Author: Cheryl Morgan

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

Reclaim, Restore, Return

023, Book Review, Karen Lord, Tobias Buckell

One of the events that I would love to go to, but probably never will, is the Bocas Lit Fest. It is the Caribbean’s premier literary event, taking place each year in Port of Spain, Trinidad. This year it was virtual, but I didn’t find out until too late and anyway I suspect there would have been time zone issues. There is a recording available on YouTube, but it is 10.5-hours long so it will take a bit of effort to find the panels of interest.

Panels of interest, you ask? Why yes, there are two on science fiction, kicking off their Future Friday programme. See here. Because this is a proper literary festival, it doesn’t turn its nose up at the likes of Nalo Hopkinson and Karen Lord just because of what they write.

That, however, is not what I want to talk about. Because this year Bocas did more than showcase science fiction, it published an anthology. Reclaim, Restore, Return was produced in collaboration with the Caribbean Futures Institute, and you can download the ebook for free here.

The book is edited by Karen Lord and Tobias Buckell, and it features the usual big names in Caribbean SF, plus some new folks I was not aware of. There are six stories altogether, plus a poem and an introduction by Lord. The general theme of the book is a positive future for the Caribbean, and that’s a challenging thing to do given the threats posed by sea level rise, an increase in hurricanes, the loss of tourist revenue due to COVID-19 and so on. Nevertheless, the team does a fine job.

I was particularly struck by how many of the stories featured queer characters of various sorts. Hopkinson’s story, “Repatriation”, features a mindboggling scientific idea for rebuilding reefs. But I think my favourite was the Lord/Buckell collaboration, “The Mighty Slinger”. It uses near-future settlement of the solar system as a metaphor, so that the wrecked homeland the characters long for is planet Earth. It centres on a Calypso band with a political message, with echoes of both Bob Marley and Jean Michel Jarre. On the literary side there are nods to The Forever War and Al Reynolds’ Chasm City. I will definitely include it next time I get to do a Music in Science Fiction panel at a convention.

Did I mention that the book is free? Go ye forth and download.

book cover
Title: Reclaim, Restore, Return
By: Karen Lord & Tobias Buckell
Publisher: Caribbean Futures Institute
Purchase links:
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Shadow in the Empire of Light

023, Book Review, Jane Routley

Declaration of interest here: Jane Routley is a dear friend from my days living in Melbourne. I reviewed several of her books in Emerald City. She rather fell off the radar for a while, but she’s recently signed up with top British agent, John Jarrold, and she has a new book out from Solaris.

Shadow in the Empire of Light will, I guess, be characterised as fantasy comedy Regency romance, but it is actually quite a bit more than that. The world in which it is set does seem to have some connection to Regency England, but the existence of magic has made a significant difference to society. Inheritance of magical talent is genetic, which helps the nobility keep control. But not every child will be a mage, so noble families are very much split between those who have the talent and those who do not. Also magic is much stronger in women than in men, so the society of the Empire of Light is a matriarchy.

Our heroine, Shine, is a minor member of the Imperial Family. She has no magical talent, but she is quite smart and does a good job running her family estates while her magically talented relations are off in the capital conspiring against each other. She is good at managing the peasantry (mainly because she respects rather than despises them). And she also has to worry about her poor Aunt Effulgentia.

Explaining that issue requires delving a bit more into Empire society. Yes, it is a matriarchy, which is good for women. One of the advantages that brings is that women are allowed to enjoy sex, and pick and choose their partners. This provides for some fun, though if you happen to be allergic to sex scenes you might want to avoid this book. However, matriarchy, coupled with the genetic nature of magical talent, brings with it a focus on reproduction. And that means that Empire society is horribly homophobic.

Aunt Effulgentia’s problem is that her only son, Bright, is in disgrace due to being gay. He’s supposedly banished to some frontier military outpost, but we are coming up to Blessing, the main religious festival of the Empire year, and he has risked a visit home. He knows he’ll get a welcome from cousin Shine, and he figures he can be away again long before the rest of the family arrives from the capital.

One of the reasons that Bright is making a visit is that he has a fugitive with him: a ghost. Ghosts are people from the cold lands to the south (Routley is Australian, remember). They are called ghosts because they have pale skin and hair, quite unlike the healthy brown skin of the people of the Empire. This chap is called Shadow, so although Shine is our heroine, this book is about him.

Why is Bright brining this fugitive foreigner into potential danger? Well you will have to read the book to find out, but it does set us up for a fair amount of comedy with people hiding in cupboards and under beds. Also ghosts are very prudish about sex. Silly people.

Of course the ghosts speak a different language. Shadow is quite competent at the language of the Empire, but he’s useless when it comes to colloquialisms. That leads him to say things like, “My excrement was almost scared out of me.”

The other main comedy element is Shine’s pet, whom she has given the imaginative name of Katti. Like felines everywhere, Katti is fierce when need be, but otherwise entirely out for herself.

Why do you speak with her when I am here? Thought Katti, purring imperiously and nudging the back of my head again. I require food.

Yes, Shine is in telepathic contact with Katti. And yet she has no magical talent. This is not explained.

Inevitably Shine gets herself into all sorts of trouble. Most of her relatives seem to be utterly awful people. Along the way we learn much more about her world, and there is plenty left unexplained for sequels. Hopefully there are some on the way.

I should note that the Empire is not intended to represent any real-world civilisation. Rather it is poking fun at British attitudes to race by making the arrogant nobility non-white. In a similar fashion, a society that we might expect to be very prudish is shown to be anything but. Routley neatly deconstructs Regency romance in all sorts of ways.

I very much enjoyed this book. Hopefully some of you will too.

book cover
Title: Shadow in the Empire of Light
By: Jane Routley
Publisher: Solaris
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Drowned Country

023, Book Review, Emily Tesh

When I read Silver in the Wood I was a bit thrown by an apparent change in the book. It started off as a serious and spooky woodland-based fantasy, and then morphed into a gay romance set against a background of a Victorian-era monster hunter story. With The Drowned Country I knew exactly what to expect, and enjoyed the book a lot more as a result.

If you haven’t read Silver in the Wood, you might want to look away now, as it is hard to talk about the sequel without dropping clues to what happened in the first book.

Having become the Guardian of Greenhollow Wood, Henry Silver has settled into a life of indolence. What else is there to do with his seemingly endless life? Also he is sulking, because Tobias Finch has gone off with Henry’s monster-hunting mother to help her rid the world of evil. How desperately dull, right?

Oh dear, Henry. Fortunately salvation is at hand, in the form of a visit from his mother. Adela Silver has a particularly complex case. A young woman has been abducted by a vampire. She and Tobias need help. Would Henry kindly agree to provide it?

Things don’t go entirely as planned. Indeed, it would be fair to say that they don’t go at all as planned. Unless, of course, Mrs. Silver had some cunning scheme of her own to get Henry back on his feet.

Mostly, I think, Tesh is just having fun. That’s fine. However, she did an interesting interview for Breaking the Glass Slipper in which she talked a bit about how Henry and Tobias differed in their approach to acquiring magical power. The two novellas are as much a character study as anything else.

Personally I’d quite like a book about Adela Silver, Monster Hunter. But then again I’d also like to see Tesh do something that uses her Classicist background, because she certainly understands Greek goddesses.

book cover
Title: The Drowned Country
By: Emily Tesh
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Flash Gordon at 40

023, Movie Review

With the dominance of Marvel, and to a lesser extent DC, in modern cinema, it is easy to forget that these are by no means the only comic book characters to have made it to the big screen. Johnny Weissmuller is by far the most famous actor to portray Tarzan, but he was only the 6th man to do so. However, in terms of entertainment for kids, Universal’s serialised adventures of Flash Gordon, starring Buster Crabbe, were by far the biggest superhero stories of their day. And because this was before we had a TV in every home, kids would go to the cinema to watch them.

After WWII, Flash Gordon disappeared from our screens, but he was not forgotten. A young man called George Lucas was keen to make a Flash Gordon movie, but he couldn’t afford the rights so he made his own space adventure instead. It did quite well.

Meanwhile, hot-shot producer, Dino De Laurentiis, decided that he would make a Flash Gordon film. De Laurentiis has made a large number of very successful movies, some of them widely acclaimed. But he also made Barbarella, which might have given people a clue as to what his Flash Gordon would be like.

It might not have happened that way. De Laurentiis had originally hired Nick Roeg, fresh from his triumph with The Man Who Fell to Earth, to helm the film. Quite a bit of work was done on Roeg’s version of the film. But the producer and director had a falling out, and responsibility for direction was passed to Mike Hodges, previously famous of making thrillers with Michael Caine.

Forty years on, it is hard to imagine how anything quite so bonkers as Flash Gordon might have been made. In these days of CGI, it is possible to create space opera that doesn’t rely on camp to cover up the paucity of the special effects. Of course the Wachowski sisters tried to have their cake and eat it. When I first saw Jupiter Ascending I was struck by how Caine’s final scenes when he has his wings back reminded me of Pygar the Angel from Barbarella. But the wedding scene in Jupiter Ascending was probably intended to hark back to the climax of Flash Gordon. The Wachowskis know their movie history well.

I picked up the 40th Anniversary edition of Flash Gordon because I wanted to watch the extras. Much of what I said above was informed by them. They also include a couple of episodes of a Flash cartoon series. (Flash and Dale have a pet baby dragon called Gremlin, who knew?) But I think they will be most of interest if you happen to be a Brian Blessed fan. He even gets to do a commentary track for the film. Naturally he is rather more interested in the character of Prince Vultan than in Flash.

One of the things I was surprised to discover was quite how much of the film was improvised by the cast. That American Football based fight scene in Ming’s palace, for example. Blessed also claims credit for improvising various iconic moments, and advising other actors on theirs. Of course that might just be Vultan talking.

Having re-watched the film a couple of times, I have to admit that my favourite characters are Klytus and Kala. Ming just a sad old man who happens to be Ruler of the Galaxy. Klytus and Kala have to work hard at being evil. Though it is great to see Timothy Dalton channelling Errol Flynn.

Oh, and there’s the music. The film would probably have become a cult classic anyway, but that iconic Queen soundtrack sealed the deal.

Editorial – September 2020

023, Editorial

We are a bit thin this month. There are a couple of novels that I wanted to include here, but did not manage to finish in time. Next month, promise.

Part of the problem is that I have been reading for work. One of the things about running a publishing company is that people send you books. If you like them you can’t review them, but you can get to publish them, which is even better. Interesting things may be forthcoming from Wizard’s Tower in 2021.

The other thing that has been eating my time is that work is picking up. I have even done an in-person (socially distanced) training course, but most of the demand is for online and that has required a lot of learning and some radical re-structuring of the material.

October promises to be full of conventions. We have Eurocon, Octocon, FIYAHcon and World Fantasy, though I expect the October issue to come out before the latter. Hopefully I will get to see some of you at at least one of them.

Issue #22

Issues

Issue #22This is the August 2020 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: Black Panther: The cover for issue #22 features Cheryl's favorite superhero

  • Unconquerable Sun: A review of the first book of Kate Elliott's new space opera, Unconquerable Sun

  • Harrow the Ninth: A review of book 2 in Tamsyn Muir's Locked Tomb Trilogy, Harrow the Ninth.

  • Lovecraft Country: As Lovecraft Country takes over our screens, Cheryl looks back on the original novel.

  • Worldcon – Wellington: It was the first virtual Worldcon. What does that mean for the future of the convention?

  • NASFiC – Columbus: There was an unexpected virtual NASFiC. What did they learn from Worldcon?

  • The Space Between Worlds: A review of The Space Between Worlds, a very promising science fiction debut by Micaiah Johnson

  • Selkie Summer: A review of Ken MacLeod's contemporary fantasy novella, Selkie Summer

  • Supergirl Season 5: In the latest season, Supergirl has a whole bunch of enemies to overcome, and a very real threat beats her.

  • Editorial – August 2020: Cheryl reflects on the loss of Chadwick Boseman and the significance of the character, Black Panther.

Cover: Black Panther

022, Art

Cover: Black PantherFor this issue’s cover I wanted to pay tribute to the late Chadwick Boseman. That meant searching the internet for re-usable pictures of Black Panther. The image I settled on is by Omar Al Farooq Pn. You can find the original here. Omar also has a page on ArtStation. He’s a professional graphic designer living in India.



Here’s the full image:

Black Panther

Unconquerable Sun

022, Book Review, Kate Elliott

Unconquerable SunSo, a book that is basically a gender-swapped Alexander the Great Space Opera. Do you think that might appeal to someone who writes Amazons in Space stories? If you do then you would be entirely correct. To quote KJ Charles’ legendary comment about The Green Man’s Heir, it is so far up my street that it could be my house.

The danger with such a thing, of course, is that it might not be what I expect. I did wonder whether I would sit there taking notes about bits of historical nonsense that threw me out of the story. I need not have worried. Kate Elliott knows what she is doing. Unconquerable Sun is far enough (by several millennia and innumerable light years) from the source material for such things not to matter. The book is inspired by Alexander, but does not pretend to be a re-run of history.

Let’s see what it does take from history first. The Republic of Chaonia is a small interstellar state which, despite its name is ruled over by a Queen-Marshal. It is bordered by two much larger states, the Phene Empire and the Yele League. All of these states are fragments of what was a much larger galactic empire which fractured after the collapse of parts of the beacon network, the wormhole system that permits rapid interstellar travel. Although the inhabitants of these systems are apparently descended from humans, a great deal of genetic engineering has been done by the Phene and, for reasons best known to themselves, they now have four arms.

The Phene, then, are the Persians. They are fabulously rich and scientifically advanced. They love art. But they are perhaps too slow moving to cope with their smaller, more agile rivals. The Yele are the Delian League, an alliance of Greek city states cobbled together by the Athenians to keep the Persians at bay after the invasion by Xerxes had been decisively repulsed. As if to reinforce the point, a Chaonian character is at one point given to exclaim, “Never trust a Yele bearing gifts.”

But it isn’t that simple. The Phene have a religion reminiscent of Byzantium, including churches called Basilica. And they speak Latin, or at least some of them do. At one point a minor Phene character exclaims, “Alea iacta est.” I look forward to the unconquerable Sun pitting her military brains against a Phene general called Belisarius.

As for the Chaonians, their historical analogue occupied a part of Greece known as Epirus. It is in the north-west of the country, just south of modern Albania. I suspect that Elliott may have chosen it in order to avoid the troublesome name, Macedonia. The Chaonians don’t have a great military history, but their near neighbours in Epirus, the Molossians, once waged war on the Roman Republic. They were led by a chap called King Pyrrhus, who gave his name to the concept of a military victory so costly for your own side that it was perhaps not worth winning. Alexander’s mother, Olympias, was the daughter of a Molossian king.

In any case this is all moot because we are in a space opera. The founding queen-marshal of Chaonia was called Inanna and she adopted an eight-pointed star as her badge. Did I punch the air when I read that? Of course I did.

The story opens with Sun still a young woman. She is the only heir of queen-marshal Eirene. However, her father, Prince João, comes from a small and mysterious people known as Gatoi who are genetically engineered to be superior warriors. João is a Portuguese name, and gato means cat in both Spanish and Portuguese. Because Sun is not pure-blood Chaonian, the various noble houses keep plotting to supplant her with one of their own, and this forms the backdrop to much of the plot.

Like Alexander, Sun has a group of loyal Companions whom she has known through her childhood. Unlike Alexander, these are not all warriors. And they all have cee-cees – companion’s companions – who also have useful abilities. James is an expert hacker, and his cee-cee, Isis, owns a pet pteranodon that she has trained as a scout. The Handsome Alika is what D&D players will immediately recognise as a Bard, and whose job on the team is to mastermind Sun’s social media presence, particularly though a popular talent show called Idol Faire. His cee-cee, Candace, is a pilot and also an expert with war fans (the Japanese practice of tessenjutsu, as made famous in Avatar: the Last Airbender).

