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.

Adwaith – Solas

068, Adwaith, Music Review

Adwaith are a three-piece all-girl band from South Wales. They were founded by Hollie Singer and Gwenllian Anthony, who were school friends in Carmarthen. With a couple of successful albums behind them, some appearances at Glastonbury, and support work for the likes of the Manics and Idles, they have done that thing that many newly successful bands do: spend two years in the studio.

The result has been a double album, Solas, which the band are now taking on tour. For their opening night they played the entire album straight through in front of their home crowd at the Lyric in Carmarthen. Jo, Chris and I went along, and were thoroughly entertained.

It was an interesting crowd. Because they are a local band, there were parents, grandparents, neighbours and so on. I was by no means the oldest person in the audience, which was unusual for a rock gig.

There was a support band: five lads who could certainly play but had little in the way of stage presence or an act. They were very shoegazy, but listenable. Hopefully they will learn to perform better in future. I never found out their name.

In stark contrast, Adwaith were very obviously A Rock Band. The core of their sound is provided by Gwenllian’s base guitar and Heledd Owen’s furious drums. Hollie, appropriately given her name, provides vocals, and also lead guitar. There was one number where Hollie and Gwenllian swapped roles and Gwenllian did a decent impression of Liza Minelli in Cabaret, but for the most part the pyrotechnics are provided by that classic base and drum sound.

I have the band’s two previous albums, but the songs on Solas were all new to me. Foolishly I ignored the queues at the Merch table after the gig, only to find out when I got home that the album is not yet on Bandcamp and their record label has sold out of the initial pressing. Argh.

Anyway, there were some really great songs. The one that opens side three was particularly memorable as it is a real head-banger. I’m looking forward to listening the album again when I can get a copy.

Adwaith’s lyrics are entirely in Welsh, which is why you have never heard of them. They are very good. Most of the tour will be over by the time you read this, but they are at the Oslo in London on March 6th and the Louisiana in Bristol on the 7th. Go see them, they are fabulous.

Mapping Middle Earth

068, Anahit Behrooz, Book Review

One of many great things about the Perspectives on Fantasy series from the Glasgow University Fantasy Centre is that their contract with Bloomsbury requires the publisher to produce paperback editions at affordable prices. You have to wait a year from initial publication for the paperback to appear, but once it has you should be able to get it for around £25. Or, having waited a year already, you can wait a little longer for Bloomsbury to have a sale. Which is how I ended up getting a copy of Mapping Middle Earth for just over £20.

The book is the product of research done by Anahit Behrooz for her PhD. As the title suggests it examines Tolkien’s use of maps in his Legendarium. In many ways it builds on Stefan Ekman’s ground-breaking study of fantasy maps, Here be Dragons. Behrooz, however, is interested in only a very small, albeit very famous, subset of the fantasy genre, and that allows her to go into much greater depth.

I should start, as Behrooz does, by noting that all maps are political. We should all know that. I presume that most of you know that the well-known Mercator projection of Earth over-states the size of land at the poles, and under-states the size of land at the equator. That has been all over social media of late, as people have gleefully pointed out that Greenland is nowhere near as bigly as Donald Trump thinks it is.

Behrooz situates Tolkien’s maps between two traditions: the mediaeval map (such as the famous Hereford Mappa Mundi), and the modern map (typified by the UK’s Ordnance Survey). Mediaeval European maps are mostly religious in nature. They generally have Jerusalem at the centre, and are oriented towards the East, where the Garden of Eden was believed to lie. Tolkien’s maps of Middle Earth in the First and Second Age are much more like mediaeval maps. Prior to the sinking of Númenor, Middle Earth was flat and it was possible to travel directly to Valinor. So the heaven of Middle Earth was literally on the map.

The Ordnance Survey, as the name suggests, was originally a military project. Specifically it was created by the English army to help them find their way around the Scottish highlands, all the better to round up any Jacobite resistance. Military maps need to be highly accurate, and while that has been a great boon for later generations of hikers, we still have to remember that the maps were created as a tool of military conquest.

Personally I think that Behrooz has missed a trick here. I suspect that the maps of Middle Earth are in large part influenced by the work of Thomas Moule, a Victorian producer of faux-antique maps. Moule’s work was very popular, and I’m sure that Tolkien would have been familiar with it. The maps use the Ordnance Survey as a basis, so are highly accurate, but are also decorated to look like something much older.

Behrooz then goes on to talk about Tolkien’s relationship to the environment, and his representation of the non-human on his maps. We are all familiar with the Ents and Huorns, with the grumpy old mountain, Caradhras, and with Old Man Willow. The Legendarium gives a voice to many non-human characters, and not just members of races other than mankind. The maps represent places like Mirkwood and Lothlorien, and give some indication of their character.

This section led me to a grudging acknowledgement of the necessity of Tom Bombadil. Behrooz points out that his function in the story is to disabuse the naïve Hobbits of their simplistic views on life, and introduce them to the world outside the Shire. I can see that is an important story function, though I still don’t see why he also has to be a purveyor of terrible poetry.

The next section is all about geography and geology. There is a lot of focus on Númenor’s Atlantis-like fate and how Tolkien sought to navigate between this essentially mediaeval view of history, punctuated by god-sent disasters, and the modern scientific view of deep geological time with its fossils and continental drift.

Finally we come to a section on Imperialism and Race, where Behrooz looks at how maps are used as a function of imperialist projects, erasing the existence of indigenous peoples and replacing them with “unexplored” lands to be conquered and assimilated. This also happens in Middle Earth, as various human societies, mostly notably Númenor, seek to expand their territory at the expense of both other races and of the natural world.

What I particularly like about this book is how it zeroes in on the contradictions in Tolkien’s work. He’s pro-environment, but also pro-Hobbit, and the Hobbits are very much managers of their environment. He has written a religious history of his world, but is also aware that science has moved on since mediaeval times. And he is concerned about the destruction of cultures by industrialisation, but is also a product of the British Empire and its educational system. Behrooz writes:

Readling Tolkien, I am struck continually by the contradictions of his approach: the moments where he edges towards a strikingly anti-colonial mindset, the moments where he falls back on the harmful racialization that characterized, and indeed fueled, the gutting force of the British Empire. To place Tolkien within a context is to place him inevitably within an imperial context, which is to say, inevitably within a racist context. What can looking fearlessly and unbiasedly at his work tell us about the necessities of understanding the entanglement between human and non-human harm? What can it tell us about an author who was suspended, constantly, between past, present and future?

And that sort of thing is why I like reading academic books. They can be so much more interesting than the simplistic takes you see on social media, or even in blog posts.

The book has also got me looking forward to the forthcoming seasons of Rings of Power, as the story should get much more interesting, if the script follows what Tolkien wrote.

book cover
Title: Mapping Middle Earth
By: Anahit Behrooz
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Substance

068, Movie Review, Paul Driggere

I’m going to make a new movie list called “One-Watch Masterpieces”, and I’ll tell you why. There’s not many lists out there like that. Sure, there’s probably a WatchMojo video out on YouTube already that claims a Top 10 or Top 20 “Movies So Good Yet You Can Only See Them Once”, and if so, hey, hats off to them for expanding their repertoire.

In the vein of body horror such as Audition or the vintage gem Freaks, and the warped, mindless reality distortion from epics like Brazil and Eraserhead comes Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, which recently became my Top #1 movie I can never watch again.

The Substance is a provocative body-horror film that delves into the societal obsession with youth and beauty. The movie follows a washed-up Oscar winning actress named Elizabeth Sparks (played with absolute perfection by Demi Moore). On her 50th birthday, after years as an aerobics star icon, she realizes her age is catching up to her. Her show producer, played brilliantly by Dennis Quaid, agrees and fires her on the spot, seeking a younger, fresher face for the screen.

When Elizabeth happens upon a rejuvenation advertisement known as “The Substance”, she boldly and foolishly takes the plunge and orders this possible solution to her problems. This leads instead to a nightmare of visceral explorations of identity and self-perception, as a much younger Elizabeth Sparks (Margaret Qualley) emerges – literally.

The struggle between Sparks and her alter-ego starts out as a playful, comedic tug-of-war for dominance of the self. Sparks convinces her producer that her alter-ego is someone else entirely. But soon Elizabeth can no longer control the alter-ego. There is gut-wrenching horror watching the fight escalate between the two selves until there is little choice but to become the only self.

I know people label this as a horror movie and, because of this, it doesn’t have a shot at the Best Film award. But the strange thing is, it’s really NOT a horror movie. I’d call it more of an outrageous comedy, a journey into mind-bending surrealism laced with glimpses of heavy satire. In fact, when you get towards the end of the movie, in some ways it could be seen as a dream sequence, and perhaps Sparks will wake up sweating in her bed.

That’s sort of what I thought would happen, but Fargeat blew me away with the ending all the same. As it turned out, there was one more mind-blowing sequence I can’t ever forget – or watch again.

I can’t understand why she wrote this particular screenplay. I have absolutely no knowledge of the body politics when it comes to women or what they want. Perhaps the movie teaches us, again, the wise words “be yourself”. I’d like to think Fargeat also wanted to illustrate the lengths women go to in remaining attractive to others, and whether it’s really all worth it. Do women want to look good for others – or for themselves? Why is there such an attraction to attraction?

In retrospect, The Substance is clearly designed to shock – with some of the most grotesque special effects ever put to screen. (And I saw In A Violent Nature, which made me cringe in parts.) The movie pulls no punches with its body horror and still leaves you breathless with laughter.

After Fargeat’s critical success with Revenge (2017), about a woman who gets even with a group of lawless men in the desert in extremely violent fashion, she is quickly becoming the Gratuitous Violence Queen of Film.

Check out The Substance, if you can stomach it. For all the graphic horror, there is a brilliant story, a fantastical, satirical comedic journey, and perhaps a lesson for us all.

Be yourself.

The Substance is currently available for streaming on Mubi and various VOD platforms. Given its graphic content, viewer discretion is advised.
Well, duh.

Gŵyl y Golau

068, Music Review, Simmy Singh

When people think of the Celtic religious calendar (which is largely a modern artefact), they tend to think in terms of Irish festivals. Thus February 1st is known as Imbolc (or for Christians, Saint Brigid’s Day). But Wales has its own traditions which do not map exactly onto the Irish ones, and which have their own names.

Thus Hallowe’en in Welsh is Nos Calan Gaeaf, the night of the start of Winter. Relatedly, February 1st is Gŵyl y Golau, the Festival of Light, which marks the beginning of Spring.

It so happened that one of the regular writing retreats that Roz & Jo run fell on the festival weekend. It also happened that an event was taking place at Dinefwr, a National Trust property just up the road from us. These days Dinefwr is known for a stately home, Newton House, but the grounds also contain the sites of two Roman first (now entirely buried) and a ruined mediaeval castle that was once home to the kings of Deheubarth (including the famous Hywel Dda). There are Iron Age structures under the castle, but that makes them hard to excavate so we don’t know much about them. All of this makes Dinefwr an ideal place for traditional festival celebrations.

