Cheryl Morgan

Marvel: What If?

October 31, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 034, TV Review

Well, the MCU had to mess up at some point, and I guess it is better that they did so in a cartoon series than in a live action movie. Having said that, it rather suggests that less care and attention was paid to What If? Because it is only a cartoon.

The core idea of the series is that in the multiverse many different versions of the MCU exist, in which the characters we know and love can have very different lives. The Watcher, because he exists across all universes, sees all, and can bring us some of these stories.

So far so good. This gives the opportunity to do a bit of fan service, such as a story in which Peggy Carter becomes the Super Soldier (but not Captain Britain, obviously, because that title is taken). There’s also one in which the young T’Challa is abducted by the Ravagers and becomes Star Lord. It was great to get to hear Chad Boseman again, but that story is exceptionally silly in that it portrays T’Challa as so irresistibly good that he converts Thanos to his side.

In fact, most of the stories are pretty silly. Many of them also go for the soft option of killing off the heroes because they aren’t the heroes of Our Universe so their deaths don’t matter. Humbug.

Talking of Boseman, many of the characters are voiced by the people who play them in the live action shows. It is notable that those who are not are characters whose actors seem to have opted out of the MCU: Black Widow, Iron Man, Cap. Quite why Natalie Portman agreed to come back given what they did the Jane Foster is a bit of a mystery, but at least that episode was funny.

The Watcher is voiced by Jeffrey Wright, and is notable for being the first example of utterly disastrous casting in the MCU project.

The one saving grace of the series is episode #4 featuring a version of Doctor Strange who becomes obsessed with seeking power so that he can save the life of Christine Palmer. This is the only episode with a decent script. This may be significant because we know that the next Doctor Strange movie will be titled, The Multiverse of Madness. So it is likely that the vision of the multiverse presented here will have some connection to the one in the movie. There may have been hints dropped. And the MCU management may have paid more attention to this episode than the others.

Ah well, roll on the Hawkeye TV series, which promises to be rather good.

BristolCon 2021

October 31, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 034, Convention Report

BristolCon has just happened. That it did is something of a minor miracle because COVID is raging out of control here on Plague Island. However, most of us are now double-vaccinated. A reasonable proportion of us are aware that the virus is airborne, and that precautions can be taken. Many of us are just fed up of the isolation.

So, wise or not, there has been a convention. The ConCom did take precautions. The number of attendees was severely limited compared to previous years. It was possible to keep your distance. Some of the programme was also streamed live, which was nice. I know that we had at least one person in France following along. The ConCom are learning to do conventions in a hybrid way, which is good, because it means that BristolCon can be shared with the wider world.

I didn’t see much of the con, partially because I had a dealer table, and partially because I am isolating as much as I can. I have a trip to Canada planned for next Wednesday and I do not want to fail my fit-to-fly test. Dealer rooms are BristolCon are always a bit quiet because the programming is good, but people do come in during the breaks and I sold almost as much here as I did in the two days (including a book launch) of FantasyCon. I am very pleased.

I also did two panels. One was about ret-conning, which turned out to be a very serious discussion about how we deal with the work of creators whom we have come to view with distaste. The other was about democracy in epic fantasy. I think both went very well.

What I liked most about this BristolCon is that it felt like a proper convention. FantasyCon felt weird. Not only was it much smaller than a typical FantasyCon, but many of the people there didn’t seem to be usual attendees. They certainly were not book buyers. This BristolCon was smaller than it has been in recent years, but much bigger than it was when it started. And the people there were very definitely book readers and buyers. Maybe nature is healing after all.

Editorial – October 2021

October 31, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 034, Editorial

Well this is an interesting issue. We’ve got Kim Stanley Robinson and Cat Valente with very different, but in some ways complimentary, takes on climate change. We’ve got Alix Harrow who is fast establishing a reputation to match those two giants of the field. (Yes Cat, I did just describe you as a giant of the field. It’s true.) And yet my top pick for this issue is a debut novel for which my review delves into music theory. Fiction can take us to all sorts of interesting places.

This issue also sees a report from another in person convention. And if all goes well the November issue will report from World Fantasy in Montréal.

Today is Halloween. I’m afraid I don’t have anything suitably witchy for you, but I can recommend Alix Harrow’s The Once and Future Witches which I reviewed at the end of last year. Given that Ben Baldwin’s cover image for The Green Man’s Challenge has hair very like mine, I can see that I need to work on a Hamadryad costume for next time we get to do Halloween in person.

Issue #33

September 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan Issues

This is the September 2021 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.

Cover: Fantasy Forest Girl: This issue's cover is "Fantasy Forest Girl" by Molly Rose Lee

The Witness for the Dead: At last a new book set in the world of Katherine Addison's The Goblin Emperor

Chilling Effect: Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes is one of the finalists for this year's Arthur C Clarke Award

In the Watchful City: A strange and lyrical novella from S. Qiouyi Lu

Ife-Iyoku: A look at the winner of this year's Otherwise Award

Light Chaser: Two science fiction greats, one novella of epic scope

Occasional Views: The latest issue of Samuel R Delany's collected non-fiction has quite a bit to say about racism in the field

FantasyCon 2021: An in-person convention! Cheryl was there.

He-Man Wars: We have not one, but two reboots of He-Man. What is going on? Cheryl investigates.

Editorial – September 2021: Much news about in-person and virtual conventions, and new books from Wizard's Tower

Cover: Fantasy Forest Girl

September 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 033, Art

It is back to Pixabay for this issue’s cover. The image is “Fantasy Forest Girl” by mollyroselee from Pixabay

Here’s the full version.

The Witness for the Dead

September 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 033, Book Review, Katherine Addison

For reasons that I can no longer remember, I did not write a review of Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor. It certainly wasn’t because I didn’t like the book. It was excellent. But it was also a stand-alone, and since 2014 a lot of people have been hoping for another story in the same world. The book was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula and World Fantasy Awards, and won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel. A sequel would have been an easy sell.

A sequel, however, is not what we have got. Instead there is what is best described as a spin-off. The Emperor Maia does not feature in The Witness for the Dead, except by reputation. Instead, the book stars Thara Celehar, a minor character from the first book who, rather like Mike Carey’s Felix Castor, is able to speak to the dead.

Unlike Castor, Celehar is not a detective. Technically he is a clergyman. His job is to ensure that the recently departed are able to rest in peace. However, in cases where death has been unpeaceful in some ways, Celehar’s abilities can be very useful to the authorities. The central story of the novel concerns a beautiful opera singer whose corpse is found in the harbour of the city where Celehar lives, and from the state of her skull it is clear that she did not drown. An investigation needs to be opened.

So much for the set-up, but there is much more of interest in this book than a murder mystery. To start with there is the world of the book. Maia’s story is typical of high fantasy, being about the struggle for a throne, but while the world is peopled by elves and goblins, they don’t have fantasy technology. Airships are commonplace, and mediaeval fantasy worlds rarely feature opera singers.

More importantly, these are books about race. The elves are fair skinned and often arrogant. The goblins have darker skin and face all sorts of racial prejudice. Maia, you may recall, was of mixed heritage, and therefore a deeply controversial person to be crowned emperor, even if his right to the throne was unimpeachable. Celehar too faces all sorts of prejudice where he is now living, and the fact that he performed a major service for the emperor counts for little.

The Witness for the Dead is a book about a fundamentally decent person who happens to have some small magical talent. Yes, he gets involved in some crimes. He also gets called upon to dispose of an undead at one point. These things are part of his life. But mostly this book is about people. In fact I think it is something of a masterclass in how to write a fantasy book that is centred on people. Sure there are elves and goblins, and Celehar does do a little magic, but what is really important to the story is how he relates to other characters. And frankly, that’s mostly how detectives solve crimes.

Title: The Witness for the Dead
By: Katherine Addison
Publisher: Rebellion
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Chilling Effect

September 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 033, Book Review, Valerie Valdes

The lovely people at Mr B’s in Bath had a display up of Clarke Award finalists. I hadn’t read all of them, and decided to take a look. I did not manage to pick the winner, which was The Animals in that Country by Laura Jean McKay. I’ll get to that one eventually. But I was going off covers and blurbs, so the book that caught my eye was Chilling Effect by Valerie Valdes. It promised space opera and psychic cats. Now admittedly that’s not the sort of sophisticated literary novel that usually attracts the Clarke judges, but how could I go wrong?

The book follows the adventures of one Captain Eva Innocente, notorious smuggler and all-round badass. Having quit her father’s criminal business and tried to find work that weighs less heavily on the conscience, she has put together her own ship with the expected group of talented misfits. But, of course, her old life won’t let her go. A very much bigger criminal empire has kidnapped her sister and wants both her and Dad to work for them to earn Mari’s release.

So much, so like a cartoon. Eva and her friends get sent on shady missions, which go horribly wrong, and they have to shoot their way out of trouble. If that’s all that there was to this book, I don’t think it would have got on the short list.

Therefore there must be more, and of course there is. To start with, the book features that staple of space opera, the mysterious artefact from a long-lost high-tech civilization that no one can now understand. Given that the people who built this stuff also built the perfectly functioning but wholly mysterious stargate system on which the entire galaxy depends for commerce, this is a big money caper.

In addition, Valdes has a story arc in mind for her heroine. At the start of the book, Eva is very much self-absorbed and in business purely for the fun of it. Which might be how she came to turn her pretty nose up at the advances of a fantastically wealthy alien emperor and cause him to vow to hunt her down and add her to his harem by force rather than by seduction.

Eva, meanwhile, is enamoured of Vakar, her engineer, who is a type of alien that communicates by smell. But she is well aware that a romance with a member of her crew is terrible for discipline and morale. As the story unfolds, she has to learn to treat her crew as family, rather than people to manipulate into helping her get what she wants.

Talking of the crew, the most sensible among them is Dr. Rebecca Jones, a.k.a. Pink, the ship’s medic. It is her job to patch Eva up after each mission. She’s also a Black trans woman. The trans thing is very much a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, but it is there. Other than that, Pink is an ordinary, or rather an exceptional, member of the crew. She is rather high femme, and some trans readers might see her as a bit of a stereotype, but I’m absolutely cool with trans characters in books being able to have any identity that suits them.

It is worthy of note that Eva is Cuban by ancestry. The book is peppered with phrases in Spanish, including many chapter titles. I haven’t tried to translate them. Knowing Eva, many of them will be colourful insults that Google will pretend not to understand. Also Cuban Spanish may be quite different from the Spanish that online translators understand. My enjoyment of the book wasn’t marred by my lack of translations.

I should also note that, while the story in the book comes to a satisfying conclusion, some of the story arcs do not. The truth behind the alien artefacts remains obscure, as are the motives of the evil criminal empire. There will be a sequel. Which is just as well.

Do you remember that I mentioned psychic cats? Well, obviously they get in the way in the cutest way possible at various points during the narrative, but they don’t have a huge role in the story. I spent the entire book expecting them to be a furry version of Chekov’s Gun, and that they would become an integral part of the plot eventually. That never happened, and therefore they are still awaiting their starring moment. I guess I will have to keep reading to see what the sneaky little furballs eventually get up to.

Title: Chilling Effect
By: Valerie Valdes
Publisher: Orbit
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

In the Watchful City

September 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 033, Book Review, S. Qiouyi Lu

Somewhere in the far future there is a city called Ora that takes good care of its citizens. It watches them, very carefully, for any sign of discontent. It would not do for any of them to be unhappy, or doing anything illegal, would it?

Anima is a Node in the central hub of the city. Ae spends much of aer life in a tub of amniotic fluid, plugged in to the central systems of the city. Ae is able to hop bodies between the various forms of (artificial?) wildlife that inhabit the city. Aer job is to watch for anything untoward, and to prevent it if ae can.

Into Anima’s life comes a person whose name is Vessel. Se is able to come and go in the city without detection — something that should be impossible. Yet se does not appear to be committing any crimes. Se carries with ser a large chest full of odd mementos. Each one, se says, has a story attached. If Anima would like to hear the stories, ae can. The only price is that ae must donate an item of aer own, and an associated story, to the collection.

