Cheryl Morgan

Atlas Alone

December 30, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Archive, Book Review, Emma Newman

All of Emma Newman’s previous books in the Planetfall series have been billed as being readable as stand-alones. The new book, Atlas Alone, may be the first to break that pattern. It is a direct sequel to After Atlas. If you are going to read it, it would be helpful to know who Carlos, Deanna and Travis are, and why they are on a starship heading after the Pathfinder. I’m going to assume that you folks know that. If you don’t, there will be spoilers.

So our heroes are safely aboard the Atlas II. Earth is a smoking ruin behind them. Most of the passengers are unaware of what happened after they left, but we know. We also know that some of the people in charge of the ship think that they have been part of the Rapture. Those sorts of people are unlikely to look kindly upon passengers who are not part of their cult. That includes our three escapees.

This book focuses on Dee. As regular Emma Newman readers will know, each of her books in the Planetfall series has a theme of mental illness. For Dee that means her unprocessed trauma from surviving London after social collapse when she was a child. It has made her self-reliant, ruthless and unable to trust others. Those characteristics happen to make her very good at immersive games – the book world technological version of LARPing, a hobby Emma is a very fond of. So when Dee is given an opportunity to play a game on an elite server available only to the upper echelons of Atlas II’s crew, she jumps at it.

As it turns out, our heroes are not the only people on Atlas II who know what happened to Earth. There is someone else as well, and he’s angry. He wants the guilty to be punished; and he wants Dee to help him. She’s unsure, but during the game she kills a non-player character, and when she emerges she discovers that a senior member of the crew has died. Somehow Dee’s mysterious contact has got her to kill on his behalf.

Pretty much all of this is in the back cover blurb, by the way.

From now on Dee is trapped. An investigation is launched. Carlos, having been a top detective back on Earth, is put in charge. Dee knows that she could be convicted of murder, but she also knows that her victim is one of the people responsible for the destruction of the Earth. Meanwhile her mysterious helper is busy trying to manipulate her into continuing to help him. He knows an awful lot about her; and is a master of psychological manipulation. Can Dee find out who he is, or help him kill the rest of the command crew, before Carlos catches her? And which should she do?

The book, then, is a psychological thriller with a badly traumatised woman as the viewpoint character. We live inside Dee’s head for the whole book; and get to feel her pain as she is ruthlessly manipulated. This is not a comfortable read, but it is a compelling one.

In happier times I would complain that the politics of Atlas Alone are simplistic and rather offensive to Americans. These days, however, we are facing what appears to be a hard-right Christian evangelist coup in the USA. I don’t suppose Emma will be the only person writing about this sort of thing. I still have reservations about the worldbuilding. I don’t believe that Europe would have been able to easily absorb the enormous number of American refugees who would want to flee the imposition of a theocratic government. But that’s not the point of the book. What we are interested in is the mental struggle that Dee is going through.

More than that I cannot say, because I absolutely do not want to spoil the ending of the book. I will be fascinated to see how other readers react to it. I also want the next book, NOW!

Yeah, it is gut-wrenching. I kind of trust Emma to do that these days. She’s very good.

But also the series has become very firmly plot-driven. The crew and passengers of the Atlas II have a number of serious issues to face. And at some point they will arrive at the colony established by the original Atlas mission. Aside from a handful of colonists stranded on Mars, these two groups are presumably the only humans left alive in the universe, so Emma doesn’t have much choice as to who and what to write about. Knowing Em, I’m sure she has it all plotted out, but it is going to be a challenge to pull off a satisfying ending.

Title: Atlas Alone
By: Emma Newman
Publisher: Gollancz
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This is How You Lose the Time War

December 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Amal El-Mohtar, Archive, Book Review, Max Gladstone

Once upon a time…

Or maybe twice, thrice. Timelines buckle and bend back on themselves twisted in the multiple dimensions of Calabi-Yau space; some of them curved so tightly that they can fit in the nucleus of a hydrogen atom, others stretching to infinity through the whole breadth of the visible universe. Running through them all, like bright shafts of laser light, are two beams: one red, and the other blue.

This is Red. She is a cyborg, a constructed creature of The Agency. At the Commandant’s command she slices through timelines, cutting and re-sewing them as required. She is the stiletto and the needle, the finest tool that the Agency has to wield.

This is Blue. She is a grown thing, like all agents of Garden. She has roots everywhere, or perhaps we should say she is a vast mycelium connecting all time and space, patiently constraining and guiding its growth towards the outcomes that Garden desires. Of all of the things that Garden has grown, she is the finest, the most subtle and accomplished.

This is the War to End all Wars, because if one side wins it will control not just the present, but the past and the future as well. The winning side will be able to recreate the past so that the loser never even existed, and never will. The stakes could not be higher.

This, then, is a song of red and blue; of left and right; of good and evil (each side good in their own eyes). It is a song of ice and fire; an irresistible force against an immovable object.

Opposites attract, and all binaries are false. But these statements can only be true if they are allowed to be. Particles might collapse into waves, but how can they when they are controlled by agencies that seek to command time itself?

This is, perhaps, a dangerous message, especially in times like these when the news media are constantly telling us that we must be either with them or against them. But it is an important message nonetheless, and one that Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone should be congratulated for writing. It is an undeniable truth that soldiers on either side of a war often have far more in common with each other than they do with the people who sit safely at home and issue orders. This is a message that the world needs to hear.

In every strand of the timeline there is a play called Romeo & Juliet. In some it is written by Shakespeare, in others by Kit Marlowe or Francis Bacon, and in one memorable one by Francis Crawford of Lymond. In some it is a comedy, and in others a tragedy. Perhaps in one it is a love story with a happy ending.

That timeline might be a novella by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone called This is How You Lose the Time War. Or it might not. Time is flexible, and can be re-written. The book that I read might no longer even exist. Buy it now, while you still can.

P.S. There has to be a p.s.. The book is written largely as a series of letters between Red and Blue as they foil each other’s schemes and get to know one another. They have postscripts, and therefore so must we.

P.P.S. The book has already been optioned for TV. That would normally mean little, save that Amal and Max are already writing scripts. I was a little worried about what might happen to the protagonists in the hands of a Hollywood studio, but Amal assures me that the genders of the protagonists are not up for negotiation. In a post-Killing Eve world, lesbian relationships are apparently something that studio executives are less terrified of. Someone, somewhere, has executed a neat intervention in our timeline, changing it for the better.

Title: This is How You Lose the Time War
By: Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone
Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books
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The Ruin of Kings

December 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Archive, Book Review, Jenn Lyons

Having a story told by one of the protagonists from his prison cell must be this year’s thing. Marlon James does it in Black Leopard, Red Wolf. Jenn Lyons does the same thing in The Ruin of Kings. Tracker, of course, is probably lying. It is what he does. We may have a better idea of the truth of the story when we hear the testimony of other members of his band. As for the prisoner in Lyons’ book, well…

Half of the story is told by Talon, a demonic mimic and eater of memories. Talon is the jailer, and she is able to describe events because she has eaten people who witnessed them. As for her prisoner, Kihrin, well, he is the Chosen One. Kihrin is the boy from the backstreets who discovers that he is secretly of royal birth. He is the boy about whom prophecies have been written. He is the Lawbreaker, the Thief of Souls, the boy who will one day wield the sword, Urthaeniel, known as Godslayer and the Ruin of Kings. Kihrin will one day destroy the world.

At least, that’s what the prophecies say.

It is a neat inversion of the traditional fantasy trope. As the strapline on the cover of my edition says, “What if you weren’t the Hero?”

There is a lot of hype around The Ruin of Kings. Tor describes it as, “The most anticipated fantasy debut of 2019.” They have a point.

I discovered this book when I saw Roz Kaveney tweet about how much she had enjoyed it. Roz is a very good judge of fantasy so I bought a copy. Within a few chapters I too was entranced.

There is a lot about The Ruin of Kings that is very traditional. It has kings and demons and prophecies. It has silly, Tolkienesque names. It has pirates and dragons and elf-like people and tentacled monsters. It has footnotes.

Wait, what? It has footnotes. The book is framed as a report by one Thurvishar D’Lorus to his Imperial ruler on the events of the past years, based mainly on magical recordings made by Talon while she and Kihrin were telling their stories. Thurvishar himself, as it turns out, was not an idle bystander in these proceedings. He’s not an idle bystander in the telling of the story either, because he has footnoted his report extensively. And he can be very sarcastic.

Let’s back up a little. Yes, there are dragons. But mainly there is a DRAGON. He’s known as The Old Man, and he’s the sort of dragon who makes Smaug seem like a winged gecko in comparison. The Old Man is to other dragons what Godzilla is to other iguanas. He’s what a dragon should be.

Did you notice that I mentioned “magical recordings”? That should tell you something. Yes, there is magic, but this is a sophisticated society we are talking about here. The magicians in The Ruin of Kings have thought about practical applications of their art. They can also be very clever in their use of spells.

There are some cunning magical artefacts as well. A major plot point revolves around something called The Stone of Shackles. If you are killed when wearing it, you are immediately reincarnated in the body of your murderer, who takes your place in the land of the dead. Because in this world souls do very much exist, and reincarnation is entirely possible. The Goddess of Death is real, and you can petition her.

One of the complications of this is that many of the characters in the story are not who they seem to be. It is bad enough that Talon can take on the shape of anyone she has eaten. Other people can also steal bodies, or be reincarnated in new ones, or in their old bodies but they have taken on new identities. There are times when The Ruin of Kings reads like a magical version of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon.

There are plots within plots. Gods are involved in some of the plots. There are long term issues involving gods who might once have been human, magicians who want to become gods, and a terrifying demon who is eating… well, no, that’s a bit of a spoiler. But really, the world is going to come to an end. This is less the Anthropocene and more the Mageropocene. (That should probably be Thaumaprocene, but fewer people would have understood it, I suspect.)

The Ruin of Kings is a long book. Some utterly terrible things happen in it. It flags slightly in the middle while Lyons is showing us what an absolutely awful excuse for a human being Darzin D’Mon is. Depravity gets boring after a while. But things soon pick up and once again, dear reader, you are forced to question everything you thought was true about the book.

This is a very impressive and assured debut. And it has footnotes. Comedy footnotes.

Title: The Ruin of Kings
By: Jenn Lyons
Publisher: Tor
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The Raven Tower

December 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Ann Leckie, Archive, Book Review

OK, let’s get the awkward thing out of the way first. This is a fantasy novel written by a science fiction writer. That’s not to say it is a bad book. It is just that if you have certain expectations of a fantasy novel to do with it having a sense of the mysterious, the ethereal, the spiritual, then you will probably be disappointed. If instead you are happy to read a well-written book that speculates about the relationship between gods and men, you will be perfectly content with what Ann Leckie has to offer in The Raven Tower.

The book has two parallel strands: one about gods, and one about men. The former takes place over thousands of years, though it eventually focuses in on a prolonged war between two rival groups of gods and their worshippers. The latter takes place over a matter of days, many human generations after the war in the other strand has finished.

The gods are very real. They may be aliens. One of them, at least, arrives from space on a meteorite. They have powers, which they don’t entirely understand, that allow then to change the world by speaking it so. They can inhabit a variety of forms and, once humans arrive on the planet, they learn to communicate with them.

It turns out that the powers of the gods are fed by worship, particularly sacrifice. Doing things that affect the world drains those powers. It is a delicate balance for an ambitious god. You should never promise your worshippers more than you think you can get back from them, or you will find that you won’t be able to deliver and they will desert you.