Because conflict is the seed of story, much of the plot also revolves around the introduction of a new Companion. Persephone Lee is the daughter of the powerful House Lee, which runs the Chaonian secret service. Perse’s elder sister, Ereshkigal, is a celebrated war hero who gave her life for the Republic. Her aunt, Moira, is a skilled political operator and a former Companion of the queen-marshal. Perse is referred to in chapter heading as “the Wily Persephone”, but it soon becomes clear that this reflects her self-image more than her actual capacity for cunning. She makes a charming foil for the ridiculously competent Sun.

Naturally, because of the setting, space battles also play a major part in the narrative. This is military science fiction, thought I doubt that any of the dudebros who love such things would accept it as such given the prevalence of women in the narrative.

There’s also a lot of court politics, and a certain amount of teenage angst, especially from Persephone. The world-building is mainly political and military, but every so often we get something charming.

The landscape beyond is grass and scrub. A herd of styracosaurus graze in the distance, mixed with a herd of dwarf diplodocus and several handsome nodosaur of the kind ridden by bold knights in the days of the Celestial Empire.

Yep, that original human galactic empire? Probably run by the Chinese. Everyone seems to eat Asian food. But fear not, white bros, the classic tunes that Alika plays are written by British and American artists.

Because this is space opera, we expect something off the wall as well. We get that in the form of a group of Phene agents called Riders. They are Phene who are born with two personalities, one of whom has a secondary face on the back of the head. All of these secondary personalities are in constant telepathic contact with each other, which is very useful in a military context where combat can be spread across multiple star systems. Also decidedly creepy.

There is an awful lot to this book, in fact a lot more than I have let on, and it is very much part 1 of a series. Sun isn’t even queen-marshal by the end of it. I have no complaints on that score. This is a 500+ page book that I devoured in a day and a half because I couldn’t put it down.

Next book now please? Also Bagoas.

book cover
Title: Unconquerable Sun
By: Kate Elliott
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Harrow the Ninth

022, Book Review, Tamsyn Muir

Harrow the NinthIt appears that the Emperor’s plan has worked. Of the eight necromancers who came to Canaan House, two have succeeded in ascending to Lyctorhood. They are Ianthe Tridentarius, and of course Harrowhark Nonagesimus, who is the central character of this book. Now the two young Lyctors are ready to join their remaining elder colleagues in the great war that the Emperor is waging against, well, something. They have a lot to learn before being plunged into battle.

Unfortunately something has gone wrong. In Harrow’s case the Lyctor process appears to have been incomplete. Part of her is missing. What’s more, we see regular flashbacks to her time in training at Canaan House. Having read Gideon the Ninth, we know those flashbacks are false memories. The people who die, and the way in which they die, are very different. And someone very important is missing.

The mystery of what has gone wrong with Harrow’s mind, and why, is one of the central themes of the book. Another is the worldbuilding. In Gideon, save for some inter-planetary travel and a few shuttles, we saw little of the outside world. It was easy to pretend that these books were fantasies about necromancers and swordsmen. In Harrow the Ninth we leave the Solar System and get to see more of the audacious universe that Tamsyn Muir has created. Simply put, these books are a space opera in which the primary technology is necromancy.

How does that work, exactly? Well we have already seen Harrow in action, creating servants from fragments of bone. But that’s all very fantasy. What about space travel? Well, there has to be a means of faster-than-light travel, and in Muir’s universe that is achieved by dropping your craft into The River, that vast stream of nothing in which dead souls go to wander. Naturally you are at extreme danger of attack by angry ghosts, so you need good necromantic protection, but once there you can travel very quickly indeed.

Mad? Yes, of course it is. The whole series is mad. Harrow is mad, which is unsurprising given the awful upbringing that she had. And a few other people might well be mad as well.

I mentioned earlier that Harrow and Ianthe get to join the remaining members of the Lyctor corps. Several of them are dead, but three remain and like, the Emperor, Necrolord Prime, King of the Nine Renewals, Giver of Resurrection, His Celestial Kindness, King Undying, God and so on and so forth (also known as John), they have been alive for ten thousand years.

Imagine, if you will, a superhero team. Say, the Avengers. They have come together to fight evil, or at least an extra-terrestrial threat. They have been doing this for some time, and over the years their relationships with each other have undergone changes. They have fallen out, fought against each other, had affairs, got married, broken up, left the team in a huff and so on.

The Avengers, however have only been going for around 50 years (subjective time, far less in comic time). Imagine what sort of conflicts might arise in a superhero team that has been around for ten thousand years, whose members cannot die, and all of whom owe their undyingness to their leader. What grudges might they hold against each other? What patient and convoluted plans for revenge might they be hatching?

You may not be surprised that many of the chapters of this book are dated in the form, “X Months before the Emperor is Murdered.” You may need reminding that if God dies, so does the Sun, and all nine planets that orbit it.

Oh, and there is the small matter of the war. There are monsters in the darkness of space. Some of them are capable of laying waste to planets, eating planets if you will. They have servants, which are known as Heralds. Of course they are. They don’t have surfboards, though.

I think that mostly covers it, though there are things I have left out because you need to discover them for yourselves. By the end of the book you will know a lot more about the deep history of Muir’s universe, and the more recent history of one Gideon Nav. There is one more book to come, and it will be very different again. It will probably be even more space opera-like than this one, but there will also be lots of bones.

Which leaves us, of course, with the elephant in the room. One the one hand, Gideon the Ninth was a sort of lesbian love story. On the other, the relationship between Gideon and Harrow was so horribly dysfunctional that it would take an entire legion of therapists to sort out. Instead Muir has dumped poor Harrow in the company of a small bunch of people who might be even less sane than she is. And threatened her with imminent, hideous death.

The point is that just about everyone in this book is a deeply damaged person. They are going to do awful things to each other. Presumably we are to hope for redemption and resolution by the end of book 3. That won’t be easy to achieve. But there is one small ray of hope on the horizon. If I might be permitted one small spoiler, my favourite character from book 1, Camilla Hect, is still alive and looks like playing a major role in book 3.

book cover
Title: Harrow the Ninth
By: Tamsyn Muir
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Lovecraft Country

022, Book Review, Matt Ruff

Lovecraft CountryAs I write this issue, the TV series is only two episodes old. It seems to be going down very well, despite the obvious drawback that trying to depict Unspeakable Horror on a TV screen is going to end up looking silly. But inevitably few of the people commenting on it (including some writing reviews in paying venues) have any idea that it is based on a novel.

Matt Ruff’s book of the same name came out in 2016 and was on my Hugo ballot for that year. From what I have seen on Twitter, Ruff has done the sensible thing and turned his creation over the Misha Green to do with what she will. She appears to have changed some names (and I regret the loss of the Dorothy Dandridge reference), and dropped Caleb entirely, but book to screen always involves changes. Green and Ruff seem to be on good terms, which is good to know.

I suspect that there might be a bit of surprise in some quarters when people discover that the original book was written by a white guy. White people have certainly tried to cash in on parts of the story. The movie Green Book has come in for a fair amount of criticism from Black Americans. Lovecraft Country did it first, and did it better.

However, the original credit should not go to Misha Green, or to Matt Ruff. At NASFiC I was on a panel with Eileen Gunn who edited one of the first online fiction magazines, The Infinite Matrix. At some point (I’m not sure if we were live at the time) Gunn commented that Ruff got the idea for Lovecraft Country from an essay in The Infinite Matrix. It was called “Shame”, and it was written by a Black woman called Pam Noles. It doesn’t mention Lovecraft, but it is absolutely about the relationship of Black people with the whiteness of science fiction. You can read it here.

Ruff gets a credit on the TV series. Noles, of course, does not. But both of their contributions are in danger of being forgotten.

History lesson over. Here is my original review of Matt’s book. I note that it was written 4 years ago when life for Black people in the USA was quite a bit safer than it is now.

There are some books that sound like an accident waiting to happen. A Cthulhu Mythos book told from the point of view of a black family from Chicago, written by a white man, seems very much in that vein. And yet it was written by Matt Ruff, who has made a career of tackling very difficult subjects. His 9/11 book, The Mirage, for example, is seen mostly from a Muslim point of view. Lavie Tidhar’s Osama might have been a somewhat better book — it certainly won more awards — but I can’t fault Matt for bravery and for trying. At a time when Lionel Shriver is making an idiot of herself whining about having to worry about cultural appropriation, Matt shows just what a good job you can do if you put your mind to it.

Well, at least I think he does. I too am, after all, a white person from a nominally Christian country. My knowledge of Islamic culture, and of African-American culture, is doubtless far more limited than Matt’s because he has done the research here and I haven’t. My research has been limited to trying to find out what actual African-Americans think of Lovecraft Country. Tor.com very sensibly asked one to write their review, and she loved the book. Charlie Jane Anders has also praised the book, and she has much more day-to-day contact with African-Americans than I do (and I expect her to have asked them, because she’s good like that). Besides, the book has been out for a while, and if it was problematic I am pretty sure that the Internet would have fallen on Matt’s head by now.

But enough of the skirting around the subject, what is the book actually about?

Well, Lovecraft Country is a tale of the Turner family who live in Chicago in the 1950s. We first meet Atticus, recently demobbed from service in Korea. Later we encounter his father, Montrose; his uncle George who runs a travel business catering to middle class black people who want to be able to travel the USA in safety; Aunt Hippolyta who wanted to be an astronomer; and cousin Horace who is a budding comics creator. We also meet two very resourceful sisters, Letitia and Ruby Dandridge. Janelle Monáe fans will know where that last name comes from.

Back in time, Atticus’s grandmother was a slave owned by the Braithwhite family of Massachusetts. Mr. Braithwhite had an interest in the eldritch arts. Because slave owners do what slave owners do with female slaves, the young lady ended up pregnant. But because wannabe sorcerers do what wannabe sorcerers do, Mr. Braithwhite came to sticky end and our heroine was able to escape to freedom.

Blood, however, is important stuff in magic. Just as one drop of black blood can mark someone out as a lesser being in the eyes of racist Americans, so the considerably more than one drop of Braithwhite blood that the Turners possess marks them out as persons of importance, and even power. As far as Braithwhite’s white descendants are concerned, there is only one thing to do:

Montrose nodded: “He’s going to summon up one of the Elder Klansmen. A host of shiggoths too, probably. And you’re the sacrifice.”

“I’m glad you are feeling good enough to joke about it, Pop.”

Without giving too much away, Atticus manages to escape the horrible fate that Samuel Braithwhite had planned for him. However, Braithwhite’s son, Caleb, proves a much more wily and resourceful adversary. The book proceeds through a succession of short narratives in which various members of the Turner clan have encounters with various cultists and eldritch horrors. The whole thing comes over as a re-telling of a Call of Cthulhu campaign in which the Turners and their friends are the player characters.

In a review in the LA Review of Books Justin Bortnick complains that Lovecraft Country has none of the feel of eldritch horror that a true Cthulhu Mythos tale should have. But Bortnick has completely missed the point. Firstly, this being a Call of Cthulhu campaign, the Turners and Dandridges are able to bring their science fiction fan knowledge to bear on the problems that they face. And they are science fiction fans. Atticus and Montrose are voracious readers. Hippolyta wants to be an astronomer. And Horace is writing a comic series about a kick ass space heroine called Orithyia Blue. One of the things you learn when playing Call of Cthulhu is that the whole set-up is inherently ridiculous.

Much more importantly, however, there is very much a sense of horror that pervades the book. That horror is provided, not by tentacled beings from beyond the stars, but by the very real racism that our heroes face. Those of us who are decent, empathetic people are already horrified enough by the victimization that black people face in America today. Without any disrespect to the Black Lives Matter movement, which is extremely important, it is an eye opener to discover just how much worse things were back then.

Here Matt’s research skills come to the fore (or possibly those of his wife, Lisa, who is a Queen of the Internet). Lovecraft Country is laced through with example after example of the horrors faced by black families in 1950s America. It is mindboggling. I have some idea of what they had to go through because as a trans person I have experienced a world in which people can fire you from jobs, refuse you access to hotels, shops, housing and hospitals, and so on, just because of who you are. But I certainly haven’t had to face the daily threat of (police-sanctioned) violence that the heroes of Lovecaft Country have to put up with.

Talking of trans issues, there’s a section of the book in which Caleb Braithwhite attempts to recruit Ruby Dandridge to his cause by providing her with a magic potion that turns her into a white woman. Ruby calls herself Hillary while so disguised. Here’s a brief extract in which other white people have been talking to Hillary about their disdain for black people.

It was nothing Ruby hadn’t heard, or overheard, a million times before. But there was a difference between having people talk about you, or at you, and having them talk to you, believing you were one of them and expecting you to think as they did. It took a significant effort on Hillary’s part not to give herself away, and to extricate herself from the conversation without telling the one sort of lie Ruby considered unpardonable—silence, in the face of some things, being damning enough.

This is very much what it is like being a trans woman prior to transition. Some men say the most appalling things about women when they think we are not listening, and they expect all other men to agree with them (and suspect you of being gay if you don’t). Well done Matt on thinking of highlighting that.

There are other ways in which Matt throws research into the book without ever seeming to infodump. For example, the Braithwhites live in a part of Massachusetts called Devon County. The original settlers came from a small town in North Devon called Bideford. Matt never explains that this is the town that the Roanoke colonists came from. He just assumes that if we know we’ll smile knowingly, which of course I did.

Then there are lovely exchanges like this one between Caleb and Ruby:

“You want to be the Al Capone of warlocks.”

“More like the Frank Costello, if we’re going with a Mafia analogy,” Braithwhite said.

“Abbot or Costello, I don’t care,” said Ruby.

Caleb Braithwhite is, in some ways, the most fascinating character in the book. Unlike his father, and most of the other occultists in the book, he’s not an out-and-out racist. He doesn’t want a return to slavery. He thinks that black people can be quite useful as employees. Provided, of course, that they know their place and are capable of taking orders from their betters. He probably thinks of himself as a good ally.

Yes, Caleb Braithwhite is the character that Matt has put in there for white people to identify with if they can’t stomach the thought of identifying with a black person. His ultimate fate is therefore quite important to how successful the book is. No spoilers, and anyway it isn’t my place to judge. But, like I said, the Internet has not yet fallen on Matt’s head, so I think he’s got it right.

book cover
Title: Lovecraft Country
By: Matt Ruff
Publisher: Picador
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Worldcon – Wellington

022, Convention Report

Worldcon - WellingtonIt all seems so very long ago now. That’s one of the disadvantages of having a monthly publication. If you hit the wrong point in the cycle, everyone else has had their say before you. Of course I did have my say on my blog. You can find my thoughts on the Hugo Award Ceremony fiasco here, and some more general thoughts on why such things happen here. And if you are a serious drama junkie then Cora Buhlert has an enormous round-up of reactions to the Hugo Ceremony here.

Mostly the whole affair has convinced me that WSFS has to change, and change quickly (well, as quickly as it can), because it simply cannot go on being run by volunteers who are expected to behave as if they are full-time professional staff. Every Worldcon has drama behind the scenes. Every Worldcon has staff who mess things up, sometimes by accident, sometimes though being overloaded, sometimes through ignorance, and sometimes through malice. But it is always WSFS and Worldcon that gets blamed when things go wrong because it is assumed that there must be a “Them” who are in charge, are probably making a fortune from being in charge, and who ought to have done better.

One thing that struck me this year is the claim that WSFS is an oligarchy. The assumption was that because you have to pay to be a member and to vote in the Hugos and Site Selection, then rich people were in charge. But that’s not how it works at all. WSFS is an oligarchy, but where the money comes in is being able to travel to Worldcon every year, paying a fortune in air fares and hotel bills, so that you can participate in running the event and sit in the damned Business Meeting for hours on end. Also, to get to run a Worldcon, you have to win a bid. To my knowledge, no one has ever won a bid by throwing money at Site Selection, buying memberships for people who will vote the way you want. But in order to win a bid you have to spend an absolute fortune on travel to other conventions to promote the bid. And that is how people who have money end up in charge.