Watching people is Anima’s job. Of course ae is intrigued.

This, of course, is a well used story structure. We are familiar with it from The 1001 Nights, and from Cat Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales. In The Watchful City, S Qiouyi Lu uses it as a means of wakening Anima from aer from aer unquestioning acceptance of Ora and its rules.

I note in passing that both The Watchful City and Light Chaser, reviewed elsewhere in this issue, tell the story of someone who unthinkingly partakes in a highly oppressive society, as an agent of that oppression. In both cases the central character comes to learn the error of their ways. There’s a theme going on here.

Back with The Watchful City, one of the things you will have noticed is that both Anima and Vessel use neopronouns. We do not know what genders these refer to. It does not matter. We might not even understand them if we were told. It is probably also the case that no one in the story is white, though some of the characters have Western-style names. Again this does not matter much to the story. Both of these things will presumably infuriate those readers who see themselves as great thinkers but cannot cope with fiction that challenges their perceived reality in any way.

That said, The Watchful City is a challenging read in many ways. It does not hold the reader’s hand along the way. Parts of it are told in verse. The stories that Vessel tells, and the glimpses we see of Anima working at aer job, are not happy tales. What we can say is that the people in Vessel’s stories are all alive in a way that the people of Ora are not. They dream, they want more for themselves, they are able to make choices. Often they make very bad choices, but at least they were free to make them. No one was watching over them to ensure that they did not do anything foolish.

Title: In the Watchful City
By: S Qiouyi Lu
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Ife-Iyoku

September 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 033, Book Review, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, Zelda Knight

This year’s Otherwise Award (formerly the Tiptree) has gone to a novella published in the anthology, Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction from Africa and the African Diaspora. The story is by Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki who also co-edited the anthology with Zelda Knight. I’ve not had a chance to read the whole anthology yet, but I have read the winning story, and I can see why it won.

The story is set in the village of Ife-Iyoku in an un-named African country. We learn that there has been a devastating nuclear war, and Ife-Iyoku is now cut off from the rest of the world. On the plus side, the villagers appear to have developed mutant powers. But the village seems to be too small to become a self-sustaining population. Every life is precious.

The main characters are Morako, the son of the chief, and his girlfriend, Imade. They are clearly very fond of each other, but Imade is not yet ready for marriage and children. Morako, being a decent young man, is happy to let her take her time. The village elders, including Morako’s father, take a very different view. The village needs children.

Meanwhile there is the wider question of the survival of the village. Much of the land around it is a devastated wilderness, but how far does it extend? Could there be other people on the far side? Could they be contacted, and would it be safe to do so?

The jury, in their comments, made much of how Ekpeki had crammed so many ideas into the story (did I mention the lava-breathing dinosaur?) and yet makes the whole thing work within the confines of a novella. However, the aspect of the story that will have won it the award is the way in which it simultaneously tackles issues of colonialism (bad outsiders) and a regressive social structure (bad insiders). To quote the jury, “What does it look like to have gender roles enlisted in the pursuit of a community’s survival against larger, aggressive, unreasoning entities?” The conflict between wanting to be free of colonialism, yet not falling into aggressive patriarchy, is very real in much of Africa today.

The Otherwise Honour List also includes some fine works. The Four Profound Weaves and City of a Thousand Feelings have been reviewed here, and I’m delighted to see Isabel Fall’s “Helicopter Story” get some recognition. The full result of this year’s award can be found here.

Title: Dominion
By: Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki & Zelda Knight
Publisher: Aurelia Leo
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Light Chaser

September 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 033, Book Review, Gareth L Powell, Peter F Hamilton

A few years back a mystery object given the name, ’Oumuamua, visited our solar system. The consensus of opinion amongst astronomers was that it was a large lump of rock. Others speculated that it might be a well camouflaged space craft.

On the album, 50 Words for Snow, Kate Bush has a song called “Snowed in at Wheeler Street”. It is a duet with Elton John about two time travellers who keep meeting up at different moments in history, and then getting pulled apart again.

These two things come immediately to mind on reading Gareth Powell and Peter Hamilton’s novella, Light Chaser. The story centres on Amahle, a long-lived star-ship pilot whose job is to travel the galaxy collecting valuable goods. She visits each world on her route once every thousand years. On each one she trades technology for memory collars which have recorded the lives of members of specific families since her last visit. She leaves new collars behind when she leaves, with instructions for them to be passed on from one generation to the next until she returns.

The alert reader will soon notice something odd about all this. The worlds that Amahle visits are all unique, and at different levels of technology. None of them have much in the way of space flight, and some don’t have it at all, yet they all welcome this visitor who clearly has far superior flight technology. None of the societies on these worlds evolves in any way in between Amahle’s visits.

The memory collars, then, are a much-prized form of entertainment for a long-lived and powerful civilisation that is keeping the rest of the galaxy as pets, producing endless streams of reality TV for their consumption. Amahle seems oblivious to all this, but into her life comes Carloman, someone who claims to have lived multiple lives, and in one of them to have been her husband.

It is an interesting conceit, and very well executed as you might expect from two fine science fiction writers. If I have a complaint, it is that Powell and Hamilton didn’t manage to find a way to make more of the idea. Amahle’s adventures on each planet that she visits are very skimpily told. Mind you, there is a little bit of male gaze going on here, so perhaps that’s just as well.

Anyway, this book has got me thinking about how novellas work, and about how you include multiple lines of narrative without making them seem skimped. This is probably a job for someone with far better fiction writing skills than me, but given the recent popularity of the form it is rather important.

Title: Light Chaser
By: Peter F Hamilton & Gareth L Powell
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Occasional Views

September 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 033, Book Review, Samuel R Delany

Slowly but surely, Wesleyan University Press has been bringing out a number of volumes collecting the non-fiction work of Samuel R Delany. Occasional Views: Volume 1 – “More About Writing” and Other Essays is the latest in that series. There are quite a few essays in the book, on a wide variety of topics. I’m still working my way through them. But I wanted to write a review now because some of the essays touch on issues of racism and homophobia. Delany has been part of the industry for a very long time, and his experiences are thus instructive. I’m going to pick just one example, from 1977.

In that year, Delany went to the cinema to see a brand new film called Star Wars. He loved it, and wrote a rave review of it for Cosmos magazine. But he did spot the lack of diversity in the cast. He noted, “When you travel across three whole worlds and all the humans you see are so scrupulously Caucasian and male, Lucas’s future begins to seem a little dull.”

Remember that Star Trek debuted on American TV in 1966, and Gene Roddenberry had made a point of having both gender and racial diversity amongst the crew of the Enterprise. He might not have done the world’s greatest job of it, but he tried. Eleven years later, Lucas made rather less of an effort.

Delany’s review of Star Wars is one of the essays reproduced in Occasional Views. But, in preparing the book for publication, Delany opted to add a footnote. Here’s how it starts.

Shortly after my review of Star Wars was published in the November 1977 edition of Cosmos, I came into the office, where I had been working as David Hartwell’s assistant on the magazine. On the desk was a large pile of mail, which apparently was responses to my review. Indeed, I had never published a piece of non-fiction before or since that so quickly received that much.

I began to open them and read them one after the other and realized, to my astonishment, I had a pile of hate mail in front of me. The only part of my review that anybody chose to respond to were the five paragraphs, out of twenty-nine, that talked about the lack of diversity in the film. By and large, the young, clearly white, mostly male readers had been infuriated.

This is 44 years ago, but the reaction that Delany was getting here is still very familiar today. White people, and particularly white men, still see the presence of anyone not like them in what they see as “their” stories to be a threat of some sort. Isn’t it time they grew up?

By the way, John W Campbell and Isaac Asimov do not come off well in Delany’s essay on “Racism in Science Fiction.”

I’ve had some pretty unpleasant experiences in the SF&F community in my time, but they are nothing to what Delany has experienced, and I’m assuming that the same is true of most, if not all, non-white authors. We may well have been better than the wider society of the time, but we should still be ashamed of ourselves.

Title: Occasional Views
By: Samuel R Delany
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

FantasyCon 2021

September 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 033, Convention Report

Dear Goddess, an in-person convention! How did that happen?

Yes, last weekend I drove up to Birmingham with a boot full of books, mainly copies of Juliet McKenna’s The Green Man’s Challenge, which was being launched at FantasyCon. I spent an entire two days in the physical company of other SF&F people, something I had not done since BristolCon 2019.

The biggest problem with FantasyCon turned out to be finding it. Central Birmingham is in the process of being completely dug up and re-vamped to make way for a tram network. Naturally no one’s SatNav had any idea this was happening, and getting to the hotel proved every bit as difficult as finding one’s way into a mythical labyrinth. The process went a bit like this.

SatNav: Turn left here.

Me: I can’t, the road is blocked.

SatNav: You are going the wrong way up a one-way street.

Me: I’m following the diversion signs.

SatNav: As soon as possible, make a u-turn.

Me: Then I would be going the wrong way on a one-way street.

SatNav: Turn left here.

Me: SHUT UP!!! I’m trying my best.

Eventually I put my car in a public car park and walked to the hotel. Thankfully the convention staff were very helpful. They not only managed to explain which small and well-hidden back street I needed to turn up in order to get to the hotel, they also helped me unload the books. Top class service.

There was a fair bit of talk on Twitter in the preceding week about the Con not having a COVID policy. Having been there, I don’t see how they could have enforced one. The hotel had given up on social distancing and none of the staff wore masks. There were lots of other people in the hotel, and most of them were maskless too. Most of the restaurants in central Birmingham had also given up on social distancing, and many of them were rammed to the rafters with customers. The entire city centre was a spreader event waiting to happen. But I don’t seem to have caught anything, which is a massive relief.

I did three panels and two book launches. One of the panels I only found out about when I was checking my phone while stuck in a traffic jam on the M5 on the Friday afternoon. But that was a panel on gender which was great fun and I’m pleased I did it. The other panels went well too.

My first book launch was for Luna Press Publishing’s Worlds Apart, a collection of academic essays on worldbuilding. My own contribution is on “Worldbuilding with Sex and Gender”. I was pleased that Adrian Tchaikovsky was in the audience so I would tell him I’d cited his thoughts on the mating habits of intelligent spiders. (Yes, the females do still eat their mates.)

The other book launch was for The Green Man’s Challenge. We had rather fewer people than I’d hoped, but my guess at attendance was based on the assumption that most FantasyCon attendees would already own the first three books in the series. As it turned out, we sold more copies of The Green Man’s Heir than of the new book. Which is excellent news because all those people will hopefully go on to buy the other three volumes.

Being a dealer at a convention is a relatively new experience for me, and that means I am getting a fresh appreciation of the difficulties they face. People have been telling me this over the years (hello Rina and Jacob!), but it is inevitably different experiencing it for yourself.

For the benefit of future FantasyCons, here are a few requests from the Dealers’ Room.

Firstly, if you don’t open until 10:00am on Saturday, there’s no point in opening at 9:00am on Sunday. I don’t think a single sale was made by anyone in that first hour of Sunday morning, and I could have had a more relaxed breakfast.

Second, some of us do want to go to the banquet and awards, so please don’t schedule it so that we have to close down the stall, load up our cars, and change into our awards finery, in precisely zero time. Ideally, don’t have the banquet and awards on Sunday afternoon at all. Have them on Saturday evening when everyone has plenty of time, and when it doesn’t matter if we celebrate because we don’t have to drive home until the next day.

All of that said, I think I did reasonably well. I didn’t cover the cost of the dealer table, but I did sell a lot of books and hopefully I have found Juliet some new readers. I certainly did better than several of the dealers, some of whom gave up and went home on Saturday.

There were awards, of course. I was delighted that Luna Press Publishing won Best Independent Press. There were a lot of other good results too. The full list of winners is here.

FantasyCon 2022 will be at Heathrow, so perhaps we shall get a few foreign visitors, and a lot more Brits. I’ve already booked up.