This year the event was extra interesting because of who was performing. Simmy Singh is a wonderful Welsh violinist who works in a variety of genres including Classical, Jazz and Rock. Last year we saw her lead Sinfonia Cymru in a fabulous rendition of the Four Seasons. She has collaborated with artists as varied as Coldplay, Lewis Capaldi, Michael Buble and Burt Bacharach. And she also happens to be friends with Roz & Jo, and with my hairdresser, Sarah. Wales is a small world.

Simmy loves working with others, and the Gŵyl y Golau event saw her team up with two amazing musicians — Bethan Lloyd and Nigel Shaw – plus folklorist Angharad Wynne.

Bethan is a vocalist. If you are into the likes of Dead Can Dance and The Cocteau Twins you will almost certain like what Bethan has to offer. She’s on Bandcamp.

Nigel is a self-confessed flute nerd who owns, and indeed makes, many such instruments. His collection includes 3D printed reproductions of Neolithic bone flutes, which apparently sound great. He and his partner, Carolyn Hillyer, run Seventh Wave Music from a small village on Dartmoor. They do a lot of Neo-Pagan stuff.

No one knows how Gŵyl y Golau would have been celebrated in ancient times, though clearly marking the beginning of spring would be important to farming communities. Angharad, however, presented us with an intriguing theory. We know that Mari Lwyd is active over winter. The events in which she features generally centre around midwinter. But she is awake from Calan Gaeaf until Gŵyl y Golau. Angharad suggested that perhaps Mari is an incarnation of Rhiannon, the horse goddess, who is spending the winter dead. When spring comes, her ghastly skeletal form is shed, and she becomes a flesh and blood goddess once more. Again there is no proof of this, but I do like it as an idea.

That was our entertainment for the evening, which took place partly in the living room of Newton House, and partly around a brazier in the gardens. A fabulous time was had by all.

Fantasy News & Lifestyle Magazine

068, Magazine Review

I don’t often post magazine reviews here, but Fantasy News & Lifestyle is new and from Germany. There are seven issues available in German, but the two most recent are also in English. So what’s going on in Fantasy in Germany?

The first thing that pops out at you is that title. Lifestyle? Really? Are they going to be running articles about recipes and home decorating? Well no, but the first English issue contains a report on the World Cosplay Summit and on a games convention in Taipei. The magazine is very much geared towards fans and, as they saying goes, ‘fandom is a way of life.’

That said, this is not a media-obsessed publication. The two issues also include author interviews, and the first issue has a piece about a much-loved German bookshop. The second issue has an article about SFWA, and one about the Leipzig Book Fair.

Although the magazine is originally written in German, the English translations are entirely understandable. There’s the occasional unnecessary apostrophe (e.g. a column titled “Tips for Author’s”), but that’s probably the fault of online translators or grammar checkers and anyway you see far too much of that from native English speakers.

My only serious reservation about the magazine is that the first issue contains a glowing article about the benefits of AI, particularly with respect to art. It occurs to me that some of the art in the magazine may be AI-generated. This is unfortunate. I have no idea what the state of the debate over AI is in Germany (hello, Cora, are you reading this?), but I would be surprised if German artists are not as furious about AI as those in the Anglophone world.

Regardless, Alex Struever clear puts a huge amount of effort into the magazine, which is beautifully laid out. If you want to check it out you can find it here.

Hugo Voting Time

068, Awards

OK, so Hugo voting is now open. So is the Locus Poll. I should have some thoughts, despite the fact that I still have a whole lot of books that I want to read.

Novels

The book that I would love to see on the ballot but won’t be is We are all Ghosts in the Forest by Lorraine Wilson. It is genuinely innovative, beautifully written, and full of heart. But most Hugo voters will not have read it. Thanks to support from another UK contributor, it is on the Locus Recommended Reading List. Hopefully that will help.

The best 2024 novel I have read this far is Space Oddity. I am, of course, a die-hard Cat Valente fan. You may have a different opinion, but you are wrong, unless you are suggesting The Book of Love by Kelly Link which is also wonderful.

Another book that has been very popular is Malka Older’s The Imposition of Unnecessary Obstacles. You might think that it is a novella, but Locus has decided that it is a novel so that is how it will get treated for award purposes. See also The Dead Cat Tail Assassins by P Djèlí Clark, though that might not make my list.

I still need to read Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer, Blackheart Man by Nalo Hopkinson and at least one of the very many novels that Adrian Tchaikovsky had out last year. I’d love to vote for Mike Carey’s Echo of Worlds, but sequels rarely win anything.

Novellas

Two of my favourite novellas of the year have been bumped into the novel category, but there is still a lot of choice. What Feasts at Night by T Kingfisher and The Brides of High Hill by Nghi Vo are both automatic picks, being part of favourite series. There is a new Wayward Children book from Seanan McGuire that I haven’t read yet (and another for this year).

In stand-alones, I was very impressed by The Butcher of the Forest by Premee Mohammed. I was surprised to find that Ray Nayler’s The Tusks of Extinction is a novella and will seek it out. Aliette de Bodard has a couple of new books that I haven’t read yet as well.

Sophia Samatar’s The Practice, The Horizon and The Chain is probably the best of the bunch. I shall be disappointed if it doesn’t win some awards.

Short Stories and Novelettes

As usual, I have read almost nothing, and will read almost nothing until the short lists come out. Then I will hate them all. The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clarke is worth voting for, though.

Semiprozine

This may not be on your radar, but I would encourage you to take a look at Alex Pierce’s Speculative Insight. It would be great to have a non-fiction magazine on the ballot.

Dramatic Presentations

This year’s crop of movies has been pretty meh, but I shall be voting for Dune 2 because it is beautiful and has a superb soundtrack.

In contrast we have had two amazing animated TV series from the Star Trek team. I very much hope to see both Prodigy: Season 2 and Lower Decks: Season 4 on the ballot, though exactly how and what episodes if they are in Short I do not know.

Eligibility

I do not expect to be on any award ballots this year, but just for completeness’ sake here is the list:

– Short Story: “More Trouble Than She’s Worth” from Fight Like a Girl 2 (Clark/Hall)
– Fanzine: Salon Futura
– Fan Writer: me.

More importantly I want you to all write in The Green Man’s War for Fantasy Novel in the Locus Poll, because Juliet deserves the recognition and no one at Locus will listen to me on this subject.

Section 31

068, Movie Review

Well I can’t say that y’all didn’t warn me. But I watched it anyway. You were right, Section 31 is terrible. Let me count the ways…

  1. The totally predictable ‘shock’ prologue
  2. The awful Mission Impossible pastiche opening
  3. The worst Irish accent in the history of fake accents
  4. The major influence in Giorgiou’s life that she somehow never mentioned before
  5. The over-long and dull fight scenes
  6. The complete waste of Melle as a character
  7. The fact that it sneers at Trek rather than making fun of it lovingly as Lower Decks does
  8. The complete waste of Michelle Yeoh’s outstanding talent
  9. The chickening out at the end

You can probably think of more.

Rather than dunk further on something that deserves to be consigned to the same fate as those lost episodes of Doctor Who, I will mention two small positives.

Rachel Garrett is not just some random Starfleet officer. She’s a future Captain of the Enterprise who has already featured in a Next Generation episode, and who was to have a statue erected in her honour at the Starfleet Recruitment Center on M’talas Prime. Sadly the statue was destroyed in the attack on that facility in the final episode of Picard. But hey, woman Captain of the Enterprise, and seemingly a fun one at that. I liked her.

Also the ending could be interpreted as indicating that the Mirror Universe has been destroyed. We can but hope. Knowing the way that Hollywood works, someone will find a way to bring it back sooner or later. But for now, rejoice! Section 31 did get one thing right.

Yeah, OK, I will miss Captain Killy, but really, the Mirror Universe was never a good idea.

Editorial – March 2025

068, Editorial

This one is a few days late because I have been traveling over the past few days. First there was a trip to London to talk to some Plaid Cymru MPs about trans rights. I combined that with a visit to the Mediaeval Women exhibition at the British Library, about which more next issue. Then I headed up to Aberystwyth to give an LGBTQ+ History Month talk for the lovely people at Aberration. It has all been a bit busy.

Next month will have sumilar issues because Kevin and I will be spending the last week of March in Victoria, BC attending the Moving Trans History Forward conference. I’m hoping to catch up with Guy Gavriel Kay and Nalo Hopkinson while I am in Canada.

There’s not a lot else I can say at the moment. It looks disturbingly like the world is rushing headlong into a major war, so I’m trying not to plan too much in advance. I am hoping to be at Eastercon in April, an academic conference in Copenhagen in May, and the Eurocon in Finland in June. Whether any of that will be possible is another matter.

Issue #67

Issues

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


  • Cover: The Angel of the Revolution: This issue's cover is an interior illustration the the 1893 novel, The Angel of the Revolution, by George Griffith. The artist is F T Jane.

  • We Are All Ghosts in the Forest: In the forests of Estonia, after the collapse of civilisation, Lorraine Wilson's heroine is haunted by the ghosts of the internet

  • Triggernometry Finals: It is showdown time for Stark Holborn's desperado sumslingers. Have they met their equals at last?

  • Sundown in San Ojuela: Ghosts and an apparent werewolf haunt Southern California in M M Olivas's debut novel

  • The New Moon’s Arms: A look back at a classic piece of Caribbean fiction from Nalo Hopkinson

  • Skeleton Crew: Avast there me hearties, Star Wars has gone all piractical. Arrrr!

  • Aquaman 2: The fishy King Arthur is back. Will there be more Giant War Crabs? Or just crabby viewers?

  • What If? – Season 3: Marvel's alternate universe animation series has come to an end, and not before time

  • Editorial – January 2025: In which Cheryl's internet is misbehaving

Cover: The Angel of the Revolution

067, Art

This issue we continue with the new practice of finding covers amongst the British Library’s collection of illustrations from old books. The picture in question was included in a 1893 novel called The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror by the British writer, George Griffith. It tells of an war fought with flying machines, between the Anglo-Teutonic Alliance and the Franco-Slavonian League, and features bombing of civilian targets. This was written well before WWI, let alone WWII.

The pictures are of interest because they were drawn by the pioneering wargamer and military nerd, Fred T Jane, most famous for his book, Jane’s Fighting Ships, a comprehensive catalogue of the world’s navies. The title was, of course, subtly changed for Jane Dennis’s fanzine, Jane’s Fighting SMOFs. Jane wrote science fiction as well as illustrating it.

A larger version of the British Library image appears below.

We Are All Ghosts in the Forest

067, Book Review, Lorraine Wilson

In the east of Estonia, not too far from the Russian border, is a small village. When the world fell apart, and she could no longer earn a living as a photographer, Katerina went there to live there because the village had been her grandmother’s home. There was a house there she could have. And perhaps neighbours.