The story focuses primarily on two gods. The main character is The Strength and Patience of the Hill, who takes the form of a very large stone. He’s not ambitious as far as gods go, but he is smart, stubborn, and very old. His friend, The Myriad, is the god who arrived on the meteorite. She takes the form of a swarm of mosquitoes (her original worshippers were reindeer herders), which naturally led me to distrust everything she said.

Humans have a different issue with godly powers. Having a god that you can communicate with effectively can be very useful. Gods can do amazing things for you. But gods do not always communicate clearly. Sometimes they don’t communicate at all. For an ambitious ruler, it can be much better to have a god who doesn’t do much, and whose utterances you, and only you, get to interpret.

The human story concerns the country of Iraden, ruled over by a god called The Raven and his human mouthpiece, The Lease. Ravens are long-lived birds, but they don’t live as long as humans. The deal is that while he is Lease, a human is protected by The Raven and speaks for the god; but when the current Instrument of the Raven, its mortal bird form, dies, then the Lease must give up his own life to the god and allow the new Instrument to bond with a new Lease.

As our story opens, Lord Mawat, the Heir to the Lease, is riding home to the capital city of Vastai. Word has reached him that the current Instrument is dying. He expects his father to follow suit, and that he will become the new Lease. However, when he arrives at Vastai, things are not as he expected.

The human story, then, is about how a corrupt and ambitious individual usurped the traditional process and installed himself as ruler. While the people might be upset about this, the rest of the political class are too wedded to the sanctity of the process to want to admit than it could be usurped. Besides, the new ruler might do some of them a good turn. He’s the man in power. It pays to suck up to him. Even if it turns out that he is in the pay of a foreign country.

I can’t imagine what real world events Leckie might be writing about here, can you?

Mawat, however, is not the hero of our story. That honor goes to his aide, Eolo, who is a trans man.

I am, I guess, expected to have an opinion on this. Especially as I have recently recorded a podcast for Breaking the Glass Slipper on the very subject of trans characters in science fiction and fantasy. Leckie, I think, has taken a fair but real-world approach to the issue. Like Claude in Kate Heartfield’s Armed in Her Fashion (which is an excellent book that I really should write about), Eolo is bound by the strictures of life in a mediaeval society. Mawat, when he is expecting to become Lease, offers to petition The Raven to transform Eolo’s body, but that’s very scary prospect that the young man never gets the chance to think through.

The consequence of this authorial choice is that there will be circumstances where Eolo’s secret (and he does keep it a secret) is in danger of being exposed. Mawat knows, and doesn’t care. He values Eolo for his bravery, loyalty and wisdom. Most other people don’t know, and might react badly if they did. This makes Eolo’s life dangerous, but Leckie never puts him in difficult situations for purposes of shock value, or voyeurism, or comedy. What she does do is make him the moral center of the story. Given the set-up of the book, I don’t think we can ask for more. Some people, I’m sure, would have preferred a different set-up.

The fact that Eolo is the smartest of a largely dumb bunch of humans is not lost on The Strength and Patience of the Hill. He narrates Eolo’s story as well as his own. That’s the common thread that will draw the two strands of the narrative together at the end. I’m not going to say anything about the end, except that I was very pleased with it.

I will be interested to see how The Raven Tower is received. I suspect that some readers of Leckie’s superb science fiction will be turned off by the fantasy setting. I also expect that some fantasy fans will complain that it doesn’t read like fantasy. It is certainly an interesting experiment, and one I enjoyed reading.

Title: The Raven Tower
By: Ann Leckie
Publisher: Orbit
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The Light Brigade

December 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Archive, Book Review, Kameron Hurley

Time travel is very much the thing these days, it seems. I loved Ian McDonald’s Time Was, and I recently read a very different time-crossed love story in Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone’s This is How You Lose the Time War. I loved that one too. Kameron Hurley’s time travel story is a very different beast again, but also well worth reading.

Look, you know that if you want gritty, uncompromising military fantasy you should be reading Anna Smith-Spark, right? Well if you want gritty, uncompromising military SF you should be reading Kameron Hurley. The boys, sadly, can’t seem to hack it these days. They are probably too emotional.

The Light Brigade knows where it has come from. The Forever War is a type of time travel story, in that the soldiers come back from each tour of duty to find that decades have passed on Earth since they left, thanks to the relativistic effects of interplanetary travel. The Light Brigade, however, owes far more to Starship Troopers, even down to the cute reveal of the lead character’s first name towards the end.

Dietz, which is how our hero is known in the Corporate Corps, lives in a near future world in which Earth is dominated by six giant corporations: the Big Six, as they are known. The Moon and Mars have been colonised, but the Moon has suffered something of an accident and the Martians have gone full-on Communist and therefore Must Be Destroyed.

(“Communist” here meaning that they don’t want to work for the Big Six.)

Life under the Corporations is not great, especially if, like Dietz, you are not a citizen/employee. However, the Martians have just wiped out the entire city of São Paulo, including what remains of Dietz’s family. You can’t let that sort of thing stand. Someone has to join up and get revenge.

From here on it is very much Starship Troopers. Dietz and several others join up to fight back against Mars. They get Basic Training and Boot Camp. And then they are ready to be shipped out on their first mission. They are ready for their first drop.

But in The Light Brigade a drop means something very different. There is no jumping out of spacecraft. The Corporate Corps has developed a primitive form of the Star Trek transporter. Soldiers are dropped literally into the middle of the action. And sometimes, because the technology is a bit experimental, into the middle of walls. Occasionally too, some troopers arrive with their limbs in the wrong places. But the really weird thing is that some troopers end up somewhen else entirely.

Naturally no one is allowed to talk about this. Troopers who experience temporal dissociation are sent for psychiatric realignment, which mostly works because they are too confused by the experience to understand what has happened to them. Eventually, however, some of these time-traveling troopers manage to work it out. They also realise that they know far more about how the war will progress than their senior officers. In war, that sort of information is invaluable.

I should note that the cast of The Light Brigade is anything but white men. The platoon that Dietz is part of comes from Latin America. There are a lot of women in it. Dietz has sex with both men and women during the course of the story. None of this is terribly remarkable in the world of the book. The villain of the story is a blonde woman called Norberg who dresses in white. She’s a very obvious Ice Maiden who, in another world, might be fronting current affairs programs for Faux News.

There are also some fairly extensive political sections in the book. I think that Heinlein would have enjoyed engaging with the ideas being presented, even if he didn’t entirely agree with them.

All in all, this is a very impressive book which very much knows its history and wants to engage with it. I think that perhaps Dietz’s transformation from confused squaddie to someone who is able to turn the situation to their advantage happens a little quickly, but that’s a minor quibble. It won’t appeal to the sort of people who think that “freedom” means having bigger jackboots than everyone else, but the mere fact that it is written by a woman would have put them off so we don’t need to worry about what they think. Everyone else will, I think, be very pleased with this intelligent addition to the great conversation of science fiction.

Title: The Light Brigade
By: Kameron Hurley
Publisher: Angry Robot
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The Haunting of Tram Car 015

December 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Archive, Book Review, P Djèlí Clark

P Djèlí Clark is rapidly becoming one of my favorite writers. His The Black God’s Drums was one of the stand-out novellas of 2018. It is set in New Orleans and has airship pirates, plus nuns with guns and chemistry labs. I mean, nuns with guns is quite terrifying enough; give them chemistry labs too and there’s no telling what they might get up to.

Clark’s new novella, The Haunting of Tram Car 015, is the second story set in his steampunk Cairo universe. When the Sufi mystic, Al-Jahiz, found a way into the Kaf, the realm of the djinn, Egypt quickly became the world’s foremost technomagical society. The Egyptians’ abilities quickly outstripped those of the colonialist British, French, Germans and Italians, all of whom were swiftly sent packing. But nothing comes without a price. Cairenes have a new saying, “Thanks, Al-Jahiz”, that they wheel out whenever some feature of sharing their world with the djinn proves less than utopian. And there is a new organisation, the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, whose job it is to investigate magical crimes.

The series began with “A Dead Djinn in Cairo”, which was published on Tor.com. It introduces us to Fatma el-Sha’arawi, one of the few women agents in the Ministry and possibly its most flamboyant. Fatma has a preference for British men’s suits and carries an impressive black steel walking cane. Think Emma Peel and John Steed in one body. She’s not to be messed with.

The story also points out that the reintroduction of magic to society has resulted in an increased interest in traditional Egyptian religion. We meet the mysterious Siti, who has, “more of Sekhmet in her than most”.

The new novel uses that classic formula of police procedurals, the older, grumpy detective burdened with a young, naïve and over-educated partner. Agent Hamed Nasr was at the Academy with Fatma. His partner, Agent Onsi Youssef, read Literature at Oxford and knows as much about Shakespeare as he does about mediaeval Arabic manuscripts. He’s also a Copt, the ancient Christian sect that is common in Northeast Africa.

Hamed and Onsi are sent to Rameses Station, the main terminus of the busy djinn-powered aerial tram network that keeps Cairo moving. One of the trams has become infested with a malevolent spirit that has attacked passengers. Clearly it needs to be removed as quickly as possible, but the process turns out to be much more complicated than Hamed anticipated.

The story is told against the backdrop of tumultuous political events in Cairo. It is early in the 20th Century, and like other modern, developed countries Egypt has been gripped by Suffragette fever. The women of Cairo might mostly wear hijabs, but they want the vote just as badly as their bonnet-clad European sisters. They have adopted the woman pharaoh, Hatshepsut, as the symbol of their struggle. Hamed is not sure what to make of all the fuss, but Onsi thinks it is all very exciting.

The case is solved eventually, as it must be, but not without a certain amount of danger to the good citizens of Cairo, not to mention our heroic investigators. A haunted tram car is a dangerous thing. Thankfully they have the aid of Siti, who looks like being a regular feature of these stories. This is probably the point where I should note that Siti is from Nubia, a country that not only preserved Egyptian religion longer after the mother country had been overrun by Greeks and Romans, but also was ruled by some of the most badass warrior queens in human history. I’m pretty sure that Clark knows this.

Another neat element of worldbuilding in the stories is the presence of the Mahdist Revolutionary People’s Republic. That, of course, is a reference to Muhammad Ahmad bin Abd Allah, the Nubian religious leader known as The Mahdi who, in our world, led a successful revolt against British rule in the Sudan in the later 19th Century. It was the only successful revolt by a colonised people in the history of the British Empire. In Clark’s world (can you tell I’ve been waiting to get that phrase in) Sudan is presumably also a technomagical society and therefore far more able to make its way in the world. Comrade Lenin and his friends, who are presumably still fighting a civil war, are probably looking on jealously.

As an extra bonus, the story introduced me to the tradition of Zār, an exorcism ritual common in Northeast Africa. I’m a little disappointed that there was no mention of the mangour, a musical instrument made of a leather belt sewn with goat hooves, but the image of the stuffy Hamed trying to play drums and being told, “You keep rhythm like an Englishman!” more than made up for it. Interestingly some sources claim that the Zār cult provided a haven for women and effeminate men in the rather misogynist and homophobic Sudanese state (that’s in our world, I have no idea what Clark’s Mahdists think about queer folks).