So WSFS needs to change. It needs to stop being a game for those people who can afford to go to Worldcon every year. But change may also happen in other ways, because the current situation with international politics and the pandemic is making in-person events less feasible, and virtual ones more popular. So I’m going to spend the rest of this report talking about how CoNZealand managed the virtual side of the convention.

The thing that became immediately obvious from attending CoNZealand was that it was using a whole bunch of software systems cobbled together. That wasn’t their fault. A good software platform for an event the size of Worldcon simply doesn’t exist. We haven’t needed it up until now. I’m sure that a whole bunch of companies are working hard on developing new features for their platforms, but right now we are stuck with jerry-built systems.

Most obviously, CoNZealand was using Grenadine for scheduling programming, as Worldcons have been doing for many years now. It was using Zoom to deliver the actual programme items. It was using Discord for the social side of the convention. It had to integrate with The Fantasy Network for streaming and archiving the programme. I understand that Jitsi was being used to provide the chat functions for the Dealers’ Room. There may have been other systems involved as well. Any experienced software developer will tell you that this is a nightmare waiting to happen, especially if you want seamless, one-time log-in across all platforms.

One of the interesting things about the convention was numbers. It became clear that the number of people with attending memberships was greater than the number of people who registered online as attending, and that in turn was greater than the number of people who registered for Discord. This was being held up as an example of how the convention had “failed”. The truth turned out to be much more complicated.

I asked on Twitter for people who had memberships and did not log in to various parts of the con why they had done so. The responses can be found here:

There’s rather a lot, so here are some of the key points.

A number of people had bought memberships but do not find virtual cons appealing, or were put off by time zone differences, or got overwhelmed by work, but did not seek refunds. There were also quite a few people living in multi-member households who only needed one login as they were only watching programme (and indeed may have only have one device with which to participate).

Of those who did register for the convention, some simply (I think mainly writers) did their panels and that was it. Quite a few had trouble logging in, and I suspect a lot of that was due to the quality of the instructions which I felt were woeful. Even Kevin and I had trouble understanding them at times. But other people, having seen complaints from other people about the log-in process on social media, decided not to bother.

Some people simply don’t like Discord. I can see why. It is like having the opportunity to talk to everyone at the convention at once. The amount of chat can be overwhelming, and if discussion about a panel gets going the flow of messages can ramp up very quickly indeed. (This was more obvious at WisCon which has far less programming.) Because the Dealers’ Room used a different chat system, some Dealers didn’t bother with Discord.

To some extent this parallels in-person events. There are people who attend Worldcon who never go to programming, who never go to parties, who have to spend almost the entire con in the Dealers’ Room, and so on. We didn’t see this before because we had little means of measuring it. Now we can measure it easily, so as well as thinking about how we can make better use of platforms we should take the opportunity to better understand the various ways in which people like to (or have to) experience the convention.

This being Worldcon, which is volunteer run, it is important to understand the staffing requirements of virtual conventions. Each programme item needs someone on hand to manage the chat and audience questions. The moderator can’t do that as well as run the panel. Each programme item probably also needs a tech person on hand to deal with any issues that might arise. And these people can’t be expected to be on duty all day. That’s a lot of staff you need to find. At an in-person convention one programme-ops person can generally manage several rooms at once.

Discord also needs a lot of staff. It needs people to set up and manage the tech and user-experience side of it. But more importantly it needs people to answer questions and to moderate the chat. Just like with any other form of social media, rows can blow up very quickly. With a large convention you need several people constantly prowling the Discord channels making sure that nothing terrible is going on. Moderating social media is a difficult and stressful job, so finding these people will be hard.

Capacity is also a major issue for online events. CoNZealand was fine most of the time, but the major events had serious capacity issues which resulted in several different streams being made available for the Hugo Award Ceremony so that if one was running slow you could always try a different one.

It may not be obvious, but Discord also has capacity issues. There is a limit on the number of channels. It would have been great if each programme item could have had its own channel, but CoNZealand chose to allocate one channel per user support ticket for internal use, and that restricted their ability to provide more channels.

With any software system, people will have objections of various sorts. In my experience, Zoom is the best meeting/webinar platform. I’ve had works meetings via Microsoft Teams and Google Meetups, and I prefer Zoom to either of them. WisCon used Jitsi for political reasons – it is an open-source, community-owned system and that suited their ethos better than any commercial product. Sadly its performance was very poor.

Zoom has also been subject to a number of complaints about security and privacy. This was partly their own fault, and partly a result of bigger software companies leveraging their contacts in the media to amplify scare stories. However, one of the effects of this is that many organisations have outlawed the use of Zoom. This is why Mercedes Lackey and Larry Dixon were unable to participate in Zoom sessions. Larry’s job didn’t allow him to have in his home.

Which brings us to another issue. Virtual conventions are critically dependent on the IT skills and equipment that programme participants have. Some people can’t manage the tech, but more importantly many people still don’t have a good enough internet connection to participate in online video. In some cases that is a permanent situation, and in others it may be temporary. Your connection might be fine most of the time, but if you partner gets called into an urgent work meeting when you are supposed to be in a panel, suddenly you may have problems.

Virtual conventions, then, are not easy, but some parts of the convention experience translate to online better than others. What works, and what doesn’t?

Panels seem to be fine. It is a bit weird being on one in that you can’t see the audience, but they can see you, and they can interact with you. There are a whole bunch of questions as to how best to manage that interaction, but the audience generally seems happy.

Dealers’ Rooms, on the other hand, don’t seem to work at all. The good thing for dealers is that they don’t have to pay a fortune to attend the con and ship their wares. But do the sell anything? I suspect not. I certainly haven’t bought anything at any of the online events I have attended, or even felt inspired to browse tables. I’ll have more to report after Eurocon where I will have a table.

Art shows are also a bit lack-lustre. Flat art looks OK, but anything 3D is at a disadvantage. I generally don’t buy at convention art shows. I have no wall space left. I’d be interested to know how people who do buy feel about the online version.

I’m generally even less interested in exhibit spaces. CoNZealand appear to have tried hard to make theirs interesting, including having a sort of VR space which allowed you to walk around the exhibits, dealers and at show, but it seemed very clunky. Maybe we need to wait for the technology to catch up.

The Masquerade at CoNZealand was very sparse. I gather that was in part because they were very late getting the regulations out, and making a good video takes time. But I suspect that a lot of costumers would be unhappy at the thought that their work was only judged on what it looked like on screen. The approach of the entries varied a lot. Some were short and dull, some where long and cringe-worthy. Amanda Arthur-Struss tried to do something creative with video, and Kat Clay chose to try to show off the workmanship. Little Annabel Pryor as Captain Janeway was delightful. The rest were a bit meh for various reasons.

Hall costumes were, of course, non-existent. And despite some creative ideas by the Discord team, badges also didn’t work well.

Parties were handled through Zoom and were OK. They are much cheaper to run when you don’t have to provide food and drink. I ran one for Wizard’s Tower and was very pleased. Special thanks are due to Kristin Seibert, the Party Maven, who was unfailingly helpful and enthusiastic throughout.

Other aspects of socialising did not work as well. You don’t meet people in corridors in Discord. You can’t go off for a quiet chat because everyone can see what you are saying and anyone can butt in. You can’t go out for dinner.

One big disadvantage that CoNZealand had was that it is on the far side of the globe from Europe, which mean that most of the programming was in the middle of the night for European fans. In theory a virtual convention could run 24/7, but you’d need staff around the world to do that. So a group of European fans got together to provide something in our time zone. The result was CoNZealand Fringe.

I got involved with this, mainly because the people doing it had a lot of experience of streaming. I wanted to learn how they did it. As it turned out, the system they used, StreamYard, seemed to provide a better solution than what CoNZeland was using. I liked the way it handled comments, and it seemed to stream seamlessly to YouTube. There was one instance where a panel was attacked by right-wing trolls and it took longer to get things back under control than it should, but that was because people were unfamiliar with the tools available, not because those tools did not exist. If I do any streaming in future, I will definitely use StreamYard to do it.

I was very pleased with the panel on Sensitivity Reading that I put together for Fringe. Other panels seemed to have been well received as well. And they are all still available to watch.

For some reason Mike Glyer has got his knickers in a twist about the existence of Fringe. I can’t understand it myself. If the CoNZealand senior management, or the WSFS Mark Protection Committee, had been concerned about what it was doing, I’m sure I would have been told. Sadly these days fandom seems obsessed with the idea of throwing law suits around. Perhaps people enjoy watching the drama. But there’s no point in suing people if there’s no real damage, and doing so is ridiculously expensive.

So where do we go from here? Virtual conventions do seem to be something of a success. They certainly allow a whole lot of people who, for a variety of reasons, would be unable to attend in person, to take part in the con. This surely has to be a good thing. I count myself in the group of people who can only attend virtually, as the next three Worldcons are likely to be in the USA, a country I am not allowed to enter.

Clearly there are technical issues, but we are learning all the time. I’ll be trying to an eye on the various issues in the coming months. The more we can pool experiences the better. My review of this year’s NASFiC includes comments on what I think they did better.

Of course no one has any idea whether COVID-19 will still be a problem come next August. And there is a non-negligible possibility that the USA will be in the middle of a civil war by then. Consequently both DisCon III and ChiCon 8 are at least considering the need to run a hybrid event, if not a full-blown virtual one. That’s good to know.

What they are not doing, as far as I can see, is considering the effect of this on membership. A hybrid convention has to offer an online-only membership, and people who have such memberships should be able to offer to be part of the online programming. Hopefully they will work that out over the coming months.

NASFiC – Columbus

022, Convention Report

NASFiC - ColumbusLockdown happened in sufficient time for this year’s NASFiC to be cancelled. However, perhaps as a result of the success of CoNZealand’s virtual programming, the committee decided at the last minute to try something virtual. It was all a bit of a rush, but it worked fairly well.

To me one of the most interesting things about the NASFiC was the different atmosphere. In theory a NASFiC is an official WSFS event. However, despite being thrown together in a hurry on a shoestring, it didn’t attract any of the opprobrium directed at CoNZealand. Of course it helped that it was free to attend, so no one felt that they’d been sold something substandard. But there was no suggestion that They should have done better.

I was on three programme items at NASFiC. One on how experience of more than one culture affects your writing; one on running SF&F organisations; and one on the effect of the pandemic on publishing. I moderated the first and third. They all went very well, so thanks to my fellow panellists for that.

The recordings of all the panels will eventually be available on the convention’s YouTube channel. However, editing video takes time and only a few are currently available. In the meantime the raw streams are available here.

There were several significant innovations that NASFiC made compared to Worldcon. Firstly each programme room had two separate hosting streams. Panellists were invited to get online half an hour before the panel was due to start. This gave plenty of time to sort out any technical issues, and gave the same experience of having the pre-panel discussion in the Green Room. I thought it worked very well.

Somewhat less effective was a system called Titan which allows embedding of a Discord channel in a website. In theory this allowed the audience to watch the panel and the associated Discord chat, and to comment directly in Discord. Each panel had a moderator on hand whose job it was to spot interesting comments from Discord and paste them into the Zoom chat, which was invisible to the audience. That replicated some of the good features of StreamYard (which has both public and private chat windows). Sadly the embedding system wasn’t very robust, but I’m sure it will get better.

Another innovation that NASFiC made was on show in the Friday night party. I missed it because it started at midnight my time. Kevin was present says he liked it, but that other people did not. It used a system called Gather Town which is a simulated mixing space. It looks like an old-fashioned video game, but you can customise the gather space, and you can only interact with people that you are physically close to in that space. This makes it feel much more like a real party.

The downside for NASFiC is that Gather Town is expensive for large numbers. You can have a free event with up to 50 people, but beyond that it gets expensive quickly. Consequently they only used it once early on. However, it occurs to me that for future conventions individual party hosts could arrange for their own Gather Town spaces and make those available to the con. A limit of 50 on an individual party doesn’t seem too bad (and some publishers may be willing to pay for more).

Finally kudos again is due to Kristin Seibert who, for NASFiC, organised a scavenger hunt on Discord. A number of kitten icons were spread about the various channels. If you spotted on and clicked on it that would open up the channel for that kitten, and each on had a task for you to complete. I didn’t have the time to complete the game, but quite a few people seemed to have done so, and lots of people enjoyed playing it. It does require a bunch of Discord channels to run, but it looks like a thing that other conventions could do, provided that they can find someone as creative and enthusiastic as Kristin to run it.

The Space Between Worlds

022, Book Review, Micaiah Johnson

The Space Between WorldsThis one was not on my radar at all, but I noticed a few people enthusing about it on social media and decided to give it a try. I’m very glad that I did.

The Space Between Worlds is a debut science fiction story by a Californian writer called Micaiah Johnson. It could, at a pinch, be described as being part of the current wave of lesbian time travel stories. It certainly features a dysfunctional lesbian relationship. However, the travel is not through time, but between worlds in the multiverse. Strictly speaking, it is much more in conversation with the Ted Chiang novella, “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom”.

The story is set in a fairly near future Earth on which Adam Bosch of the Eldridge Institute has discovered a way to travel between worlds in the multiverse. You can only move between worlds that are fairly closely related (so no going to a world where Rome never fell, or dinosaurs still exist), but there is a snag. You can only travel to worlds in which you do not exist. If you arrive in a world in which another version of yourself is alive, you will die.

Our heroine, Cara, is a “traverser”, one of the people employed by Eldridge to travel between worlds to study them, and occasionally steal from them. She has the job because few of the 382 accessible worlds contain a local Cara. While Eldridge has its offices in a wealthy futuristic city called Wiley, Cara comes from a slum settlement called Ashtown that exists in the desert outside Wiley City. Her mother is a sex worker and drug addict. On most Earths she hasn’t lived to adulthood. As she notes, this makes her a rare resource that Eldridge finds valuable.

The book is in part a meditation on nature and nurture. While many of the characters have versions of themselves in multiple worlds, they are by no means identical. Someone who is a ruthless gang leader in one world can be a thoughtful politician in another. Someone who is a lesbian in one world can be violently homophobic in another. Much of how someone turns out is dependent on choices made in youth, accidents of fate, and upbringing.

Where biology comes in is that each version of you in every world looks pretty much the same. I’ll leave you to put two and two together here.

The other main theme of the book is privilege. Cara knows that coming from Ashtown she will never be seen as an equal by the Wiley City folks, no matter how much of a well-paid job she has. In many ways she’s right, but her knowing this also makes her very prickly and difficult to get on with, which doesn’t help. It is a position I can sympathise with. The stark contrast between the wealth (and social safety net) in Wiley City, and the poverty and violence of Ashtown, plays out in many other ways in the book.

I note also that the madam of the brothel where Cara’s mother worked, who is an important political figure in Ashtown, is a genderqueer person called Exlee. They are a fairly minor character, but very welcome nonetheless.

I think by the end I didn’t care enough about Cara to be invested in the outcome, but other people clearly love the book, and I can’t help but admire the ingenuity of it all. It is great to see such an interesting debut science fiction novel. I will look forward to seeing what Johnson does next.

book cover
Title: The Space Between Worlds
By: Micaiah Johnson
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Selkie Summer

022, Book Review, Ken MacLeod

Selkie SummerThis is another one of the novellas being published by Ian Whates’ NewCon Press. It is something of a departure for Ken MacLeod. He’s mostly known for writing highly political science fiction. What is he doing writing a love story about selkies?