The villagers welcomed her cautiously. Katerina’s grandmother had been an honoured member of their community. But in the world that had vanished, young people moved around. They married outside their community. Katerina’s skin is brown, courtesy of an Indian parent. It marks her out as different. Fortunately, thanks in part to books left by her grandmother, and in part due to her intellectual curiosity, Katerina is good with herbs. She can make medicines, which are sorely needed. She can advise on keeping pests away from crops. And she can help get rid of ghosts.

There are ghosts, of course. They used to live in the internet. That, like so many things, is no longer what it was. But things linger: adverts, a stray character from a streaming drama, an audiobook. You don’t want them near your house. Well, most people don’t anyway. Katerina remembers the internet and used to live by it. The ghosts don’t scare her. She has a cat called Orlando. She feeds him copper filings because that helps him stay solid and real. Orlando, being a cat, accepts what is due to him.

Hmm, let’s see: a woman who is good with herbs, who looks different to the rest of the villagers, and has a ghost cat as a pet. There’s a word for that sort of person, isn’t there.

It is no accident that the two villagers who make Katerina most welcome are Elisabet, who is autistic, and Jaakob, who is gay but doesn’t let that be known to any but his most trusted friends.

What really disturbs the villagers, however, is Stefan. Katerina is away trading: exchanging medicines for ingredients she can’t get at home. In a busy marketplace a teenage boy approaches her. He is mute, but he gives her a note.

My dear Katya,
Take care of Stefan. I have no one else to ask, no one else I would want to, and I know that you will keep my son safe through what is to come.
Yours always,
Aleksander

Katerina has no idea who Aleksander is, has never heard of him before, but the boy needs help so she can’t turn him away.

This, then, is the set-up for We Are All Ghosts in the Forest by Lorraine Wilson. It is a fabulous story: weirdly imaginative, lightly creepy, ultimately tear-worthy. Wilson is, I think, one of the brightest new talents that we have in the UK at the moment. She has now graduated to mainstream publication. All that is left is for the awards to start coming in. She already has a British Fantasy Award, for a short story in Strange Horizons. Those of you outside of the BFS circle should start taking note.

book cover
Title: We Are All Ghosts in the Forest
By: Lorraine Wilson
Publisher: Rebellion
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Triggernometry Finals

067, Book Review, Stark Holborn

All good things must come to an end. In the case of an extended pun that has already produced two short books, Triggernometry is probably more overdue than most. And yet, somehow Stark Holborn has managed to squeeze a little more life out of a very silly idea.

The set-up, in case you don’t remember, is that, some time in the Old West, the study of mathematics has been outlawed. Therefore mathematicians have become outlaws, and alongside their guns they also sling protractors and slide rules. The Triggernometry books tell the story of their fight for justice, and the freedom to write long and boring books full of complex equations.

The hero of the books is Malago Browne. She and her partner, Pierre de Fermat, are wanted in every town in every state of America. Life has got too hot, even for them. But then the legendary Carl Friedrich Gauss comes to them with a mad plan, something that could put an end to their outlaw status forever.

As is traditional, we get introduced to new mathematician heroes. John Napier, happily playing with his bones, has become a necromancer. The Bernouilli Brothers are working in a circus. You get the idea.

There’s not a lot more that I can say, because the book is very short. Triggernometry is a very silly idea, taken expertly to ridiculous extremes. Triggernometry Finals is fitting conclusion to a joke that could have been a social media post. Total respect to Stark Holborn for wringing so much out of it.

book cover
Title: Triggernometry Finals
By: Stark Holborn
Publisher: Rattleback Books
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Sundown in San Ojuela

067, Book Review, M M Olivas

Horror is not normally my thing. I very rarely read it. But the prospect of a book by a Mexican trans woman was too much to resist. Besides, MM Olivas has been mentored by none other than Nalo Hopkinson. She has to be good, right?

Lizzie Remolina is an ordinary Latina teenager from Southern California, except that one day La Muerta appears and tells her that she no longer has a soul. In return, Lizzie has acquired the power to see the dead. It is cool, in a goth kind of way, and Lizzie is a goth kind of kid. But really, it is not ideal for a teenage girl.

Obviously there has to be some reason for this. Matters come to a head when Lizzie’s beloved Aunt Marisol dies. Lizzie and her younger sister, Mary, get dragged down to the country town of San Ojuela where Marisol lived in a rambling old hacienda called Casa Coyotl. Much to her surprise, Lizzie finds that Aunt Marisol has left the house to her.

Casa Coyotl is an ancient house with a history dating back to the days when California was part of Mexico and conquistadors roamed the land. It remembers the days of the Nahuatl and the glory of Tenochtitlan.

Lizzie’s story is cut with that of two others. The first is Lucas Jackson, the local sheriff. He’s Latino by birth, trying to make his way in the Anglo world by hunting down his own people on the border. Lucas desperately wants to be a hero of law enforcement, but he may have learnt too well from his violent father.

The other viewpoint is that of Julian Zavala. When Lizzie and Mary were young, they lived with Aunt Marisol for a while. Julian and Lizzie became firm friends. But then Mrs. Remolina took her children away, preferring to raise them in a whiter environment. Julian, being a local, had nowhere to go.

There are other characters of importance, but the most significant is Xolotl, the dog-headed god of fire and lightning. In Nahuatl mythology the twin gods, Xolotl and Quetzalcoatl are guardians of the Sun. The Feathered Serpent is a god of light who guides the Sun on its path through the sky. At dusk, when the Sun descends into Mictlan, the underworld, Xolotl takes over as its guide. The book is called Sundown in San Ojuela for a reason.

Lucas, of course, knows nothing of this. He thinks he is hunting a werewolf. But Julian knows. It is in his blood. And in Lizzie’s too.

While this is a great horror set-up, the book is also very much about Southern California and the tensions between the white and Latin populations. It is probably far more relevant now than it was when it was written. But it would have been written in the previous iteration of the Dark Times when all we had to worry about was a silly wall.

One slightly odd thing about the book is that the main viewpoint characters are treated very differently in their views. Lucas’s chapters are all written in first person, perhaps to help us get inside his very conflicted head. Julian’s chapters are second person, perhaps because he is consumed with guilt and the constant “you” references reinforce this. Lizzie’s chapters are all third person. It is a bit jarring, but I think it works.

I should note also that there is strong queer representation in the book. Not all of the queer characters have happy endings, because this is Southern California, but the book cares about them all in the same way that it cares about Mexican-Americans and their Nahuatl ancestors.

This is a debut novel, and a very impressive one. I think it would appeal strongly to fans of Liz Hand. I hope it does well, because Olivas has a very different voice to what we normally get served by US publishers. I’d love to see more books from her.

book cover
Title: Sundown in San Ojuela
By: M M Olivas
Publisher: Lanternfish Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The New Moon’s Arms

067, Book Review, Nalo Hopkinson

I was looking for some SF&F to recommend to some local PoC friends, and naturally one of my first thoughts was of Nalo Hopkinson. Given that said friends are also a lesbian couple, and one is from the Caribbean, I zeroed in on The New Moon’s Arms. Then I discovered that I had never reviewed it, so I re-read the whole thing.

Yes, seriously. Cheryl read a book for a second time. I know it is a bit of a shock, but it can happen.

First up, a word about the title. It comes from the phrase, “the Old Moon in the New Moon’s arms”, which describes the phenomenon of being able to see the full globe of the Moon while only a thin crescent is lit. What I think Hopkinson intended was to signal that this is a book about an unpleasant older person who becomes better thanks to the love and care of the younger people in her life.

Calamity (a name she gave herself because she hated being called Chastity) has not had an easy life. Her mother disappeared when she was young, and island gossip has always held that Calamity’s father murdered her. Calamity became a single mother as a teenager, in part because the boy she was sweet on was gay and didn’t want to marry her. It is easy to see why she fell so easily into homophobia.

But Calamity has always had a talent for finding things. Lost stuff just turns up. Following her father’s funeral, this magical power ramps up notch or two. When she finds a half-drowned boy on the beach, she decides to adopt him. Clearly she cannot manage this on her own, so she is forced to ask for help from family and friends. This means her daughter and grandson. It means her daughter’s father and his husband, who make far better parents and grandparents than Calamity has ever done. It means people who tell Calamity off for being a terrible bigot.

All of this comes to a head when we put together the mysteries of Calamity’s mother’s disappearance, the boy on the beach, and the legend of the (now extinct in our world) Caribbean Monk Seal. There is a lovely blend of Scottish folklore, marine biology and Caribbean sociology. It is very clever. It is also, I think, a book that wants to teach some of Hopkinson’s fellow Caribbean people to be better. I hope the message got through to some of them.

book cover
Title: The New Moon's Arms
By: Nalo Hopkinson
Publisher: Warner US
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Skeleton Crew

067, TV Review

Kudos, I guess, to the Star Wars folks for trying something different. And lots of people seem to have enjoyed Skeleton Crew. My take on it is somewhat more ambivalent.

When I see such things (books as well as TV) I tend to wonder who they are intended for. If Skeleton Crew was intended for kids, I think it is probably for quite young kids. Teenagers, even teens the age of the characters in the story, are likely to spend much of the time rolling their eyes and how adult scriptwriters think teenagers behave.

If it is a story intended for parents to watch with their children, some of the parents are going to have a fit when they get to the episode set on a brothel planet.

On the other hand, if the series is intended solely for adults, they may well bail early on because the kids are so annoying. I watched the first episode and hated it. I would not have gone back to it had it not been for the rave reviews the series was getting on social media.

I’m glad I did, though, because Jude Law is magnificent. He’s even more cartoonishly villainous than he is as Yon-Rogg in Captain Marvel. And yet we still end up feeling sorry for the rogue. His character is, of course, based heavily on the character of Long John Silver from Treasure Island, so he has excellent source material to work with. Even so, it is a job very well done.

For those counting the pirate references, the droid, SM-33, is based on Mr. Smee, the boatswain from Peter Pan, though Tak Rennod is more like Captain Flint than Hook. Wim is Jim Hawkins. There are doubtless many more morsels of pirate lore buried in the script if you bother to look for them.

I should note that at times the plot makes no sense whatsoever. But then it is Star Wars, so it doesn’t have to.

One thing the series does do is give further credence to the theory that the quality of a Star Wars product is inversely proportional to the number of Jedi in the story.

Anyway, it was fun. Don’t expect anything more from it.

Aquaman 2

067, Movie Review

I did not go to see this film in the cinema. I waited to buy it on disc until it was a bit cheaper. I did not have high expectations, but I hoped that there would be more giant war crabs.

My lack of expectations was not disappointed. My hope for crabs was.

To be fair, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom was probably doomed from the start. There was, of course, the huge fuss over Amber Heard. I’m pleased to see that she kept her role as Mera, though she did quite literally spend much of the film holding the baby. Now that we have the Blake Lively story to consider as well, maybe people will re-examine their opinions of Heard, and not just assume that beautiful women are guilty until proved innocent above and beyond all reasonable doubt.

Then there was the take-over of the DC Movie Universe by James Gunn. There is, we understand, to be a complete re-boot. No one quite knows what that means, but there is no guarantee that anyone who had roles in the past will keep them. Jason Momoa has apparently been cast as an anti-hero character in the forthcoming Supergirl movie, so Aquaman’s place in the Gunn regime must be in doubt.