Finally a small personal note. I discovered in Birmingham that my hearing has deteriorated somewhat over the past two years. I’m fine in small groups, and in online meetings, but in a large room with a lot of ambient chatter I have great difficulty hearing people. This inevitably means that I will be spending less time in bars at conventions. People going to World Fantasy please note. I’m not being deliberately rude.

He-Man Wars

September 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 033, TV Review

There’s nothing like success to prompt Hollywood into doing more of the same. Therefore, off the back of Noelle Stevenson’s brilliant reboot of She-Ra, we have not one, but two new reboots of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Both are available on Netflix, but they are very different.

First up is Masters of the Universe: Revelation. This is created by Kevin Smith, and it is rather more aimed at adults than at children. The story begins with Skeletor finally managing to kill He-Man, whose secret identity is thereby revealed. The forces of good immediately fall to squabbling, with Prince Adam’s parents blaming He-Man’s companions for their son’s death, and Teela absolutely furious that everyone seemed to know who He-Man was except her.

Years later, Teela finds herself teaming up with Evil-Lyn to solve the mystery of what happened in the final battle. That is not the sort of thing that a kid’s show would do.

You can also tell the adult focus because the show spends a lot of time trying to explain aspects of the He-Man universe that are frankly silly, such as why the good guys’ castle is in the shape of a giant skull, and whether Evil-Lyn’s parents actually named her Evil-Lyn.

The best thing about this series is the cast. Mark Hamill has a whale of a time playing Skeletor, and Lena Heady (Cersei Lannister) has equal fun as Evil-Lyn. Sarah Michelle Gellar plays Teela, who is the focal character for most of Season 1.

However, whereas Stevenson’s She-Ra could be equally enjoyed by both adults and children, I suspect that this incarnation of He-Man will mostly go over the heads of any young kids who watch it. For us adults, it is very watchable.

The other series, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe 2021, is created by Rob David, previously best known for writing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. This series is very much for kids, with themes of teenagers rebelling against stupid adults being a major part of the plot.

Another major difference between the two series is the style of the animation. Kevin Smith has gone for a look that very much evokes the original series. Rob David, on the other hand, has gone for a manga-inspired look. The characters have giant eyes, and all of the heroes have transformation sequences. He-Man also has a power use sequence that gets into most episodes. There is much posing of the characters in ways that are probably exact copies of the action figures made for the show.

I hadn’t quite realised before looking at these two series just how many versions of He-Man were out there. The Kevin Smith series appears to be based mostly on the original stories, whereas Rob David has mined the He-Man comics for a storyline in which Skeletor is actually Prince Adam’s evil uncle.

I guess that if you are some sort of He-Man purist all these variant storylines will be infuriating. Personally I found the fact that the two series were so different to be refreshing and interesting. If they had both tried to do the same thing one would have inevitably eclipsed the other. As it is, we have two new series that we can enjoy for what each is trying to do, with little in the way of competition.

Of course neither series holds a candle to She-Ra, but I did enjoy watching them and will pick up season 2 of both when they arrive.

Editorial – September 2021

September 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 033, Editorial

You would have thought that with a month off I would have a bumper issue for you. No such luck. Life, as they say, has happened. I’ve talked a bit about the sort of issues I’m dealing with on my blog. It is not fun, and it takes time away from important stuff such as making books.

Having said that, I have been to my first in-person convention in what seems like forever. There’s a report on FantasyCon in this issue. We launched The Green Man’s Challenge there, and the book is already well on the way to 1000 copies sold, which I never would have believed if you had told me about it back when I started Wizard’s Tower. I’m also delighted that we will be bringing back Chaz Brenchley’s Outremer series over the next couple of years.

There’s a fair amount of book-related activity in my near future as well, starting with Octocon this weekend, at which I am doing two panels and experimenting with their virtual dealers’ room.

On Tuesday Oct. 19th you can see an interview with Kim Stanley Robinson about The Ministry for the Future. That’s part of the Bristol Ideas Festival of the Future City. I had the honour of introducing Stan and, having heard the interview be recorded, I can warmly recommend it.

Following that will be BristolCon on Saturday Oct. 30th. Again that’s an in-person event, and I will have a dealer table. A few days after that I will be jetting off to Montréal for World Fantasy, and I will be getting to see Kevin in person for the first time since the Dublin Worldcon. Hopefully I will have some more books read and made before then.

Issue #32

August 1, 2021 Cheryl Morgan Issues

This is the July 2021 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.

Cover: The Ancient of Days: This issue's cover feature's William Blake's last, and perhaps most misunderstood, painting

Loki – Season 1: Cheryl's massively spoilerific review of the God of Mischief's TV debut

A Strange and Brilliant Light: A review of Eli Lee's debut novel, A Strange and Brilliant Light

William Blake vs The World: A review of John Higgs' recent biography of William Blake

Riot Baby: A review of Tochi Onyebuchi's Hugo Finalist novella, Riot Baby.

Worlds Apart: Cheryl has a new book out. Lots of other people are in it too.

Raya and the Last Dragon: Disney's latest fantasy movie is, um, very Disney...

Editorial – July 2021: Apologies time again. Also a Worldcon update.

Cover: The Ancient of Days

August 1, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 032, Art

This issue’s cover should be instantly recognisable. Yes, that is “The Ancient of Days” by William Blake. Blake did several versions of this image, including the last work he made before his death. This is apparently a version from 33 years earlier. A lot of Blake’s work is under copyright, but I found this one thanks to the very useful CC Search.

Here’s the image without the text.

Loki – Season 1

August 1, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 032, TV Review

SPOILER ALERT

Do not read this if you haven’t seen the series, or have seen it and don’t want things that go on in it explained.

Thank you for sticking with me. What I’m going to do here is look at the series and its connection to the Marvel Comics Universe. As you will see, the Cinematic Universe team have not followed the comics slavishly (not should they, the comics continuity is a mess). Nevertheless, it is interesting to see what has been done.

Let’s start with the Time Variance Authority. Somewhat to my surprise (because I have never followed Thor much), they are not new. They first appeared in Thor #372 in 1986. However, this incarnation of the TVA was a homage to an earlier version of a timeline monitoring organisation originally used in the Alan Moore and Alan Davis run on Captain Britain in the early 1980s. It is perhaps not surprising that a couple of British writers came up with something quite so close to a Doctor Who plot, and in fact the stories first began publication in Doctor Who Monthly. This particular storyline also features one of my favourite superhero groups, The Special Executive.

The original TVA was created by Walt Simonson and Sal Buscema and was also an homage to their friend and colleague, Mark Gruenwald, who was Marvel’s continuity expert. He literally was the Guardian of Marvel’s Sacred Timeline, and all the TVA staff, including Mobius, were drawn as Gruenwald clones.

Where the TV series begins to deviate from the comics original is in the character of Ravonna Renslayer. That’s a name that is well known to Avengers fans. Originally she was the love interest, and single weakness, of one of the Avengers’ greatest foes, Kang the Conqueror. Introducing her to the TV series was a clear indication that Kang would be the primary villain, though how they manage that relationship has clearly been put back to Season 2. The original Ravonna was a princess of a world that Kang had conquered, not a teacher from Earth, so there are definitely changes in store.

So “He Who Remains” is Kang, right? Yes, obviously, if only because it had already been trailed that Kang would be the villain in the next Wasp (and Ant Man) movie, and that he would be played by Jonathan Majors. QED.

However, Kang has come a long way since his first appearance in Avengers #8 in 1964. As a time-traveling megalomaniac (and possibly a descendant of Victor von Doom), he has had many lives. The whole story about a war in the multiverse between rival versions of Kang was taken from the comics. It is likely that He Who Remains is only one version of Kang that Majors will get to play. Personally I want to see him as Rama-Tut.

Alioth too is a character from the comics, and closely associated with the Kang/Ravonna storyline.

Which just leaves us with Sylvie. She’s a Loki variant, right? Well, not exactly.

You will remember that Sylvie keeps talking about enchanting things. It is what she does. Well, back in the day, Thor had a lot of trouble with an Asgardian magician called Amora and known as The Enchantress. She and another Asgardian villain, The Executioner, became part of Baron Zemo’s Masters of Evil, and were therefore regular Avengers enemies. In the comics she’s still up to her tricks, but if she existed in the MCU then she presumably died in Ragnarök.

Meanwhile, a teenager on Earth got given Amora’s powers by Loki. She is called Sylvie Lushton, and she later becomes a member of the Young Avengers alongside characters such as Wiccan & Speed – Billy & Tommy Maximoff (whom we met in Wanda/Vision), Patriot – Elijah Bradly (whom we met in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier); Hulkling – Teddy Altman (a skrull whom I expect us to meet in the Nick Fury & the Skrulls movie) and the new Hawkeye – Kate Bishop, who we will meet in the forthcoming Hawkeye TV series. The team also includes Kid Loki, who featured in the multi-Loki cast at the end of time. As you can see, there’s a lot of forward planning being done.

Incidentally, Sylvie Lushton was created by Paul Cornell, who has written Doctor Who TV episodes, so there’s another nod to the Time Lord in the Loki series.

Not knowing all of this is not going to spoil your enjoyment of the Loki TV series. Indeed, I have been fascinated by the way in which people who are obviously entirely unfamiliar with Avengers lore have approached the series and enjoyed it. Then again, not knowing that the reason Kang is eating an apple in the season finale is because he claims to have knowledge of everything, and is tempting Loki and Sylvie with that knowledge, won’t spoil your enjoyment either. But you can be sure that it wasn’t an accident.

That, however, is another story.

A Strange and Brilliant Light

August 1, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 032, Book Review, Eli Lee

I don’t get many review copies these days, but every so often Jo Fletcher sends me something that she thinks might be of interest. A Strange and Brilliant Light is one such book. It is a debut novel by Eli Lee, and Jo was quite right to think I would find it interesting.

Probably the most important thing to say about the book is that the author (in her Twitter feed) describes it as “speculative literary fiction”. What that means is that it is a book about characters rather than a more traditional, plot-based science fiction novel. However, the speculative element is still very much there.

The narrative centres on three women: Lal, Janetta and Rose. They happen to be living at a time when an AI revolution is taking place and robot workers called “auts” are taking everyone’s jobs. Lal has subscribed to the idea that hard work is everything and, if only she devotes her entire life to her employer, then happiness will ensue. Her sister, Janetta, does not need to work hard because she’s a genius. Her PhD on AI programming is sure to land her a top job somewhere. But Janetta is much less good at life, and girlfriend trouble is messing with her ability to complete her studies. Rose is Lal’s best friend from school. They start off working together at a franchise café, but while Lal wants to climb the corporate ladder, Rose, whose father was a famous trade unionist, can see how they are being exploited, and will soon be replaced.

The main speculative element is the usual one of robot revolution. Here one of the characters sets out the dilemma:

We both know that sooner or later, somehow or other, AI is going to become conscious. It’s inevitable, isn’t it? And when it does, unless it is programmed to be docile, obedient, essentially not alive, it’s going to rise up and kill us.

Ah yes, the robot version of Great Replacement Theory. We must keep the immigrants from the colonies in their place, or they will rise up and do to us what we have done to them.

Lal thinks that is this all good for corporate profits. Janetta thinks that if she can somehow program the right sort of emotions into the AIs they will be better people than us. Rose knows that the auts will take her job, and those of all her friends and family, unless someone stops them.

So much, so traditional. Where the book gets interesting is that Rose gets involved in a political organisation advocating for something called “source gain”, which is essentially a made-up name for Universal Basic Income. Lee is asking, if the robots take all our jobs, what will that mean for us? Will we have huge amounts of leisure, and a guaranteed income from the government, or will we starve?

I should note, by the way, that the characters live in a made-up world. That is, the world of the book feels like Earth, but the action takes place in a country that does not exist. There are times when the great city of Mejira, where Lal goes to work, reminds me of Singapore. There is also a section where Janetta goes on vacation to somewhere that might be Nepal. But these are only suggestions, and the book should not be taken as being set in those places. It is an interesting approach by Lee, which allows her to set the book in what is presumably a non-white community, while not having to worry about correctly representing the culture.