We can start with the biography. MacLeod was born on Stornoway in the Western Isles. He’s very familiar with island life, and the small town atmosphere that such a closed and isolated environment engenders. Having spent quite a bit of time on Scilly, I recognise much of what he’s writing about.

Next, this is an environment story. On the face of it, the world of Selkie Summer is something like that of Juliet McKenna’s Green Man books. The existence of supernatural beings such as selkies and kelpies is a matter of fact. Except for McKenna it is a little-known secret, whereas for MacLeod it is public knowledge. These non-human creatures don’t only exist, they can talk to us, and sometimes vent their feelings.

For example, the kelpies have put paid to the idea of hydroelectric power messing up their beloved rivers. They weren’t going to stand for it. And this the electricity company that in our world is know as “The Hydro” is known to the cast of Selkie Summer as “The Nuclear”. (MacLeod as a thing about nuclear power being a solution to environmental issues, as readers of The Sky Road will remember.)

As for the selkies, well, they live in the sea, and that means that just like whales they get upset about the sound pollution produced by human shipping. In the case of those living off the west coast of Scotland, that includes the activities of the British nuclear submarine fleet based at Faslane down near Glasgow. They also get upset about bridges, which is why the Skye road bridge doesn’t exist in the world of the story and anyone wishing to visit the island has to do so the traditional way by ferry.

All this, however, is background. The main plot concerns young Siobhan Ross, a student from Glasgow University who takes a summer job as a cleaner in a guest house on Skye. Her workplace has an entertaining gang of supporting characters. There is Mairi the waitress who is into Death Metal, Gordon the chef who is the only gay on the island, and Mrs McIntyre the owner who is a formidable if apparently somewhat superstitious old dear. I rather wish that story had been longer and that Mairi and Gordon had been given more to do.

While on Skye, Siobhan meets and falls in love with a handsome selkie called Cal who works on the ferry. All of the islanders know he’s a selkie, and most of them warn her off him (though Mairi and Gordon are both mildly jealous). Siobhan, however, seems to have an affinity for selkies, which draws her deeper into their society, and ends up getting her in rather a lot of trouble.

Along the way, MacLeod can’t resist the opportunity to turn the story into a bit of a political thriller. It wouldn’t be a proper Ken MacLeod story otherwise.

However, the thing that kept poking at my consciousness while I was reading Selkie Summer is the connection to another story of an isolated coastal community that has contacts with an aquatic race of beings.

In “The Shadow Over Innsmouth” HP Lovecraft writes about how Robert Olmstead travels to a decrepit New England town that is close to the home of the bug-eyed fishmen known as Deep Ones. Like Siobhan Ross, Olmstead discovers that he has a particular affinity for sea-dwelling creatures. Everything else about the two stories goes in very different directions. I would therefore suggest that, though there is absolutely no mention of Cthulhu and his tentacled pals in Selkie Summer, the story is nevertheless part of the current wave of repurposing Lovecraftian ideas for the greater good.

All this in one little novella? Yes.

book cover
Title: Selkie Summer
By: Ken MacLeod
Publisher: NewCon Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Supergirl Season 5

022, TV Review

Supergirl Season 5This was not one of Supergirl’s best years. Following the intensely political season 4 was always going to be hard, and the season had other major problems to cope with, so I’m actually very relieved that it has been renewed for a 6th season.

One of the problems I had with the season is the way in which it upended a lot of fixtures at the end of season 4. This seems to be becoming a habit on the show. It would be nice to have a bit more continuity. Also I thought that Leviathan was a fairly weak major villain. They are a super villain group so supposedly powerful that you can’t quite work out why they don’t win easily.

I wasn’t convinced about the addition of Andrea Rojas to the show. We already have one very rich, morally compromised, genius businesswoman in the shape of Lena Luthor. We don’t need another one. I also thought that William Dey was a rather limp excuse of a love interest. Kara certainly doesn’t have the same chemistry with him as she does with Mon-El, though there are good reasons for that which I will get to.

On the upside, Dreamer is still a regular feature on the show. What’s more, half of one episode (“Reality Bytes”) was devoted to her hunting down a villain who is beating up trans women. Social media hatemongering was a feature of the episode. I was pleased to note that, in this universe at least, the L is still very much with the T. That episode will be on my Hugo ballot next year (though I don’t expect it has any chance of being a finalist).

Jon Cryer’s Lex Luthor is so delightfully self-centred and devious that the character actually makes sense to me for once. I’d never really understood Lex before. Now I do.

One of the biggest issues that the series had to deal with is having Crisis right in the middle of it. It must be really hard to craft a story arc when the whole multiverse is remade half way through. And where Lex’s public persona has changed from master criminal to a beloved philanthropist and hero overnight.

One episode is devoted entirely to explaining just how cunningly Lex has been manipulating things behind the scenes since Crisis finished. Because Kara has very little presence in that, Melissa Benoist took the opportunity to make her directorial debut. I thought she did pretty well.

The final villain that the show was unable to overcome was the pandemic. The season ends on a massive cliff-hanger, but only because filming got cut short by Lockdown. Some of the team were stuck at home in LA, others were stranded in Vancouver. It can’t have been much fun waiting to see if the show was going to be renewed, and the final episode(s) shot.

As it is, one of the crew has made the best of the hiatus. The start of season 6 will be delayed a little because Benoist is on maternity leave. I understand that the father is Chris Wood who plays Mon-El, which explains the whole romantic chemistry thing.

I gather that season 6 will begin some time in the middle of 2021, though when we will get it in the UK is another matter. I shall wait patiently.

Editorial – August 2020

022, Editorial

I was fully intending to use the art from Juliet McKenna’s The Green Man’s Silence for this issue’s cover. Then the news of Chadwick Boseman’s death broke and there was a last minute change of plans. I’ve been a fan of T’Challa since I was a teenager, a time when being a Black Panther meant something far more important than being a fictional superhero. In those days the character was written by a white guy called Don McGregor. He also created the character of Eric Killmonger, and was responsible for the first inter-racial kiss in mainstream comics. Having said that, Ryan Coogler’s movie makes T’Challa seem so much more like a real African superhero. That Boseman will not be available to reprise the role in the sequel is a tragedy.

The movie business will, of course, grind on. Kevin Feige & co. are doubtless still weighing their options. Like so much of their casting, the choice of Boseman to play T’Challa seemed perfect. I have no idea where they will go from here, but I have a lot of faith in their judgement.

I’d like to finish up with two things. Firstly the end credits scene from Black Panther in which T’Challa makes a speech at the UN which includes a very obvious dig and certain politicians: “In times of crisis, the wise build bridges, while the foolish build barriers.” And second a reminder that the very term, Black Panther, is a protest.


Black Panthers protest at the 1968 Olympics

Issue #21

Issues

This is the July 2020 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


Cover: Blue Night Sky

021, Art

This issues cover is another free piece of art from Pixabay. This one is called Blue Night Sky. It isn’t quite an image of the Southern Cross but it will have to do.

The artist is called coffee. You can find the original posting here.

Here’s the full version.

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

021, Book Review, M John Harrison

The term ‘Matter of Britain’ is usually applied to Arthurian literature. I suspect that M John Harrison would be horrified if he thought I had accused him of writing an Arthurian novel, and yet his latest novel, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, is very much about the matter of Britain.

Fortunately there is a connection. The land of Lyonesse is a sunken kingdom located between Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly. It features in the legend of Tristan and Iseult. Practically speaking, it is probably a memory of the fact that Scilly was mostly a single island as recently as Roman times, and that sea level rise has fractured it into many islands surrounding a shallow lagoon that can still be walked across at the lowest of tides. Fictionally it is much more mysterious. Here’s Tennyson in Idylls of the King.

Then rose the King and moved his host by night
And ever pushed Sir Mordred, league by league,
Back to the sunset bound of Lyonesse—
A land of old upheaven from the abyss
By fire, to sink into the abyss again;
Where fragments of forgotten peoples dwelt,
And the long mountains ended in a coast
Of ever-shifting sand, and far away
The phantom circle of a moaning sea.

Harrison takes his title from an essay by Charles Kingsley. He was also the author of The Water-Babies, a Victorian children’s novel which has a prominent role in Harrison’s book. In it a young chimney sweep called Tom falls into a river and is transformed into a ‘water-baby’, an underwater creature that may, through correct moral behaviour, earn the right to become human once more.

Kingsley intended to book to be a warning about the evils of child labour, and poverty in general. He also saw it as a defence of Darwin. However, it is what one might call a ‘book of its time’. It is chock full of racism of various sorts, and its understanding of evolution seems to come more from the popular press than science. Harrison, I think, uses it in part to represent Victorian Values, and the sort of obsession with human devolution that so poisons everything that Lovercraft wrote.

More of this later, but first I should say a bit about the story. There are two main characters, the first of whom is known primarily as Shaw, his last name. Late on in the book we discover that his first name might be Lee, but I don’t think he ever uses it. His mother, who is in a care home suffering from dementia, uses a succession of first names for him, all of which he angrily rejects as not being correct.

Shaw lives in South-West London in the region of Barnes and Mortlake. This is near where Harrison used to live. I once visited his home there to do an interview. Don’t be fooled by the references to White Hart Lane. This is not Tottenham. There is a road with the same name in Barnes running north from the A205 to the Thames.

Mort Lake, of course, would be Death Lake in an Arthurian novel.

As the novel opens, Shaw is having an on-off affair with a woman called Victoria. He is convinced that her last name is Nyman, but in the chapters that are from her viewpoint it is given as Norman. That disconnect is typical of their relationship. Both of them are so self-absorbed that they are unable to talk to each other about themselves, and consequently know nothing about each other. This makes them fairly typical Harrison characters.

Soon after the start of the book, Victoria leaves London for Shropshire where she has inherited a house in a small town from her deceased mother. Given its location on the Severn Gorge, the town sounds very much like Ironbridge, but Harrison never identifies it as such. He certainly knows the area as, when he left London, he took up residence somewhere in the Welsh Marches. I’ve not visited him and haven’t asked for an address.

I suspect that the town in the book is a construct intended to be like a Shropshire town but not a specific location. Certainly I can’t find a reference to a Geoffrey de Lacy who supposedly built the town’s castle. This surprised me because pretty much every Norman family had a Geoffrey somewhere in the family tree. The de Lacys were Marcher Lords, but their seat of power was further north around Ludlow than in the Severn Gorge.

Because Sandy Denny’s voice is unforgettable, I then wondered if there was any connection, but it turns out the that Fairport Convention song is actually about Bruce Lacey, who surely deserves a place in an M John Harrison novel if anyone does.

Shaw gets a job working for a strange man called Tim whose business appears to be entirely based on selling copies of his conspiracy theory book, Journeys of Our Genes, and running an associated website called The Water House. Tim’s theories revolve around weird ideas about human evolution and possible connections to fish-like beings. How this brings in enough money to pay Shaw a salary, let alone sufficient salary to allow him to rent the small room in London where he lives, is never explained. Perhaps that’s the point, because who knows where the money comes from to fund much of the conspiracy theory stuff that goes on online.

Meanwhile Victoria discovers that the town she has moved to has an Innsmouth-like vibe to it. Everyone seems to know everyone else, and we readers can see that there is a definite connection between these inbred people and the fish-people conspiracies being peddled by Tim. Neither Shaw nor Victoria ever summons up enough energy to try to understand what is going on. Victoria does email Shaw with regular messages about how strange her new life is becoming, but he never reads them.

All of this proceeds at a fairly glacial pace. This is not Light. There are no cosmic mysteries, one-shot-cultivar street gangs or white cat star fighters. It is Britain, and therefore just as damp, bleak and uninteresting as you might expect. Except for the possibility of fishmen. On the other hand, it is a Harrison novel, so you get descriptive passages like this:

Rain, blustering in from the Chiswick shore, had forced him to turn up his collar. Now it varnished the thin headstones, swirling into the north-east corner of the graveyard where a few trees clustered against the wall of the old Barnes fever hospital. His jeans were soaked.

Occasionally there are really specific references such as this:

…it had charged the air in the downstairs rooms so that her cushions and covers, though they remained dull and even a little grubby-looking, took on the pure painterly values and eerie depth of the objects on a Virago book cover in 1982.

My first thought was that Harrison was referring to work by Judith Clute, but her covers were for The Women’s Press and later in the 1980s. I think this is a reference to the cover of The Tidy House by Carolyn Steedman, which won the Fawcett Society Prize in 1983. Harrison’s book is full of references to various works of art.

Harrison is one of those writers who carries a notebook with him everywhere and jots down observations and snatches of conversation that he thinks might be useful one day. Here Shaw and Tim are on a train from London to Wolverhampton. Shaw overhears a couple talking in the seat behind him.

With a little inadvertent sigh of pleasure the woman said, ‘There must be some meaning to these clouds.’

I’m pretty sure that was taken from life. It also fits perfectly in with the conspiracy theory theme of the novel.

Have we got anywhere here? Are we any closer to understanding this book? Or are we, like Tim, writing down snippets of nonsense and extrapolating fantastical connections between them? Let’s try some theories for size.

Firstly this book is very much concerned with water. That’s hardly surprising. Water has always been a fact of life in the UK, but it is becoming much more so. One of the effects of climate change is an increase in seasonal flooding. Back in Arthurian times the Summer Country, or Somerset as it is now known, disappeared under the waves every winter, only to re-appear again in spring. These days the Isle of Avalon is finding itself surrounded by water again when the winter rains come.

A much stronger theme, however, is Brexit. Harrison admitted as much in an interview that he did with Gary Wolfe for The Coode Street Podcast a couple of weeks ago. Like Shaw and Victoria, many British people have spent the last few years sleepwalking through a world in which goggle-eyed, rubber-lipped fishmen (not mentioning Farage or Gove by name), backed up by professional conspiracy theorists with no obvious means of financial support, and inspired by crazed fanatics like Cummings, have slowly but surely taken over the country. We didn’t see it coming, and now it is too late. We have no option but to be submerged by the waves.

Sorry Britannia, the waves rule you now.

book cover
Title: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again
By: M John Harrison
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Mordew

021, Alex Pheby, Book Review

Welcome to the city of Mordew. It is approximately semi-circular in shape. The base is bounded by massive mountains riddled with mines. The arc is formed by the Sea Wall which prevents the city from being flooded. Within the Sea Wall are slums, populated by the city’s poorest, whose streets run with Living Mud in which all sorts of vile creatures may be found/created. Within them is the walled Merchant Quarter, and within that the domain of the aristocracy. Right in the centre, high on the city’s only hill and reachable only via the spiralling, jet black Glass Road, is the Manse of the Master of Mordew, whose sorcerous powers keep the entire city running, and subservient to his whims.

If you think that the geography of Mordew is a little far-fetched, I suggest that you check out the town of Jardim Do Mar on the island of Madeira which I suspect provided Alex Pheby with some inspiration for his fictional creation.

The plot of Mordew centres on Nathan Treeves, a thirteen-year-old boy living in the slums. His father is dying of an infestation of lungworms. His mother has taken to sex work to make ends meet. Nathan helps out as best he can, but there is little a young boy can do to earn money. His best option is to fish valuable creatures out of the Living Mud, which would be much easier if he could only use his peculiar talent, the Spark, which his father has expressly forbidden him from using.

What does the Master want with a crier? Well, a boy’s tears are a precious thing, you can use them in all sorts of ways: in potions, in tinctures, some say the Master uses them like a merchant uses salt – to give flavour to his food – but the truth is that when you weep, part of your soul goes away in the water, part of you, and the more you cry the more of you goes.

Yes, as you will have guessed, Nathan is a very special boy. By the end of Mordew you will have found out just how special. But there is a long way to go before then, and first we must follow a Dickensian tale of his life in the slums. We learn about the gang of street urchins run by the enterprising but cruel Gam Halliday. We learn about Prissy who has taken to a life of crime to save herself from a life in a brothel. We learn about Jerky Joes, who were once twins but whom some mysterious magic combined into a single body before they were born. And we learn about Mr. Padge, the vicious crime lord to whom Gam is beholden and who seems to know rather more about Nathan than one might expect.

