaha, the show leads to a movement amongst alloys to scale back some of the more cruel punishments for social deviance. Those of you who have read Meru may remember that the conservative alloy, Pushkara, and his unwitting dupe, Kaliyu, have been condemned to exile for their part in attempting to sabotage Jaya and Vaha’s mission to Meru.

While Aks and Somya don’t want the Challenge to be banned, they become very much aware that a significant part of alloy society is heavily invested in their story because it is providing fuel for the anti-exile campaign.

All of this gives us plenty to think about while we follow Aks and Somya on their journey. There is a certain amount of personal growth that they go through as well, not to mention some genuine peril caused by Earth’s weather, but that by itself would have made for a dull book. The sort of philosophical debate that Divya indulges in is all too rare in science fiction these days. I for one am grateful that she’s around to do it.

book cover
Title: Loka
By: S B Divya
Publisher: 47North
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Future’s Edge

069, Book Review, Gareth L Powell

The latest offering from Gareth L Powell is a fast-paced space opera with multiple themes. A little background is required to explain what goes on.

The central character of the book is Ursula Morrow, a young archaeology student who is studying the remains of an alien civilization. While on the dig she meets and falls in love with a dashing naval officer called Jack. However, Ursula makes the mistake of putting her bare hand on a piece of alien technology and ends up infected with, well, something.

Leaving hospital on Earth where her infection was being examined, Ursula gets urgent word from Jack to flee the planet as it will soon be under attack. Thanks to Jack’s warning she is able to get on an evacuation vessel and ends up living in a refugee camp. Two years pass, and she hears little of the war against the mysterious aliens called Cutters. All she knows is that Earth has been destroyed and Jack is out on the front lines.

Then Jack turns up. He needs Ursula’s help because the alien technology with which she is infected may be the key to fighting back against the Cutters. Also he is now married. To his starship.

In the book, most of that is background which is related in the first chapter or two. It is a lot. We already have war against an implacable and seemingly unstoppable foe (similar to Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Final Architecture series), archaeology on an alien civilisation that is millions of years old (around 64 million, to be precise, think about what that means in Earth chronology), a human-starship relationship, and the problem of dealing with your ex’s new wife when she happens to be an intelligent war machine with the unlikely name of Crisis Actor (Cris for short).

In his social media posts, Powell has occasionally talked about writing thrillers. It is clear from the opening chapters of Future’s Edge that he’s been practicing the style. The book doesn’t slow down from there. A story that Tchaikovsky might have spent three fat novels over, Powell wraps up in a single, fairly short, stand-alone. It certainly pulls you through the book, but personally I would have liked more space to explore the themes and characters.

And there is more. We get to meet Ursula’s old professor, and her gay best friend, both of whom are still studying the aliens. There’s a whole thing about Ursula’s dead twin, Chloe. There’s the rest of the crew of the Crisis Actor, who make for interesting found family. But blink and the narrative has moved on.

This is possibly a little hypocritical of me, because I don’t have time to read big, fat books. (I still haven’t read part three of The Final Architecture.) But I did finish the book feeling like I wanted to know more about just about everything in it.

book cover
Title: Future's Edge
By: Gareth L Powell
Publisher: Titan
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Mediaeval Women

069, Book Review, Eleanor Jackson, Julian Harrison

Those of you who follow me on BlueSky will remember me posting about my visit to the Mediaeval Women exhibition at the British Library. As social media is rather ephemeral, I will recap some of what I said here, but mainly this is a review of the book of the exhibition.

While seeing an exhibition in person is wonderful because of the personal connection you can have to the items on display, I often find the book to be of equal or greater value. You are not pressed for time when reading it, not surrounded by crowds. Also the curators have much more space in which to expound their themes. That is particularly valuable in the case of any exhibition where there may be political constraints on what can be said on the exhibit labels.

My main complaint about the exhibition is that it foregrounded a very “traditional” view of women and played down they amazing things that the women of that period could and did achieve. At first glance the book follows the same pattern. It begins with a section on ‘Private Lives’ in which women are kept firmly in their roles of daughter, wife and mother. We then go through ‘Public Lives’ and ‘Working Lives’ to ‘Spiritual Lives’ where women are once more sequestered away, this time in the cloister.

However, once you dive into the book, you get a much more nuanced view. The ‘Private Lives’ section spends a good deal of space talking about women’s role in medicine. ‘Public Lives’ opens with an admission that this section is mainly about women who achieved political power. And the ‘Spiritual Lives’ section does make it clear that entering a nunnery was a way in which women could achieve wealth and power (and pet cats) with very little interference from men, and freedom from the expectation to breed.

As a consequence, the book is far better in its coverage of Empress Matilda, who was most shamefully disparaged by the exhibition label. She was Empress of the Romans by dint of her marriage to the Holy Roman Emperor, and Queen of England by order of her father, Henry I. None of this was invention or self-aggrandisement on her part.

The book (and exhibition) concentrates primarily on Europe because the term ‘mediaeval’ has little meaning outside of that context. But there was significant contact between the Christian and Muslim worlds, and one European country – Spain – was in large part Muslim ruled. As a result we do have a few Muslim women in the book, perhaps most excitingly the amazing story of Shajar al-Durr who rose from being a slave concubine to be, for a few glorious months, Sultan of Egypt and Syria. She held her country together when her husband died fighting the Crusaders, and seems to have relinquished power to one of her generals only because of the impracticality of ruling from the confines of the women’s quarters. She continued to play a major role in Egyptian politics for years afterwards.

The full title of the book is Mediaeval Women: Voices and Visions. That’s partly because we do sometimes have their words, as opposed to words written by male contemporaries, and partly because women sometimes played a major role in the book trade. One of the stars of the book is the feminist writer, Christine de Pizan who, along with Isabella of France and Joan of Arc, is a major inspiration for Guy Kay’s Written on the Dark. Also featured is Jeanne de Montbaston, the creator of the hilarious ‘penis tree’ image.

The book is edited by Eleanor Jackson and Julian Harrison, primarily because of their jobs at the British Library looking after its collection of mediaeval manuscripts. While having a male co-editor does not perhaps give the right impression, the majority of the contributors are women. Also two of them openly identify as non-binary, including Rowan Wilson who penned the excellent and very respectful section on the transfeminine sex worker, Eleanor Rykener.

Although the exhibition is now closed, the book is still available from the British Library shop and from Amazon. At around £25 for a hardcover it is exceptional value. It is a hefty tome with high quality paper and is absolutely stuffed full of colour illustrations that are mainly taken from stunning illuminated manuscripts. Yes, it is a coffee table book, but it is also informative and has an excellent section on suggested further reading for those of us who want to know more about the women it features.

book cover
Title: Mediaeval Women: Voices and Visions
By: Eleanor Jackson (ed.) & Julian Harrison (ed.)
Publisher: The British Library
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura
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