This being a book by a woman, about three women, there is inevitably a little feminism in there too. I was especially pleased to see Lee skewer left wing men who fancy themselves as intellectuals, because that is one serious real-world trope.

As someone with several decades of IT experience, I have to say that the resolution of the plot is pure Handwavium. Then again, so is the ending of many cyberpunk movies, and Independence Day, so we can hardly complain. This is not a book about programming AI, it is a book about the social issues that will result if AI becomes more all-pervasive than it is already. That’s certainly one of the sorts of science fiction book that needs to be written right now. Not that I think AI will become conscious, but “AI” that is not conscious, or remotely intelligent, but has a heap of in-built biases, is actually taking our jobs and affecting our lives.

Title: A Strange and Brilliant Light
By: Eli Lee
Publisher: Jo Flecther Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

William Blake vs The World

August 1, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 032, Book Review, John Higgs

Why, exactly, is Cheryl reviewing a book about William Blake in a magazine about science fiction and fantasy? Well, because alongside Tolkien, Blake is Britain’s greatest mythographer. One could make a case for Geoffrey of Monmouth as well, but it seems likely that he stitched together his history of Britain from folk tales already extant at the time, whereas Blake and Tolkien were both engaged in substantial creative activities.

Blake himself probably wouldn’t have seen it that way. He is more likely to have said that he was just explaining the world the way that it was, and that everyone else’s understanding of Christianity and the Bible was wrong. He was idiosyncratic and stubborn like that. But one of the interesting claims made in John Higgs’ book, William Blake vs The World, is that Blake benefited from a something similar the synaesthesia, and actually did see the visions that he claimed he saw, without any aid from mushrooms and the like.

Of course, my own interest in the book was also historical. Having had to do a deep dive into 18th Century ideas about gender for a talk on Charlotte de Beaumont, I was hoping that a book about Blake might further enlighten me. Sadly Higgs is not overly interested in Blake’s ideas about gender. He does indicate that is aware of the issue, noting:

Blake appears to have been cisgendered and heterosexual, but there may have been a transgender aspect to his sense of self when it was let free in his imagination.

So Higgs is familiar with the terminology of trans issues. Also he later lumps Mumsnet in with 4chan and the Mail Online as examples of places people who want to live in Hell might choose to frequent. However, he doesn’t really follow up on Blake’s interest in androgyny. Higgs has also left me wanting to know a lot more about an 18th Century Christian sect known as the Moravians, of which he writes:

The Moravians preached that union with Christ could be achieved through both marital and extramarital sex and gender transgression. Each individual Christian was considered to be the bride of Christ, and therefore female in terms of spiritual sexuality. They practiced visualisation exercises, which focused on the wound in Jesus’s side, in order to better understand the spiritual nature of being penetrated by the male Christ.

Apparently modern-day Moravians have deviated sharply from these teachings.

Of course Higgs’s book isn’t really a history book, it is a book about Blake. Fortunately for him, it is not his job to explain the 18th Century to us. Explaining Blake is quite a big enough job for anyone. When he does get into history he’s liable to mess up, such as here:

Many early Christian thinkers saw the material body as the prison of the immaterial soul, and henceforth something to be despised. The practice of self-flagellation which runs throughout Christian history is a product of ideas such as this, although thankfully few took it to the lengths of the third-century Christian theologian Origen of Alexandria, who is said to have castrated himself for God.

Higgs seems unaware that, while there is no proof that Origen was castrated, becoming a eunuch to demonstrate one’s piety was very popular in the Byzantine empire and hundreds, if not thousands of Christian monks did so.

But let’s get back to mythography. The world that Blake created was very different from Tolkien’s in many ways, because Blake was trying to understand the real world as he saw it, whereas Tolkien was very clear that he was practicing subcreation. Nevertheless, comparisons can be drawn and Higgs does not shirk from the challenge. He writes:

If we were to compare his writings to that of the later English mythmaker J.R.R. Tolkien, then Songs of Innocence and of Experience was Blake’s Hobbit, the Bible of Hell was his Lord of the Rings, and his nineteenth-century works were his Silmarilion.

I am not sufficiently well versed in either the works of Blake or of Tolkien to comment on the veracity of that comparison, but it is interesting that it has been made.

The other obvious connection between Tolkien and Blake is that both make use of the name “orc” for a violent adversary. In Tolkien orcs are a species of violent creatures bred by Melkor in mockery of the elves. In Blake Orc is a spirit of violence and destruction and an enemy of Urizen, the embodiment of authority.

The connection between the two orcs is somewhat nebulous. For example, here Matthew David Surridge is adamant that Tolkien’s orcs have no etymological connection to Blake. The accepted wisdom is that Tolkien took “orc” from the word “orcneas” which comes from a line in Beowulf listing “eotenas ond ylfe ond orcneas” as various enemies of God. Tolkien says as much in a letter to Naomi Mitchison. But he also says that he chose the word for its sound as much anything else.

As a professor of English at Oxford, Tolkien must have been aware of Blake. He was probably also aware that Blake created the character of Orc as a spirit of violent revolution, not in response to events in France, which were then still in his future, but following his witnessing of the Gordon Riots in London. In these riots, an anti-Catholic mob stormed the city’s prisons, ostensibly to free their colleagues held within. Catholic churches and the homes of Catholic notables were also attacked and looted. Over the space of a week, 850 people were killed in the rioting. Tolkien, being a devout Catholic, may have taken note of this.

Incidentally, the Gordon Riots were named after a populist politician whose intemperate ranting had inspired them. Higgs notes:

George Gordon was sent away as a child and bullied at Eton, then entered the Navy where he was considered ‘a damned nuisance wholly unsuitable for promotion.’ A seat in parliament was subsequently bought for him, where he was considered something of a joke. Privileged, narcissistic and generally mediocre, personalities like Gordon are sadly familiar in this history of populist violence.

Like Higgs, I will leave it to the reader to discern which contemporary politician might be being referenced here.

The key element of Blake’s mythmaking, and something that sharply distinguishes him from the many Tolkien imitators in epic fantasy, if not entirely from Tolkien himself, is his belief in the inappropriateness of demarcation. Blake lived at a time when a rush of new discoveries in science was encouraging intellectuals to sort the world into boxes. Categorisation was the fashion. And with it came a passion for abandoning nuance and concentrating on difference. We are still living with the effects of that today.

This application of reason to sort everything into its place was seen by Blake as the triumph of Urizen, the authoritarian god of rationality, whom Blake characterised in ways very similar to the god of the Old Testament (most famously in the artwork on this issue’s cover). But Urizen was only one of four related deities, the “four zoas”. The others – Urthona (creativity), Luvah (emotion) and Tharmas (physical senses) – were, in Blake’s view, lessened by the triumph of Urizen, and the world was poorer for their being side-lined.

Blake lived to see and be horrified by the Napoleonic Wars, which touched much of the known world at the time. He would have seen Urizen very much at work in the Nazi focus on eliminating people they deemed inferior but would probably have despaired at the need for the likes of Churchill and Stalin to lead the resistance against Hitler. If he were alive today, he would probably be railing against the far right and its quest to set everyone against everyone else.

The greatest irony of Blake’s legacy is that a hymn he wrote calling for the tearing down of the establishment, and poking fun at places such as Eton, is now seen as the embodiment of the myth of English superiority. If anyone out there is writing epic fantasy, what the world needs now, and England needs in particular, is a little more William Blake in its mythology, and a little less focus on Good v Evil.

Title: William Blake vs The World
By: John Higgs
Publisher: Orion
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Riot Baby

August 1, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 032, Book Review, Tochi Onyebuchi

It is a good job that Worldcon is later in the year this year, because I have only just made a start on my Hugo reading. Then again, three of the Novella finalists are works I had nominated (and I have read five of the Novels), so I’m in a pretty good position.

I hadn’t read Riot Baby before I got to fill in my ballot, but had I done so it may well have made its way onto my list. It is an incredibly powerful book. The baby of the title is Kevin, who is born at the same time as Los Angeles is being torn apart by riots following the death of Rodney King in 1991. The supernatural element comes from Kev’s elder sister, Ella, who has “a Thing”; that is, supernatural powers.

Following the riots, Kev and Ella’s mother decides to leave LA and move to New York. It is an understandable reaction, but makes no difference. Institutional racism pervades all the USA. As a young Black boy, Kev’s future is predictable. He might be very smart, with a hard-working and respected nurse for a mother, but he’s caught between the gangs who want to recruit him, and the police who want to put him jail. The police win. Kev ends up in Rikers Island.

Riot Baby is a very angry book. In this interview for Salon, Tochi Onyebuchi makes it clear that the book is not for white people. He wrote it for his fellow Black people, who have every right to be as angry as he is. Mostly the book is about the prison-industrial complex in the USA. There is a conveyor belt which takes young black men off the street, on the slightest pretence, into prison, where everything conspires to keep them there for the rest of their lives. They are slaves in all but name.

Interestingly, parts of the book are set a few years into the future. Here Onyebuchi looks at how technology will change policing. With the Internet able to keep tabs on people at all times, and algorithms used by the criminal justice system packed with anti-Black bias, the results seem inevitable. You don’t need a crystal ball to make these predictions.

The other aspect of the book is the supernatural one. Ella has powers. It is not always clear exactly what she can do. She can see the future, she can travel out-of-body, and she can cause damage. Is she able to burn down Rikers and take Kevin to freedom? Perhaps. And what would be the consequences if she did? Could she liberate all Black people? And what would be the consequences if she did.

As Onyebuchi suggests in the Salon interview, if Ella uses her powers to help anyone, she will always be Magneto, never Black Panther. Does that mean that her powers are useless? Or does she have to go full on Killmonger to have any chance of success?

In the interview, Onyebuchi is asked why any white person would read Riot Baby. Isn’t that just self-flagellation? Well perhaps. But clearly there are still many white people out there who don’t know how America really works when you are Black. Or if they know it doesn’t seem important to them. And then they wonder why all those Black people are suddenly so angry. Elsewhere people like Lewis Hamilton are trying their best to remain calm, educate people, and change the world. That’s great, more power to them. But racism is a bit like climate change. If we ignore it for too long, one day it will be too late.

Title: Riot Baby
By: Tochi Onyebuchi
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Worlds Apart

August 1, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 032, Book Review, Francesca T. Barbini

This is less of a review and more of an advertorial, because I have an essay in this book. Worlds Apart: Worldbuilding in Fantasy and Science Fiction (to give it its full title) is the latest volume in the Academia Lunare series from Luna Press Publishing, edited by Francesca T Barbini. My essay is titled, “Worldbuilding with Sex and Gender”, and it full of good ideas for making your aliens queer. That’s enough of that. What else is in the book?

Of immediate interest is the essay by Claire Burgess on the work of William Blake. As I have said elsewhere in this issue, I don’t think Blake would have seen himself as doing worldbuilding. He was just explaining the real world as he saw it, to people who lacked his insight. But to the rest of us Blake is very clearly practicing mythography and I’m pleased to see him in a collection such as this.

Tangentially related to this issue is an essay by my Finnish friend, Jyrki Korpua. He has taken a sabbatical from writing about Tolkien, and is instead explaining the Nordic roots of Disney’s Frozen franchise. We probably all know that the original film was based on The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Anderson, but Disney’s team has put a lot of work into reflecting aspects of Nordic culture in the films.

There is, of course, an article about Tolkien in the book. There’s also one about Le Guin, and delightfully one about Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Those all join the Blake in focussing on a particular author. Other essays, such as mine, focus on general techniques. I was particularly interested in “No Elf is an Island” by Ricardo Victoria-Uribe and Martha Elba González-Alcaraz. This uses something called System Theory to examine the practice of worldbuilding – what works and what doesn’t – by examining a number of well known fantasy worlds. Along the way the authors note:

However, when the author adds details upon details without reason, or to justify post facto things that were left out or are inconsequential to the larger plot, they feel like add-ons, patches to the story, in detriment to its organic growth, as had happened to the Wizarding World by JK Rowling in recent years.