All of this takes up roughly the first half of a 500+ page story. It is quite slow. But do please persevere, dear reader, because from then on things speed up exponentially until, by the end, the pace of events is positively breathless.

‘The Master’s house has many rooms, and some of these are kept separate from the others. If there are women, or girls, they must be kept separate because their effluvia can disrupt the magics that order this place, every part having its own function.’

Regular fantasy readers may, I suspect, become a little frustrated. Nathan has very little agency for most of the book. He is manipulated by his parents, by his friends, by the Master, and the Master’s sworn enemy, the Mistress of Malarkoi. It is not by any stretch of the imagination an appropriate coming of age for a thirteen-year-old boy, with the inevitable consequences. Mordew is not a happy book, and most of the people in it are ruthless and manipulative in one way or another.

What child – when surrounded by bullies, taunted and mocked and poked – no matter how weak, does not long for the strength to best their foes, to drive them weeping back to their hovels? What child would not kill their persecutors, if they were able to?

There is, I am fairly sure, a moral message in all of this. That is given away by a massive spoiler that you will find in the cover blurb, and probably the marketing material as well. Far below the Manse there is a vast cavern. In that cavern is a corpse. That corpse appears to provide much of the magical power that sustains the rule of the Master. Because that corpse belongs to someone that the world generally knows as God.

Quite how God came to be dead (murdered?) and His body stuck in a cavern under Mordew is not something we will learn from this book. Mordew is, in the finest fantasy tradition, merely the first book of a trilogy. But if you make it into the second half of the book you will, I think, want to keep reading. For starters there’s that corpse to explain. Then there are some subtle hints that Pheby drops about the location of his world. And finally there is a 100+ page glossary at the end, that you should probably not read before the book, but might read after it, and in which are further revelations about key characters that you will not have fully gleaned from the text.

Alex Pheby is not a fantasy writer. He teaches creative writing at the University of Greenwich and his previous novels include a study of schizophrenia and a story about the daughter of James Joyce. Mordew is published by Galley Beggar Press who are currently most famous for the Booker shortlisted Ducks, Newburyport. However, they are run by Sam Jordison whom I first met at a Clarke Award ceremony and who clearly knows his SF&F and well as his LitFic. Sam used to write reviews of LitFic books that might be of interest to SF&F readers for Salon Futura back when it was a professional venue.

Mordew, then, is not your usual fantasy fare. But it is a very interesting first step on what promises to be a fascinating trilogy. Sam kindly sent me this review copy, and I rather hope he’ll send me the subsequent volumes as well because I want to find out What Happens Next.

book cover
Title: Mordew
By: Alex Pheby
Publisher: Galley Beggar
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Empress of Salt and Fortune

021, Book Review, Nghi Vo

Well, here is a discovery. The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a novella by Nghi Vo. It is set in a fantasy world, but I’m going to have to use real-world analogies to give you the impression of it. I may well mess up horribly, for which I apologise in advance.

The action is set in the Empire of Anh, which is kind of China-like. The story is about the late Empress, In-yo, who hails from somewhere to the north where it is always cold and people fish for seals at ice-holes. So maybe we are talking about far-eastern China and southern Siberia. In-yo appears to have been a trophy bride for the late Emperor. She is recently dead, and her daughter has inherited the throne. That’s the political background.

The main character is Chih, a cleric from the order of the Singing Hills. Clerics appear to forsake gender when they join an order. Chih is accompanied by a talking hoopoe called Almost Brilliant. The hoopoe is a neixin, which is a Chinese word that the internet variously tells me might mean “innermost being” or “psychological drama”. The order of the Singing Hills specialises in collecting and recording history.

Chih and Almost Brilliant have journeyed to a place called Lake Scarlet, which has been “taken off every map and effectively disappeared by a highly dedicated and skilled imperial sorcerer.” There they meet an old woman called Rabbit who was once a trusted servant of the late Empress. In a series of short chapters, Rabbit tells Chih the story of her life, and in doing so reveals the secret history of the life of In-yo.

I can’t tell you much more about the plot, but I will say that there is some splendidly cunning espionage involved. The sort of thing that Francis Lymond would have been happy to have devised. By the end of the story, Chih will be in possession of a secret that could cost them their life.

I really loved this book, and I’m delighted to see that there will be more stories set in the same world.

book cover
Title: The Empress of Salt and Fortune
By: Nghi Vo
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Pre-Worldcon Report

021, Con Running

Wait, what? A Worldcon report already? It hasn’t even started yet. Well no, but social media has been full of outrage already, so I wanted to look at the issues raised.

I should start by saying that I don’t want anything here to be taken as criticism of CoNZealand. What they have had to do is unprecedented, and that they have produced a convention at all is remarkable. Hopefully, however, the pain that they, and indeed the rest of the world, has had to endure because of the pandemic will leave us with a huge amount of valuable new information about how to run an online convention.

One of the issues that people have been complaining about is that this year, yet again, some Hugo finalists were left off programming, or asked to be on programme items that they knew nothing about. How do we keep making the same mistake year after year?

The first thing I want to note is that CoNZealand has somewhat less programming that a normal Worldcon. That means it is harder to give everyone the programme slots that they want. Lots of people probably think that with an online convention you can have as much programming as you want, but I suspect that it isn’t as easy as it seems. I’m hoping that after CoNZealand we’ll have a good idea of how much it costs to run an online event that can cope with a Worldcon-sized audience, what the timelines are, and so on.

Something else that is worth noting is that, having been made aware of the issue, CoNZealand has done something bold and innovative. They have given free attending passes to all Hugo finalists, and allowed them to buy full Attending Memberships for the price of a Supporting Membership. You might think that every Worldcon should do this, but in the past it would have been fairly pointless. A free membership is of no use if you can’t afford the cost of travel and accommodation, which is much higher.

This provides an interesting challenge for future Worldcons, assuming that in-person events are possible. Should they continue this new “tradition”? If so, does that commit them to providing at least some programming online? I’d like to see them do that.

The main issue, however, is the perennial question of why the same mistakes happen year after year. Is there no continuity? Do people not learn from what went before? There are, of course, some people who work on Worldcon in some capacity every year. Not all of them continue to work in the same area though. Also, working on Worldcon every year is much easier when the convention simply moves around North America. Doing that when it moves around the world is much harder.

Another issue is that, while the people working at lower levels may be the same year-on-year, the senior management team is largely new each time. Those are the positions that the local people want. What they don’t want is to have a bunch of foreigners come in and tell them what to do.

What it comes down to, is that the competitive nature of the site selection process often results in the bid being won by a group of people who are then determined to show they world what they can do. They want to put on their sort of convention, not do things the same way that the Americans do them. And that leads to a lot of reinventing the wheel.

There are other factors that prevent us having as much continuity as we would like, and I will come back to them later, but we have arrived at the other major issue that people have been complaining about: Site Selection.

The main focus of the controversy is the existence of a bid from Saudi Arabia, a country which more than half of regular Worldcon attendees ought to be very nervous of visiting. The issue is compounded by the existence of a bid for China for 2023, the folding of the Nice bid (who have lost their venue) and the fact that everyone who is not an American is suddenly very frightened about traveling to that country too.

It is rather ironic that, after years of fandom yelling about how Worldcon needs to visit other countries around the world, they are now yelling, “but not those countries”. That, however, is in large part a result of how the world has become so much less safe since 9/11. When I was much younger we would probably have approached the Saudi and Chinese bids with an attitude of, “yeah, let’s go there, and help the local fans do something that will annoy their oppressive governments.” No one is taking that line now.

There is a fair amount of privilege on display by those complaining, because for many people Worldcon has been hard to attend for years. There are people like myself and Peter Watts who are banned from travel to the USA. There are people who have Muslim-sounding names who are terrified of going through immigration to Western countries (including the UK). A number of African fans who wanted to attend the Irish Worldcon were unable to get visas. And of course the majority of fans around the world simply cannot afford to attend Worldcon at all, sometimes even if it is in their country.

Mostly, however, the outrage results from people not understanding how WSFS works. They assume that because the Saudi and Chinese bids exist, that someone in WSFS has approved those bids as suitable venues.

There is a job called Site Selection Administrator. This year it is held by my long-time friend from Melbourne, Alan Stewart. Should he have disallowed the Saudi bid? There are reasons why he can do so, but those reasons are based purely in factual issues such as does the bid have a contract with a venue. They do not include judgements such as, “does the country have a good record on civil rights?”

Maybe such a condition should exist. We could write such a rule into the WSFS Constitution. But how would it work in practice? Prospective bids, I am sure, would claim that their countries did have a good record to civil rights, especially compared to the USA which has hosted the majority of Worldcons in the past. What is the Site Selection Administrator to do then?

A good example of this sort of issue in practice is the administration of the Hugo Awards. In the past fandom has yelled at Hugo Administrators too. In particular, a lot of people said that it was wrong to allow the Puppies onto the final ballot. Hugo Administrators said that was down to the voters, and if they didn’t like the finalists they could always vote No Award, which they duly did. Worldcon might have got much less of a pasting in social media and the press if the Hugo Administrators had disqualified the Puppies, but then again they might have gone running to the media complaining about “cancel culture” and “no-platforming”. We can’t know.

This, however, is not the first time that people yelled at Hugo Administrators that they should have disqualified someone. Ten years earlier there was also massive outrage about a Hugo finalist. That was me. Lots of fans said that Emerald City, because it was distributed electronically rather than on paper, was not a proper fanzine. The Hugo Administrators refused to listen to them and allowed me to be on the ballot. And in 2004 Emerald City won Best Fanzine. Years later some people were still complaining that a “mistake” had been made and that my Hugo should be retrospectively taken away.

Now you may say that that’s a trivial example and of course they should have let me on the ballot. That’s what any sensible person would have done. And yet I was blacklisted from programming at the 2004 Worldcon, because the head of programming deemed that I was not a worthy Hugo finalist. If you put people in positions of power, they may abuse that ability.

The simple fact is that Hugo Administrators are afraid to disqualify anyone from the ballot, because they feel that if they did then they would be the focus of a fannish flame war with people claiming that they had acted unfairly. It is much easier for people to say, “let the voters decide”. That way you are off the hook.

I think that the same thing would happen with Site Selection. Sure, we could introduce rules about whether a country is a suitable place to be allowed to host a Worldcon. But Site Selection Administrators would be terrified of using that power. They would much rather say, “let the voters decide”, which is what happens now anyway.

Now there is a procedural issue here to do with what happens if None of the Above wins Site Selection. I will come back to that later, but first I want to address why people don’t seem to understand the “let the voters decide” argument when it is applied to Site Selection.

These days people understand the role of being a Hugo voter. They pay for the right, but it isn’t much if you just buy a Supporting Membership and you get the Voter Packet in return. But many of them don’t see being a Hugo voter as being synonymous with being a WSFS member. When it comes to Site Selection, they also don’t see themselves as WSFS members. Sometimes they don’t even understand that the “Voting Fee” that they are being asked to pay will in fact give them Hugo voting rights at whichever convention wins – something that they might have been planning to buy anyway.

Worse still, in addition to not seeing themselves as part of WSFS, that WSFS is not “Us”, they also seem convinced that WSFS is “Them”. That is, large numbers of fans seem convinced that there must be some secretive Board of Directors of WSFS who could, if they wanted, fix all the problems than fandom is exercised about. That “They” seemingly refuse to Do Something is the cause of much fannish ire on social media. But how are They supposed to Do Something if they don’t exist?

So why do Worldcons not explain all of this properly? Why don’t they just institute an annual membership fee for WSFS and have done with it? At this point we have to cue the ominous music, because I am about to mention the Great Fannish Shibboleth.

They don’t do that because they are terrified of it leading to WSFS Inc.

Way back in the early days of fandom, before even old timers like Kevin and myself got involved, there was a huge debate as to whether WSFS should incorporate, have a Board of Directors and so on. This idea was hugely controversial. That was partly because in those days fandom was very much influenced by American Libertarianism, but also the few non-American fans didn’t want the Americans telling them what to do all the time. Remember what I said earlier about non-American Worldcons wanting to do things their own way? Yeah, that.

A corporation was actually formed in 1956 and started to take action, but in 1958, Anna Moffatt, the first woman to chair a Worldcon, presided over a Business Meeting that effectively dissolved it. There were numerous attempts to resurrect the idea over the decades, all of which came to nothing. If you are interested in this history, it is available here.

Kevin, who arrived in fandom at the tail end of all this, tells me that he thinks official WSFS policy is that the Society should incorporate, but not yet. If ever the issue is raised, old time fans who were around in the 70’s are liable to yell “to the barricades” and head to the Business Meeting.

I wrote a lot more about what WSFS can and can’t do, and why, last year.

So WSFS is, in effect, an anarchist cooperative. That is “anarchist” in the literal sense of having no leaders. The only way that important decisions get taken is by putting them to the membership. Like other anarchist societies, WSFS is vulnerable to being unduly influenced by those who have the time, willingness and resources to participate in its governance. This is very different from a representative democracy, in which ordinary citizens elect representatives to do the governing on their behalf.

However, times change. What worked in the 1950s and 1960s may not be applicable decades later. It seems to me that a lot of the issues that fans are currently complaining about might be fixable if WSFS had some sort of central control.

A lot of the problems that we have with Worldcon these days is that everything has to be done from scratch by the current Worldcon committee. You need a large group of local fans prepared to do the work, and once they have done it they probably won’t have the energy to do so again for around 10 years. This severely restricts the number of places that can host a Worldcon.

If we had some sort of central control then we might (and I say “might” because I know it isn’t easy) be able to make a large part of Worldcon something that we can drop in anywhere in the world. That would probably involve a substantial amount of online programming. It would also mean that things like the Hugos and other WSFS functions would all be handled centrally, that Hugo finalists would automatically get a free Supporting Membership, and so on.

In particular it would mean that the online Hugo voting process could be centralised and not reinvented from scratch each year as seems to happen at the moment.

Part of that would probably mean having paid staff. Probably not full-time, at least to begin with, but there would be some sort of compensation for people prepared to devote part of their time to doing the same job on Worldcon year after year. Obviously WSFS would need money to pay for that, but a substantial amount of online programming that was accessible to Supporting Members could significantly increase revenue. Having staff who owe their allegiance to WSFS rather than to an individual Worldcon would do a lot to help knowledge retention and discourage reinventing the wheel.

The fact that WSFS members could have access to online programming would also help with the issue of people being unable to travel to Worldcon for a variety of reasons, including visa, personal safety and expense. That would mean that there would be less of an issue about where Worldcon was held.

In addition, if a WSFS Board did exist, then it could be responsible for deciding whether a bid was suitable. Joint corporate responsibility is much safer than asking a single, named individual to make such a decision. In practice they would have to do a lot more scrutiny because they would need to know that the drop-in aspects of Worldcon would work. There could still be competition for Site Selection, but the process of getting on the ballot could be more rigorous.

Hopefully such a system would also drastically reduce the cost of bidding, because for years now this has been a major problem. Running a Worldcon is hard enough, without exhausting and beggaring your fan base on bidding before you can even get started.

There could be a commitment to moving around the world. I think it would be a good thing to have Worldcon in an Arab country, though obviously Saudi Arabia is not a good choice right now. I’d like to see Worldcon in Brazil, though perhaps not while Bolsonaro is in charge, and India, though perhaps not while Modi is in charge.

For me, however, the main benefit of having some sort of central organisation is that fandom would have much more of a sense of ownership of WSFS. They would understand that they were WSFS members, and they would see WSFS as “Us” rather than “Them”.