The film’s creative team probably knew they were marooned on a raft in some lost corner of the DC universe with little chance of rescue. They may have decided to ham things up a bit. After all, they had a star who is very good at doing just that.

James Wan, the Director, talks enthusiastically in the extras about how they worked hard to recreate the look and atmosphere of the 1950s pulp era Aquaman comics. I’m sure they did, but was that of any interest to the cinema-going public? I suspect not.

As to the script, it is about as corny as they come. The bad guys threaten Atlantis and the only way that King Arthur (they never call him that in the movies, but that’s obviously his title) can foil them is by enlisting the help of his half-brother, Orm, who is currently in prison for doing lots of bad things in the first movie. It is a bromance team-up movie, except of course they can’t actually fall in love because they are half-brothers. To add to this, there is the small matter of the bad guys wanting to sacrifice Arthur & Mera’s baby son for purposes of Evil Blood Magic.

Adding to the corniness is the fact that the baddest of the bad guys lies sleeping under the ice in Antarctica surrounded by some suspiciously Lovecraftian monsters. I don’t think we can blame the scriptwriters for this. As I understand it, the whole Lost Kingdom concept was taken from the comics, so whoever wrote them was presumably the Lovecraft fan.

Then we discover that the bad guys have decamped from Antarctica and now live in an actual secret volcano lair on an island in the South Pacific. Seriously.

One of the characters (I think Orm) mentions that the base must have a lot of shielding to not show up on satellites. But the volcano has a massive plume of green smoke coming out of it…

Because they probably know what a mess this is, the script team have also thrown in a bunch of references to other movies. The scene where Arthur and Orm visit an undersea crime lord is clearly based on Jabba the Hutt and Mos Eisley Cantina. Arthur’s final big speech is a combination of T’Challa’s speech to the UN and Tony Stark’s “I am Iron Man” press conference. There are probably others too.

All of this is a little bit sad because lurking in the background of the film is a lot of good messaging about climate change and saving the planet. I suspect that good work was largely wasted.

There were no giant war crabs.

What If? – Season 3

067, TV Review

This is the final season of Marvel’s What If? animation series, and not before time because the creative team has clearly run out of steam. Where the series used to do interesting things with existing parts of the MCU, it has now been relegating largely to promoting forthcoming bad ideas (Thunderbolts) and past disasters (Eternals).

There’s an episode in which there is a legion of kaiju Hulks opposed by Avengers wearing giant mecha suits. Why?

There’s an episode in which Howard the Duck marries Darcy Lewis and everyone is trying to kidnap their egg. Why?

Kate Bishop and Shang Chi reimagined as wild west heroes? Scraping the barrel here, aren’t we?

The point is that, instead of taking the existing characters and timelines, and doing something slightly different with them, after the manner of an alternate history novel, they are now just picking genres from elsewhere and plonking a random selection of Marvel characters into them.

Given that this series appeared in the winter, it is a marvel (pun intended) that we did not get an episode in which the ghosts of X-Men past, present and future visit stingy old Erik Scrooge and persuade him to do more for poor, blind Scott Cratchit and his son, Tiny Charles, who can’t walk.

I haven’t seen the final two episodes. I’m not sure that I can be bothered.

Editorial – January 2025

067, Editorial

It has been a while. As planned, the holidays allowed me to get more books read. Most of them were intended for Wizard’s Tower, not for review. Sorry about that. You’ll be seeing some of them eventually.

I’m somewhat relieved to get this issue out, becuase this week has been a bit of a disaster. My internet died on Saturday, and has been dodgy ever since. Zen and OpenReach are blaming each other, and I have swapped every piece of kit I can. Nothing fixes the problem. It is fine for email and occasional web browsing, but for anything else, including putting this ‘zine together, I have to tether off my phone. And the phone signal here in Darkest Wales is pants.

February is a short month, and I’m normally quite busy with LGBTQ+ History Month (which is February in the UK), but I should be able to get an issue out. It may be a few days late as I have to do a thing in Westminster on the 26th and another thing in Aberystwyth on the 28th.

And there are books to make. Expect a press release or two in February.

Issue #66

Issues

This is the November 2024 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


Cover: The Conquest of the Moon

066, Art, George Roux

There’s a change of policy with the cover art this issue. Sadly the free art on PixaBay has been swamped by AI crap, and there doesn’t appear to be any easy way to filter it out in searches. So instead I am using art from the public domain images collection of the British Library. The plan is to find illustrations from science fiction and fantasy books. I hope you’ll find the results interesting.

This issue’s cover is an internal illustration from a book called The Conquest of the Moon: a story of the Bayouda by André Laurie. The art is by George Roux. The book was originally published in French in 1887 under the title, Les exilés de la Terre, Séléne Company Limited. The English translation, from which the illustration is taken, was published in 1889.

Laurie was a pen name of the Corsican author, Paschal Grousset. He was a contemporary and friend of Jules Verne. Indeed, he wrote the original book that Verne turned into The Begum’s Millions. A committed supporter of the Paris Commune, Grousset wrote that book while living in exile in London.

The devices in the illustration are not radio telescopes, they are giant magnets. In the book, a commercial operation plans to drag the Moon down to the Sahara Desert where it can be mind. Unfortunately for them, they end up being dragged to the Moon instead.

More information about Laurie/Grousset is available at the SF Encyclopedia. The book, The Conquest of the Moon, is available in paperback and ebook editions from British Library.

The Tapestry of Time

066, Book Review, Kate Heartfield

I’m a sucker for a good secret history. There are, of course, a lot of bad ones out there, but I’m happy to report that the latest novel from Kate Heartfield is a fine example of the genre.

The book is set mainly in occupied France during WWII, which gives plenty of opportunity to explore women’s history. To start with, Paris before the war was pretty much World Lesbian Central. Heartfield declines the opportunity to feature real members of that community who were involved in the Resistance, such as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, but a lesbian relationship is very much central to the plot. To my delight, Heartfield manages to make the romance fiction tropes work in the book, rather than shoehorn the characters into them.

Thus we have our main character, the bookish Kit Sharp, who is an art historian working at the Louvre, and Max Yardley, her headstrong and adventure-loving childhood friend. Kit’s father is also an historian, and has an obsession with the Bayeaux Tapestry. Max’s father is an MP, and therefore deeply involved in the war effort. Both have major roles to play in the story.

Next up in our tour of early-mid 20th Century women’s history we have the Special Operations Executive. This was a special forces unit that worked closely with the Resistance. Many of its members were women who were parachuted into occupied France to work as spies and radio operators. Kit’s youngest sister, Ivy, forever trying to prove herself in a family where she will always be the baby, ends up joining the SOE.

Ivy doesn’t just get to punch Nazis, she kills them.

Kit has two other sisters. One, Rose, is heavily into mathematics and music. She ends up working at Bletchley Park, another way in which women contributed to the war effort. From the book’s point of view, she gives out heroines access to information that would normally be Top Secret.

Finally we have Helen, who so desperately wants to fit into her society’s view of a proper woman (wife and mother) that I kept wanting to slap her. She ends up working with the Land Army (which you may be familiar with from Tiffani Angus’s Threading the Labyrinth), until she gets pregnant by her soldier boyfriend.

The other main character in the story is the Bayeaux Tapestry (famously not a tapestry but an embroidery). Given that it depicts a successful invasion of England, the Nazis were keen to use it as a propaganda tool. Himmler was particularly fascinated by it, and shoehorned the story of William the Conqueror into his Aryan ideology. It is a bit of a weird thing to have done, given that the people whom William defeated were the Germanic descendants of the Angles, Saxons, etc.. But William was a Norman, and therefore of Norse descent. And in any case, Nazis have never been big on actual facts.

The missing piece is the fantasy element. Himmler, of course, was deep into occultism. Heartfield gives us our fantasy element in part through the mysterious character of Aelfgyva whose presence in the Tapestry is a subject of much debate amongst historians. In the book, Himmler believes that the Tapestry can be used, through magic, to manipulate the future. Of course he reckons without plucky English gals who can also tap into that magic.

The Tapestry of Time is a book that is dripping with excellent historical research, and a deep respect for the roles played by women in WWII. Of course I loved it. I hope you will to.

book cover
Title: The Tapestry of Time
By: Kate Heartfield
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Nightward

066, Book Review, RSA Garcia

I’m delighted to see the career of RSA Garcia flourishing. Aside from her being an SF&F author, we talk a lot about cricket on social media. She won this year’s Sturgeon Award for ‘Tantie Merle and the Farmhand 4200’, an engaging tale of an old lady, a farm robot and a goat. The Nightward is her second novel. The first was Lex Talionis, about which I interviewed her for Ujima Radio some ten years ago. You can find that interview here.

While Lex Talionis is science fiction, The Nightward is clearly fantasy, at least at first look. It has a map, and people who do magic. The publicity for the book connects it to The Witcher. That’s primarily because it shares the concept of forces of chaos erupting into the world and unleashing bizarre monsters on the unfortunately human kingdoms. (Well, not kingdoms, queendoms. More of that later.)

Something else that the book shares with The Witcher is a rather freeform approach to worldbuilding. While the society is broadly mediaeval in nature, Garcia brings in Caribbean mythology, names from ancient Greece and modern Europe, and a whole lot else. The map is, well, odd. I’m not an expert in geography, but it seems weird to me. All of this may be off-putting to people who are heavily into fantasy worldbuilding. Please don’t let this be you.

One of the clichés of this sort of epic fantasy is that there is an Evil Overlord whom the good guys must overcome. Garcia has avoided that simplistic approach. While the book does open with an act of great villainy, we soon discover that the supposed bad guys all have reasons for what they have done. Only one is a genuinely selfish megalomaniac.

Our heroine, meanwhile, is something of a Disney princess. But Viella is a young teenager when the book opens, with very little understanding of the world and a headstrong selfishness born of privilege. She’s a good kid, but she has a lot to learn.

I promised you queendoms. The other fascinating aspect of the book is the gender politics. This is a world ruled by women, save for one small part of the map where men rule. These are not separatist communities, and that inevitably destabilises the politics. When the book opens, Viella’s mother, High Queen Elise, is about to enact legislation to give men more rights. This is too radical for the conservative elements of society, and not radical enough for others.

The world of book is also one in which magic is primarily done by women. Men who have magical powers are often seen as dangerous. However, there is a particular dangerous class of magic users known as the Unbound, and they are dangerous (and powerful) precisely because they are not bound to one binary gender or the other.

Finally I should note that this is not exactly fantasy. It becomes clear very early on in the book that what we are seeing is an post-scientific world, in which all sorts of ancient technological secrets are there to be discovered. The magic that the various characters do may all be uses of technology that they do not fully understand. The goddess Gaiea, whom all the queendoms revere, may be one of these ancient scientists, or a product of their messing with genetics. We’ll have to read book 2 to find out.