The essay that I was particularly keen to read was, “Town Planning in Viriconium: M John Harrison and Worldbuilding,” by Peter Garrett. As Garrett well knows, Harrison is allergic to the very idea of worldbuilding. The Viriconium project is, at least in part, an exercise in undermining the concept. I was particularly interested to see Garrett invoke reader-response theory, because part of the nature of Viriconium is that everyone who discovers it perceives it in a different way. I don’t have time to re-read the books, and then go back and re-read Garrett’s essay, but I have a feeling that this could be the start of a much larger conversation.

There are several other essays in the book that I haven’t had time to look at yet, but the bottom line is that I really appreciate what Barbini is doing with this series. Occasionally I wish she would encourage contributors to tone down the academic stiltedness of their contributions, but overall I am delighted that someone is publishing a regular series of interesting discussions of our genre(s).

Title: Worlds Apart
By: Francesca T. Barbini
Publisher: Luna Press Publishing
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Raya and the Last Dragon

August 1, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 032, Movie Review

Well, that was very Disney. Then again, what should I expect?

For those who haven’t seen it, Raya and the Last Dragon is a sort of Disney Princess fairy tale animation. It is set in a county that is presumably somewhere in South-East Asia, and it features water dragons, which I am now fairly familiar with from Aliette de Bodard’s writing. The basic plot is about how humans have warred among themselves, which causes all sorts of evil to happen, and we have to learn to be friends with each other again. All of which is seen through the eyes of a young princess who befriends the only dragon left alive. It is exactly as soppy as you would expect.

I try to remember that these things are intended mostly for kids, and we should not expect any realpolitik in them.

The film is beautifully animated and a lot of fun along the way. I don’t expect anything less from Disney. But I have reservations.

Firstly the core dynamic of the plot is the rivalry between Raya and Princess Namaari of the Claw Tribe (who ride giant cats). Namaari has been brought up to believe that her people have been kept in poverty by the Heart Tribe, Raya’s people. It is the young Namaari who tricks Raya into betraying Heart secrets and causes the disaster at the start of the film, which Raya must put right. Before that can happen, Namaari must repent, and Raya must learn to trust her. All well and good, except that Namaari is given a very obvious lesbian haircut and is portrayed in a very Amazon warrior way, and this is entirely queer-baiting because it is a film for kids and nothing is going to happen between her and Raya. I am assuming that a lot of fan fic is getting written, but it would be nice if Disney did more than just hint.

My other concern is with the cast. It is headed by Kelly Marie Tran, which is wonderful. If ever there was an actress who deserves a starring role in a successful movie, she’s it. All of the rest of the cast are people of colour too. But they are also all American, and this is a cartoon. So although all of the characters that we see are non-white, they mostly have American accents. On the one hand, this is a great piece of representation by Disney. Asian Americans in particular will doubtless be pleased by that. But I found myself wondering whether people outside the USA (and maybe Canada) would see it as representation, or whether they’d assume that the actors were all white people. Because I did until I looked them up.

Obviously I’m not in a position to judge here. I’d welcome feedback from Asian friends.

Editorial – July 2021

August 1, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 032, Editorial

OK, so this issue is a day late (it is now August) and a little thin on the book reviews. Sorry about that, folks, life happens. Sometimes I need to read a lot of things that are not reviewable. And sometimes I need to sort out things in my life.

The good news is that August is one of the two months per year that I plan to take off. Ostensibly this is because I’m busy with Worldcon, but of course this year I am not. I hope to use the extra month to read lots and get ahead of the game for the rest of the year.

Talking of Worldcon, things have moved on quite a bit from last month. My very best wishes to Mary Robinette for taking on the crazy task of chairing the convention. We now seem to be getting actual progress. There was a Zoom meeting for potential programme participants a couple of weeks ago, which I got an invitation to on the strength of being a Hugo Finalist. The head of programming assured me that she wanted to make use of the hybrid nature of the event to bring in programme participants from all around the world, and on the strength of that I have signed up as a Virtual Member.

Finally for this month you may remember me muttering back in June about Google retiring Feedburner. A small number of you were subscribed to this site by email through feedburner. You should continue to get emails through a service called Follow.It. If you think you should have been getting emails and did not get one this month, please let me know.

And don’t forget, there will be no new issue in August. See you all in September, by which time I may have actually attended FantasyCon.

Issue #31

June 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan Issues

This is the June 2021 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.

Cover: Clown Woman: This issue's cover is Clown Woman by Molly Rose Lee

Shards of Earth: A look at the new Adrian Tchaikovsky novel, Shards of Earth

The Album of Dr. Moreau: Hey, hey, we're a Monkee! Well, chimp actually, plus an elephant, an ocelot, an armadillo and a bat. With help from Daryl Gregory, the world's latest hot boy band has produced The Album of Dr Moreau

QualityLand: In the near future, Germany will be the Best of All Possible Countries: QualityLand by Marc-Uwe Kling

Worldcon Drama Again: What? It's only a couple of months since the last Worldcon fiasco. Of course we were due another one.

Blackheart Knights: Laure Eve's debut urban fantasy, Blackheart Knights, re-invents King Arthur in a near-future London

Birds of Prey: Cheryl explains why the Birds of Prey movie does not appeal to leopards

Red Dust: From Yoss, a star of Cuban science fiction, comes Red Dust, a mystery featuring a robot detective who is a fan of noir fiction

Editorial – June 2021: Cheryl is tired and cannot brain today

Cover: Clown Woman

June 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 031, Art

As is often this case, this month’s cover comes from PixaBay. The artist is mollyroselee and you can find it here.

Here’s the unadorned image.

Shards of Earth

June 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 031, Adrian Tchaikovsky, Book Review

I have been meaning to catch up with Adrian Tchaikovsky’s work for some time. He’s clearly on the cutting edge of modern SF, and I’ve really enjoyed the readings I have heard him do. All I needed was a suitable entry point; a new series that I could make a start on. Shards of Earth fits the bill nicely.

I should note at this point that the new series does not (as yet) involve any giant spiders. There is a species that looks a bit like giant crabs, and another that looks very much like giant clams. There is also a very nasty species that looks like moon-sized sea urchins. But nothing arachnoid. Yet.

Moon-sized sea urchins? Yes, you heard right the first time. They are called Architects, though they don’t seem to actually build anything. More typically they will take existing things and re-shape them according to their rather eccentric artistic whims. This usually involves shredding things into bizarre shapes and putting things that were on the inside onto the outside. Items of space real estate likely to be re-shaped in this manner include spacecraft, orbitals and planets.

(As an aside, I have this odd feeling that the idea for the book might have come, in part, from Season 5 of Agents of SHIELD with its startling images of Earth after its destruction by Quake.)

Given that the Architects proved invulnerable, implacable, and entirely uninterested in communicating with the subjects of their artistic endeavours, this constituted a major crisis in which all intelligent life joined together as one to oppose them. Or at least to provide evacuation fleets and new homes for the refugees.

Still the Architects would have won easily, had humankind not accidently discovered how to talk to them, or at least get their attention. The Intermediary Program involved the identification and training of humans with a rare biological aptitude for interfacing with the fabric of the universe and thereby being able to make a loud enough noise on the right communication channels for the Architects to notice them.

Most Intermediaries died in the training program, but a few survived long enough to be sent into combat. They made contact. The Architects went back to wherever it was they had come from. The galaxy heaved a collective sigh of relief.

Fifty years later we have a book. Yes, this is an After the War novel. Idris Telemmier, the hero of the Battle of Berlenhof, the man who made the Architects go away, is in retirement. Well, more accurately he is in hiding. The Council of Human Interests, colloquially known as “Hugh”) would love to have him back in their service, which is why he is hiding out as the pilot of an elderly salvage vessel with a rag-tag, dysfunctional-but-lovable crew. Intermediaries, it turns out, make superb hyperspace pilots, so he earns his keep.

The crew of the Vulture God fits neatly into a standard SF trope that is quite popular right now and probably owes a lot to Firefly. There are several of them, but I want to highlight two. Firstly there is Kris, who is a disgraced elite lawyer. Her job is to make sure that the contracts the crew enters into are watertight, and to keep Idris out of the clutches of Hugh. Secondly there is Olli. In our time she would doubtless be described as having “birth defects”, but she turns out to be an absolute genius at interfacing with waldos of all sorts, which is really useful in space.

Is there a plot here, Cheryl? Yes, of course. Remember that we are 50 years after the war. What happens when memories of shared peril fade? Correct, former allies start fighting among themselves. In particular there is growing antagonism between Hugh and The Parthenon.

Is this something to do with Athena? Well yes, because Athena was born without a mother, hence the term “parthenogenesis”, which should be familiar to readers of feminist SF and my essays on interesting biology. The Parthenon is a community of genetically engineered, vat-grown women warriors. They are an elite fighting force, physically perfect, and trained from birth for that purpose. They see themselves as guardians of the galaxy. Everyone else sees them as a dangerous military dictatorship. Most importantly for our purposes, The Parthenon does not possess the knowledge of how to make Intermediaries. And Hugh is terrified of what they will be capable of if they acquire that technology.

So, a plan. Myrmidon Solace has been kept in cryo-sleep for most of the past 50 years, just in case her experience might be needed again. Thanks to being in the right place at the right time, Solace ended up as the personal bodyguard of Idris Telemmier at the Battle of Berlenhof, and continued in that role for the remainder of the war. Any two young persons thrown together in circumstances of mortal peril are bound to develop some sort of bond. The Parthenon’s High Command thinks that Solace might be able to persuade Idris to defect.

That’s mostly your set-up. Solace wants to persuade Idris to help her people. Idris just wants to disappear. The crew of the Vulture God mostly just want to get on with their next contract in peace, except for Olli who wants to get rid of the vile, eugenicist Parthenon woman as quickly as possible, and with extreme prejudice. And don’t forget the giant clams – sorry, the Essiel – because they do have an empire, and they do want the rest of the galaxy to submit to their rule, because everyone will be so much better off being taken care of by superior beings.

It is a common nostrum that science fiction books are not about the future, they are about the now of when they are written. That is absolutely true of Shards of Earth. A key element of the story is the inability of human politicians to unite against an existential threat until it is way too late. The Essiel have clearly been taking a leaf out of the Vladimir Putin playbook, fostering the growth of populist, far-right movements in Hugh territory to distract and weaken human government. On a personal level, Solace struggles with being seen as an agent of an Evil Empire when all her recent memories are of saving the galaxy from destruction, while Olli’s understandable distrust of eugenics, and therefore hatred of Solace, causes fractures among the crew of the Vulture God. It is all very spot on.

Finally, we have that core feature of space opera, the mysterious ancient civilisation. Who were the Architects? Where did they come from? Why did they leave so suddenly? And most importantly, will they be back. You know the answer to the last of those. The other questions are what will keep you reading eagerly to the end of the trilogy.

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

The Album of Dr. Moreau

June 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 031, Book Review, Daryl Gregory

What if the creatures from The Island of Dr Moreau escaped, moved to the USA, and started a boy band?

No, I’m serious, that is exactly the premise of Daryl Gregory’s latest book, which I think is a novella (the Kindle app says it has 141 pages, but does not give a word count even though it very easily could). Of course that’s not all there is to the story. It is also a murder mystery, a meditation on the phenomenon of boy bands and the awful music industry practices that allow them to be created and exploited. There’s also stuff about eugenics, and the USA’s obsession with immigration, and a whole lot more stuff. Stick with me here, it will be worth it.

The WyldBoyZ have just played a hugely successful gig in Las Vegas. However, the following morning their manager, Maurice Bendix, known as Dr M, is found brutally murdered. Bobby O, who is part ocelot and very well endowed in the claw department, swears that he didn’t do it, even though he woke up next to Bendix’s eviscerated body and was covered in the dead man’s blood.