Clark’s Cairene stories combine the fun adventure typical of steampunk with a fascinating glimpse of a sophisticated Egyptian society. I should note that Clark himself is from Trinidad, not Egypt, but he knows far more about his setting than I do so I’m prepared to take it on faith that he’s doing a decent job. Now what I want is a novel. Someone commission one, please. Hello, Tor? Diana?

Title: The Haunting of Tram Car 015
By: P Djèlí Clark
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
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The City in the Middle of the Night

December 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Archive, Book Review, Charlie Jane Anders

You probably know by now that Charlie Jane Anders’ new novel, The City in the Middle of the Night, is set on a tidally locked planet. That is, the planet always presents the same side to its sun, just as our moon does to us, resulting in one side that it always day and another that is always night. Human settlers have to reside in the equatorial zone.

If you are expecting the book to contain a lot of science about such planets, you will be disappointed. I’m sure that Charlie Jane has done the research, but she hasn’t dumped it all into the book. It is not central to the story. Like me, you may have questions, though mine are more sociological and biological than to do with physics and geology. I’m wondering how, given how stupid and murderous the colonists seem to be, that they have survived this long. Surely they would have wiped each other out long ago.

I’m also wondering, as I always do in the case of planets inhabited by large numbers of Giant Murder Beasts, what the food chain looks like. There are other animals, because they get mentioned, but they don’t seem sufficient to sustain the large carnivores. The giant squid that live in the Sea of Murder must eat something when they can’t find a tasty tinned snack of stupid humans trying to cross the ice in armoured personnel carriers.

But, as I said, these things are not what the book is about. Firstly it is about the two main cities on the planet of January: Xiosphant and Argelo. The former is rigidly authoritarian and conservative, though probably Socialist in a way because all the means of production seems to be owned by the state. The latter is an “anything goes” sort of place, which means that you can do anything you want as long as you don’t upset one of the important families, who probably see themselves as the nobility but are actually little more than crime syndicates. It is this contrast in governmental styles that is most reminiscent of Le Guin. The Dispossessed does something similar.

Neither of these cities, by the way, are the titular location, because neither of them are in the middle of the night side of the planet. That’s a clue for you.

Our guides to these cities are two young student revolutionaries from Xiosphant. Bianca is upper class and oozes natural privilege that has the effect of charming everyone she meets. She is a Leader in waiting. Sophie is one of the few working class students at the university and is a revolutionary because why wouldn’t she be, and because the other students need a person from an oppressed minority to be fighting on behalf of, and to make the tea.

Bianca and Sophie are roommates. Sophie is in awe of Bianca. Bianca loves the fact that someone has faith in her and will follow her anywhere. And then, of course, something dreadful happens.

The political mixture is complicated by the presence of Mouth, the sole survivor of a hippy-like religious group, the Citizens, who chose to eschew city living and instead travel endlessly around the planet’s equator communing with nature, such as it is. The trouble is that nature is getting less and less friendly all the time and no one, not even the Citizens, knows why. Being out there, they were the first victims, but the cities’ days appear to be numbered too.

The question that The City in the Middle of the Night seems to be asking is: How can we hope to survive on a planet that is dying? Hint: murdering each other in a constant quest to retain a large share of dwindling resources is not the right answer. Only Sophie, armed with a good heart, a trusting nature, and a willingness to try anything, has any hope of finding a way forward.

Is there a lesson in there for Planet Earth? I rather suspect that there is. Unfortunately, just like the colonists on January, we are mostly much too busy trying to ensure that “people like us” survive, and “people not like us” don’t, to be able to see it.

Title: The City in the Middle of the Night
By: Charlie Jane Anders
Publisher: Titan
Purchase links:
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Empress of Forever

December 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Archive, Book Review, Max Gladstone

One of the things that is fashionable in the publishing industry these days is to have an “elevator pitch” for your book. This is just a couple of lines describing your idea that you can pitch in a matter of seconds, perhaps where a decision maker is in an elevator with you and can’t escape.

For Max Gladstone’s Empress of Forever the elevator pitch might have been: Flash Gordon, but Emperor Ming is a woman and Flash is a lesbian tech entrepreneur.

That, of course, is only the first layer. The book does feel very much like a Flash Gordon story at times, but there’s a lot more too it than that. I won’t dive into the depths as that would be spoilery, but here’s a few examples of the entertainment on offer.

Our hero is Vivian Liao, self-confident to a fault but utterly out of her depth having been stolen away from Earth and dropped in the middle of a galaxy-spanning conflict. All she has to rely upon is iron determination and a lifetime’s experience in people management.

Fortunately she has Hong, a warrior monk of the Mirrorfaith. Hong’s people worship the Empress, but he is a heretic, seeing in Vivian an opportunity to bring about change.

There is also Xiara, princess of a warrior clan on a backwards planet where the locals just happen to have been genetically engineered to be brilliant space pilots.

Most of all, however, there is Zanj, the Pirate Queen. Zanj is probably the only person in the galaxy that the Empress fears. She had led a revolt that was very nearly successful, but instead ended up imprisoned in a star, until Viv came along and freed her. Furred and tailed, with claws as sharp as her intellect, Zanj is the ally everyone needs, if only it were possible to trust her further than you could throw her. And let’s face it, anyone who tries to throw Zanj anywhere is likely to end up dead in very short order.

Zanj had her tricks, but Viv would never accuse her of subtlety. If she needed to hide in the shadows, she’d just snuff out the sun.

These, then, are some of the rag-tag group of misfits ranged against the Jade Empress, a woman so powerful she dreams of bending all of reality to her whim. Not to mention against the Pride, the spiky-death-metal robot race who are the mortal enemies of the Mirrorfaith. This is superhero-style space opera with a vengeance.

As befits the format, the book is shot through with pop culture references. One of my favorites is when Viv gets her eyes on the Mirrorfaith’s secret arsenal of super weapons:

Viv stepped through into an immense space, dimly lit by pulsing dots on the walls, no brighter than city stars. The Archivist followed her, and Qollak, and the door swung shut behind them with a thud. Viv’s night vision chiselled shapes out of the darkness: catwalks, shelves flanked by those stardots, and on the shelves all manner of boxes, baubles, weapons, machines, guns and crowns and shields and armor and, for some reason, a simple, blocky hammer.

This book is a heap of fun. It is also, as I noted earlier, much more complex than it seems at first sight. It is also decidedly queer, and a heartfelt plea for opposing factions to work together in the face of a seemingly all-powerful enemy.

Empress of Forever is about as far away from hard science fiction as it is possible to get and still be set in a far-future, technologically advanced civilisation. It is hugely entertaining. And yet in its own way it is a very serious book.

Of course, all of those people who have been clamouring for a return to fun science fiction adventures will hate it.

Title: Empress of Forever
By: Max Gladstone
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
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Ancestral Night

December 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Archive, Book Review, Elizabeth Bear

Hmm, what have we here. Let’s see…

Far future civilisation – Check
Plucky human heroes – Check
Mysterious lost high-tech alien civilisation – Check
Big Dumb Object – Check
Space pirates – Check
Space dragons – Check
Cats in Spaaaaaaace! – Check
Sleek, deadly warships with silly names – Check
Scary alien cop – Check

Yep, this is space opera alright.

Elizabeth Bear has form, of course. Her Jacob’s Ladder series ranks as one of my favorite science fiction trilogies. I was expecting good things of Ancestral Night. I was not disappointed.

Our hero is Haimey Dz — I’m guessing Jamie Diaz with a bit of linguistic shift. She’s an engineer by trade. She and her colleagues run a salvage business, finding old, lost starships and bringing them in for recycling. Said colleagues are Connla, her pilot; Singer, her ship’s AI; and two cats, Bushyasta & Mephistopheles.

Salvage is the sort of business where you limp along from one job to the next, barely making enough to re-equip for the next voyage. You do it because it gets you away from the mass of humanity, and because you hope that one day you will get lucky and find something really valuable.

I can’t tell you much more than that without spoilers, but I do want to note that there are pirates. Because if you do find something valuable you can bet someone will want to take it off you. (That’s not a spoiler, you knew that was going to happen.) Pirates, in Bear’s future world, are brave and dashing and sexy. They are also Libertarian arseholes who have no responsibility to anyone other than themselves. They go by that famous maxim, “I should be free to do whatever I want, and I’ll kill anyone who tries to stop me.”

At one point during the book this leads to a long political debate between Haimey and the pirate leader about personal responsibility and freedom. It is all very Heinlein. Unfortunately for Haimey, she has a past. Because she accepted mental re-programming as part of a plea bargain, she can’t remember it. But that doesn’t mean that no one else knows what happened.

The book delivers pretty much what you would expect. Lots of mysterious alien stuff; political debate (including skewering certain people who I am very pleased to see skewered); high-stakes adventure; and cats. There will be some readers who find it overly sentimental, but there’s no reason why all of the characters in a book have to be horrible people. Some people will also go, “ewww, lesbians!” There’s no accounting for some people. Most folks, I suspect, will thoroughly enjoy it. I know I did.

It is worth noting that, while there is no reason why Bear should not write more adventures of Haimey in other books, this one works perfectly well on its own. Things are wrapped up nicely at the end. I say this because some sites are listing the book as “White Space #1” (White Space being Bear’s name for hyperspace), and some of you may be put off because you think the book will end on a cliffhanger. I should note also that the book is set in the same universe as the Jacob’s Ladder books, though presumably well after the events of that series.

There are also some very interesting bits of alien technology. This being space opera rather than hard science fiction, Bear does not have to explain exactly how they work. A fair amount of handwavium is involved. But there’s enough actual science there to make it all sound roughly believable. I particularly liked the idea that ships emerging from hyperspace have a bow wave of high energy particles that will destroy anything in their path. Which is either very useful or deeply embarrassing depending on who happens to be in your way.

Overall, a definite paws up on this one. It doesn’t do anything startlingly original, but it knows exactly what it is doing and it does it very well.

Title: Ancestral Night
By: Elizabeth Bear
Publisher: Gollancz
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

A Memory Called Empire

December 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Archive, Arkady Martine, Book Review

We seem to be particularly blessed with debut novels this year (2019). I was hugely impressed with The Ruin of Kings in epic fantasy. Now it is the turn of space opera and A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine.

Let’s start with the worldbuilding. Everyone has some idea of what an interstellar empire looks like, so creating one that will stand out takes a bit of doing. Martine’s academic expertise is in the Byzantine Empire, so she certainly knows how empires work. Teixcalaan, however, feels more Chinese to me. They have ideogrammatic writing, put great store by civil service exams, and have a cultural addiction to poetry. All of this makes life a little challenging for our heroine.

Mahit Dzmare is the new ambassador to Teixcalaan from a small, independent space station called Lsel. She has been summoned to Teixcalaan in a hurry, and on arriving she soon finds out that her predecessor has been murdered, though his death has been officially recorded as accidental. Apparently he got himself involved in palace intrigue. This is not a good start, and Mahit has a lot of catching up to do. Although she has been a keen student of Teixcalaani culture, living it is a very different matter from reading about it. There are translation issues to navigate. And of course the whole experience of living on a planet is new and strange to her.

One of the more quirky aspects of Teixcalaani culture is their naming system. Everyone’s name is a number followed by an object of some sort. Mahit’s liaison is called Two Seagrass, which may not mean anything much. However, the Emperor is called Six Direction, for the very obvious reason that his power extends in all six directions of 3D space. There’s a general called One Lightning who fancies himself a fascist dictator. Names can clearly be important.