On the other hand, implementing this would not be easy. The arguments against WSFS Inc still have a lot of validity. We can see good and bad examples out in the world. SFWA, I think, has done an excellent job in becoming more democratic and responsive to the requirements of its members. It is also getting good at running an annual conference, though admittedly it only has to do it in within North America. World Fantasy, on the other hand, is a glaring example of how things can go very wrong when the organisation is controlled by a small number of people who tend to be very conservative and can’t easily be held to account.

Let’s return now to that question of what happens if none of the bids for a particular year is acceptable to fandom. Right now the decision would be left up to the Business Meeting. This strikes me as a recipe for disaster, because a small group of fans could potentially overrule the desires of a much larger group. But, if we had a core Worldcon that we could drop in anywhere, then in a year where no site is acceptable we could just run that as a purely virtual con, and not have to skip a year or choose an unsuitable site.

This would also provide a useful backup option if circumstances change in the two years between Site Selection and the convention. It used to be that we expected the world to carry on in much the same way for years to come, but right now I would not be surprised to see the UK descend into civil unrest before 2024 and the expected Glasgow Worldcon. Civil unrest in the USA has clearly already started.

Talking of the Business Meeting, I am well aware that changing the WSFS Constitution is a slow and painful process. But there are things that could be done without BM approval. DC and Chicago (because Chicago will win, despite all of the worries about the Saudi bid) could both commit to providing an online element to their programming. They could also commit to working together to create elements of the convention that could be passed on to successor conventions. I know that’s extra work, but if we want Worldcon to have a future it is work that needs to be done. If it doesn’t get done then I’m sure that fans will start organising online international conventions in competition to Worldcon. Or someone with money will step in and create a commercial event.

This, then, is only the start of the discussion. I want to fix the problems with Worldcon, but I believe that fundamental change is necessary, and we’ll never fix anything if the discussion around how to fix things only ever happens on social media for a few weeks a year around when Worldcon happens. (We were talking a lot about the potential problems of the China bid this time last year. Has everyone forgotten?) I certainly don’t have all the answers, and I’m sure that there will be things I have missed in this article.

So I’m writing this now, during Worldcon, in the hope that people will start discussing it at the convention (i.e. on Discord). I’m also hoping that other fanzines will take up the baton and offer their own ideas as to how to fix things (not just complain that things are broken and that “They” must fix them). Most importantly, we need discussion as to how such a version of WSFS would be governed, but that’s a job for Kevin, not me.

Scarlet Odyssey

021, Book Review, CT Rwizi

In a fantasy world, a young boy discovers that he has special powers, and that he may be destined to save his people. There are hints that he will play a vital part in world-shattering affairs. This is volume one. So far so predictable, right? Well not quite.

Scarlet Odyssey is a debut noel by CT Rwizi. He grew up in Swaziland and Zimbabwe. He went to college in the USA. And now he is back living in South Africa. This is not your average, white, European fantasy.

The story is set on a different world (two suns) in a society that is very African-influenced. Our hero, Musalodi (Salo to his friends) is from a small tribe who live on the Yerezi Plains. His people have a leopard totem, and their local rivals have a hyena totem. This is sufficient for me to fall in love with the book because leopard people are my people. That, however, is largely irrelevant to your likely enjoyment of it.

Although Salo’s people live a fairly simple life, they do have technology. They also have magic, though that too is very technological. Sorcerers talk about crafting the ‘prose’ of a spell in much the same way as programmers talk about code. Also there are ‘tronic beasts’ – “exotic machine-organic hybrids with metalloid features and mind stones inside their brains” as it says in the book.

Elsewhere in the world, there is more of what we would understand as a city-based civilisation. The great jungle metropolis of Yonte Saire is ruled over by the Saire people, who have an elephant totem and are famed, among other things, as bankers. We also learn of trade with a civilisation across the sea. We learn of rivalry between those who practice moon-based magic, and those who practice sun-based magic.

While we do get thrown headlong into the politics of this world in this volume, the greater global and perhaps even cosmic issues will have to wait until later books. Meanwhile we have our heroes to meet.

Salo’s big problem is that he wants to be a sorcerer, and among his people this is women’s work. He’s gay too, though you might not pick up on the clues in this book. I’m only certain of it because Rwizi has talked about it in some of the publicity for the book. This does not go down well with his father, the Chief, or with his younger half-brothers, or indeed with pretty much everyone in the village. Of course it is inevitable that it becomes necessary for him to use his powers, but it is an interesting backstory for the fantasy hero.

“A man’s strength is not in letters written on a page but in his knowledge of the soil and the rivers and the lakes. It’s in his herd of cattle and the sweat of laboring in the suns; it’s in the arm that wields the spear. Leave books to women; they are creatures of the mind. You are a man and must be a creature of the flesh.”

Salo gets sent on a mission away from home, for his own safety as much as anything else, and along the way he picks up companions. One of them is Ilapara, a Yerezi woman who is a warrior and therefore similarly outcast. Presumably she’ll turn out to be a lesbian. There’s also a fascinating character called Tuksaad who appears to be some sort of magical cyborg made by foreign sorcerers.

One of the things I like a lot about this book is that there is plenty of moral ambiguity. Salo tries hard to be good, but he has no understanding of the wider world and all too often his moral instincts only make things worse. Ilapara would rather an easy life as a bodyguard for some rich idiot, but she reluctantly gets sucked into Salo’s orbit. And then there’s The Maidservant, the evil sorceress who is the proximate cause of Salo’s banishment and who dogs his steps on the journey. Her story is just as interesting as that of Salo.

Which brings me to the title of the book. Sure, Salo goes on a journey, and he does come from the Redlands. He also uses moon magic, which is blood magic. But there is more of Homer to the book than those superficial comparisons. You see, blood magic requires sacrifice. The bigger the sacrifice, the more power you get. Agamemnon learned the hard way that making a huge sacrifice for a huge gain does not always turn out for the best. That same calculus runs all through Scarlet Odyssey, and makes it an interesting book.

My thanks to Rwizi’s agent, Julie Crisp, who thought I might like a copy of this book.

book cover
Title: Scarlet Odyssey
By: CT Rwizi
Publisher: 47 North
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders

021, Aliette de Bodard, Book Review

One of the most unlikely power couples in SF&F has emerged from Aliette de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series. He is Asmodeus, Fallen Angel, ruthless head of House Hawthorn, and known as the “stabby one” because he has never met a problem that he didn’t think couldn’t be solved by the judicious application of a sharp implement to soft flesh. And He is Thaun, dragon prince, hailing from an immigrant community of Vietnamese magical creatures living in the waters of the Siene, known as the “bookish one” because he never met a problem that he didn’t think couldn’t be solved by application of knowledge and talking things through over a nice cup of tea. Together, they fight crime.

Well, in this book they do. Thaun has invited Asmodeus beneath the waters to celebrate Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, with his dragon family. Unfortunately for Thaun, Second Aunt, or the Empress as she is known to the rest of the underwater kingdom, is not having a good time. There are rumblings of discontent in the Imperial Bureaucracy. Events in the city above have not been kind to those under the water. It has even been suggested that Her Imperial Highness has lost the Mandate of Heaven, meaning that she needs to be deposed for the good of the people. This leads to plotting, and plotting leads to murder.

Asmodeus is bored. Very bored. Until the murder happens. Murders are what Asmodeus likes best.

From here on in Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders is simply a murder mystery. Thaun and Asmodeus need to find out why it happened, and what cunning plot against the Empress the victim was killed to keep secret. It is a novella. There is no need for more plot than that.

Murder mysteries are dependent on two things: the actual mystery, and the characters involved in solving the crime. De Bodard is not Agatha Christie. You won’t find Asmodeus revealing the murderer to a locked room of suspects at the end of the book. He’d rather lock them all in separate rooms and torture them until someone confesses. But you will be very much entertained by the unlikely couple as they unravel the mystery. You’ll probably also learn quite a bit about Vietnamese culture along the way.

There’s not a lot more I can say about the book. It is quite short. Fans of the Dominion of the Fallen books will know exactly what to expect, and De Bodard delivers it expertly and elegantly. You just have to read and enjoy.

book cover
Title: Of Dragons, Feasts and Murders
By: Aliette de Bodard
Publisher: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Doom Patrol

021, TV Review

Some American superhero shows appear very quickly on British TV. Others suffer significant delays, or don’t get there at all. One of the prime factors affecting the appearance of a show is queer content. Batwoman, for example, took ages to get on British TV. Sky wouldn’t take it at all, and it finally ended up on E4 on a Sunday night, just before Naked Attraction, which appears to be a nude dating show. That’s because Kate Kane is a lesbian. The most actual sex I’ve seen in episodes I have watched before has been a bit of kissing in bed. Doom Patrol never made it to TV at all, for reasons which will become obvious, but it is now available on Amazon Prime and you should all watch it.

While the Doom Patrol first appeared in comics in the 1960s, the TV series appears to be based on Grant Morrison’s run on the post-Crisis revival of the comic. I haven’t read all of that, so I’m not well placed to say how different the characters and storylines are, but the inspiration is clearly there, including the characters of Crazy Jane and Danny the Street, whom Morrison invented.

Anyone coming to the TV series cold will probably assume that it is a piss-take of the X-Men. The team is lead by a wheel-chair-using older man, Doctor Niles Caulder, aka The Chief. All of the characters have powers that somehow prevent them from living among ordinary people. There is even a Brotherhood of Evil for them to fight. But a lot of this connects back to the original 1963 incarnation of the team, and there is some suspicion that Stan Lee got the idea for the X-Men from the Doom Patrol.

Unlike in the X-Men, the powers of the Doom Patrol are not immediately useful. Robotman (Cliff Steele) is simply a brain in an iron body. He’s strong, but even the original incarnation of Tony Stark’s Iron Man would take him apart in minutes. Elasti-Girl, Rita Farr, has a body that naturally dissolves into an amorphous blob of flesh. It takes all of her concentration just to force it into shape so that she can look like a human. Negative Man (Larry Trainor) has no powers at all. His body is swathed in bandages because of extreme all-over burns. But inside him lives a mysterious alien energy being that might be useful in a scrap if it wasn’t so angry with Larry. And then there is Crazy Jane, who has 64 different personalities. Some of them have superpowers, but who knows which one will have control of her body at any one time?

It should be noted also that none of the Doom Patrol members are exactly hero material. Cliff is an ex-racing driver and misogynist arsehole. Rita is a former Hollywood starlet and exactly as arrogant and manipulative as you might expect. Larry is a closeted gay man who led his wife and boyfriend a merry dance before the accident that made him Negative Man. And Jane, well, there are 64 of her, and some of them are really unpleasant. Even the seemingly cuddly Niles might be hiding a secret or two.

Into this mix, to give the team some actual fire-power, and some more ethnic diversity, the scriptwriters have added Cyborg (Vic Stone). He’s an actual member of the Titans in the comics, but he fits perfectly into the Doom Patrol being a somewhat upgraded version of Robotman and someone whose backstory involves accidentally killing his mother.

Of course it is exactly this mix of totally unsuitable characters that makes Doom Patrol such a good series. It is very much character-driven, and much of the arc of the first series involves the members of the team coming to terms with their lives. They are matched against an all-powerful villain called Mr Nobody who cunningly uses their own insecurities against them. Early on, Mr Nobody kidnaps The Chief, and the effectively leaderless team has a whole lot more issues to overcome before they can get their leader back.

Doom Patrol never remotely takes itself seriously. One of the adversaries the team takes on is The Beard Hunter, a man who gains knowledge and power by consuming the facial hair of his opponents. Cyborg is helpless against him once he’s found some of Vic’s hair, but of course he has no power over Rita. Many of the episodes have voice-over narration from Mr Nobody, who leaves us in no doubt how much he hates Niles, and how much contempt he has for our heroes. He has no qualms about talking to camera, and by the end the fourth wall is not so much broken, as lying in pieces at his feet.

The show certainly isn’t for kids. All of the characters, especially Jane, have harrowing backstories. There isn’t a lot of obvious sex and violence – nothing compared to Sense8, for example – but it does give a little pause for thought. At one point they use Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” for the soundtrack, which shows you just how depressed everyone has become. Larry’s background story obviously involves quite a bit of men kissing. But the thing that probably terrified the British TV executives is not explicit at all.

Danny the Street is a sentient high street from a small American town. They can teleport, so they can appear almost anywhere in the world. Sometimes we find them out in a field, sometimes in the middle of a real town. Because of this, Danny has become home to an extensive queer community seeking refuge from a world that hates them. One of the main businesses on Danny is Peeping Tom’s Perpetual Cabaret, hosted by the drag queen, Maura Lee Karupt. Danny themself is non-binary, and even contains a flagpole with the non-binary flag flying from it.

This is one area where the TV show has obviously updated the Morrison comic, because they have the terminology spot-on. I should note, however, that if the show runs long enough they will probably get to Rachel Pollack’s run on the comic and have to introduce Coagula, a trans woman superhero.

The other great enemy in the show is the Bureau of Normalcy, a secret government department dedicated to returning the world to the presumed holy status of straight, cis, white 1950s America. As you can imagine, agents of the Bureau have a particular loathing for Danny.

The other thing that the TV series has going for it is the cast. Timothy Dalton plays Niles Caulder with all of the Shakespearean gravitas you might expect. Brendan Fraser manages just the right mix of buffoonery and pathos as Cliff. And Diane Guerrero is simply brilliant as Jane, often having to completely change personality mid-scene. (There may be some TV trickery involved here, but in any case she has to play several distinct versions of Jane, not just one character.)

I am really annoyed that it took so long to get this show in the UK. I would have had it on my Hugo ballot both in BDP: Long Form for the series, and in BDP: Short Form for “Danny Patrol”, the episode that introduces both Danny and the Jane alter-ego who is a manipulative blonde called Karen. Thankfully Amazon have decided to make season two available on time, and if it is anywhere near as good as season one I will have it on my ballot next year.

Exhalation

021, Book Review, Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang collections are rare and beautiful things. They are rare, of course, because it can take Chiang a year or more to write a single story. But what stories they are. As such, Exhalation does not disappoint.

Wisely the publishers have chosen to name the collection after Chiang’s most famous story. “Story of Your Life” is, of course, hugely well known in its mutated form as the film, Arrival, but it is not the Chiang story that people remember. I have been in many panels and discussions on science fiction, and when Chiang’s name is mentioned it is almost always in connection with “Exhalation”. The story has clearly hit a nerve with the SF-reading audience. It also won a Hugo.

But then what Chiang story hasn’t? The collection also includes “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” and “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”, both of which are also Hugo winners and have a bunch of other awards. Two other stories, “Omphalos” and “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom” are finalists in this year’s Hugos. “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” was an unsuccessful finalist back in 2014. That leaves just three stories out of nine that have not been on a Hugo ballot. How many other collections (not by Chiang and not actual Hugo finalist anthologies) can boast such a table of contents?

I haven’t had a chance to read the whole thing yet, but I did read the two stories that are on the Hugo ballot and they are very much what we’d expect. “Omphalos” riffs off the idea of Young Earth Creationism. It takes as its starting point the idea that the creation of the Earth some 8000 years ago is scientifically provable. There are fossil trees that have no rings in their centre because they were created partially grown. There are mummies from Peru that have no navels because those people were not born. But what happens if a scientist makes a discovery that challenges this orthodoxy? The story is a great example of taking an off-the-wall idea and running with it.

As for “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom”, it is a parallel worlds story, but not the sort you might expect. The novum of the story is a device that allows communication with a parallel world that split off from ours as a result of one of two buttons on it being pressed. A decision has made, and the quantum universe has bifurcated. Chiang talks briefly of how these devices are being used by historians to try to get a better understanding of the processes of history, and Asimov might have run with that, but Chiang’s story is much more personal.