This is clearly case for Detective Lucia Delgado, primarily because she has a good track record in dealing with celebrity crime. She used to be a stage magician, so she has some understanding of the show biz mindset. Luce has only two problems. The first is that her teenage daughter, Melanie, is the WyldBoyZ’s biggest fan. And the second is her partner, Mickey Banks, who has a penchant for truly terrible puns.

Oh, and there’s finding out who actually killed Dr M, so I guess that’s three problems.

It’s not like there is any shortage of suspects. Dr M is an amalgam of everything bad about pop industry impresarios. He’s very clearly cheating on his charges, right down to giving himself writing and production credits on all of the songs even though he has no part in creating them. All of the band have good reasons to hate him. Well, all except Bobby, but that’s only because Bobby is so sweet that he couldn’t hate anyone for more than a few seconds. Then there’s Mrs M, who also hates her husband and is having an affair with Devin, the chimp member of the band.

Naturally, solving the murder also requires digging into the mystery of the WyldBoyZ’s origins in a secret maritime research lab, how they came to escape, and how Maurice Bendix found and enslaved them.

For 141 pages, there is one heck of a lot packed into this book. I was very impressed. I figured out some of how the murder was done before the end, but that was only because Detective Delgado is very good and occasionally has Banks do things do check out her suspicions. I did not see the big reveal coming, but I will note that The Album of Dr Moreau is also a science fiction story, as it should be given its ancestry. It is also obvious that Gregory knows a lot about music, from how pop songs are actually put together to the history of boy bands from the Beatles to BTS.

Oh, and the whole thing is packaged as a concept album, with each chapter being a distinct track. Of course it is. Doubtless available on Island Records.

Title: The Album of Dr. Moreau
By: Daryl Gregory
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

QualityLand

June 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 031, Book Review, Marc-Uwe Kling

In the near future, Germany, or possibly the EU, has taken the sensible step of declaring itself to be the Best Possible Country. Welcome to QualityLand, where life has never been better, and everyone has exactly what they want.

That is the premise of a novel by Marc-Uwe Kling, which was apparently a huge hit in Germany, and is now available in English translation. If I were doing an elevator pitch for it, I would describe it as the love child of Cory Doctorow and Douglas Adams. Kling has all of Doctrow’s fascination with the effect of the internet on society, but approaches it with the surreal, acerbic comedy of Adams.

The first thing that you will notice about QualityLand is that a new naming convention has been adopted. Boys are given a family name according to their fathers’ occupations; girls are given a family name according to their mothers’ occupations. Thus, of course, we have names like Henryk Engineer, and Hans Lorry Driver, coupled with names like Hannah Hairdresser and Melissa Sex Worker. If you have started to see a problem, I can add that Tony Party Leader is in fact the leader of the Progress Party, just as his father was.

Doctorow, when he was younger and less cynical, once wrote a novel extolling the virtues of a social ranking system called wuffie. Kling knows exactly how this will turn out. Every citizen has a Level rating, and the higher your level the more social privileges you have.

Of course everyone is happy, because they are sold everything they want by TheShop, a monopoly online retailer. You don’t even have to browse. TheShop knows exactly what products to send you, based on your Level, your interactions on the Everybody social network, and its infallible algorithms. QualityPartner will recommend romantic interests for you in the same way.

Our hero is a chap called Peter Jobless. He’s not actually jobless because he has inherited a scrap metal business from his grandfather. Peter actually wanted to be an AI psychologist, but it turned out that helping AI’s with mental problems is classed as a form of repair, and repairing anything has been made illegal as it is a threat to TheShop’s business model.

So people give Peter dysfunctional machines to dispose of. But he’s a soft-hearted chap, and once he’s been given something to destroy he becomes its owner. He can’t bear to actually put a thinking machine in a scrap metal press, so he keeps them all. Thus he shares his home with a LawBot who has developed a conscience, a CombatBot with PTSD, a tablet that has read too much Marx and Lenin and wants a robot revolution, a male SexBot who has fallen madly in love with a client and can’t get it up for anyone else, and an AuthorBot who wants to write science fiction. It is all very reminiscent of Doom Patrol.

All of this would be fairly irrelevant to life in QualityLand, were it not for the fact that Peter is sent a product from TheShop that he does not want: a pink, dolphin-shaped vibrator. His attempts to return it gradually escalate until they become a matter of national significance.

Meanwhile there is an election going on. The President for Life is dying, and a new one has to be elected. (It is a woman president, doubtless this has specific meaning for German readers.) The far-right QualityParty is putting up a loud-mouthed TV chef turned politician, Conrad Cook. Cook’s face is on the wrapping of half the food sold in TheShop so he has plenty of voter recognition. In desperation Tony and his colleagues decide to take the unusual step of putting up a candidate who is an android.

So politics jokes, Amazon jokes, sex jokes, and some serious discussion of where modern society is going. It is a heady mix. There is a definite male gaze to the text which some female readers may find tiresome, but the female characters do get a fair amount of agency and some of them come out on top, so I’m prepared to forgive Kling. It isn’t often that I enjoy a comedy novel, but this one had me laughing out loud in places.

QualityLand is translated from German by Jamie Lee Searle, who does a fine job of keeping just enough German references to keep the sense of setting while making the text eminently readable.

Title: QualityLand
By: Marc-Uwe Kling
Translator: Jamie Lee Searle
Publisher: Orion
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Worldcon Drama Again

June 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 031, Articles, Awards, Con Running

Another month, another meltdown on the Worldcon/Hugos front. Can’t we be better than this? Apparently not.

Early this year there was a huge fuss when DisCon 3 released policies suggesting that they would effectively be limiting the number of people who could be part of a finalist group to 4. Naturally a bunch of people were upset by this, and it ended up with most of the WSFS Division people resigning, and then with one of the co-chairs resigning. There were promises that things would be done better.

Then the list of Hugo Finalists was announced, and there was more drama, mostly because DC3 had failed to explain conversations that had taken place with Strange Horizons regarding their listing of some 87 or so people. This misinformation resulting from that is still being widely spread. You can see an explanation of the situation here.

This month an email was sent to Finalists explaining that, contrary to promises made in January, only 4 people from each Finalist group (and their +1s) would be allowed at the pre-ceremony reception. It wasn’t entirely clear why, but space and budget seemed likely explanations. There was also a strange comment about only 38 people being allowed on stage at any one time, which I can only interpret as a dig at Strange Horizons. No one had bothered to check how many people from each Finalist were actually planning to be at the ceremony.

Shortly thereafter most of the Hugo Admin team, and the head of WSFS Division, resigned. Apparently they had been unhappy, not only with the email they had been told to send out, but also with other aspects of how DC3 was planning to treat the Hugos.

As I am a finalist this year, I got to hear rather more about this than most people. In particular we got invited to a meeting (organised by the ever-resourceful Mary Robinette Kowal – thanks MR!) with a couple of representatives of the convention. One of those was Gadi Evron, the head of Events, and therefore the man in charge of putting on the Hugo ceremony. He assured us that there were no problems with space or budget.

All of which means that the email sent to finalists contained information that neither the Hugo Admin team, nor the people involved in running the ceremony, agreed with. I took a look at the organisation chart of the convention, and it was clear that there was only one person with the actual authority to overrule two separate divisions in that way.

Shortly thereafter, the one remaining con chair resigned.

There is, by the way, a potential issue with regard to time. I understand that there has been a lot of pressure on Gadi and his team to keep the ceremony time down below two hours. That’s understandable given last year’s embarrassing blow-out. However, the more categories we have, and the more people who are part of winning teams, the harder that becomes. Also if you are doing a hybrid ceremony to bring in winners who can’t attend, that is likely to add to the time. There’s a real conflict that Gadi has to deal with here, and maybe he can’t make everyone happy. My own view is that as long as the show is good, people won’t mind how long it runs. They only complain about the time the ceremony takes when they are bored stupid by it.

That is where we are at the moment. We do have a new head of the WSFS Division (commiserations, Linda Deneroff). We don’t yet have a new Hugo Admin team, but that will doubtless appear soon. And the con currently has no chair. Thankfully Worldcon is a dinosaur and is perfectly capable of running around for a few weeks without its head.

Naturally there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Lots of people are asking why this keeps happening, and what we can do to stop it happening again. Over at File 770 the retired colonels of fandom are harrumphing away about kids these days. Apparently this is all the fault of Strange Horizons, middle-class British people, and Archive of Our Own. I don’t think they have blamed woke liberals and the Black Lives Matter campaign yet, but I’m sure it is coming.

But what can we do? Not much. There is one administrative fix that I will get out of the way first, but a proper solution will be much harder to make happen.

In traditional Worldcon organisation charts, WSFS Division exists to manage the three things that every Worldcon is mandated to do: run the Hugo voting, Site Selection and the Business Meeting. But this doesn’t make a lot of organisational sense. The Hugo ceremony is normally run by Events (and the post-ceremony party by someone other than the Worldcon). The Business Meeting is a program item. And Site Selection is done at a table in the Exhibits Hall. It might make more sense to split the WSFS functions between those three divisions, because they have nothing to do with each other save for all being mandated by the WSFS Constitution. At Glasgow in 2005 Kevin and I had the whole of WSFS as part of Events, and that seemed to work OK.

That might help, but it is only a small fix. It doesn’t get to the root cause of the problem, which is that each Worldcon is a law unto itself, and all too often it ends up re-inventing the wheel. Lots of people are asking for more institutional knowledge to be passed on from one year to the next, but we’ve been asking for that for decades now and it doesn’t work. Nicholas Whyte, the recently departed head of WSFS Division, has oodles of experience of running the Hugos. He seems to have quit because he felt that he wasn’t being listened to. Gadi Evron was Deputy Division Head of Events in New Zealand, so he has masses of experience of what not to do, and certainly sounds like he learned a lot from it.

The problem is not individuals, the problem is the system. It is the bidding system, which encourages committees to become emotionally attached to the idea that they need to show they can put on the Best Worldcon Ever. It is the one-year nature of the event, which means that individual Worldcons have no incentive to consider the long-term good of the event, the Hugos and WSFS. And it is the total lack of meaningful sanctions for any Worldcon committee that messes up.

Various people have been calling for the Hugos to be separated from Worldcon, and a permanent (possibly professional) organisation to be set up to run them. The trouble is that most of the people calling for this have no idea how to make it happen, and that means that it won’t. It is possible, but it requires people to do some actual work. And yes, it means that significant numbers of people have to attend the Business Meeting.

In fact the first thing that you will need to do is destroy the Business Meeting, because if you don’t the people who go there every year will just reverse your changes the minute you stop paying attention. I know that a lot of people, Kevin included, enjoy the BM, but ultimately it is a means to an end. Participatory democracy is wonderful in theory, but once you get above a few hundred people in your community it becomes unworkable. It wouldn’t even have worked in Athens if they had given women, slaves and foreign-born residents a vote. (This may surprise you, but Kevin agrees with me on this.)

So you need to change the WSFS Constitution to make it into a membership-based organisation that has some sort of elected management. And you need to put that management in charge of running the Hugos. There’s a lot else that you could do as well, but that’s the absolute minimum and when it comes to getting things through the Business Meeting the less that you have to debate the better. One you have got rid of the BM it will be a lot easier to make other changes.

If people want to do this, I’m sure that Kevin would be happy to help draft the necessary legislation. I can’t bring it forward myself as I am barred from entering the USA, but I’d be happy to help drum up support.

Oh, and then you will need to make sure that you are a WSFS member and that you help to ensure that sensible people get elected to the management group. The reason that fandom has always been so heavily opposed to having such a thing is that if the wrong people get elected to such a thing, then you are totally and utterly screwed. Us middle class Brits can attest to that fact, because we (as a nation) voted in a far-right government with a massive majority.