The idea of a vast empire with an aging ruler is hardly new. We find it everywhere from Star Wars to Ancillary Justice. Martine therefore has to find a new angle, and she does a decent job. Without giving too much away, there is a potential succession issue. An empire with a succession crisis is a dangerous thing. There tends to be a lot of sabre-rattling. The daily news fills up with planted stories praising or denigrating powerful people. There is talk of war, for war is always good for taking people’s minds off domestic politics. Perhaps the empire should annex a few more regions of space, such as that one containing a few, largely defenceless, independent space stations.

All of this would be hard enough for Mahit, but she has trouble at home to deal with as well. The Ruling Council of Lsel does not appear to be entirely united at this dangerous time. Indeed, it looks like someone has sabotaged her mission before it even began.

How and why Mahit has been compromised is something I will have to leave you to find out. It revolves around another interesting science fiction trope that Martine has latched onto and made her own. It will get introduced fairly early on in the book, but the full import of what is going on may not become clear until much later.

There are no great space battles in this book, at least not in view of the characters. However, great space opera in books doesn’t need that spectacular vista to succeed. What it needs is a grand scale of events, a convoluted plot, and some fascinating characters. Martine delivers on all three.

If I have a reservation about the book it is that it seems to wrap up too neatly at the end. Martine makes it seem like that’s the end, that the book is a stand-alone. Which would be a shame because the threat of massive interstellar war that the book introduces has not gone away. Thankfully the publishers are not as coy. They insist that the book is the first volume of a trilogy. Huzzah! Bring on book 2!

Title: A Memory Called Empire
By: Arkady Martine
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

A Brightness Long Ago

December 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Archive, Book Review, Guy Gavriel Kay

What can you say about a new Guy Gavriel Kay novel? You read it, it is brilliant, you decide once again that Kay is a genius. Plus ça change. If you are a Kay fan then you will love A Brightness Long Ago. If you have never read him before you should probably start with Tigana or The Lions of Al Rassan. If you don’t like what Kay does, the new book will not change your mind.

On then to the question that Kay fans will have about any new work: what real world history has inspired it? Well, the book is a prequel of sorts to Children of Earth and Sky. It is set in the Kay-world analogue of Renaissance Italy. We meet younger versions of some of the characters of the previous novel; in particular the healer, Jelena, whom Danica meets when she encounters the rebel leader, Iskander. It turns out that Jelena’s early life is far more exciting than simply being associated with a legendary warrior.

Other characters from Children are mentioned briefly in passing. We meet Duke Ricci, hear of Emperor Rudolfo, and discover that the odious Erigio Valeri learned macho posturing from his father. However, the book is not about any of these people, not even Jelena. It is, inevitably, about condottieri.

Switching back to our world, we should be aware of the rising power of the Medici of Florence. We should know of Francesco Sforza, the man who bought himself the Dukedom of Milan. But we should also know of Federico da Montefeltro, the one-eyed lord of Urbino, and Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, known as the Wolf of Rimini, two brilliant military commanders who were bitter enemies. None of these people are in Kay’s book, but people very like them are.

The beauty of Kay’s technique of running almost parallel to real world history is that he is free to add to and adapt the original timeline. Francesco Sforza did not have a beautiful and headstrong redhaired daughter. However, his granddaughter, Caterina, was seriously badass and doubtless fed into Kay’s creation of Adria Ripoli.

The central character of the story, however, is Guidanio Cerra, a smart and bookish young man from Seressa whose life intersects with that of the rich and famous in important ways. He acts as our guide and interpreter of local politics and society. He’s a thoroughly decent young man when we first meet him, and he manages to stay so through the novel, despite the various escapades he is involved in. That caused me to reflect on the nature of Kay’s work.

There are those, I am sure, who dismiss Kay’s work as sentimental. Certainly it can be at times, but it is not naively so. People die in Kay’s novels. They die because everyone has to eventually; and they die because they live in dangerous, violent times. Young Cerra kills two men early on in the novel. But Kay’s work is never going to be classed as Grimdark because it is also relentlessly hopeful. The expectation of a Grimdark novel is that everyone is awful, and that things will turn out bad in the end. In a Kay novel, the world is full of awful people, and things do often turn out bad. However, there are also good people in the world, and every so often they achieve small victories. A Kay novel never gives in to despair, which is one of the reasons why I love them so much.

After all, the real world is not irredeemably hopeless either. Sometimes, despite all of the oppression and nonsense social codes, people get to do amazing things, or be happy, or both.

“If I could write everything that happened, I would shock the world” – Caterina Sforza, Lady of Imola, Countess of Forlì.

Now there is a lady I would love to have met. Sadly I don’t have a time machine, but I have at least met Adria Ripoli, and I am very grateful for that.

Title: A Brightness Long Ago
By: Guy Gavriel Kay
Publisher: Hodder
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

The Night Circus

December 23, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Archive, Book Review, Erin Morgenstern

There are plenty of people out there who absolutely love Erin Morgenstern’s debut novel, The Night Circus. There are others who think it is massively over-rated. I can see where both sets of people are coming from, and indeed I vacillated between the two views rather a lot when reading the book. How can a book have that sort of effect on people? Here’s a challenge for a reviewer.

The starting point has to be that the book is a really beautiful object. The Circus from which the book draws it’s name has a black and white color scheme. The book matches it, with a black and white cover (backed with sparkly silver stars) and dramatic black edging to the pages. Fans of the circus identify themselves to fellow obsessives by wearing all black, or all white, with a single flash of red, often a scarf. The book has a red bookmark, and red boards peeking out from under the black of the cover. A lot of care and attention has gone into the packaging of this object, and I feel very sorry for anyone who bought it as an ebook. Paper still has the edge when the publisher is prepared to go to such lengths to make a book look good.

Coupled with this attention to appearance, the book has some wonderfully evocative and atmospheric prose. I’m sure that there are many experienced authors out there who would love to be able to describe a scene the way Morgenstern can. Here’s an except from one of my favorite chapters. The viewpoint character, Bailey, is a visitor to the circus. He wandered into a tent promising stories and memories. A note at the entrance said, “Please enter cautiously and feel free to open what is closed.” Bailey finds the tent full of glass jars.

He recalls what the tag said about opening things, wondering what could possibly be inside all of these jars. Most of the clear glass ones look empty. As he reaches the opposite side of the table, he picks one at random, a small round ceramic jar, glazed in black with a high shine and a lid topped with a round curl of a handle. He pulls the lid off and looks inside. A small wisp of smoke escapes, but other than that it is empty. As he peers inside he smells the smoke of a roaring fire, and a hint of snow and roasting chestnuts. Curious, he inhales deeply. There is the aroma of mulled wine and sugared candy, peppermint and pipe smoke. The crisp pine scent of a fir tree. The wax of dripping candles. He can almost feel the snow, the excitement, and the anticipation, the sugary taste of a striped candy. It is dizzying and wonderful and disturbing. After a few moments, he replaces the lid and puts the jar carefully back on the table.

There’s a lot of material like that. Morgenstern is a very visual writer, and very concerned with the sensations her descriptions convey. I understand that she’s a painter as well as a writer.

There is so much that you want to love in this book, especially if you enjoy paragraphs like the one above. But a novel needs more. Specifically it needs plot and characters. Here’s the outline.

Two aged magicians, known as Mr. A.H.– and Prospero the Enchanter, are rivals and have been so for almost all their lives, possibly for centuries. Every so often they have a contest in which each trains up an apprentice, and these young people are pitted against each other in test of skill and endurance. This time Prospero has chosen his young daughter, Celia. Mr. A.H.– has chosen an orphan boy called Marco. The venue for the contest is a circus. Each young magician vies to produce more and more spectacular attractions, while continuing to fool the paying public, and most of the other performers, that this is all cunning artifice, not real magic. Celia and Marco fall in love, and complications ensue.

For about three quarters of the book that’s basically all there is. The plot moves at a snail’s pace as we are introduced to the various delights of the circus (all beautifully described) and a collection of mostly cardboard supporting characters. Eventually, in the final quarter, matters come to a head and suddenly you want to keep reading to find out what happens.

At this point I had decided that the book really needed to be a horror novel. Mr. A.H.–and Properso are a thoroughly inhuman pair (the latter someone literally for much of the book), mercilessly manipulating their young charges and casually murdering people who become a nuisance. The true nature of the contest is much more vicious than it is initially described. But the intensity of emotion never seems to ratchet up properly. Even when people die, it is all very understated. Eventually, of course, there has to be a happy ending. The book is really a love story.

The somewhat dreamlike nature of the narrative doesn’t help much either. The book is clearly stated to take place in the Edwardian era, but we don’t see much of real life. We see the circus, and we see a small group of impossibly rich, impossibly talented people who are its owners. Bailey and his briefly glimpsed family are just about the only real-world people in it.

(There is, by the way, one minor Willis-ism. Morgenstern appears to think that trains in the UK are boarded from ground level as they are in the US. But it is a very small niggle and the scene more or less works anyway.)

The main problem for me, however, was the characters. Most of them seem like cut-outs. They have little labels on them detailing their function in the plot. Some of them also have labels indicating feelings. But it never really seemed like they were people with actual objectives and feelings. It is a failing I find all too obvious in my own infrequent attempts at fiction. Maybe that’s why it stood out for me in this book. And it is a real shame because there are some good ideas there. Isobel and Tsukiko are both pivotal characters in the book, and more could have been done with them. Chandresh’s descent into drunken madness could have been much more poignant.

It is possible that Morgenstern is trying to replicate the extreme reserve required in upper class society during the Edwardian era, which would explain why people don’t seem to react the way they should. If so, I see what she was trying, but I still don’t think it works, at least not for most modern-day readers.

All of this may sound like I disliked the book. I didn’t. It took a long time to get into it, but I very nearly stayed up very late to finish it. I can see why so many people love the book. But, as I said at the start, I can also see why it has got a bunch of bad reviews as well. The best I can do is try to explain what the issues are so you can make an informed decision as to which camp you will fall into. For myself, I’m still not convinced it is a great book, but when Erin Morgenstern produces her next novel I will buy it. This one is her first. She shows tremendous talent and promise. Things can only get better from here.

Title: The Night Circus
By: Erin Morgenstern
Publisher: Vintage
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Signal to Noise

December 23, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Archive, Book Review, Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Every so often a publisher does something that completely surprises you. Here’s a case in point. Solaris do some great books. They publish Gareth L Powell’s Ack-Ack Macaque books, and Juliet E McKenna’s latest Einarinn series. But both of these are very clearly genre novels. I did not expect them to come up with something they might want to submit to mainstream literary prizes and not feel they were wasting their time.

More surprise: Signal to Noise is a novel from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, whom I previously knew from Innsmouth Free Press. It is not particularly a horror novel, and certainly not Lovecraftian. It has a lot more in common with Graham Joyce in the way it connects magic with a carefully observed family saga; and with Tim Powers in the way that modern-day magic works. There’s a bit of Liz Hand in there as well, mainly because of the love of music that suffuses the narrative.

Basically it is a love story about two misfit teenagers. And it is set in Mexico City.

Back in 1988 Meche (Mercedes) and Sebastian were two poor, geeky kids against the world. He loved books, she loved music. Their only ally was chubby Daniella with her love of romantic soap operas and belief in the power of home-made cupcakes as a cure for all ills. There ought, by rights, to be a burgeoning romance here, except that the logic of the classroom dictates that both kids should aspire to something better.