What Chiang realises is that if devices such as this exist, then unhappy people will be desperate to find windows into parallel worlds in which their lives might be different; worlds where a certain decision might not have been taken, or a certain accident did not happen. Such people are emotionally vulnerable, and therefore easy prey for the unscrupulous. Hence conflict, and hence story.

I am, as always, in awe of Chiang’s inventiveness, and of the singlemindedness with which he pursues his premises to their logical conclusions. If science fiction is really the literature of ideas, then the Ted Chiang story is its Platonic Form.

book cover
Title: Exhalation
By: Ted Chiang
Publisher: Picador
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Editorial – July 2020

021, Editorial

This issue is slightly earlier in the month than usual. That’s because I wanted it out in time for Worldcon, which has recently started.

It being Worldcon, there is a huge amount going on already. I’m struggling to keep up.

Of course I’m used to virtual cons by now. There are a whole lot of people struggling with the technology. I’m sure we will all learn a lot from this experience. At least I hope we do because, as I explain elsewhere in this issue, we really need to make a go of online conventions. Real world ones are getting too dangerous and/or difficult for too many people.

– Cheryl

Issue #20

Issues

This is the June 2020 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


Cover: The Swordsman’s Oath

020, Art

The Swordsman's OathFor this issue’s cover I have used the cover of Juliet McKenna’s The Swordsman’s Oath. It is the second of five books in the Tales of Einarinn series, all of which are available again as paperbacks after many years, and which are newly available as hardcovers to most readers.

The art is by Geoff Taylor who did the covers for all five books.

Here’s the full wraparound version.

Chosen Spirits

020, Book Review, Samit Basu

Chosen SpiritsA week or two ago there was a minor spat on Twitter about cyberpunk. I forget who was involved, but as I recall one side was calling for more modern and relevant cyberpunk, while the other was saying that cyberpunk was a dead genre based on an imagined future that no one believed in any more. I would like to suggest that both sides read the new novel from Samit Basu, Chosen Spirits.

There are many different ways to define cyberpunk, but one possible description might be a form of near future science fiction that looks at the effects of computer technology on society in a world that is dominated by corporations rather than governments. That is precisely what Chosen Spirits is. Usefully it is set in India, a country with a far greater rich/poor divide than the USA, and which has suffered from rampant corporate colonialism from the likes of the East India Company down to modern investment by American, Russian and Chinese corporations. One only has to remember the Bhopal disaster, or the Bangladesh sweatshops, to understand that South Asia is a place where corporations feel free to operate with minimum regulation in order to provide cheap goods to rich markets elsewhere.

Today’s news crisis is the discovery of an automated ship in the Indian Ocean swarming with East African climate change refugees, clinging onto the deckless craft like ants in the rain, preferring to risk incredible dangers to cross to unknown lands instead of being slaughtered by European vigilante pirate crews.

The star of our story is Bijoyini Roy, Joey to her friends. She is a Reality Controller, which basically means that she manages the future version of reality TV stars. Basu uses “Flows” rather than “Streams”, but these people are YouTube influencers with TV station budgets and support crews. Joey’s job is to produce the Flow of one of Delhi’s biggest stars, her university pal and ex-boyfriend, Indi. She’s very good at it, which is just as well because her naïve, middle-class left-wing parents have been completely unable to cope with how their world has changed from a nascent liberal democracy to a brutal, authoritarian regime where everything they say and do is liable to be spied upon. Joey, having grown up in this world, knows how to manage herself, and her charges, online. How to get away with just the right amount of social conscience that doesn’t cause her bosses to get an unwelcome call from someone with power and influence.

Joey can’t imagine what that must have been like, the freedom to criticise the powerful and corrupt in your own home. Nothing that had happened since – not the blasphemy laws in several states, not the mass de-citizenings, the voter-list erasures, the reeducation camps, the internet shutdowns, the news censors, the curfews, not even the scary stories of data-driven home invasions, not the missing person smart-scrolls on every lamp-post – had succeeded in convincing Romola or Avik that the world had really changed, that the present was not merely a passing aberration.

The world that Basu builds is not much extrapolated from our own, some of which is fortuitous as he must have written the novel before the pandemic hit. Meetings take place in Zoom-like environments, but everyone has sophisticated custom backdrops, and if they are very wealthy then custom AI that makes it look like they are listening intently but is actually matching their image and expressions to a pre-determined strategy.

The book is also very Indian. There are pushy parents who want you to make just the right marriage to move you up-caste. There is Hindu-Muslim rivalry. There are trains, and police whose brutality, if not sophisticated weaponry, make American police seem tame. Inevitably, there are monkeys. If you have seen Sense8 you will have some idea of what to expect.

There are internet trolls, of course, but Joey has software to screen them out. She also knows how to push the mob’s buttons. Growing a following for Indi is all part of the job. Most of the time it is easy to keep things under control. You just have to avoid major scandals such as, well, accusations of sexual harassment. Did I mention that this book is totally on point now?

Of course you can’t run operation like a Flowco without a lot of money. Much of it comes through sponsorship for product placement. It matters what Indi is seen wearing, what beer he drinks. Where he is seen going shopping. But there are other considerations as well. Shadowy oligarchs with billions in their pockets stalk the dark corridors of the corporate world. Sudden take-overs happen. Priorities change. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss except for the narrative he wants to push though the Flow.

Some of these oligarchs are simply interested in making money in the entertainment industry. Some of them, however, are pursuing much darker agendas, because their business models depend on exploiting the masses in new and interesting ways.

He doesn’t need to see her links to know what’s in them. He knows they’re about trafficking, mass abductions from refugee camps and villages, concentration camps and other things he’s spent his whole life avoiding conversation about. He knows they’re about perfect-child breeding projects using bodies from around the world, the birth outsourcing industries booming in post-law nations, organ-growth sweatshops, body farms, womb-renting factories, sex-slave training centres, cell-harvest centres, gene-testing prison camps. He knows humans will never go really obsolete, because there’ll always be uses for their bodies, right down to the last cell, there’ll always be people willing to use them.

The trouble with being famous is that you end up being useful to people you would much rather not be useful to. And let’s face it, if your job is manipulating people, aren’t you a monster already?

If it sounds gloomy, well it is. Tim Maughan’s Infinite Detail wasn’t a bundle of laughs either. Basu does his best to manufacture a hopeful ending. It kind of works, but then you get to the Acknowledgments.

At the time of writing this, Delhi and India are facing multiple crises, nearly all man-made, and however bleak Chosen Spirits might seem, the truth is that the real world will probably be much harsher: this book is set not in a dystopia, but in a best-case scenario.

This was written before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

So yes, it is gloomy, but we need science fiction like this. Our world is more interconnected than it has ever been. What happens in India today can easily happen in Europe and North America tomorrow. Indeed, some of it already is.

book cover
Title: Chosen Spirits
By: Samit Basu
Publisher: author
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Mexican Gothic

020, Book Review, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Mexican GothicMeet Noemí Taboada: party girl, fashionista, and one of the most eligible young women in Mexico City. Her father despairs of her flightiness, and her absurd ideas about going to university. How is that supposed to get you a husband? But Noemí doesn’t care. She’s young, she’s beautiful and she’s rich. The world is at her feet.

Besides, who wants to get married anyway? At least not yet. Look what happened to her dear cousin Catalina. OK, so Virgil Doyle was incredibly handsome in that moody sort of way, but now poor Catalina is living in some remote town in the south of Baja where the only parties that are ever likely to happen are when a goat has a new kid.

That Cata’s new life is even less sunshine and roses became clear when Noemí’s father received a letter. “… he is trying to poison me. […] They are cruel and unkind and they will not let me go. […] You must come for me, Noemí. You have to save me.” It sounds to Señor Taboada that Catalina has sunk into hysteria or some other sort of women’s illness, but the family honour is at stake and Cata has asked for Noemí, so Noemí must go. Besides, he can dangle a carrot that he knows the foolish girl won’t refuse.

It was the kind of thing she could imagine impressing her cousin: an old house atop a hill, with mist and moonlight, like an etching out of a Gothic novel. Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, those were Catalina’s sort of books. Moors and spiderwebs. Castles too, and wicked stepmothers who force princesses to eat poisoned apples, dark faeries cursing maidens and wizards who turn handsome lords into beasts. Noemí preferred to jump from party to party on a weekend and drive a convertible.

Of course, once we meet the Doyle family we can see how deeply suspicious they are. They are English for a start (despite the very Irish name). They were once rich but have fallen on hard times. Their three remaining servants are old and barely speak. And the head of the household is a gloomy, pale chap called Howard.

Old would have been an inaccurate word to describe him. He was ancient, his face gouged with wrinkles, a few sparse hairs stubbornly attached to his skull. He was very pale too, like an underground creature. A slug, perhaps. His veins contrasted with his pallor, thin, spidery lines of purple and blue.

A more obvious family of vampires would be hard to imagine. They even have a graveyard in the back garden. Except that they are living on top of a silver mine, on which their fortune is based. So sure, Mexican Gothic is exactly what it says in the title. It is also far more weird that you might expect.

One of the reasons that I love Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s work is that it is proudly and unashamedly Mexican. Noemí, for all her modern airs, has still been raised a Catholic. The herbalist woman in the town takes payment in cigarettes to donate to her patron saint. There is mention of Lotería cards. A writer who isn’t Mexican simply wouldn’t have done this as well.

The setting is also superb. El Triunfo is a real town in the Baja California Sur mountains, and it really did once have silver mines which shut down in the 1920s. The population these days is apparently a little over 300. It is just perfect for a Gothic horror story.

As well as telling a fun tale with a brave, but often inevitably clueless, heroine, Morena-Garcia has taken the opportunity to take a pop at some of the racist ideas popular at the time (and now creeping odiously back into fashion). Uncle Howard is a big fan of eugenics, and because Noemí has ambitions to study anthropology they have a lot of excuses to discuss such issues. There may even be reasons for Uncle Howard’s obsession. The politics is eased into the book neatly and cleverly.

There will, inevitably, be people who don’t like this book because the lead character isn’t a manly action hero, and the plot isn’t resolved with a firm punch to the jaw. The rest of us, however, should get plenty of enjoyment from it. Sure it is quite formulaic in some ways, but that’s the point. You can’t complain that a book is an obvious Gothic novel when it says on the cover that is exactly what you are going to get. If you are going to do that sort of thing, you need to do it well, and Moreno-Garcia definitely delivers.

This book was a freebie from Jo Fletcher books. They sent it to me because they know I have enjoyed Moreno-Garcia’s work in the past. I accepted it because I know Jo well enough to feel safe reviewing it honestly.

book cover
Title: Mexican Gothic
By: Silvia Moreo-Garcia
Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power – Seasons 4 & 5

020, TV Review

She-Ra and the Princesses of PowerIt took me a little while to get to the end of this series. I had hugely enjoyed the first three seasons, but got stuck in the middle of season 4. More about that later, but when I saw how happy everyone was with the fifth and final season I knew I had to watch it all through. I was not disappointed.

Those of you who were young when the original He-Man and She-Ra series aired (I was much too old) will remember that She-Ra defends the planet of Etheria from the evil Hordak and his, well, evil Horde. There is a theoretical connection in that Princess Adora, her non-magical identity, is the sister of Prince Adam, aka He-Man. However, the two series take place on different planets. Hordak was originally an ally of Skeletor who was betrayed by his boss and banished to Etheria.

The new series completely reboots this. We are still on Etheria, we still have Hordak and his Horde, but everything else is much more complicated and the supporting cast has changed out of all recognition.

For the first few seasons She-Ra is fighting against Hordak and the Horde as we expect. Characters from the original series such as Bow, Glimmer and Catra still exist, but are very different. In particular all of the main characters are quite clearly teenagers, whereas in the original series they were adults. One of the things I like about the series is the way that the characters are shown to be growing older as it progresses. That’s particularly clear with Glimmer between season 3 and season 4 after she becomes Queen of Etheria. The dude-bros who complained that the new She-Ra didn’t look sexy enough in the new series might be happier with what she grows into by the end.

All of the major princess characters in the new series are based on characters from the original series, but are significantly changed. In particular, while the original series was very much a battle of good against evil, the new series is full of moral complexity. We see that, for example, with Scorpia who is loyal to The Horde until their cruelty drives her away, and Entrapta who is loyal to whoever gives her the most interesting science project to work on. Even the witch, Shadow Weaver, is happy to work with the Rebellion when it suits her.

While the original series was mostly fantasy, the new series is a marvellous mix of fantasy and science fiction. The First Ones are re-cast as an alien race who came to Etheria determined to harness its magical energy for their benefit. Hordak is revealed to be merely a lost clone of Horde Prime who was abandoned on Etheria when it was moved into the shadow dimension of Despondos. The rest of the universe has been conquered by Horde Prime and his clone army. He is keen to find his way back to Etheria so that he can finish the job.

However, the main difference between the original series and the new one is that the new series has masses of queer content. Bow has gay dads (who are adorable librarians). Two of the minor princesses, Spinerella and Netossa, are a lesbian couple, and the whole series hinges on the relationship dynamic between Adora and Catra.

In the original series, Catra is simply the baddest of the bad girls working for The Horde. She is She-Ra’s principal antagonist. But the storyline also has Adora growing up as a member of the Horde until she escapes, joins the Rebellion, and becomes She-Ra. The new series shows us Adora and Catra growing up together as best friends. Adora is always the star student, Catra is always running foul of Shadow Weaver and getting punished. Fortunately for Catra, Adora is always there to pick up the pieces.

Adora rarely questions her own privilege, especially after she becomes the mightiest warrior on the planet. Catra is left with a burning desire to prove herself, and if the only way to show that she’s as good as Adora is to become Hordak’s chief lieutenant then so be it. Adora, of course, desperately wants to rescue her friend and redeem her. The last thing that Catra wants is for Adora to save her yet again.

Despite the constant warfare and rivalry, the affection between Adora and Catra is always evident throughout the series. That it should end with a kiss and them expressing undying love for each other was always inevitable. It was only a matter of how it would come to pass.

Actually I’d had a sneaking hope that the series might have ended with Kyle saving the universe by accident, but I don’t have space to explain what means so I’ll just have to leave it here for other She-Ra fans.

I should note that Adora and Catra are by no means the only happy couple by the end of the story. There are several others, some of which have been carefully set up by the scriptwriters. One in particular is integral to the plot. I’m not going to spoil that.

The queer content was also the one element that gave me pause during season 4. This introduced a character called Double Trouble who is a shape-shifter and a spy for the Horde. DT, as they are known, infiltrates the Rebellion and reports their plans back to Catra.

Gender on Etheria is a complicated thing. Queer relationships are common, and many of the characters are clearly not human. Catra, for example, has cat ears and a tail. Nevertheless, there do appear to be males and females, by which I mainly mean that there are characters with boobs and characters without boobs. Fans of the series have come up with all sorts of headcanon by which characters are secretly trans, but the only canonically trans character in the series is DT.

Given the moral complexity of the series, the fact that DT works for the Horde doesn’t make them Evil. They do it for the love of the job as much as anything else. By the end we get a brief glimpse of DT fighting against Horde Prime alongside everyone else. I should also note that DT is voiced by a non-binary person, which is excellent representation.

The problem I have with the character is that, in their natural form, DT is presented as a person-without-boobs, but in order to infiltrate the Rebellion they disguise themselves as a person-with-boobs, albeit quite a young one. This plays directly into the common trope of trans women being “deceivers” and dishonest.

Thankfully this did not end up being a major feature of the plot. DT is unmasked fairly quickly and there is nothing said about the method of the deception. But given how aware the scriptwriting team have been of queer issues, I’m sure they must have been aware of the problem and I’m wondering why they wrote DT as they did. Possibly the fact that DT gets to come back in one episode of season 5 playing a character who is basically Prince was an attempt to redress the balance.