As you can see, there is a lot going on in this book. And Garcia throws in a bunch more ideas right at the end. As I said before, the worldbuilding is very eclectic. But sophisticated worldbuilding is not what Garcia is trying to do here. She is much more interested in a good story, and in thinking about gender politics.

The other point that I must mention here is that Garcia has achieved all of this while battling cancer. Healthcare in Trinidad is not cheap. She has a fundraising page to help with the expense. If you read and enjoy this book, do please consider donating so that she can write more.

book cover
Title: The Nightward
By: RSA Garcia
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Welsh Giants, Ghosts and Goblins

066, Book Review, Claire Fayers

Waterstones has an award for Welsh Book of the Year. Who knew? Not me, until this year, when the winning title was clearly something of interest to me. Much of the credit here should go to Stephanie Burgis who has been enthusing about the book for some time. I think she also knows the author, Claire Fayers.

According to Amazon the book is suitable for readers of 8 years and above. That seems about right to me. My first impression of the book is that it is something you could read to children. That is, unless you are the sort of person who rails against ‘the woke’ and would never subject your children to anything more progressive than Enid Blyton.

Given the title of Welsh Giants, Ghosts and Goblins you have probably guessed that the book is a collection of folk story re-tellings. That is certainly true, but Fayers has not simply made ancient tales acceptable to a modern audience, she has put her own spin on all of them.

The conceit of the book is that Idris the Giant, having inherited his father’s throne as King of the Giants, is fed up of all the court nonsense. He decides to take a sabbatical and go off in search of stories. Eventually he will end up at Cadair Idris looking at the stars and dreaming, but he encounters many interesting stories along the way.

My favourite part of the book is the re-telling of the tale of Culwch and Olwen from The Mabinogion. It has a very unusual twist, which I won’t spoil for you. I was also quite taken by Amethyst, the coblyn princess, who wants her father to get her a pet human.

From an adult point of view, the main interest of the book is in the range of folk takes that Fayers has researched for the book. There are no end of interesting magical creatures in the British Isles, and Wales has a full share of them. Fayers give good notes as to where she got her stories from.

The book is also beautifully produced, and consequently would make a fine present for a young person of your acquaintance. It is, after all, that time of year.

book cover
Title: Welsh Giants, Ghosts and Goblins
By: Claire Fayers
Publisher: Firefly Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Helen Brady Interview

066, Helen L Brady, Interviews

Helen L Brady is a new addition to the Wizard’s Tower stable. Here Cheryl talks to Helen about her career in screenwriting and why she has moved into novels instead. They also touch on Helen’s work in costuming for theatre, and her past in historical re-enactment. Helen also talks about her first experiences of science fiction conventions at Worldcon and Bristolcon.


Fantastika 2024

066, Convention Report

And breathe! The convention circuit is over for the year.

Not that I would have missed Fantastika. While I have been to many Finnish conventions, and made many Swedish friends as a result, I haven’t been to Stockholm since 2011. I did got to the Eurocon in Uppsala last year, but that just gave me an appetite for visiting Sweden again.

My trip out was a screaming disaster. On the night before I was due to fly I got email from KLM telling me that my flight had been cancelled and they had re-booked me on a later flight that did not get into Arlanda until 23:20. As it turned out, the flight has not been cancelled, but it was overbooked and I had been bumped. I have been promised compensation, and I hope I am actually able to get it. Due to the late arrival, I had to get a cab from Arlanda to the hotel, which was eye-wateringly expensive. Also we ran into roadworks on the E4 on the way in. Thankfully the driver turned off the meter while we were sat there, or the fare would have probably hit four figures in GBP.

The hotel was very lovely, though being Swedish the rooms had very little furniture and it was all wooden. Also there was no coffee service in the rooms. I did get some time to work, and I spent much of it down in the lobby where there was a free coffee service and long desks with comfy chairs and power points.

An unusual feature of the hotel was that they served a free meal each night. There was very little choice, though each individual item was served separately so if, for example, you didn’t want a particular vegetable, or a sauce, you didn’t have to have it. I managed to eat there happily most nights, but I can imagine that it would have been a lot more difficult for folks with allergies.

The convention was not in central Stockholm (which would have bene much more expensive), but in a suburb called Sickla. The space we used was in a cultural centre that was conveniently across a small square from the hotel. It contained a bar, a café, and a library as well as meeting space (some of which seemed to double as a concert/theatre venue). There was a cinema next door, and a shopping mall nearby. I’m told that the space was cheap to rent. Possibly it was subsidized by the local council.

Public transit in Stockholm is excellent. Sickla’s main tram stop, which is a terminus, was being renovated, so we had to use a temporary stop further along the line. It was very easy to navigate once you knew where everything was, but was probably a bit daunting if you arrived by tram, especially as it was uphill all the way to the hotel.

Other than love of travel, my primary reason for going was because Juliet McKenna was a Guest of Honour, and as a responsible publisher I do try to support my best-selling author. Of course, thanks to Brexit, it wasn’t possible for me to take books to Sweden to sell. However, a Swedish bookstore was able to order some from the UK and, being familiar with the tax issues, was happy to deal with importing them. The seemed to sell well.

I would have been perfectly happy to sell ebook copies of The Green Man’s War, but the Swedish fans seems uninterested in ebooks. Either that or they were unfamiliar with Juliet’s work and wanted to start with the first book in the series. In the latter case, I’m hopping that they’ll soon be hooked.

My first panel was on Friday night, and was about Strong Female Characters. I was happy to be able to use this it tell people about Fight Like A Girl 2, but I do think that we should be beyond this sort of panel by now. I did a bit of research for the panel and discovered that CL Moore’s first Jirel of Joiry story was published in 1934. That’s 90 year ago, and people are still surprised when a fantasy book has a woman with agency as the protagonist.

Having said that, I do think that there has been a change in recent years, and I think that is because the Romance genre has discovered fantasy. We now have Paranormal Romance and Romantasy as top selling subgenres, which means that everyone is SF&F is forced top notice how well Romance sells.

On Saturday I chaired a panel on The Dispossessed, one of my favourite books, which is now 50 years old. We had an excellent panel with 4 people who knew the book very well, and thanks to Saga for showing that you don’t have to be ancient to know about it. One question I didn’t get to, but which we had discussed in the Green Room beforehand, was whether the book would sell to a mainstream publisher these days. Sadly we all agreed that it would have no chance.

First up on Sunday was a panel entitled “Herding cats”, which was all about how to moderate a panel. Again we had a good group of people, but for some reason the programming folks chose to give us a moderator who had never moderated a panel before. Of course we were all very supportive, and Timothy you did a great job. Hopefully you learned a lot.

Finally I got to do a gig with Juliet. We had been asked to talk amongst ourselves on the state of publishing today. It was a pretty grim subject, and the audience seemed to go away with a much better understanding of how bad things are. Quite why anyone wants to be an author these days, I do not know. Though it is probably not as daft as wanting to be a publisher.

As I’m getting old and don’t know how much more foreign travel I will be able to do, I decided to spent a couple of days in Stockholm after the convention. There are a lot of great museums. I finally got to see the Vasa, which is a jaw-dropping sight when you first enter the vast hall where it is kept. I also spent a lot of time in the Viking Museum and learned a few things. These two and the Abba Musuem – another must see for folks of my generation – were all in the same large park, along with several other museums. I did not get to the Museum of Nordic Life, or to the Museum of Swedish Drinking Culture (which promised free samples). Honestly, I could have spent a week there.

But that is Sweden done for a while. Next year’s Swecon is in the city of Lund, and it is in October so I will not have time to go.

Agatha All Along

066, TV Review

If you look carefully at the poster for the TV series that accompanies this review, you will see that it says at the top, “From the twisted minds that brought you WandaVision”. Never a truer word…

I’m sorry Agatha, I know this show has your name in the title, but it was never about you. It was always about her. About Wanda.

If you have followed my Mavel Cinematic Universe reviews over the past few years you will have noticed a common theme: the slow but inexorable drive towards a Young Avengers movie. Many of the pieces are already in place, but some are still missing.

As part of her domestic fantasy in WandaVision, Wanda created two children for herself and Vision: Billy and Tommy. Billy took after his mother with an aptitude for witchery. Tommy inherited speedster powers from his uncle Pietro. At the end of WandaVision, both boys were presumed dead. Ha! Even in my review I was confident that wasn’t true.

In the comics the two boys end up as prisoners of Mephisto. The MCU goes away from that. Instead we have this TV series which is ostensibly about Agatha, but also features a mysterious teenage boy who is a) gay, b) is played by one of the stars of Heartstopper and c) has a talent for magic. If you spend 5 minutes thinking about it you should guess that this is Billy.

There is, however, a TV show to build around that revelation. It is done through the conceit of the Witches’ Road, a rite of passage for covens which is supposed to lead to “glory at the end” and give the triumphant witches their heart’s desire. Anecdotally, Agnes is the only witch to have survived the journey. It would be a massive spoiler to tell you why that is true.

So as supporting cast we get a bunch of washed up witches who want their powers back. In many ways they are the more interesting parts of the show, though not all of them will live through it. I particularly liked Lilia. The star of the show, however, is Aubrey Plaza as Rio Vidal. I do hope that she gets a place in future MCU productions.

The Road plot allowed the scriptwriters to build each episode around a test on the journey, each of which was associated with some aspect of witchery: potions & poisons, Ouija boards and so on. It was a clever structure and it worked well, but it was always only padding to get us to the end of the Road and the big reveal of Billy’s identity.

We also learned a lot about Agatha during the journey. Much as I’d been looking forward to seeing Kathryn Hahn in the role again, I have to admit that I thought this series stretched her a bit too far. Agatha is an incredibly complex character who flips rapidly between being charming but duplicitous, traumatized and vulnerable, and downright wicked. The role is a tough challenge.

That challenge also afflicted the ending. Many people seem to have disliked it. I didn’t, but then I kind of expected it. Marvel has a deeply ambiguous view of witchcraft. On the one hand characters such as Wanda and Billy are heroes. On the other, their powers stem from forces that are inherently evil, and this warps everything they do. This is something that will doubtless cause much heartache for Billy in future MCU appearances.

Anyway, the job has been done, another member of the Young Avengers is on the board. And by all means let’s go look for Tommy. But I would much prefer to see Billy go look for Teddy, his Skrull prince boyfriend, because cuteness will ensue.

Deadpool and Wolverine

066, Movie Review

Team-up movies are the bro version of enemies-to-lovers lesbian romances. You put two lads with very different personalities together. They fight a lot. And they end up sharing a beer and slapping each other on the back in a just good friends really sort of way.

If ever there was a team-up movie crying out to be made, it is Deadpool and Wolverine. That’s because both of these characters have powers of regeneration. They can’t be killed. And that means that they can fight to the death, over and over again, and still get back up for more. It is bromance heaven.