Meche, therefore, is in love with the handsome Constantino, just like every other girl in her class. Sebastian is in love with the beautiful Isobel, who is of course Constantino’s girlfriend because no one else would be good enough for her, or for him.

None of this would have been too much of a problem, broken teenage hearts aside, if Meche hadn’t discovered a talent for magic, and involved her two friends in her quest to use it to better themselves, and gain revenge on their enemies.

Magic, of course, is done with popular music. And because the book is set in Mexico City that music is a fascinating mixture of songs that I know and love, and whose power I understand, cut with work by artists I have never heard of, probably because they don’t sing in English. Now I want to look them up.

In some ways the book reminded me a lot of Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon. The fantastical elements are nowhere near as exuberant, but the sense of reading something written by a person with a deep understanding of the setting, as opposed to an Anglophone tourist, is very much the same. Here’s an example.

She grabbed her jacket and walked two blocks away, to a narrow Chinese café. She asked for tea, but this being a Mexican-Chinese café, there was none.

Mexican Chinese restaurants don’t serve tea? Really? Then again, goodness only knows what Moreno-Garcia would make of a Mexican restaurant in rural Finland. Cultures blend in all sorts of odd ways.

Getting back to the plot, the scenes from 1988 are cut with a parallel storyline from 2009. Meche is now a successful, well-paid software engineer. She lives in Oslo, having traveled widely before that. Now she is back in Mexico City because her father has just died. Inevitably this brings back memories of Sebastian, and of the acrimonious nature of her parents’ relationship during her teenage years. As the story progresses, we learn more about what happened back then, both to her and to her parents. And we learn that power, magical power especially, never comes without a price.

I have to admit that Meche is not the most likeable character. She has a lot of growing to do via her reunion with friends and family. If you are the sort of person who needs to identify with the central character of a book you won’t like this one. Stroppy or no, however, Meche does have a neat line in banter. Here she is telling Sebastian about her life in Norway.

“What do you do in Oslo?”

“I’m a coding monkey. Didn’t I say that?”

If she had not told him, then she was sure her mother had.

“When you’re not coding?”

“I don’t know. I watch TV. I take care of Svend.”

“Is that your boyfriend?”

“It’s a very big fern. I have several ferns but I only baptized one because if you name more than one inanimate object you’re heading into crazy cat lady territory.”

Signal to Noise is a beautiful book. Had I not seen Gary Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan enthusing about it, I might never have read it, let alone been expecting something good. Thanks as ever, guys. I loved it. Hopefully other people will too.

Title: Signal to Noise
By: Silvia Moreno Garcia
Publisher: Solaris
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Issue #13

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Issues

This is the November 2019 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.

Cover: Space Station: This issue's cover is by Steve Bidmead, used under a Creative Common licence

Editorial – November 2019: We've made it to four issues. Hugo eligibility! Huzzah!

The Ten Thousand Doors of January: A review of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, the debut novel by Hugo-winning short story writer, Alix E Harrow.

The Future of Another Timeline: A review of Analee Newitz's novel, The Future of Another Timeline.

Infinite Detail: A review of Tim Maughan's debut novel, Infinite Detail.

The Rosewater Redemption: A review of the third and final part of Tade Thompson's Rosewater series, The Rosewater Redemption

The Deep: A review of the novella, The Deep, written by Rivers Solomon and based on the Hugo-finalist clipping song of the same name.

Interview – Rivers Solomon: An interview with Rivers Solomon, mainly about the book, The Deep.

The Exile Waiting: A review of Handheld Press's re-issue of Vonda McIntyre's debut novel, The Exile Waiting.

Interview – Kathryn Allan: An interview with Kathryn Allan from 2014. The main topic is Allan's work on themes of disability in science fiction.

What Can WSFS Do?: What exactly is the World Science Fiction Society, and why does it so often fail to respond to fannish controversies?

The Forbidden Stars: A review of the concluding volume of Tim Pratt's Books of the Axiom, The Forbidden Stars.

Silver in the Wood: A review of the novella, Silver in the Wood, by Emily Tesh

BristolCon 2019: Cheryl's report on the annual SF&F convention in Bristol.

Cover: Space Station

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 013, Art

Getting artwork for a fanzine cover can be a bit challenging. I’m very much aware that artists should be paid for their work, but fanzines typically don’t bring in any money, let alone enough to pay decent usage fees. Thankfully there are people out there who put good quality art up with Creative Commons licences. This one is by Steve Bidmead and you can find the original here.

Editorial – November 2019

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 013, Editorial

Issue #13, eh? Presumably unlucky for someone, somewhere, simply by the law of averages. I took a look back at Emerald City #13 and discovered that it had been written shortly after I had come out as trans to my family. That did not go well. Fortunately Kevin was there to pick up the pieces. This time around I’m just scared stupid of what will happen to the UK if Boris Johnson is returned as Prime Minister. Fortunately I’m a lot older and more sanguine about things, but I worry dreadfully about those who still have plenty of life ahead of them.

Getting this issue out means that I have now done the requisite four issues in the year, and am therefore eligible for next year’s Hugo Awards in Best Fanzine. Technically I’m eligible in Best Fan Writer as well, but it is the fanzine category that I’m hoping to revive by tossing my hat back in the ring. I don’t need to win any more rockets, but hopefully having me involved will increase voter interest in the category.

Both of the interviews in this issue are a little old. I was going to have one with Lucy Hounsom, but I screwed up the recording. We’ll fix that next year. In the meantime profuse apologies to Lucy. Also the two interview I have included both have a direct connection to reviews in this issue. Next issue my chat with Kate MacDonald of Handheld Press will have disappeared off the Ujima Radio Listen Again system, so I can run that here.

Apologies are also due to Kate Heartfield because I didn’t get around to the second Alice Payne book as I’d hoped. We’re deep into end of the year list season now and I have much to read. Hopefully by this time next year the discipline of having this ‘zine to fill will have left me in a much better state. Next issue, Kate, promise.

Over the holiday season I hope to do some work on the website to provide some decent indexation of the reviews. I’m also planning to transfer some of my older reviews to this site so that everything is in the same place. You’ll see some of that starting with this issue.

There will be a December issue, but it won’t be out before the Solstice so I should wish you all a very happy holiday season, in whichever way you choose to celebrate it.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 013, Alix E Harrow, Book Review

Alix E Harrow is not a necromancer from the Ninth House, though she may sound like it from her name. Nor does she appear to have a thing about bones. She does, however, appear to have a thing about doors. This year she won the Short Story Hugo for something called, “A Witch’s Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies”. Her debut novel is called The Ten Thousand Doors of January.

If I tell you that the January in question is a young girl who acquires the ability to travel through magical portals to other worlds you might think there is something of Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway going on here. But this is not that book.

You might think, when Miss Jane Irimu sweeps into January’s life like some Bantu Mary Poppins to save her from the grim governess, Miss Wilda, that you were in a different book entirely. Mary did, after all, have the ability to conjure magical portals to other worlds. But this is not that book.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is, as the back cover blurbs suggest, a love story. It is a story of people whose love endures even though they are literally worlds apart. But it is much more than that.

If you want your book to appeal to a literary audience, one of the best ways to win them over is to make your book about stories. Ideally it should contain nested stories, after the fashion of Scheherazade, or Cat Valente’s The Orphan’s Tales. For a long time The Ten Thousand Doors of January seems like it might be that book. There is certainly a book within in a book.

We are first introduced to Miss January Scaller whose father is an archaeologist, forever off on expeditions on behalf of his employer, Cornelius Locke. As her mother is dead, January lives as a ward of Mr Locke in his rambling Vemont mansion around the start of the 20th Century. He tries hard to make a proper young lady of her, but he is working with entirely the wrong materials.

January, meanwhile, has come into possession of a book called The Ten Thousand Doors, produced by an academic in the city of Nin in the year 6908. Nin is not in our world, so it is no surprise that their calendar is different. That book tells the story of a young farm girl from Kentucky who finds a door to another world. (She is not from Kansas, and she does not travel there on a whirlwind; this is not that book.)

It is not clear to begin with what these stories have to do with each other. But then, on page 164 to be exact, or much earlier if you spotted the clue that Harrow leaves lying in plain sight, everything falls into place. Yes, this is a love story. But it is also a story about Doors.

If we address stories as archaeological sites, and dust through their layers with meticulous care, we find at some level there is always a doorway. A dividing point between here and there, us and them, mundane and magical. It is at the moments when the doors open, when things flow between the worlds, that stories happen.

It is no accident that a story about Doors contains a character called Mr Locke. Nor is the prestigious New England Archaeological Society quite what it claims.

Like all good books, this one is not just concerned with its own story, but also with the Now. January’s father is black and so, inevitably, despite taking strongly after her mother, is she. Both of them get to experience the least pleasant side of the USA. The scholar, being from another world, is well placed to observe:

One of the most difficult elements of this world is the way its social rules are simultaneously rigid and arbitrary. It is impermissible to engage in physical love before binding legal marriage, unless one is a young man of means. Men most be bold and assertive, but only if they are light skinned. Any persons may fall in love regardless of station, but only if one is a woman and the other a man.

January, at one point, is committed to an asylum, which is exactly the sort of “cure” that was recommended for wilful young women in that time. She takes stock of her fellow inmates at bath time:

I shivered beside the fish-pale nakedness of two dozen other women, all of us made ugly and unsecret, like snails pulled from their shells. I watched them furtively—twitching or weeping or silent as tombstones—and wanted to scream: I’m not like them. I’m not mad, I don’t belong here. And then I thought: Maybe they didn’t belong here, either, at first.

And finally, January’s father is under no illusions that his work for Mr Locke is scientific:

…my papers at the border identify my occupation as an exploratory archaeological researcher, but they might more accurately say well-dressed grave robber. I once overheard the Uyghurs of China refer to me by a long and complicated name filled with fricatives and unpronounceable combinations of consonants—it means the story-eater.

I am reminded of the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford. So many Things.

There is a point to all this. Doors are agents of change. Who knows what might come through them? Mr Locke and his colleagues, as agents of the Kyriarchy, wish all Doors to be closed. It may be that in a world like ours, wishing for Doors (Borders?) to be open might be seen as mere escapism. But there can be no revolution without hope of escape. In any case, love is an agent of chaos. Cupid strikes where he will. And when he does, no mere Door can keep the lovers apart.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January is a book about Doors, but every book needs an antagonist. In this case the enemy is Walls.

Cue Pink Floyd and Gerard Scarfe, repurposed for the age of Trump and Bozo.

Title: The Ten Thousand Doors of January
By: Alix E Harrow
Publisher: Orbit
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The Future of Another Timeline

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 013, Analee Newitz, Book Review

Well, here we go again, this is yet another time war story.

It is, however, rather more than that. Most of what we’ve seen in such stories this year has shied away from any specific political issue. Analee Newitz has no such scruples. Perhaps thanks to the renewed popularity of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Newitz has gone full on gender war. Though they don’t quite say as much, their time war is one whose objective is more or less to create or prevent Gilead. I also suspect that this is their attempt to write a Joanna Russ novel, because there are no holds barred at times and a lot of discussion on the appropriate tactics for feminist revolutionaries.

If you go into this book looking for a novel about time travel I think you will be mostly disappointed. There are five time machines hidden away in various locations around the planet. No one knows who built them, or even how to operate them properly, but they’ve been in use for at least 2000 years and a lot of time travel gets done, but the secret never gets out and no one starts a time war until the 20th Century. Yeah, right. If you are going to power your science with handwavium, it is wise to use as little of the stuff as possible. The more you try to explain things, the more like a puppet show it all looks.