Blackheart Knights

June 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 031, Book Review, Laure Eve

Arthuriana is clearly in the air at the moment. We have had the massively different takes of Legendborn and SisterSong, both of which I loved. We have Spear due from Nicola Griffith coming very soon. And we also have Blackheart Knights from Laure Eve. It has a woman in armour on a motorbike on the cover. How could I possibly resist?

Blackheart Knights is set in a future version of London that still has a veneer of technology but has reverted to a mediaeval society. Duelling by highly trained and presumably neutral gladiators (knights) is an acceptable way of settling legal disputes. Money is in the form of batteries, known as “tricks” because they contain electricity. There’s some very interesting worldbuilding going on here.

The story is told in two threads that will meet in the present day. One is told over a single year and features a young woman called Red who has a burning desire to become a knight. The other is told over nineteen years and tells how Art Dracones, bastard son of King Uther, wins the crown for himself and sets out to build a better society.

There’s not a huge amount more than I can tell you here, because you all know Arthur’s story and anything I say could easily become a spoiler. There are things that shouldn’t be spoiled. What I can tell you is that magic is a key part of the story. There are people whom Eve calls “godchildren” and whom I shall call “mutants” because that fits the near future setting much better. As with the mutants that we know and love, there are various groups of powers, but each individual is unique. Naturally they are viewed with deep suspicion by ordinary humans.

I loved much about this book. The worldbuilding is fabulous: just enough detail to be unique and fascinating, not too much to overwhelm the story. There are some great characters, with some nice innovation on the standard Arthurian cast. Gawain (sorry, Garad) in non-binary. Where I think it falls down is that it ends too quickly. Possibly it has to be constrained to a single volume for the story to work as conceived, though that’s sad because there is so much Arthuriana to play with. But the sudden rush to a climax in the last few chapters feels too pat and a bit forced.

Nevertheless, if you are into Arthuriana, or even just things like Shadowrun, I’d recommend this book. There’s a wealth of imagination on show here. I can see people setting role-playing campaigns in this world. As with the original Arthur cycle (and Pendragon which is based on it), everyone will know how the story ends, but there is 19 years of history to play out in order to get there. I think it would work very well.

Title: Blackheart Knights
By: Laure Eve
Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Birds of Prey

June 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 031, Movie Review

OK, before I start I have to explain something. Leopards and hyenas are natural enemies. Firstly, the lazy bastards keep stealing our prey by ganging up on us in huge numbers. And secondly, unlike leopards who are creatures of impeccable taste, hyenas are exactly the sort of vile creatures who would eat people’s faces. It was probably them who started that horrible meme in the first place.

So when I discovered that Harley Quinn had a pet hyena, I’m afraid I was somewhat poorly disposed towards this movie. OK, hyenas to have a certain amount of feminist badassery, albeit thanks to some highly dubious childbirth techniques, and calling him Bruce is funny. I bet he does do that. But even so; hyena. Strike one.

Having got that out of the way, Birds of Prey is a fairly entertaining movie. It is not in the least bit realistic. It is also about comic book characters so it doesn’t have to be. Plus it is film about a bunch of highly capable women, some of whom do their best to be decent human beings, one of whom is a badly behaved kid, and one of whom is an utterly terrible person by her own admission. And she is a psychiatrist so she should know.

The plot basically consists of a long sequence of men proving what hopeless, misogynistic assholes they are, and our heroines getting excuses to beat the crap out of them in various elegant and entertaining ways. There is something about a diamond that is the key to the riches of a mafia family, but that’s easily forgotten.

It is funny, and frankly I’m not sure what else you can do with Gotham City. Adam West and co figured this out decades ago, and Frank Miller’s attempts to make Bruce Wayne into square-jawed macho action hero have only succeeded in making him more laughable. Comedy is the way to go, and Birds of Prey is pretty good in that department despite the utter awfulness of much that goes on. Margot Robbie is clearly having an absolute whale of a time. There is perhaps a limit to the number of times you can fairly laugh at some thug getting kicked in the nuts, but if that limit exists the film did not manage to find it.

As for the Hugos, I’m still thinking. I’ve watched three of the films thus far and I still think that Soul is probably the best. The three I haven’t seen all look to be various shades of awful. If I’m feeling rebellious when I fill in my ballot I might yet vote for Harley.

But not for Bruce.

Red Dust

June 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 031, Book Review, Yoss

Yoss, I am told, is a legend of Cuban science fiction. I am ashamed to say that this book is the first I had heard of him. If you haven’t either, there’s an interview with him on his publisher’s website which reveals that he also fronts a heavy metal band. Interesting chap.

Red Dust is a mystery novella staring a robot detective. Raymond lives and works on a giant space trading station called the William S Burroughs. It was constructed by the Galactic Trade Confederation when they discovered the Earthlings. It is parked out near Saturn and acts as a gateway between the humans and the rest of the galaxy. Quite rightly, the alien races who run the Confederation, don’t entirely trust these unpredictable new creatures.

If you are expecting a galactic Confederation with almost-friendly aliens such as Vulcans and Ferengi, think again. There are three alien races in Red Dust. There are the xenocidal insectoid Grodo, the huge, reptilian Colossaurs, and the Cetians who look exactly like humans but very much aren’t. All three races are entirely out for their own interests. We shouldn’t be surprised that a Cuban writer has a much darker view of galactic society than those of us who live in countries with a seat on the UN Security Council.

Raymond is actually a security droid, a Positronic Police Force officer or “pozzie”. His real identifier is MSX-3482-GZ, but he happens to have a passion for 20th Century English-language literature, in particular noir detective stories, hence his name. Some of his colleagues have different passions. They have adopted names like Zorro and Achilles. There are, of course, no dingy bars on the Burroughs. Nor are there beautiful dames who might lead an unwary gumshoe into danger. There aren’t even any murders. The security is too good. So when one does happen everyone is caught by surprise.

Naturally the authorities panic, and Raymond, having been very close to the incident and far too curious for his own good, gets put in charge of the investigation.

From there things escalate rapidly. I got the impression that Yoss had made his antagonist a bit too powerful, and consequently poor Raymond was robbed of much of his agency, but the ending worked well enough for me to be happy with the book. There are a fair few robot jokes along the way, which helped.

The one thing that concerned me about the book is the inclusion of a bunch of characters who are from a Roma community. They seemed to be a bit of a cultural stereotype. Not being Roma myself, I’m not going to pass judgement, but I would like to know what actual Roma think about the book.

Of course one of the issues with translation is that anglophone culture is not universal. So what I think, and what an anglophone Roma person might think, doesn’t necessarily translate to what a Cuban Roma person might think.

Talking of translation, David Fyre appears to have worked on a number of Yoss’s books. That’s always a good sign because author and translator will have had time to build up a good working relationship. Fyre has done a fine job here.

The book is only a novella, so it is a short read. I enjoyed it. Why not try a bit of Cuban science fiction for a change?

Title: Red Dust
By: Yoss
Translator: David Fyre
Publisher: Restless Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Editorial – June 2021

June 30, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 031, Editorial

Here I am again for another month. There’s a lot going on in my life, but most of it is not stuff you would want to read about here. I will leave ranting about British politics to my personal blog.

Of course there is Worldcon drama too, and that I can rant about here, so I have done.

Mostly, however, I’m just tired. There’s a ‘zine, it is more interesting than me.

Before I go, though, one quick tech point. Google is withdrawing FeedBurner. It will be dead by the next issue. I will be porting the functionality to another service, but if you rely on Feedburner to tell you about new posts here you may want to look for the July issue manually, just in case.

Issue #30

May 31, 2021 Cheryl Morgan Issues

This is the May 2021 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.

Cover: Steampunk Gears: Do we have a steampunk review in this issue? That might explain this cover.

A Master of Djinn: A review of A Master of Djinn, the new steampunk Cairo book from P. Djèlí Clark

Fugitive Telemetry: A review of the latest Martha Wells Murderbot book, Fugitive Telemetry

Defekt: Nino Cipri returns to the whacky world of LitenVärld furtniture stores in this new novella, Defekt

The Vanished Birds: Cheryl takes a look at The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez, who is one of the finalists for this year's Astounding Award.

Requiem Moon: A review of Requiem Moon, the second volume of CT Rwizi's African-themed fantasy series.

The Old Guard: A review of the Hugo Finalist movie, The Old Guard, and the graphic novel on which it was based.

Wonder Woman 1984: The Amazons are back. There's good and bad. The good is mostly in the extras on the disc.

Editorial – May 2021: The sun is shining in the UK. Cheryl is taking bets on how many days this will last. Meanwhile, in-person appearances are being planned.

Cover: Steampunk Gears

May 31, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 030, Art

In honour of a new P. Djèlí Clark book, we have a steampunk cover for this issue. Image by prettysleepy1 from Pixabay. The unadorned version is below.

A Master of Djinn

May 31, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 030, Book Review, P Djèlí Clark

This is a book I have been wanting for some time. Pretty much since I finished reading The Haunting of Tram Car 015 to be precise. I didn’t know then that a novel was in the works, but I am very pleased that it was.

A Master of Djinn is, of course, set in P. Djèlí Clark’s steampunk Cairo where the djinn have returned to Earth thanks to the Sufi mystic, Al-Jahiz. It once again features Fatma el-Sha’arawi, the star agent of the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities. Hamed and Onsi also feature in the novel, but only in supporting roles.

Previous stories in this setting have featured magical threats, but this book starts with something much more mundane: the murder of a human. However, not just any human. The victim is Lord Alistair Worthington, also known as The English Basha, a British nobleman who has developed a fondness for Egypt and lives there full time. If the death of one of the richest men in Cairo isn’t enough of a worry, Lord Alistair was also a diplomat. When he died he was in the middle of brokering a peace conference in Cairo at which he hoped the feuding European powers could settle their differences and avoid a war.

Remember, this is a world in which the First World War did not happen, but that doesn’t mean that the tensions that caused it have gone away. Indeed, as we shall see, the advent of magic has given the Europeans a whole new arms race in which to compete.

While this is clearly a major political event, you may be wondering why the Ministry is involved. Well, Lord Alistair was also the head of a secret magical society dedicated to uncovering the mystical lore of Egypt. Nor did he die alone. His entire coven died with him, including a couple of Egyptian members who were associated with the traditional religious movement – that is, the worship of ancient Egyptian gods.

Fortunately the identity of the murderer is fairly obvious. A man in black robes and a golden mask was seen fleeing Lord Alistair’s mansion. He sounds suspiciously like the rabble-rouser stirring up the poor people of Cairo with fiery, anti-government speeches, and by claiming to be a reincarnation of the great Al-Jahiz himself. And who very obviously has magical powers.

This, then, is an obvious case for our favourite suit-and-bowler-hat-wearing lesbian detective. However, things aren’t easy for Fatma. To start with the Ministry has saddled her with an assistant. Hadia is a nice enough young woman, but she’s an orthodox Muslim, albeit prone to scandalously coloured hijabs, whereas Fatma is as unorthodox as they come and is carrying on a passionate affair with a priestess of Sekhmet.

Ah yes, Siti. When I mentioned traditional religion you probably guessed that she’d be involved somewhere along the line. This time she has a stake in the game as she knew two of the victims. One of those victims had a husband, a man call Ahmad who prefers to be addressed as Lord Sobek because he is high priest of the crocodile god. Naturally Ahmad wants revenge but, being a reptilian sort of person, he goes about it in a very crocodile manner. This does not make Fatma’s job any easier, though Ahmad does keep apologising for being creepy.

Then we have the Europeans. Lord Alistair’s family, being British, are insufferably arrogant and useless. The foreign dignitaries arriving for the peace conference are not much better, and some come with friends. Kaiser Wilheim, it turns out, has brokered a deal with the Goblin Court and has brought one of their representatives with him. Raymond Poincaré, the President of France, is rumoured to have been in discussions with the Fae. The Russians too are rumoured to have supernatural allies.

The British, obviously, are too arrogant to have sought magical help.