Of course Wolverine is actually dead, at least as far as the MCU is concerned. Indeed, he had one of the most beautifully choreographed deaths in movie history. Everyone seems to agree that Logan was a great movie, and a perfect send-off for an iconic character. But, as we know, no one in comics stays dead for very long. And now we have the Multiverse, so no one need stay dead for more than a few seconds. There is always another reality in which they are still alive and can be fetched, rabbit-like, from the script-writer’s hat.

The plot of the movie is fairly basic, if somewhat unusual for Deadpool. At last Wade Wilson gets to save the world, rather than just himself. For those unfamiliar with the franchise, that’s unusual because Wade Wilson is an arsehole. No, let me correct that. Wade Wilson is to arseholes what black holes are to kitchen sink waste disposal units. That’s the thing about the Deadpool franchise. You have a character who is utterly insufferable, but no matter how many times you kill him, with however much extreme prejudice, he just keeps coming back.

Logan, in contrast, is an actual hero. He might be grumpy and insolent, often drunk, and prone to ridiculous levels of violence, but beneath it all is the traditional heart of gold that won’t let people down if they really need him. Even someone like Wade Wilson.

My favourite part of the film is where Logan gets to say to Wade:

“I mean, you are a ridiculous, immature, half-wit moron. I have never met a sadder, more attention-starved jabbering little prick in my entire life, and that says a lot because I’ve been alive for more than 200 fucking years.”

That’s just before they spend ten minutes or so ripping each other to pieces and coming back to life again.

Every superhero movie needs a villain, and in this film the role is taken by Cassandra Nova, Charles Xavier’s evil twin sister. She’s magnificently portrayed by Emma Corrin who, I note, despite having played the super-feminine Princess Diana in The Crown, uses non-binary pronouns. I think Diana would have liked that.

There are guest appearances by other X-Men characters, but as this is a Multiverse story few of them are the Earth 616 versions of them. And indeed the whole movie takes place in a different timeline to the main MCU, and therefore can be conveniently ignored for continuity purposes. There’s a strange, red-skinned version of Nightcrawler whom I rather liked. Apparently that’s Azazel, who used to be Kurt’s father but now isn’t because X-Men continuity is insanely complicated.

The film also features guest appearances from Elektra and Blade (both played by the original actors). It has a newly grown up Dafne Keen reprising her role as Laura/X-23, which is lovely, and the worst piece of casting I have seen in the MCU. I gather from the ‘Making Of’ documentary that Channing Tatum has always wanted to play Gambit, and indeed has been desperately trying to interest Hollywood in a Gambit movie. It is lovely that Ryan Reynolds gave him the chance to do it, but he looks like a muscle-bound thug stuffed into a too-small Gambit costume. It is sad.

The film is, of course, supposed to be a comedy. I laughed twice. Once was when I saw how they had styled Cassandra’s base. That was seriously imaginative. The other was when the Deadpool Corps turned up. This is a small army of different version of Deadpool from different parts of the Multiverse. So we have Nicepool, who is irritating in a very different way, Ladypool, Kidpool, Samuraipool, Dogpool, Cowboypool and so on.

There is also a character whose costume bears a Welsh flag, so obviously he is Welshpool. That probably means nothing to you, but there is a town in North Wales called Trallwng, which the English call Welshpool. It has a lovely steam railway, which Kevin and I visited over the summer, and a splendid National Trust property. It is quite small as towns go, but it is very near Wrecsam. Consequently many of the inhabitants will be fans of Wrecsam football club, which Ryan Reynolds owns. Of course by the time you have explained the joke it is no longer funny.

I’m sure that lots of people will have found Deadpool and Wolverine funnier than I did. But I did find it clever. I loved the way they had used existing parts of MCU continuity to make the team-up happen. And I appreciated the way in which they poked fun at Marvel, Disney, Fox and the whole Hollywood studio system along the way. Deadpool movies don’t so much break the fourth wall as take a wrecking ball to it and reduce it to rubble. I am occasionally amazed at what they get away with.

Also this was a movie that was partly about Logan. Hugh Jackman was magnificent as always. He gets to wear the yellow suit at last, which will make the fans happy. And it worked. I cried.

Editorial – November 2024

066, Editorial

This one is a few days late again. That’s partly because I have been stupidly busy once again, and partly because I didn’t see any point in putting it out on a Sunday. Y’all have better things to do, right?

Since last issue, Wizard’s Tower has published two books and put out a major press release about a whole new series. Also I have read something which is a Secrit Projekt at the moment, but I’ll be telling you more about next year. I am very excited about it.

I still have three novels to read and three books to do the layouts for before the New Year. I wasn’t planning on doing a December issue anyway. Maybe I can clear the backlog of WTP reading over the holidays.

Anyway, as this will be the last issue before the seasonal break, I hope you all have a very happy whatever festival it is that you normally celebrate. I have celebratory meals planned for Heuldro’r Gaeaf (Winter Solstice), Nadolig (Nativity) and Dydd Calan (First Day). The Alban Arthan thing is one of Iolo Morganwg’s inventions. Iechyd da!

Issue #65

Issues

This is the October 2024 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.


  • Cover: The Green Man’s War: Ben Baldwin has raised the bar for book covers once again

  • The Moonlight Market: A charming tale of the war between the butterflies and the moths, fought out on the streets of London

  • The Knife and the Serpent: Tim Pratt is back with a new series. In this one a hapless student from Berkeley finds himself in the middle of a war for the multiverse, with the main protagonists being his girlfriend and his ex.

  • On the Economics of Small Presses: Is running a small press a viable business? Not without significant discrepancies in who gets paid.

  • Juliet McKenna Interview: The Green Man's War is on pre-order. Juliet McKenna talks to Cheryl about the future of the series, and about where she got some of her ideas from.

  • BristolCon 2024: For the first time ever, BristolCon runs for 2 whole days.

  • The Sheep Look Up: A reprint of Cheryl's review of the classic John Brunner novel of eco-catastrophe, first published in Emerald City #96

  • The Wood at Midwinter: Brilliance from Clarke as always, but possibly the shortest hardcover book Cheryl has ever read

  • Rings of Power – Season 2: Like Durin III and his mithril, the folks of Amazon are determined to mine every bit of fan service out of The Silmarilion

  • FantasyCon 2024: If it is Chester then it must be Romans, with a little FantasyCon on the side.

  • Editorial – October 2024: Cheryl is having a very busy month

The Moonlight Market

065, Book Review, Joanne Harris

Joanne Harris is, of course, a hugely well-known and respected writer of mainstream fiction. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, which is not the sort of honour that is doled out to hoi polloi of genre like us. And yet, she turns up at conventions. She was at Worldcon in Glasgow, and she’s a Guest of Honour at this year’s BristolCon. I first met her at FantasyCon the previous time it was in Chester. I interviewed her and she pointed out that almost all of her books include magic in some shape or form. She is totally one of us.

Given that she has now written books about Loki, most people probably accept that. But The Moonlight Market is somewhat different. It is a straight up fairy tale, set in London. If you are pining for the likes of Neverwhere and Stardust, this is a book for you. I see that the publishers are promoting the book on that basis, which is very perceptive of them.

The background to the story is a war between the Butterfly Queen and the Moth King, a feud which started when their son accidentally left the Kingdom of Faerie and ended up in the world of the Sightless Folks (us). The Spider Mage, whose incompetent babysitting caused this tragedy, has vowed to find the lost Prince and put an end to the war, but it has been going on for so long now that no one else cares about anything except victory.

Tom Argent is a young man who has devoted his life to photography. He manages a photography shop near King’s Cross which never seems to do much business. Tom is kept in a job by the shop’s kindly owner, the mysterious Mr. Burnett.

One day Tom meets a beautiful woman called Vanessa. He falls instantly and helplessly in love. Little does Tom know that the woman of his dreams is a powerful butterfly whose only interest in him is to feed on his life force, something the butterflies call “nectar”. Thankfully help is at hand in the form of an old homeless man who calls himself Spider, and his scruffy, sarcastic assistant, Charissa.

All would be well, except that Tom is a hopeless case, totally in thrall to the glamorous Vanessa. No matter how many times Spider and Charissa point out that his life is in danger, he insists on trying to find Vanessa again and beg her to love him in return. Slowly we begin to understand that this is not the first time this story has played out, and it always ends the same way.

Except, of course, that fairy stories have to have a happy ending. We know that, and anticipate it. The joy in reading comes from the way in which the inevitable unfolds, and how well the author illustrates the emotions of the protagonists as it does so. In the hands of a expert writer such as Harris, the predictability of the ending is not a problem, especially given the convoluted route by which she gets us there.

book cover
Title: The Moonlight Market
By: Joanne Harris
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Knife and the Serpent

065, Book Review, Tim Pratt

If I need something that will be a quick and entertaining read, not too challenging or depressing, I know I can always rely on Tim Pratt. Their books are inventive, amusing, and contain just enough mild peril to keep you reading. The books also tend to include a few queer characters, Pratt being genderfluid, which is nice.

The Knife and the Serpent is a new departure for Pratt, in that there are no previous novels in the universe. However, they have tested the waters with a couple of short stories featuring the concept of Nigh-Space. This is a version of the multiverse which is described as being multiple planes of existence stacked on top of one another like a ream of paper. Moving between nearby planes is fairly easy, but the further apart two planes are the harder it becomes. Thankfully for the rest of the multiverse, Earth does not yet have inter-dimensional transit capabilities.

Our hero, Glenn Browning, is a mild-mannered PhD student at the University of Berkeley. Imagine his surprise when he discovers that his sexy new girlfriend, Vivy Sattari, is secretly an alien spy whose job it is to help keep Nigh-Space free of Fascists and other unpleasant and aggressive persons.

Imagine his surprise also when he discovers that his ex, Tamsin Culver, is also an alien and is heiress to an arms dealing empire on another plane. She’s on Earth because her family was the victim of a mafia-style hit operation by a rival family, and she’s the only survivor. But blood breeds true, and Sin, as she likes to be called, wants her family empire back, and more.

Add to this the fact that Glenn is an enthusiastic sub who very much enjoys being tied up and ordered about by powerful, confident women. Oh dear.

Actually Pratt doesn’t make as much of that as I expected. I had thought that we’d see Glenn torn between his two loves, but in practice Tamsin is so awful that there really isn’t a choice. Pratt must have had enormous fun writing her, because she is utterly selfish and megalomanical. At one point Pratt actually has her say, “After all, why shouldn’t I get everything that I want.” But Tamsin, who is the viewpoint character for half of the chapters, is brilliant at self-justification. She really didn’t have any choice about murdering all those people. It was them or her.

As this is space opera, the book wouldn’t be complete without a sentient spaceship. That would be Vivy’s sidekick, who calls himself The Wreck of the Edmund Pevensie. For much of the book he ends up manifesting as a very annoying foppish Englishman.

The other interesting innovation in the book is something called snap-trace. It is a means of travel between planes invented by Vivy’s employers, a group called The Interventionists. The way that snap-trace works is that you concentrate on something or someone that means a huge amount to you, and you are immediately drawn through the multiverse to where that thing or person is. It is a method of inter-dimensional travel powered by love. Someone should tell Russell T Davies. I’m sure he could find a use for it.