If, on the other hand, you are looking for a book about feminism, you won’t be disappointed. (Well, unless you happen to be a Roman history geek and goddess worshipper, but I’m assuming that none of you are actually me.)

There are two main strands to the book. One of them starts off looking like it will be a high school drama story along the lines of I Know What You Did Last Summer, but ends up being more of a meditation on the awful things that get done to teenage girls in California. It is there mainly to show why the other characters are so angry about men.

The other involves a group of time-traveling feminists known as the Daughters of Harriet (Tubman, of course) who are waging an edit are against a group of pro-Patriarchy fellows who want to prevent women from ever getting civil rights. The story centres on Tess, who happens to be a white Californian woman, but the group as a whole is quite diverse, including at least one black woman, a trans woman, and a non-binary person.

Much of the action takes place at the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893. We learn a lot about early American feminists such as Lucy Parsons and Emma Goldman, and about the history of belly dancing in America. The villain of the piece is a chap called Anthony Comstock who was an early moral crusader. Newitz has grounded all of this in extensive historical research which made it very enjoyable to me.

There are a couple of well-worn feminist debates being given a run out here. The first is whether it is permissible to use what one might call feminine wiles as a tactic. Belly dancing, or hoochie coochie as they called it back then, is a form of erotic dance therefore likely to be condemned alongside stripping, pole dancing and so on by many modern feminists. There’s an argument to be made that women in 1893 had so little political power that any tactic that worked was worth using, but that won’t wash with the hardline anti-sex-work lobby whom I suspect will see Comstock as a potential ally.

The other issue, and this is where the Russ connection comes to the fore, is who much violence is permissible. Given that men have pretty much total control over society, should women take the law into their own hands and kill bad men? If you think that’s a little extreme, remember that rape is effectively legal in the UK because convictions are so difficult to obtain that the Crown Prosecution Service is very reluctant to bring any case to court. Not to mention the fact that certain people are immune from prosecution due to being things like President of the USA or a member of the British Royal Family.

There is, therefore, lots of meaty stuff to think about in this book. It isn’t going to go down well with a lot of men, but then neither do Russ or Atwood. Hopefully lots of people will read it and think about the issues raised.

From my point of view, while the end of the 19th Century is clearly a key period in the fight for women’s rights, I’m slightly bemused by the lack of mention of contraception. I’m of the opinion that it is the availability of cheap, simple and easily obtained means of preventing pregnancy that has made the path towards gender equality inevitable. If I were a time traveling Men’s Right’s Activist, that’s the thing I would be looking to prevent. But the World’s fair story is interesting, and I quite understand that Newitz needs to make sure that their story is simple enough to be told effectively. I can’t always have everything I want out of a book.

Title: The Future of Another Timeline
By: Analee Newitz
Publisher: Orbit
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Infinite Detail

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 013, Book Review, Tim Maughan

One of the things I love about the current internationalisation of science fiction is the fact that we can read books by people who understand others places far better than we white Westerners do. I still love Ian McDonald’s books set in Kenya, India, Brazil and Turkey, and I think that they were a necessary step on the journey that our community has undertaken over the past couple of decades, but now we can have the real thing. We can read Silvia Morena Garcia writing about Mexico, Aliette de Bodard exploring Vietnamese culture, Tasha Shuri introducing us to India, and many fine writers from China and Nigeria. What distinguishes them all is their in-depth understanding of their settings.

That can also be true about what we do, though, because there are pockets of difference even in Anglo-American culture. You can read a book set in the American South, or in Glasgow, or even London, and know whether the author has lived experience of the setting. One such book is Infinite Detail, the debut novel from Tim Maughan. Parts of it are set in New York, where Maughan has spent time, but the majority of the novel is set in a place called The People’s Republic of Stokes Croft. It is somewhere that I visit often, and which Maughan knew far better than I do before he lit out for North America to seek fame and fortune.

Stokes Croft is a region of Bristol which stretches from the Bearpit roundabout on the edge of the main shopping district up to the more middle-class area of Gloucester Road where the more affluent ex-hippies of Bristol live. The Croft is home to vegans, anarchists, animal rights activists, radical feminists who are actually both radical and feminist, and just about every other counter-culture movement that you can think of. But it also borders on St. Pauls, the district most famous for its Afro-Caribbean residents, though these days there’s encroachment from both gentrification and new immigrants from Somalia. Stokes Croft is a melting pot of cultures and ideas; and is thus a perfect setting for Maughan’s novel.

The New York content has some good social commentary too. We see the city from the point of view of Rush, the Pakistani-British programmer as the centre of the story. He is in New York to meet the boyfriend he found online, and Scott moves in social circles far above anything Rush could previously imagined. Nevertheless, Rush drags Scott out to see a Black Lives Matter protest. Scott is gobsmacked.

“There’s just so…” He pauses to pick his works carefully. “So much urgency, you know? And focus. I’ve been on Pride, and I went on the Women’s March … but this … They were different, right? Like it felt people were there to have fun. Like the signs all had jokes on them, people were partying, taking selfies. This, this feels like its about something. Like I said, focussed. Urgent. Angry. But with good reason. You know what I mean?”

I sure do, Scott. It is also like the difference between Pride and Trans Pride, though we are on a much smaller scale as we are not actually getting shot by the police.

As we might expect from Maughan, who has made his reputation writing about the internet and its influence on our culture, Infinite Detail is a novel about how we live now. Cory Doctorow is probably the writer closest in themes to what Maughan does. The book is set partly in the near future when our reliance on machines and the algorithms that drive them has increased significantly, and not necessarily to our benefit.

So much of what we do today is ruled by data and algorithms. Right now, most of those algorithms are pretty crappy. We’ve all had experiences of Amazon recommending books to us that we already own, that we have published, or even that we have written. Some of them, however, are much more sophisticated, especially when big money is involved. I used to work in derivatives valuation. I only did support and end-user training, and I struggled to understand some of the things that the programmers (all of whom had PhDs in things like quantum physics) were telling me. Our sales people understood them even less. As for the users, far too many of them didn’t care. As long as the software helped them make buckets of money in the short term they were happy. They very specifically didn’t care about risk management. Few people were less surprised than me when the crash of 2008 was blamed on credit derivatives.

Tim Maughan knows this stuff. In fact we probably talked about it at some point. He has a stock market trader in the book. He gets it right.

So there are algorithms, and they will only get better. There is data, which we have to keep giving to the likes of Google and Amazon because they have become indispensable to our lives. Heather Child’s novel, Everything About You, asks what happens when your personal assistant knows you so well that it can indulge in major psychological manipulation. Emma Newman’s After Atlas asks what it will be like when your employer can spy on everything you do. Maughan knows this stuff too.

What’s different is that the massive inhuman artificial intelligence wasn’t enslaving us with nuclear bombs or turning us into batteries (how WOUD that work?) or crushing our feeble human skulls with its metal feet, but by finding the best ways to sell us stuff. SkyNet is real, and it wants to sell you shoes made by child slaves.

But in Stokes Croft things can be different, because despite the fact that it is in the centre of one of the UK’s larger cities, a city that prides itself on being home to all sorts of cutting edge technology, people in the Croft think seriously about being off-grid. You don’t have to go and live on a farm in Orkney to do that. It is just harder here.

So while part of the book is set in the near future, much of it is set years later after the Crash. After the internet. Most of the UK is under the heel of the Land Army. The government has to keep order, and make sure everyone can be fed, right? But the Croft is still there, and still trying its best to be independent.

Much of the book is the story of the Crash: how it came to happen, and what part a bunch of anarchists in an obscure part of a lesser-known British city might have played in that. But the book also interrogates the central question: is technology always bad, and if not how can we ensure that it is used for good. There are, of course, no easy answers. But asking such questions is what science fiction is often all about. Like Child and Newman, Tim Maughan is writing science fiction that is very much about today and about what technology is doing to our society. We should be paying more attention to what they are saying.

“It’s not enough to just take power away from those in charge. If we don’t use it ourselves, they just take it back.”

Which is a lesson than every revolutionary needs to learn.

Hello, Ken MacLeod, I think you would enjoy this book.

Title: Infinite Detail
By: Tim Maughan
Publisher: FSG Originals
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The Rosewater Insurrection

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Archive, Book Review, Tade Thompson

I need to start this review by saying that it will inevitably contain spoilers for Rosewater. It is pretty much impossible to talk about the new book without explaining what Rosewater is. There will also be mention of some of the major characters of the first book. So if you haven’t read Rosewater, go out and do that now. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Rosewater Insurrection, then, picks up the story fairly soon after the first book. The city of Rosewater, which has grown up around the alien incursion, has an uneasy relationship with the rest of Nigeria. Politicians inevitably want to control both the futuristic city and the alien that makes it possible. But the people of Rosewater also have ambitions for the future. And we should never forget the alien. Wormwood has come to Earth. It didn’t do so by accident.

While Kaaro does feature in the new book, he is not the principle character. That honor falls to his girlfriend, Aminat. As kick-ass heroines go, she’s pretty damn impressive. Her work for the secret service organisation, S45, puts her right at the center of the action, and most of the time she’s more than capable of doing the job, even though she’s technically a scientist, not a secret agent.

My favorite character in the book is Aminat’s boss, Femi Alaagomeiji. She’s smart, determined, ruthless, devious, and utterly untrustworthy. She’s everything that Colonel Hayley in Supergirl wants to be but isn’t. Thank goodness she’s not Nick Fury, or the Marvel Universe would be in dreadful trouble.

The plot of the book is a three-way power struggle for control of Rosewater. On one side we have the charismatic Jack Jacques, mayor of the city and its defender against the outside world. Ranged against him is the President of Nigeria who wants to keep control of a valuable resource. But we should never forget Wormwood. The alien has its own mission. The people who sent it to Earth expect it to carry out that mission. The Earthlings are largely incidental to its task.

As is necessary for an entertaining story, all sorts of things go wrong. Rosewater descends into chaos. Our heroes must struggle to survive and make alliances where they can. Tade Thompson handles this very well. But the book isn’t entirely a near-future thriller. There are definitely points being made. There are probably more than I, with my limited knowledge of Nigerian culture and history, am going to notice.

One of the unavoidable references is to Biafra. Most of you reading this will be too young to have lived through the terrible civil war that wracked Nigeria at the end of the 1960s. I was a kid then, and the TV coverage of the conflict has stayed with me. The war and its aftermath gave rise to the relief organisation, Médecins Sans Frontières. I don’t suppose I have fully understood the references that Tade is making, but the echoes are clearly there.

Another fairly obvious reference comes in the nature of Wormwood’s mission to Earth. I don’t want to give too much away here, but Wormwood is an alien and it has invaded Earth. There is an inevitable colonisation narrative here.

There is one other very interesting character in the book. Her name is Lora Asiko and she is Jack Jacques’ loyal assistant. I can’t tell you too much about her as that would definitely be major spoiler territory, but do keep an eye on her. She’s special.

We all know by now that there is a third book in the series. Rosewater Redemption will appear in due course, presumably next year. So don’t expect much in the way of resolution at the end of Rosewater Insurrection. What’s more you know that not everyone is going to die, no matter how bad things seem. But in terms of set-up for the final volume Tade has done a fine job. I’m very much looking forward to the next book. And I’m trusting Femi to save the world. She might double-cross everyone else, but she has humanity’s interests at heart. She’s the last person on Earth any alien would want to tangle with.