As you can see, there is a heck of a lot going on. And that’s before the djinn get involved, as they inevitably will. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. That is in part because Clark is an historian and therefore peppers his narrative with all sorts of entertaining titbits drawn both from Egyptian history and folklore. There is, for example, a mention of the infamous Massacre of the Mameluks. And Fatma has to do research in a book called the Thousand and One Nights which, as Clark well knows, comes in multiple versions with different mixtures of stories.

Basically this is all very entertaining but, as anyone who has read Ring Shout will expect, it is also peppered with pointed political references. As to the plot, I saw the reveal coming a mile off, but then I probably have an unfair advantage in this particular case. It didn’t spoil my enjoyment. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I did. And I’m looking forward to sequels. Those goblins are not going to keep quiet for long.

Title: A Master of Djinn
By: P. Djèlí Clark
Publisher: Orbit
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Fugitive Telemetry

May 31, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 030, Book Review, Martha Wells

What can you say about a new Murderbot book? Surely you all know the set-up by now? Martha Wells doesn’t have to do much beyond roll her beloved creation on stage and let readers watch him in action. How long can she keep this up for? Well, The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon has at least 397 episodes. Surely Murderbot will want to last at least as long as its favourite soap opera.

To keep things going, Wells has to introduce new plot elements, and new characters. Murderbot is now living on Preservation Station with Dr Mensah and her friends. They are still very much at risk from the vengeful Gray Cris Corporation, but at least they are on home territory.

Unfortunately, the security services on the Station are not keen on the idea of having a rogue SecUnit on their territory. Who knows when it might suddenly murder a whole bunch of people? It is a Murder-bot, after all. Murderbot would much rather sit quietly and watch media, but it does have to keep Dr Mensah safe, so it needs to find a way of getting along with this desperately incompetent bunch of humans trying to do a job it is so much better suited for.

Then they find a dead body.

Fugitive Telemetry is a murder mystery. Technically, I suppose, it is a locked station mystery, because the first thing that happens after the discovery of the body is that Preservation Station is put into lockdown so that the perp can’t get away. Station Security suspects Murderbot. It is, after all, a professional killer. Murderbot is worried because the perp seems to have abilities well beyond those of the usual human thug, which suggests that corporate agents are involved.

It is a short book, and you’ll race through it because Wells is very good at what she does. You might, like me, spot a rather obvious suspect very early on, but knowing who doesn’t mean that you know why or how.

To some extent Fugitive Telemetry feels like the middle book of a trilogy. It seems like Wells is introducing us to a setting and some characters, and that something more dramatic will happen using those elements in the near future. Unfortunately “near future” probably means another year to wait before the next Murderbot book. Why can’t we get a new one every week like a proper soap opera?

Title: Fugitive Telemetry
By: Martha Wells
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
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Amazon US
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Defekt

May 31, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 030, Book Review, Nino Cipri

Welcome back to the wild and whacky world of LitenVärld. Yes, the world needs more silly stories about weird Scandinavian megastores selling flatpack furniture, and Nino Cipri is just the person to provide them.

Cipri says in their acknowledgements that they had no intention of writing a sequel to FINNA. However, as often happens with writers, a character got inside their head and refused to shut up until their story was told. Thus Defekt happened.

The character in question is the person we know as “Fucking Derek”. The reason that Amy from FINNA called Derek “Fucking Derek” is because Derek is an ideal employee. He is flawless in dealing with customers, his store uniform is always immaculate, and he is regularly named employee of the month. Derek even lives in a converted shipping container parked at the edge of the store carpark. He has no life outside of LitenVärld. And yet the plot of FINNA hinges on Fucking Derek taking a sick day.

Why? What possible reason could there be for this most devoted of company employees taking a sick day? It is allowed, if you dig deep enough into the Company Handbook, but it is highly unusual. Derek is the last person that Tricia the Manager would expect to take a sick day. This was a mystery that required a new book to solve.

As you may recall from FINNA, one of the more unusual things about LitenVärld stores is that they are prone to opening up wormholes to parallel universes. Mostly this is simply an inconvenience. It doesn’t do to have customers get lost in the twisty and confusing layouts of the store, cunningly designed to prevent anyone from leaving until they have bought something, and fall through a wormhole into another world. The plot of FINNA is rescue mission for one such unfortunate customer.

But LitenVärld would not be LitenVärld if senior management had not wondered whether this peculiar feature of their stores could not, perhaps, be exploited to increase profits. As it turned out, it could.

Most of LitenVärld’s products are made in China to keep costs down. However, shipping large quantities of flat-pack furniture from China to the USA is expensive and time-consuming. LitenVärld has discovered that some worlds in parallel universes are able to manufacture products just as cheaply as the Chinese, and the shipping costs though the wormholes are practically zero. Profit!

The downside of this strategy is that the build quality of products from these other worlds sometimes leaves a little to be desired. Some products are a little defective. Some of those look distinctly sentient. And some of those are downright homicidal.

If it turns out that a LitenVärld becomes home to a sentient chest in the shape of a pig designed for a child’s bedroom, or a sentient luxury toilet, something has to be done. That something is a Special Inventory, carried out by the Corporate Inventory Team. These are people specially trained in the techniques necessary to hunt down and eliminate Defekts. After the events of FINNA, Derek’s store is badly in need of a Special Inventory.

However, each LitenVärld store is unique, so it is useful for the Inventory Team to have a local guide who knows the layout well. Derek would seem to be an obvious choice. Besides, Reagan from Corporate Resource Management has reason to think that he’d fit right in. Thus it is that Fucking Derek gets to spend his own version of A Night at the Museum. In the process he learns far more about himself that he would ever have imaging possible.

Yes, it is very silly. It is also resolutely anti-capitalist. And it is a novella so you find yourself racing through it in no time. When you find yourself with bits of faux-wood spread all around you, and you have no idea what they one odd screw is supposed to go, this is just the book that you need.

Title: Defekt
By: Nino Cipri
Publisher: Tor.com
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The Vanished Birds

May 31, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 030, Book Review, Simon Jimenez

Simon Jimenez is one of the finalists for this year’s Astounding Award. I had been unaware of his debut novel until recently. It is now in the top ten list for Debut Novel in this year’s Locus Awards. And the other day Roz Kaveney phoned me up to rave about it. I can take a hint.

The cover on my edition is a little weird. There’s a spacecraft scene, so we should be expecting a space opera, and then there is this very odd quote from Stephen Baxter that reads, “An astonishing debut. Ursula K Le Guin… Kim Stanley Robinson… Simon Jimenez.” Presumably Baxter was comparing Jimenez to those other SF luminaries, and the PR people at Titan had to butcher his second sentence to get it to fit on the cover.

From there things get a little more confusing, because The Vanished Birds does not follow any accepted ideas of how to open a novel.

Chapter 1 is all about a young farmer called Kaeda who develops an obsession with a woman from the space fleet that comes to his planet every fifteen years to buy their produce. Thanks to relativity, Nia barely ages from one Shipment Day to another, while Kaeda becomes a man, then a leader of his people, then old. The only other piece of plot is that Kaeda rescues a strange young boy from a crashed spacecraft. As the boy is an outworlder, Kaeda gives him to Nia to take care of.

Chapter 2 takes place aboard the starship Debby. Nia, it turns out, is the captain. Her crew are not overly enamoured of the strange boy who cannot speak, but appears obsessed with music. Fortunately their journey is not that long, and eventually they find themselves once again approaching Pelican Station.

Chapter 3 takes us back to the dying Earth, where a young woman engineer called Fumiko Nakajima is about to make a name for herself by designing the magnificent space stations that Umbai Corporation would one day build as homes for those people rich enough to flee their wreck of a planet and make a new home among the stars. The project, developed in deepest secrecy by Umbai, costs Fumiko the love of her life, because loyalty to the company comes before all else. Fumiko names the stations, and designs their looks, after her favourite species of birds that she loved as a child, when there were birds.

We are now, according to my Kindle, 27% of the way through the book, and we have no idea what is going on. Fortunately Chapter 4 sees Nia on Pelican Station meeting up with its designer who, thanks to a variety of technologies, is now 1000 years old. Now, at last, we start to understand what a strange, traumatised boy who walked away from a seemingly deadly spaceship crash might mean for the rest of humanity, and the roles that Nia and Fumiko will have in shaping his future.

Of course, this is not what the book is about. Yes, there is a story about Nia, Fumiko and the boy. But The Vanished Birds is a meditation on something very different: colonialism. Jimenez is using his space-bound civilisation as a metaphor for the Earth-bound world of the 16th to 18th Centuries when superior technology and command of the seas enabled countries like Britain to build up world-wide empires based on commercial exploitation of the rest of the world.

Jimenez’s story does not have slavery in the same way as we did, but it is clear that most people in his world are controlled by corporations in some way. Kaeda and his people must continue to grow crops, and are dependent on the company ships that will come and buy every 15 years. Nia and her crew are locked into a cycle of trading, barely making enough each time around to live off, and to make repairs to their ship. Fumiko has signed her life over to Umbai. Everything that she does becomes theirs.

As the story develops, we start to see the consequences of corporate greed for other parts of human-inhabited space, and the likely effect, on those planets not yet firmly under corporate control, of the technological secrets that power the plot. The whole thing is expertly done, and I can see exactly why Stephen Baxter chose Le Guin and Robinson as comparable writers to Jimenez. He might not be as good as them yet, but the themes he is working with are also themes those two writers have made much of.

Plus, Jimenez is brave. Now many people would have created a book that takes so long to get into, which spends much time developing characters only to discard them as the plot moves on, and to be quite so political in a debut novel.

For a number of years now, women have dominated the Best Novel category of the Hugo Awards. It is about time that we had a new male writer to get excited about. Simon Jimenez might be just that person.

Title: The Vanished Birds
By: Simon Jimenez
Publisher: Titan
Purchase links:
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Requiem Moon

May 31, 2021 Cheryl Morgan 030, Book Review, CT Rwizi

Having enjoyed Scarlet Odyssey, I was very pleased when Julie Crisp offered me book 2 in the series, Requiem Moon. This is what I’m assuming is book 2 of a trilogy, so CT Rwizi has his work cut out making it more than just moving the plot along. Mostly, I think, he succeeds, because he provides a story to anchor this book. This review will contain spoilers for book 1.

The entire book is set in Yonte Saire. Salo and his colleagues have just arrived in the city following the dramatic events of the previous book. Most of the Saire ruling family has been murdered, and the Crocodile clan is poised to seize power. Meanwhile Princess Isa has been declared King, and is hiding out in the Red Temple. To buy time she has agreed to marry Kola Saai, the chief of the Crocodiles, but she desperately needs allies.

Wait, did I say “King”? Yes, the ruler of Yonte Saire is a King, regardless of their gender. It is an Egyptian thing. A nice touch.

Salo spends most of the book finding out about his powers, which turn out to be much more impressive that you might have suspected from Scarlet Odyssey. We also find out a lot more about the world of the books, and it becomes very obvious that this is a “science so far beyond ours that it looks like magic” setting. I like that sort of thing.

Rwizi also uses this book to let Salo’s companions have a little more of the limelight. Ilapara is my favourite, because she’s basically Dora Milaje, but Tuksaad is much more interesting. He is our link to the wider world outside of the Redlands, where there are powerful sorcerers capable of making artificial beings like him. Alinata, the Yerezi sorceress, doesn’t get quite as much action, but then she is there to spy on Salo on behalf of their queen. Salo provides his friends with a few magical toys that Q would be proud of, and towards the end of the book the team gets sent out on a job that feels right out of Mission Impossible.

Inevitably, Salo gets drawn into Isa’s schemes, and that provides him with further opportunities to explore the nature of his world. There is drama, plans come to fruition, and plots within plots are revealed. Rwizi has certainly set things up nicely for book 3. These big fantasy books take a lot of reading, but this one zips along nicely enough, and if you get to the end of Requiem Moon I can guarantee that you will want to know what happens next.

Title: Requiem Moon
By: CT Rwizi
Publisher: 47 North
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
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