I guess I should probably describe this book as Cosy Space Opera. If that sort of thing tickles your fancy, I warmly recommend it. If you prefer something meatier, more grim, or with less kink, you should maybe give it a miss. But personally I think that everyone deserves a little light-hearted fun now again. And the beauty of a book is that you don’t need a safe word, you can just put it down.

book cover
Title: The Knife and the Serpent
By: Tim Pratt
Publisher: Angry Robot
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

On the Economics of Small Presses

065, Articles

At World Fantasy this year, Scott Andrews of Beneath Ceaseless Skies gave a speech about the economics of short fiction magazines. His point was that, while they pay writers very well, and pay people such as slush readers, they mostly don’t pay the actual editors. This, Andrews maintained, meant that only people with a substantial amount of personal privilege could afford to be an editor, and that necessarily limited the diversity of the field.

Andrews was specifically talking about short fiction magazines, but he did add that he thought that similar issues affected small presses, and he is dead right. When I started Wizard’s Tower, I promised myself that the company would not lose money. Technically it makes a small profit each year, but that’s only because if I charged all of my convention travel to expenses it would make a big loss and the tax man would get suspicious. So I mostly account for things like flights and hotel bills as my hobby. I’d be going anyway, regardless of whether I’d be selling books.

Clearly I have a lot of privilege to be able to do this. I have a reasonable income from other work. My time is fairly flexible. And these days I get a state pension as well. So I’m old, white and fairly comfortably off, which is what people tend to think of when it comes to privilege. I would like to publish a more diverse range of writers, but I suspect that a lot of the people I’d like to work with either wouldn’t trust me, or would not want to be associated with me. There’s not a lot I can do about that. Thankfully I have managed to publish a number of stories by trans people, which makes me happy.

But the economics of small presses skews strangely in other ways. There is a hierarchy when it comes to who gets paid. I don’t take a salary at all, so all of the layouts, the admin and what marketing I can manage to get done is all unpaid. I don’t pay the authors an advance, but I do pay royalties. That means that the authors are taking a risk that their books will sell well, and that therefore they’ll get some decent money. That works for some, but not for others.

There are other people who are needed to get a book out. You need a cover artist, and unless the author is very experienced you need an editor. Even the best authors will produce better books if they are edited. These people are freelance professionals and they expect to get paid market rates. Most people who work with small presses don’t get the sort of money they would get if they were working for a mainstream publisher, but they do expect a decent rate. What’s more they expect to put their prices up on a regular basis. Over the 13 years that Wizard’s Tower has been running, the costs have gone up quite a bit.

Let’s look at an example. Suppose I have to pay £400 for a cover, and another £400 to an editor. If I only do an ebook there are no additional costs except the ISBN. Suppose I sell it on Amazon at £5. That means I get £3.50 per copy, if Amazon don’t discount it. That means I would have to sell just shy of 230 copies to break even. But that assumes no money to the author. I probably need to sell nearer 500 copies. The chances of that are not good. And all this is without considering a paperback edition, where the costs are higher and the margins razor-thin.

With those numbers, the author would be getting a little over £800 for the book, which is not to be sniffed at. But in terms of an hourly rate it is still way less than the cover artist and editor are getting. Writing a novel takes a long time.

There are, of course, people out there prepared to do a job for “mates rates”. But that just leaves the publisher feeling guilty about not having paid the going rate, and wondering when someone is going to call her out for exploiting people.

It would be nice if I could put the prices of the books up. I’ve had to do it with the paper editions because the cost of paper went through the roof over the past few years. Putting the prices of ebooks up is only going to lead to lower sales.

As a result, I’m not sure how much longer I can do this. I’m not going to invest £1000 or so in each book with little hope of getting the money back, because I promised myself that I would not run the company at a loss. Also I don’t fancy being investigated by the tax man. It is all very challenging, and not sustainable in the long run.

Juliet McKenna Interview

065, Interviews, Juliet E McKenna

The Green Man’s War is currently available for pre-order (links here). Because Wizard’s Tower was launching two books at BristolCon, I wasn’t planning to interview Juliet at the launch. Instead I did it via Zoom, which also gave us more time to chat. The results are in the podcast below.

Juliet and I discuss a range of subjects. Obviously the new book is top of the list, but it isn’t the only book that she has due. Look out for Different Times and Other Places, forthcoming from NewCon Press in December. That’s a short story collection, and it includes a new Green Man story. We also discussed plans for the future of the Green Man series.

It is something of a joke in writerly circles that the one question authors hate getting asked is, “where do you get your ideas from?” As Juliet often notes, getting ideas is not the problem, it is turning them into quality fiction that is the hard bit. However, once in a while an author will experience something that sticks with them, and which gets used in a book. In this podcast you will hear about an event that affected Juliet and her husband, and which directly influence the frightening events that open The Green Man’s War.

BristolCon 2024

065, Convention Report

This year saw the 15th iteration of BristolCon, and the first that was a whole weekend long rather than just Saturday. Con Chair MEG was upfront about this being an experiment. Lots of people had asked for it, but the only way to know if it would work was to try it.

From my point of view the con was something of an embarrassment as I was supposed to be launching two new books – The Green Man’s War and Fight Like A Girl 2 – but neither was ready in time so I could only sell ebooks and pre-orders. Thankfully some people did pre-order the books.

I had two panels. The first was on Saturday when I was moderating a discussion on worldbuilding societies. I hadn’t got contact details for the panel in time to check in with them beforehand, but I needn’t have worried. I had GoH, Peter Hamilton, on the panel, and he is more than capable of doing the entire panel by himself. Ditto Penny Hill who was muttering about writing a book on the subject. If she does I will buy it. You might think that it was odd to have Kevlin Henny on such a panel, given that most of his fiction weighs in at 1000 words or less, but the skill and precision required to give a sense of a real society in very short fiction are not easily gained, and Kevlin is a master. Helen Gould wasn’t quite as much of a history buff as the rest of us, but she hangs out at radical book fairs and was more than capable of holding her own in discussions of politics and economics. I think the panel went very well.

My Sunday panel was about climate fiction, which I used as an excuse to enthuse about Sean McMullen’s powerful Generation Nemesis. Doing good climate fiction is hard these days because it is clear that all of the warnings that people have been writing over the past decades have largely fallen on deaf ears. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote about the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream in the Science in the Capital trilogy twenty years ago, and now people are asking why science fiction didn’t foresee this possibility. Now it is too late to prevent a whole raft of catastrophic changes to our climate. The panel spent most of its time asking what writers of climate fiction should do now. I’m not sure that it came to any great conclusions save that we should not give up hope.

Anyway, I got to recommend The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner to a bunch of people who are too young to have seen it when it came out. I have included my review of it from Emerald City in thhis issue in case anyone else out there has never heard of it.

Sunday was also my book launch. Juliet read from The Green Man’s War, and if you want to know the sort of thing she was reading about you should check out the podcast interview elsewhere in this issue. I was also lucky enough to have Juliet, Gaie Sebold and Anna Smith Spark on hand to read from Fight Like A Girl 2. There was cake. We sold books.

It is not yet clear whether the two-day convention experiment was a success. Quite a few people only attended on Saturday. A smaller number only attended on Sunday. As far as I am aware, the total number of memberships wasn’t much changed. This meant that there was more room in the function space.

We could have more programme, which was nice. From my point of view, two days meant two book launches. Had we just had the one day, I would have lost out to Macmillan who were doing an event for Peter Hamilton.

The main issue for me, however, was sales, which were up 44% on last year. That was quite encouraging. If I had had paper copies of the two new books I would have done even better.

If there was a downside to the con, it was the number of people who came to my table, looked at the pile of books under five different names (plus two anthologies) and said to me, “that’s an awful lot of books you have written.” Apparently these days it is inconceivable that anyone would be selling books at a convention unless they are self-publishing. The trouble is that if I saw a self-published writer with that many titles I would assume that the books were pretty bad. I’m not sure what I can do about that.

Finally for me, it was great to catch up with Peter, Geoff Ryman, whom I have not seen at a BristolCon before, and Joanne Harris, who was the other GoH. Harris is a very fine fantasy writer, and it surprises me that she doesn’t get more attention from the community.

The Sheep Look Up

065, Book Review, John Brunner

This review was first published in Emerald City #96, dated August 2003. Twenty-one years later, we are now scarily much closer to the world that Brunner described in his novel.

Science fiction books are not generally supposed to be predictive. Where they do include things like social and political commentary, their writers intend them to be read as an examination of how we live today, not some irrelevant tale about the future. Even so, some SF writers do manage to sound awfully prescient after the event. This is particularly true if they concentrate on near-future stories. John Brunner (The Shockwave Rider) and Pat Cadigan (Synners) are now credited with having foreseen computer viruses and spam. Philip K. Dick’s work is currently hugely popular as a reflection of modern society, though people thought him paranoid when he wrote his books. But perhaps the most prescient SF book ever written is also one of the least known, at least outside the environmentalist movement. Now at last it has been reissued by a small press company in the US. In 1972 when it was released, John Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up seemed an unlikely nightmare vision of the future. These days it is scarily prophetic. The quotes from The Independent and New Scientist are real.

I am especially pleased to see […] The Sheep Look Up reappear in a fine edition. Its warning, and stark, terrifying beauty, are just as relevant today, even if its message has been partly heeded. For we need reminders that the ultimate decision is ours.

David Brin
from his Introduction to the new edition


At its most basic, The Sheep Look Up is an eco-disaster novel, much like Oryx and Crake. However, there is no mad scientist plotting the downfall of the human race. It is a book entirely about incompetence, greed, and the remarkable fragility of our modern world when faced with disaster. Brunner did not consider the possible collapse of power grids — his agenda was purely in the area of biosciences — but his awareness of the type of trouble we could get ourselves into was striking.

More cows had died in the night, bellies bloated, blood leaking from their mouths and nostrils, frozen smears of blood under their tails. Before the children were allowed to go to school they had to dip their rubber boots in pans of milky disinfectant. The same had been sprayed on the tires of the bus.

The book has an innovative structure, being made up of a monthly diary of seemingly unconnected events that eventually coalesce to form a coherent plot. Many of the entries under a particular month are quite short: a news report or extract from a political speech. Others follow the declining fortunes of a range of well-meaning but largely ignorant characters as their world falls apart around them.

The story begins with an horrific outbreak of violence in a small African state caused by a shipment of food aid that turns out to have been contaminated with an ergot-like hallucinogen. The Africans, used to a long history of American economic imperialism (if you don’t think that happens see the quote below, and yes I suspect the EU is just as bad), assume that they are being deliberately poisoned.

US cotton subsidies […] Oxfam claims, are distorting the world market with payments worth $4bn a year — more than America spends on aid for the whole of Africa — enabling America’s 25,000 cotton farmers to dump their produce on the international market and get rich in the process. World cotton prices are now lower than at any time since the 1930s Depression, causing an economic and social crisis in sub-Saharan Africa and tipping the 10 million people who depend on cotton for their livelihood below the poverty line.