Title: The Rosewater Insurrection
By: Tade Thompson
Publisher: Orbit
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The Rosewater Redemption

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 013, Book Review, Tade Thompson

“It was always going to come down to humans versus aliens,” says Femi. “That’s all it ever was.”

Fair enough. Femi Alaagomeji is my favourite character from the Rosewater series, and she generally talks sense. I’d expected this ever since reading The Rosewater Insurrection. Look, Rosewater is a story of alien invasion set in Nigeria. How can it not be a story about colonisation? So while Wormwood and the Homians have brought all sorts of interesting technology to Nigeria, and Jack Jacques is trying hard to build a new world were aliens and humans can live side-by-side, we can’t escape the weight of history.

I hate to bring the British into this, but it’s unavoidable. To understand the future we need to understand the past, not just as context, but as the seeds of catastrophe.

That was Oyin Da, otherwise known as The Bicycle Girl. Now as far as I can make out John and Richard Lander did not discover a book of prophecies far more accurate than Nostradamus in the wilds of Nigeria. Not did they fall into the hands of Viscount Goderich, the man whose record for the shortest tenure of a Prime Minister who did not die in office Boris Johnson will hopefully soon eclipse. But the influence of British colonialism on Nigeria runs deep and we really can’t expect Nigerian writers to let us off by writing fluffy technofuturism when they could be writing about us instead.

Colonisation is not just a matter of geography. We didn’t just take their land. We crushed their culture and tried to supplant it with our own. So year, a bunch of aliens from a far off and with massively advanced technology who want to implant their minds into the zombie bodies of the dead locals is totally an appropriate metaphor.

That said, there is still a lot of other stuff in Rosewater Redemption for readers, even British readers, to enjoy comfortably. We have, after all, had two books full of these characters already. War is coming to Rosewater once again. We’d like to see what happens to them. Plus there’s the question of how the heck you manage to fight the Homians when their technology is so massively superior to anything humans might have.

Having read David Mogo, Godhunter, I now understand Taiwo and Kehinde, the crime bosses of Rosewater, much better, and therefore not at all. Are they actually orisha, or just human avatars? Is there presence in this obviously science-fictional work turning into fantasy of some sort? Who cares, white girl? Yours is not to understand, yours is just to read and enjoy.

Personally I have never quite understood the relationship between Jack and Hannah Jacques. Then again, I have never understood the relationship between Bill and Hilary Clinton either. Politicians are a breed apart, and Tade Thompson has had rather more contact with such people at a high level than I have, so I’ll defer to his judgement on this one.

I’m pleased to see that Lora Asiko is back in this novel, and I also very much like the new boy in town, Blessing Boderin. Boderin is Jack Jacques’s lawyer, and the disagreement that he and Lora have over Hannah’s court case on whether reanimates are alive is one of the most fascinating aspects of the book. They are both right: Boderin from a legal point of view, and Lora from a political point of view. There’s a subtlety of understanding here that is often lacking from fiction.

Then there’s time travel. Yes, it is the theme of 2019. Can we change the future by changing the past? Should we even try to? Or can we just go back in time to find the information we need to win a war in the present? Oyin Da thinks that she can. That may be the key to defeating the Homians. The fact is that we can’t, but I so understand the temptation for people to want to write about it now.

Is this something of a scattergun review? Yes. Sorry about that, but trying to find things to say when some of you might not have read the first two books, and for everyone else the only question is who lives and who dies, is not that easy.

So let’s wrap it up here. Rosewater Redemption is a fitting end to a very fine trilogy. Tade Thompson has definitely arrived on the world stage. I’m very much looking forward to seeing what he does next. (As long as it isn’t more blood-spattered horror. You know that about me, don’t you Tade. Sorry mate.)

Title: The Rosewater Redemption
By: Tade Thompson
Publisher: Orbit
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The Deep

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 013, Book Review, Rivers Solomon

Many of you will recall that Rivers Solomon’s new novella, The Deep, is based on the Hugo-finalist clipping song of the same name. It is a story about a race of marine creatures who are descended from pregnant African women thrown overboard from slave ships. I interviewed Solomon about the book last year and have included that interview in the issue. I’m delighted to see that the book is finally out. Here’s the song as a reminder.

Before I start, a couple of quick words about the copyright page. There is no mention in the credits of the editor, Navah Wolfe. She is thanked profusely by both clipping and Solomon in their afterwords. Saga Press fired her recently, despite her having done some amazing work for them. Publishing is a rough business. Also the copyright note only lists the names of the members of clipping. That means that, although Solomon’s name is listed first on the cover, this book is work for hire. Presumably clipping’s lawyers insisted on that as part of the deal. Hopefully the book will garner Solomon an award or two to sweeten that particular pill. They deserve more than just a fee.

On now to the book, which is interesting and complicated because, as Solomon notes in the interview, it is hard to write something from the perspective of creatures that live underwater. The wajinru, as they have chosen to call them, are very alien. Their communication methods are very different to ours, though they have retained the power of human speech too.

The central character of the book is Yetu who is the Historian of the wajinru. That capital H is there with purpose. The entire history of the wajinru is steeped in trauma. Remembering where and how they came to be is deeply painful for them. Mostly they just want to forget, and live in the moment like the other creatures of the sea. But to do so would also be violence to their ancestors. So one wajinru out of all their people is selected to Remember. This is not a fun job.

The basic thrust of the plot is how Yetu comes to terms with both her job and the history that she has been selected to preserve. Along the way Solomon also fill us in on some of the gaps in wajinru history that are not found in the clipping song. As the band say in their afterword, this is not creating canon, it is creating story. There may be other versions of that story in the future. It is interesting that this parallels how Marlon James is approaching his fantasy story, but is very different from the (predominantly white) fannish obsession with canon.

There is another factor that comes into play with the story as well. The US edition (which I have) was published in November. I got my copy around the time of the annual Trans Day of Remembrance. Reading a book about remembering traumatic history written by a trans person of colour, at the time when I was having to lead a remembrance ceremony for trans people (mainly trans women of colour) who have been murdered, was a unique and disturbing experience.

Solomon does play with gender a bit in the book. We discover that the wajinru are truly hermaphroditic, being blessed with both “male” and “female” genitals. And yet we know that Yetu is definitely “she”. Other wajinru that we meet use “he” as their pronoun. This is never explained. Yetu probably doesn’t understand why humans would find it odd.

I think there are some readers who will find this book too dreamlike. Others may want something that is more angry. I will be interested to see other responses come in. For my part I definitely enjoyed it. Books narrated by characters who are decidedly alien are comparatively rare, and I’d like to see more SF writers attempt this form.

Title: The Deep
By: Rivers Solomon
Publisher: Saga
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Interview – Rivers Solomon

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 013, Audio, Interviews

This interview with Rivers Solomon dates from August 2018. They were just heading off to San José where they were a finalist for the Astounding Award (then the Campbell). The interview is mainly about Solomon’s projected work on a book based on the clipping song, “The Deep”, which had been a Hugo finalist in Helsinki.

The photo of Rivers Solomon is by Martha Levine.

The Exile Waiting

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 013, Book Review, Vonda N McIntyre

One of the themes of Analee Newitz’s The Future of Another Timeline is how much feminist history has been forgotten. Brave women do amazing things to advance the cause, but then nothing seems to change and we forget that they ever did anything. This is very much true of the science fiction community. Whenever I see an article that claims that there were no women in science fiction until recently, I wonder what happened to the glory days of the late 1970s. If you listen to Ellen Datlow’s interview from last issue you will hear her talking about how exciting those times were because suddenly women were appearing on award ballots.

Then there was cyberpunk, and women vanished from the scene. Even Pat Cadigan, despite the fact that she was one of the best of the new breed, was somehow deemed to have never existed. Only Le Guin has survived the purge of the popular imagination.

But Le Guin was not alone. There was Joanna Russ and Suzy McKee Charnas; there was Octavia Butler; there were feminist allies such as Samuel Delany and James Tiptree; and (among many others) there was Vonda McIntyre.

Despite winning the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards for her second novel, Dreamsnake, McIntyre largely faded from the popular imagination soon thereafter. She got into writing Star Trek books. I’m told by those who know that her novelisations of some of the early films are much better than the films themselves, thought that may be a fairly low bar. She also did a lot of work behind the scenes, including being instrumental in setting up Book View Cafe. Handheld Press, which specialises in publishing work by unfairly overlooked women writers, has just released a new edition of McIntyre’s debut novel, The Exile Waiting.

In some ways this book is a prequel to Dreamsnake, in that it is set in the same world. In the far future, mankind has spread far from Earth. The Sphere is a rich and expanding region of human influence in the galaxy. Meanwhile the home planet is a dying ruin, almost forgotten. Jan Hikaru, a rich young man at a loss for purpose in life, has befriended an ancient starship navigator whose one remaining ambition is to see Earth one more time before she dies. This gives Jan the opportunity to find out what the homeworld is really like.

What he finds is not pleasant. Earth is mainly a forbidding world wrecked by war and wracked by storms that stir up the black sand covering the planet. Human life, such as it is, appears confined to Center, a small settlement based in an ancient fallout shelter and associated missile silos. Center is ruled through an uneasy truce between Lord Blaisse in his Palace, and the middle-class Families of Center. Most of the population seems to scrape by as beggars, slaves, or workers who might as well be slaves.

Center has a particular obsession with racial purity, not in the contemporary sense of white supremacy, but rather freedom from mutation. This is, remember, the 1970s. The idea that humans might mutate when exposed to radiation as very popular, and McIntyre was working on a postgraduate degree in genetics when she decided to quit academia and become a writer. Any child with an obvious mutation is exiled to the underground cave system where an entirely separate society is being formed, but some mutations are invisible.

The hero of the novel, Mischa, is a young girl who in another world might be a Prince in Waiting. She’s a genius, and has a telepathic relationship with her siblings. But in Center intellectual ability counts for nothing. Mischa’s only practical skills are physical, and she’s forged a career as a thief. She has to make money somehow because her cruel uncle is using her telepathic relationship with her siblings, in particular her disabled sister Gemini, to blackmail her into supporting him. Mischa would like nothing more than to get away from Center, but doing so would condemn her siblings to death.

The other key character of the story is the pilot of Jan’s ship, known only as Subtwo. He is part of a bizarre child rearing experiment detailed in the short story, “Cages”, also published in this volume. Subone and Subtwo are “pseudosibs”, young men reared in complete isolation from human society as an experiment by an arrogant psychologist. Both of them are deeply damaged by the experience, and Subtwo in particular has great difficulty with human relationships.

Inevitably the story is one of how Jan discovers Mischa and together they help Subtwo on his journey to becoming a functional human being. Along the way there are consequences for the people of Center as well. But more importantly the story is one of a triumph of human ability and spirit against social expectation. This passage stood out for me:

Mischa had never heard of any Families abandoning their children; she had assumed, like everyone else, that they were somehow immune to changes. “You don’t act like them.”

“I used to.” She touched the bright, fine hair on the top of her shoulders; it grew down her arms, across her back, and tapered to a point at the base of her spine. “When this started to grow I was frightened, but I thought I could hide it. I pulled out the hair, but it always grew back. That’s when I began to understand what it was like to be powerless.”