One episode in season 5 is set on an alien planet that our heroes have to visit to get more fuel crystals for their spaceship. (Yes, obvious Star Trek reference. There’s a thing about having to fly through an asteroid field too.) There they meet up with the three Star Siblings who are fighting against Horde Prime. We only see them this once, but they were clearly introduced for a reason and I suspect that they will be central to the rumoured She-Ra film that is being hinted at on social media. I am so glad that we haven’t seen the last of these characters, or the creative team.

I could talk about this series for a very long time, but I don’t suppose that everyone is as obsessed with it as I am. What I will say is that the quality of the plotting is the best I have seen in any TV series in a very long time. I very much hope that season 5 makes it to the Hugo short list next year. Noelle Stevenson absolutely deserves a Hugo for this, and while I doubt that she’ll get one I at least want to see her name on that list.

Diversity Audit

020, Articles

Diversity AuditIn view of the new awareness of diversity issues prompted by white people finally taking the Black Lives Matter movement slightly seriously, I figured I ought to do a diversity audit of the books I have reviewed. First up, a few notes of explanation.

These numbers refer only to books that I have reviewed since the relaunch. They refer only to posts that are tagged “Book Review” (which means no comics, TV, etc.). They do include the few older pieces that I have ported over from Cheryl’s Mewsings.

There are currently 77 reviews.

Categories are inevitably complicated. I have probably undercounted in some of them because people are not necessarily open about their identities. There’s also the question of how to handle books with multiple authorship, which I’m still thinking about. Right now there’s only one. My choice of categories is not fixed in stone. I’m open to feedback on what people think it is important to monitor.

OK, time for some numbers. First up, gender.

Male 27%
Female 66%
Other 6%

I make no apologies for that. I see it as redressing the balance because so many high-profile review venues are male-heavy.

I note also that 23% of books reveiwed have some sort of queer theme to them, and 10% have a trans theme. These are higher than the percentages of queer (22%) and trans (8%) authors.

The percenatge of translations is only 5%. I’m not happy with that and want to do better in future.

As for ethnicity, here are some numbers.

White Anglo 64%
White Non-Anglo 6%
Black African 5%
Black Non-African 3%
Middle East 1%
South Asian 5%
East Asian 4%
LatinX 8%
Jewish 3%
Native American 1%

I have separated out non-Anglo white people to indicate those who would be classed as white but whose native language is not English. They are marginalised in a way that native English speakers are not. I have also separated out Black Africans from the wider Black diaspora because I know that it is important to some people (hi Nnedi).

I’m not proud of these numbers, but I’m not despondent either. In some ways I am restricted by what the publishing industry produces. But I do want to do better. My goal is to get the White Anglo percentage down to 50%. I’d also like to get the number of translations up. And as far as I know I don’t have any disabled writers in the list at all, which is clearly an issue.

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water

020, Book Review, Zen Cho

The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in WaterZen Cho has described The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water as fanfic for an imaginary 50-episode wuxia TV series. I know pretty much nothing about wuxia, but if this is what it is like then I’m in.

The novella tells the story of a group of outlaws who, much like Robin Hood’s band, are doing their best to survive and do some good in a time of general lawlessness. Instead of King John they have The Protector. Instead of the Sheriff’s men there are the mata, who are a sort of (very corrupt) police force. Instead of Saxons and Normans there are Tang people and, well, at this point my understanding of East Asian history fails dismally. But you get the point.

Things begin to go wrong for our heroes when their leader, the handsome and charismatic Lau Fung Cheng, intervenes in a dispute in a coffeehouse to save a waitress from abuse at the hands of an arrogant customer. Matters quickly deteriorate, and Fung Cheng ends up having to accept the girl into his band because she has lost her job.

The girl, Guet Imm, also known as Sister Nirodha, is a former anchorite in the aforementioned Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water. Having not been fed for several days, she emerged from her seclusion to discover that her fellow devotees had all been slaughtered by bandits, or the mata, who knows these days? Hence her ending up as a waitress.

That’s about as much as I can tell you, except that that this is no Robin and Marian tale. Guet Imm is (more or less) a sworn virgin, and anyway she gets on much better with Tet Sang, the story’s version of Little John.

(I have elided over an entire comedy scene about men having to sacrifice their dicks to the goddess should they defile one of her sacred vessels, because it is a bit gruesome and I don’t want to put the boys off reading this… oh, sorry…)

Unlike Robin Hood stories, however, this is not a matter of robbing from the rich to give to the poor. The band does have a shipment of rice to take to poor people in a nearby town, but they also have a much more valuable cargo. It is not just people’s stomachs that are at stake, it is their entire culture. Imagine if the Saxons still worshipped the Æsir, that the Normans were busy trashing temples, and that Marian was a priestess of Frigg.

That should give Western readers some idea of what to expect. Of course the parallels are not exact. This is very much an Asian story (I think set in Malaysia, but again my understanding is poor). It is also fun, beautifully written, and with a fascinating twist that made me very happy. Recommended.

book cover
Title: The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water
By: Zen Cho
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

FINNA

020, Book Review, Nino Cipri

FINNAAmy is a young woman with a stack of mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. Jules is a young, Black non-binary person doing his best to survive in an America that is clearly not welcoming to his kind. They both have shitty jobs at LitenVärld, a multi-national purveyor of Nordic kitsch and flat-pack, self-assembly furniture. Awkwardly they have just broke up after a brief and passionate affair. They have sensibly arranged to be on different shifts so that they are not in the store at the same time, but one of their co-workers, whom Amy names as Fucking Derek, has called in sick. It wouldn’t have been so bad had it not been the day that IT happened.

It had all started quietly. Amy had been on the Customer Service desk with Tricia The Manager, at least in part so that Jules knew where she was and could avoid her. A young woman came up to the desk to say that she had lost her elderly grandmother, a Mrs. Nouri. That sort of thing happens all of the time. LitenVärld is a frustrating and confusing labyrinth of themed domestic display settings with evocative names such as Midlife Crisis Mom, Parental Basement Dweller, Coked-out Divocée and Nihilist Bachelor Cube. But when Mrs. Nouri doesn’t respond to public address announcements the staff are sent to investigate. Inevitably Amy and Jules are sent together, and what they find causes Tricia The Manager to wheel out an ancient staff training video.

“We’re here to tell you what to do if a wormhole opens up on your shift!”

“The unique layout of LitenVärld encourages wormholes to form between universes. These wormholes connect our stores to LitenVärlds in parallel worlds.”

And so Amy and Jules are sent off to rescue poor Mrs. Nouri from whatever dangers she might have innocently stumbled into in worlds even less made for aged South Asian grannies than our own is for the likes of Jules. Along the way they encounter carnivorous furniture, killer corporate clones, and a pirate submarine. It is all very exciting, and a whole lot of fun.

FINNA, then, is a comedy novella from Nino Cipri, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the Helsinki Worldcon. It reminded me a lot of the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novellas from Steven Erikson, particularly The Healthy Dead, as it exhibits the same sort of satire about corporate jollity and enforced conformity. That is to say, it is very funny. It has the added benefit of being a great story about a fractured relationship between two young queer people.

I note also that Karin Tidbeck was the Swedish Consultant on the book, and Rivers Solomon did the sensitivity read for the character of Jules. So I have complete confidence that both aspects were well handled.

Honestly folks, this is cheap, a quick read, and hilarious. Why have you not bought it already?

book cover
Title: FINNA
By: Nino Cipri
Publisher: St. Martins Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Crisis on Infinite (TV) Earths

020, TV Review

Crisis on Infinite EarthsI have avoided crossover events in comics because they tend to require buying vast numbers of comic books that I mostly don’t have much interest in. That is, after all, the point. The comics companies hope you will like the books you don’t normally buy and stick with them. No way, comics buying is far too expensive a hobby these days.

The crossover events on DC’s television series are a different matter. I’m weirdly addicted to them because they are so bizarrely artificial.

While the Marvel Cinematic Universe is mostly a carefully constructed whole, curated under the watchful eye of Kevin Feige, the DC equivalent is something of a chaotic mess spread over multiple independent series on a wide variety of platforms. Does the Bruce Wayne who features in Titans on Netflix have any relationship to the one who is so notably absent from Batwoman? Who knows?

The concept of the multiverse is actually quite helpful to this. The idea that most of these different series take place in different universes, and that there might be different versions of the same characters in each universe, allowed DC to give their creative teams much more artistic freedom. There was no overall canon to adhere to.

And yet, Crisis exists. It happened in the comics. It had to happen on TV as well. Besides, the Arrowverse – the suite of TV shows airing mostly on the CW channel under the creative control of Greg Berlanti – was ripe for just that sort of thing. The fact that Supergirl was set on a different Earth to Arrow and The Flash, and that Batwoman was on a different one again, seemed weird. Goodness only knows which Earth Legends of Tomorrow is set on. Crisis would bring them all together, and give us more opportunities for that great chemistry between Melissa Benoist (Supergirl) and Grant Gustin (The Flash).

For UK viewers this latest crossover was complicated by the addition of Batwoman to the mix. It is airing on E4 rather than Sky, and the programme managers there decided to skip the Crisis episode because E4 viewers might have no idea what it was all about, or indeed who all of the other characters were. I ended up buying the DVD of the crossover series because that was the only way I could watch the whole thing.

The series itself is the usual superhero fluff ramped up to cosmic proportions. In Avengers: Infinity War Marvel famously killed off half of all life in the universe. Those of you who save seen Endgame know how that turned out. In Crisis DC kill off everyone in all of an infinite number of universes, except for a small handful of heroes, and everyone in every universe except ours stays dead. It is, without doubt, the greatest mass slaughter in the history of comics. Of course there is a version of many people in our universe, but many other universes will have deviated far from ours and be full of completely different people. All of whom now never existed in the first place. Ouch.

Talking of dead, and major spoiler warning here, it appears that Oliver Queen (the Green Arrow in our universe) is really, most sincerely dead. At least for a few months. He doesn’t dramatically reappear in the few episodes of Arrow that follow Crisis, and no future seasons are planned. I’m sure that he’ll be back eventually, but there has been a rare and welcome sense of permanence to his passing.

Other series are less affected. Following episodes of The Flash certainly reference what happened. Supergirl is perhaps more affected that most because of how Lex Luthor manages to manipulate the events of Crisis in his favour. I have to say that Jon Cryer’s Lex is fast becoming my favourite screen villain ever. He is actually as smart as Lex is supposed to be. And incredibly slimy with it. Also the Supergirl screenwriters have found a way to make him morally ambiguous for a while. There are actually things in the universe that are more of a threat to us than Lex. That makes them a threat to him as well, and he won’t tolerate that.

Batwoman carried on as if nothing had happened. Which is just as well given the scheduling decision from E4. (No, I have not forgotten that the Australian TV channel that took Babylon 5 decided to mess with the order of the episodes so that the one featuring the election of President Clark came after the one in which he was assassinated. TV executives can be that stupid.)

Goodness only knows what will happen with Legends of Tomorrow. That series is so insane that nothing would surprise me. During crossovers the Legends cast regularly break the fourth wall to talk about how they dislike being roped into crossover events; or have missed out on things because they refused to get involved in the last crossover. Its delightful.

Possibly the most interesting aspect of the series is that there were aspects referencing DC shows outside of the Arrowverse. That indicates that not only is the Arrowverse now all in the same universe, but that Titans and Doom Patrol are too. Black Lightning even had a starring role in Crisis. This is quite interesting, because Connor and clone-Krypto exist in the Titans universe, which has direct implications for Clark, Kara and Lex in Supergirl. Also everyone in Batwoman says they have no idea where Bruce is, but he appeared in the last series of Titans. Or possibly not, but that’s all speculation for season 3.

Anyway, no one told me that Doom Patrol season one was available on Amazon, so as soon as I have finished this zine I will be watching. Season two has apparently already dropped. I am so looking forward to this, even if we don’t get Coagula.

Ormeshadow

020, Book Review, Priya Sharma

OrmeshadowI bought this book as a direct result of the “Addressing Our Biases” episode of Breaking the Glass Slipper. It reminded me that Priya Sharma is one of the nicest people that I have ever met, and while I’m unlikely to review an entire short fiction collection, she does have a novella out too.

Ormeshadow is a very English story. It also reminds me of why I hate the Georgians so much. It is a period of British history that is deeply patriarchal and misogynist, had a massive gulf between the rich and the poor, and the rich were making a fortune out of the slave trade. Nothing in Ormeshadow is on the level of a Hogarth etching, but it is nevertheless a story of good people fallen on bad times, and on the mercy of cruel and selfish people.

Gideon Belman is the son of a middle-class family living in Bath. His university-educated father had a good job as a private secretary to a rich man, but something has wrong and the family has had to sell everything and head north to the Belman family farm. In theory Gideon’s father owns half of it. In practice it belongs to Uncle Thomas, who is a violent drunkard.

Mostly the story is domestic drama about awful people being awful to everyone else, but seen through the eyes of an innocent young boy. A particularly interesting character is Gideon’s mother who is very beautiful and determined to use that beauty to get her own way, whatever the cost. On the one hand, as a woman in Georgian England, she’s making use of the only advantage that she has. On the other, she’s abominably selfish.

Naturally things go bad very quickly, and poor young Gideon’s only solace is the collection of stories about the local dragon that his father had told him. Things get wrapped up in a way that is far too neat and far too easy to be anything other than fantasy, but it is all beautifully written so I don’t want to complain. And frankly, none of us wants to live in a Hogarth etching, even if that’s the way his world really was.

book cover
Title: Ormeshadow
By: Priya Sharma
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Editorial – June 2020

020, Editorial

We’re a little bit light on content this month. That is at least in part because things went a little crazy in the world. I spent a lot of time explaining to people why everyone was so mad with the nice author lady, and what is so wrong with “protecting women” anyway. I can’t promise that July will be any better. The UK government is supposed to announce plans for stripping away trans people’s civil rights in a couple of weeks time. Assuming that they don’t bottle, which seems unlikely, that’s going to be so not fun.

Anyway, there are reviews. I’ve also done a diversity audit of the books I have reviewed. I’m not proud of the results, but thankfuly they are not terrible either.

Issue #19

Issues

Issue #19 coverThis is the May 2020 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: The Aldabreshin Compass: This month's cover is by Ben Baldwin

  • Network Effect: A review of the first novel-length book in Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries, Network Effect.

  • Goldilocks: A review of Laura Lam's near-future science fiction novel, Goldilocks.

  • The Lost Future of Pepperharrow: A review of The Lost Future of PepperHarrow, the latest novel by Natasha Pulley.

  • Threading the Labyrinth: A review of Threading the Labyrinth, the debut novel by Tiffani Angus.

  • WisCon Online: Cheryl reports from one of the first major conventions to go online thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.

  • Paper Hearts: A review of Paper Hearts, a new novella from Justina Robson

  • Interview – Maria Gerolemou: An interview with Dr. Maria Gerolemou, an expert on ancient automata.

  • The Mandalorian: A review of the Disney Channel's Star Wars spin-off series, The Mandalorian.

  • Earth Abides: Cheryl looks at two reviews of a post-apocalyptic classic, Earth Abides by George R Stewart.

  • Herland: A review of the feminist classic, Herland, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

  • Oxford Fantasy Lectures: A breif review of a series of podcasts on fantasy literature produced by Oxford University.

  • Editorial – May 2020: Another month in Lockdown, another issue. Here's what Cheryl has been up to.

Cover: The Aldabreshin Compass

019, Art, Ben Baldwin

For this issue’s cover I have made use of the common background that Ben Baldwin developed for the covers of Juliet E McKenna’s series, The Aldabreshin Compass. Juliet and I have been using these backgrounds for a series of short stories set in the same time as that series. The “Quartering the Compass” stories have been made available for free during the pandemic as part of our Lockdown Reading series. You can download them all here.

And if you think that there ought to be four stories, well so does Juliet. She writes about that here.

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