The Independent Magazine
16 August 2003


The tale of how the contaminant got into the food, and the impact this has on US society, forms the backbone of the novel. Along the way, the US President, a character portrayed as a bumbling idiot who speaks in tabloid newspaper headlines, claims that terrorists have attacked the US with biological and chemical weapons. A war on terrorism is declared and draconian security measures are instituted.

Meanwhile, in the US, public health is becoming a major issue. More and more children are being born with diseases such as asthma, and even physical deformities. Tap water is unsafe to drink. Medicines cease working, as bacteria become resistant to antibiotics. The cost of health insurance skyrockets. Does any of this sound familiar?

“You bastard,” she said. “You smug pompous devil. You liar. You filthy dishonest old man. You put the poison in the world, you and your generation. You crippled my children. You made sure they’d never eat clean food, drink pure water, breathe sweet air. And when someone comes to you for help you turn your back.”

Thankfully much of what Brunner foresaw has not come to pass. The Sheep Look Up was significantly instrumental in the founding of the environmental movement (Brunner himself was one of the founders of CND). As a result, DDT is no longer commonly used as a pesticide (at least not in countries with firm environmental regulations), supersonic planes do not over-fly the US causing avalanches in the Rockies and the Mediterranean is not a fetid cesspool. Of course as a result we also have extremists like the Animal Liberation Front to deal with. But Brunner foresaw that too. In the novel his environmentalist hero, Austin Train, despairs at the violence done in his name.

Even this far from shore, the night stank. The sea moved lazily, its embryo waves aborted before cresting the layer of oily residues surrounding the hull, impermeable as sheet plastic: a mixture of detergents, sewage, industrial chemicals, and the microscopic cellulose fibers due to toilet paper and newsprint. There was no sound of fish breaking the surface. There were no fish.

There are also elements of The Sheep Look Up that will jar with a modern readership. Although Brunner demonstrates a social conscience throughout, characters in the book express attitudes regarding race, gender and sexual preference that are likely to be the cause of a discrimination suit if uttered in public in a Western society today. But of course Brunner is only commenting on society as it was in his day, like any good SF writer should.

“What frightens me in retrospect about The Sheep Look Up […] is that I invented literally nothing for it, bar a chemical weapon that made people psychotic. Everything else I took straight out of the papers.”

John Brunner


You won’t find any comfort in reading The Sheep Look Up. Brunner is unrelentingly bleak in his prose. Although his “sheep” do finally decide that the way their world is going is not what they want, and that they must take action, it is far too late for them. Possibly the planet can be saved, but for individuals there is no hope. There are books (including Oryx and Crake) in which the author destroys the world in some spectacular cataclysm or disaster. But The Sheep Look Up is the only novel I can think of in which almost every character you meet dies alone, unheroically, and often through some stupid accident or mistake. But that, as David Brin says, is the terrible beauty of the book. It is a stark and uncompromising warning of what can happen to a world that puts short-term comfort and political expediency before all else. Just as in 1972, we can read it and think, “it couldn’t happen to us.” But in the intervening years much of it has. And it could yet get worse.

The growing trend around the world to drink water from underground sources is causing a global epidemic of arsenic poisoning. Tens of thousands of people have developed skin lesions, cancers and other symptoms, and many have died. Hundreds of millions are now thought to be at serious risk.

New Scientist
9 August 2003


book cover
Title: The Sheep Look Up
By: John Brunner
Publisher: Benbella
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Wood at Midwinter

065, Book Review, Susanna Clarke

When Susanna Clarke produces a novel it makes a huge amount of money for Bloomsbury. Naturally they would love her to do so regularly. Probably more so now as their other best-selling author is doing everything she can to trash her own reputation. But Clarke seems to produce novels only once a decade. Therefore, Bloomsbury will push out absolutely anything as the new Susanna Clarke book, as long as it is something she has written. If she sent them her shopping list, they would probably publish that.

The Wood at Midwinter began life as a short story to be broadcast by the BBC as part of their Christmas radio programming in 2022. Clarke tells us this in a lengthy Afterword which also talks a lot about Kate Bush and her album, 50 Words for Snow. The Afterword is 9 pages long, out of a total of 60 in the book. But the story is heavily and beautifully illustrated (by Victoria Sawdon). I haven’t counted, but I suspect that there are more words in the Afterword than in the story.

Because this is Susanna Clarke we are talking about, the story, short though it is, packs an awful lot into it. On the surface it is a charming tale about a young woman called Merowdis who sees animals as people. Along the way the story touches on issues of arranged marriages, the stupidity of lapdogs, autism, the nature of sainthood, and that very weird Christian concept of a virgin mother who acquires a child in the depths of winter.

It is a brilliant story.

Is it worth buying as a hardcover book? Let’s just say that, as a publisher, I wouldn’t have the nerve to put it out in that way, no matter who had written it.

book cover
Title: The Wood at Midwinter
By: Susanna Clarke
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Bookshop.org UK
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Rings of Power – Season 2

065, TV Review

Amazon’s Tolkien vehicle continues to be Marmite for fans. I’ve seen some people who have been hate-watching it, and others who love it to pieces. There doesn’t seem to be much in between.

Of course trying to craft a sensible storyline from the dull and largely plotless mess that is The Silmarilion is a monumental task. Much of the criticism seems to come from people who assume that the show has been crafted from scratch, rather than started from a position that no one in their right mind except a marketing executive would actually start from.

The Rings of Power script team do seem to have done some interesting things. They have tried hard to provide character motivations for the various events that happen in the timeline. They have also, shock horror, added some women to the story. After all, the events of The Lord of the Rings would never have happened had the non-Elven peoples not had women to make more people for them. The only woman we know for sure existed in that time is, I think, Galadriel, and she’s not going to have given birth to whole nations of men, dwarves, hobbits and orcs.

The best thing they have done is try to portray Sauron as a genuinely cunning and deceitful adversary, rather than the cardboard cutout from LotR. The way in which he manipulates Galadriel in season one, and Celebrimbor in season two, is very well done. I particularly liked the way in which Celebrimbor is undone by his desire to perfect his craft.

One of the most interesting characters in this season is Adar, the fallen Elf who has taken the orcs under his wing and who tries to free them from Sauron’s control. In some ways he’s the most noble character in the show. Of course the poor guy is doomed, but he is a useful means of puncturing the self-righteousness of the Elves.

All of this would be fine were it not for the fact that the showrunners feel the need to fill each episode with fan service moments. It is all depressingly predictable. At some points I could actually predict what a character was going to say. Some of this, I suspect, is because of the heavily structured nature of modern screen-writing. There are rules, and the writers’ room has to stick to them. Being an old-fashioned curmudgeon, I much prefer the freedom of prose fiction.

By the end of this season, most of the major pieces are in place. Sauron has all of the rings save the important one. We have been introduced to all of the important Elves, Dwarves and men, and to Gandalf. It should be possible to wrap things up in one more season that features the fall of Númenor and the war against Sauron. However, I have been given to believe that five seasons are planned. Goodness only knows how they will pad that out. Oh well, I’ll probably watch it, as long as it isn’t just bloody Tom Bombadil singing silly songs.

FantasyCon 2024

065, Convention Report

I hadn’t been intending to go to FantasyCon this year because October was busy enough already. Or, at least, I didn’t think I had a membership and I wasn’t going to buy one. Then, about a month before the convention, I got sent some programme assignments. I hastily checked with the con, and lo, I did have a membership. I must have bought it last year and then forgotten about it. The programme assignments sounded interesting, and Chester is a great place to visit, so I decided to go.

The con was quite small this year, presumably because many people were financially tapped out by having gone to Worldcon. That’s entirely understandable. The dealers’ room was correspondingly small, and seemed to be mainly self-published people. There was no art show, and I didn’t have a banquet ticket, so all that was left was programme. Well, and Chester.

You see, Chester has a whole pile of Roman ruins. And a museum full of more Roman ruins. Some of it is quite important. There are even a couple of images of Attis, proving that Cybele worship happened in Deva (the Roman name for Chester). It is also the city from which Macsen Wledig embarked on his ultimately doomed quest to become Emperor of the Romans. I’m not going to bore you with details here. I spent much of Saturday in town doing research, and buying books in the museum.

But I had panels. Three of them. The first was on Friday evening and was about Cities in Fantasy. That’s what the title said anyway. But the description talked about Urban Fantasy, and there were two Urban Fantasy writers on the panel. Now clearly Urban Fantasy is fantasy that takes place in cities, but it doesn’t represent the totality of fantasy set in cities and I was hoping to bring a different perspective to the panel. Thankfully the moderator was OK with that, and Davd Green backed me up.

On Saturday I’d been put on the queer representation panel. It was scheduled against the banquet. There were four of us on the panel, and three people in the audience. As I was moderating, I invited the audience to join us on the panel and we had a great chat between us.

This was when I discovered that young folks these days, even feminist young folks these days, have never heard of The Female Man. And presumably haven’t heard of Joanna Russ either. Aaargh.

The title of the panel was a bit scary because it talked about role models in fandom. Thankfully the description made it clear that what that meant was fans finding role models in fiction. And we then went on to debunk the concept of role models, so all was well.

My final panel was on Sunday and was about demystifying the editing process. I would have felt a bit of a fraud on this had I not been moderating, but I had a superb crew with a wide variety of experience. They were absolutely brilliant. I learned a lot, and by all accounts the audience did too. You get a real buzz when a convention panel goes really well.

There is no FantasyCon next year because the crew that usually runs it is running World Fantasy instead. I know that I have a membership for that. I also have a dealer table, so I won’t be doing much programme.

Editorial – October 2024

065, Editorial

Well, this has been a busy month. It has included three conventions, though I have not done a report for Octocon because my presence there was limited to one online panel. I’m on my way to a fourth right now. And in the middle of all that I have produced two new books through Wizard’s Tower. It has been, and continues to be, rather exhausting.

Of course, despite the rather gloomy look at the economics of small presses in this issue, I wouldn’t have it any other way. The point of running Wizard’s Tower is to get good fiction into the hands of readers, and the pay the authors at least something for it.

If you were at BristolCon you will know that there is a lot more coming from Wizard’s Tower over the coming months. Look out for press releases. Much of this is to do with rescuing people left high and dry by the collapse of Grimbold / Kristell Ink.

At least next year should be quieter. I’m not taking books to Eastercon because the whole Brexit nonsense is too complicated. Worldcon is in the USA, and there is no FantasyCon because there is World Fantasy instead. I’ll be at Archipelacon, of course, but that’s the Eurocon and there is no Finncon or Åcon because of it. I’ll have to find some other events to go to instead.

This issue is a little late. I was hoping to get it finished while I was at Bristol Airport waiting for my flight, but the free wifi there was terrible, presumably because they have way too little capacity for the number of users. Also I got bumped from my flight and was 4 hours late arriving in Stockholm, so all I wanted to do when I got to my hotel was sleep. Thankfully Fantastika does not start until late afternoon, so I’m sat here in the hotel getting this done.

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