Today we might see that as an allegory for a trans kid. In 1975, when this book was published, trans people were barely known, and trans kids were certainly not an issue. But the story is the same. People should be valued for who they are, not for whether they fit into some rigid idea of social acceptability.

So what is McIntyre writing about? In her afterword in this volume, Una McCormack makes the point that most of the characters in the book are disabled in some way. The mutants, particularly Gemini, have obvious physical differences. Mischa and some of her friends have injuries as a result of punishments inflicted by the Center authorities. Subone and Subtwo are psychologically damaged, as are some of the children raised as slaves in the Palace. Mischa’s brother, Chris, has become a drug addict. Mischa, obviously, will escape to a new life of possibility in the Sphere, but this is not a story about how people’s disabilities are magically cured by science, it is a book about how people are valuable despite being seen as different.

Given the subject matter, I have put a link in this issue to my 2014 interview with Kathryn Allan about her work on disability in science fiction.

It should note also that McIntyre has gender-flipped the traditional teenage hero, which is relatively unusual for science fiction in the 1970s. However, the world of Center is still mostly Patriarchal, and it seems like the Sphere is too.

The Exile Waiting is a first novel. I think some of the pacing was a bit off, and I’m pretty sure that if McIntyre were still around she’d acknowledge that she’d become a much better writer over the years. However, it is a very interesting book, and one that touches on themes that we are still talking about in science fiction today. We shouldn’t be forgetting books like this.

Title: The Exile Waiting
By: Vonda N McIntyre
Publisher: Handheld Press
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Interview – Kathryn Allan

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 013, Audio, Interviews

This interview dates from August 2014, when the anthology, Accessing the Future was due out. I have reproduced it here because the themes of disability in science fiction are very relevant to Vonda McIntyre’s The Exile Waiting. Una McCormack cites Allan heavily in her afterward of that book.

Accessign the Future was an anthology intended to showcase how disabled characters could be used well in fiction, but the work that McCormack cites is Disability in Science Fiction, an academic book edited by Allan which, if you read this early enough, you might be able to pick up for a mere £9.99 in the Palgrave sale. I have a copy on order.

Although these books are several years old, the issues that they raise are still very relevant.

What Can WSFS Do?

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 013, Con Running

Rumbling aftershocks from this year’s Worldcon continue to surface occasionally, and there was a very interesting blog post recently on a Canadian website about future venues for Worldcon. This is all good. I like to see people discussion the future of the convention. But I also see a lot of misunderstanding out there as to what WSFS is and what it can do. Much of this comes in the way of inquiries to the various WSFS websites, and it comes from outside the community, but there is still a lot of misinformation in fannish circles as well so I thought it would be useful to see what WSFS can actually do.

Much of the problem is in the name. If something is called the World Science Fiction Society then people assume that it must be a rich, multi-national organisation with posh offices in New York or Los Angeles, a board of directors, a large full-time staff, and of course an army of lawyers at its disposal. Nothing could be further from the truth.

WSFS bills itself as an “unincorporated literary society”. The “unincorporated” is the important bit. It might have a constitution, but it has no paid staff, and the bare minimum in terms of legal existence. Indeed, one of the reasons why the Hugo trademarks are not registered in Canada is that Canadian law cannot understand how an organisation like WSFS can exist.

But, I hear you say, WSFS must at least be rich. Look at the huge profits that Worldcon makes! Well, no, actually. The rules of Worldcon financial management are very clear. Any surplus cannot be kept, either by the organisation that ran the event, or by WSFS. Money can be donated to the successor Worldcons, and this is invaluable in keeping the convention afloat. It may also be donated to fannish good causes provided that they are not too closely associated with the organisation that ran the convention.

The only income that WSFS has is a levy of $1 per member. It is a suggested donation that Worldcons are asked to make, but and not required. If a Worldcon is in financial difficulties it will be one of the first things dropped. The money goes to the Mark Protection Committee, and it is spent mostly on attempting to register the trademarks in new parts of the World, on occasional bits of legal advice, and on paying a lawyer to exchange letters with people like Hugo Boss, and anyone trying to call their convention “Worldcon”, or present a “Hugo Award”.

This brings me to an important point. WSFS cannot sue anyone, because it has no money to do so. The most that it can do is write letters asking people to cease and desist misusing its trademarks.

Because WSFS has no permanent staff, it cannot do anything that involves the running of Worldcon. It cannot decide where Worldcon is to be held, no matter how much of a subsidy your local tourism authorities are prepared to offer. It cannot revoke a site selection decision, no matter how angry you are with the current committee. It cannot force a Worldcon committee to do something, either before during or after the event.

The most that WSFS can actually do, aside from grant the right to run a Worldcon to the group that wins a Site Selection ballot, is pass a motion at the Business Meeting condemning something that a Worldcon has done, and which people disapproved of.

Of course WSFS could change the Constitution to require future Worldcons to do specific things. But those have to be things that Worldcons are likely to be happy to do anyway. It would be foolish of WSFS to require future Worldcons to do something that they would probably not want to do, because that would encourage them to disobey that rule. And frankly, if they do, there’s nothing that WSFS can do to prevent it.

It is also the case that, beyond changes to the Constitution voted on at two successive Worldcons, there is nothing that WSFS can do to affect the Hugo Awards. WSFS cannot introduce a new category just because you petition them to, nor change the rules because you think they ought to. WSFS cannot remove someone from the ballot, prevent someone from winning, or change the results after they have been announced.

So the answer to the question, “What can WSFS do?” is, “Almost nothing.” The next obvious question is, “Why is it like that?”

In the early days of WSFS there were people who thought that the organisation should have an official structure, complete with officers, and maybe offices and staff. That concept is known in fannish history as “WSFS Inc.”, and there are few phrases more likely to get old time fans to flock to the Business Meeting to vote something down than mention of this shibboleth.

That too requires explanation, and the reason is that back in the day fans did not trust other fans to be in charge. British and Australian fans did not want the organisation to end up being run by Americans. East Coast US fans did not want the organisation being run by people from the West Coast and vice versa. No one wanted WSFS being run by people who wanted to run WSFS, because people who desire power have probably got ulterior motives. And of course no one wanted anyone making a profit out of running a fannish organisation.

Yes, I know that there are people out there who think that there are “upper class fans” who have made a fortune out of Worldcon. I laugh.

So WSFS is the way it is primarily because no one wanted the Wrong People to be in charge. However, these days there is an increasing pressure for there to be Someone in charge. The modern world driven by social media moves very quickly, and if an organisation cannot respond in good time then it will be seen to have failed.

Furthermore there is actually Someone in charge. To that the extent that there is any control, it is in the hands of people who attend Worldcon regularly and have the time and patience to attend the Business Meeting. If you happen to live in Melbourne and can only afford to attend Worldcon once every 10 years when it is in your part of the world, you have little say in the governance of WSFS. If you are a Dealer who attends Worldcon every year, but are stuck behind a table all five days, you have little say in the governance of WSFS. If you are part of a minority group and find that the regular attendants of the Business Meeting have views that rarely line up with your own interests, you have little say in the governance of WSFS.

So the question is, can anything be done to change the way in which WSFS works, so as to make it more responsive to challenges, and to make it more representative of all of the people who wish to be part of the Worldcon community, without significantly increasing the risk that the Wrong People will get to be in charge?

That isn’t an easy question to answer. Kevin and I spent some time thrashing through possibilities at our Kaffeklatsch at Titancon this year. When we get time (or more accurately when Kevin gets time) we’ll present some ideas for discussion.

The Forbidden Stars

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 013, Book Review, Tim Melody Pratt

I have very much enjoyed Tim Pratt’s Books of the Axiom series. You can find my thoughts on The Wrong Stars and The Dreaming Stars here. This is a review of the final part of the trilogy, The Forbidden Stars.

I’m not going to say a huge amount about the story and characters because you’ll want to read the earlier books, and the earlier review, for that. What I will say is that this is very much a final book. Pratt makes a conscious effort to wrap up, not just the danger of The Axiom, but also the personal journeys of several of the main characters. There is a sense in which the book is more about that than it is about the plot of the book.

In addition, there is a clear sense of massively escalating stakes here. In the previous two books Callie Machedo and the crew of the White Raven were merely plucky adventurers going up against an isolated outpost of a much more powerful foe and hoping to get away with it. Here they take on that foe much more directly, with the real possibility of the fate of the galaxy, perhaps even the universe, being at stake.

The basic plot is that a mysterious Benefactor (he calls himself that, with a Capital B) tips off our heroes that they can find an Axiom outpost in a long-lost human colony system where the wormhole gate has ceased to operate leaving the colonists stranded. The story quickly turns into a mission to liberate the colony, which has been conquered by agents of the Axiom, and the stakes keep going up from there.

So in some ways The Forbidden Stars is not like the two previous books in the series. However, it is still a thoughtful piece of science fiction, and an exciting space opera romp. We still get to hang out with Callie and her crew, who are a great bunch of characters. As I expected, I whizzed through the book in a couple of days, eager to find out what happened next.

If I sound a little disappointed it is mainly because I would have loved to spend more time with these characters. This was a great series, and now it is done. Pratt could presumably write other stories in the same world, even about the same people, but all of them will have been irrevocably changed by the events of this book.

That, I suspect, is the way of things in publishing these days. It used to be that a long-running series was a thing to aim for, but in our newly data-driven world authors are at the mercy of their sales figures. If you want to keep working with the same publisher, you have to keep improving your sales. With a long-running series it is almost always the case that sales drop slightly with each successive volume. Seanan McGuire seems to be able to churn out one October Daye book after another and still get great sales, but she’s something of an exception.

So I guess that Pratt will be looking to write something new, possibly for a new publisher, maybe even under a new name, thought that’s less of an issue for men than it is for women. Whatever it is that he does next, I will be looking out for it, because the Axiom books were a lot of fun.

Title: The Forbidden Stars
By: Tim Pratt
Publisher: Angry Robot
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Silver in the Wood

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 013, Book Review, Emily Tesh

So, stories about the Green Man and dryads are a thing now? Cool!

It amuses me that the author of Silver in the Wood, Emily Tesh, has a Classics degree from Cambridge to match the one that Juliet McKenna has from Oxford. There, however, the resemblance ends. McKenna’s Green Man books are very much set in the modern era, are effectively crime fiction, and have a lead character who is merely the mortal assistant of supernatural forces. Silver in the Wood is something else entirely.

To start with the book is set in what appears to be the mid 19th Century. Henry Silver, he of the title, has recently come into possession of Greenhallow Hall, and being an amateur antiquarian he’s keen to investigate the legends surrounding the associated woodland. He, however, is not the protagonist of out story. That honour falls to Tobias Finch, a woodsman who lives in an ancient cottage deep in the forest and has done so for, well, quite some time.

At once slow deep green rolled over him. He took a breath, and another smelling old rotting leaves and healthy growth and autumn light. He felt almost as though he could have planted his feet and become a tree himself, a strong oak reaching up to the sky, brother of the old oak who ruled the wood. Ah, he thought, and nothing else.

Along the way we get a sprinkling of Robin Hood style legend, and a fair amount of being off with the faeries. So this is very much traditional British folk fantasy. I’m not entirely convinced by Tesh’s decision to meld that with some monster hunting as you might find in Theodora Goss’s Athena Club novels (or indeed in Juliet McKenna’s Challoner, Murray & Balfour stories). There’s a whole lot of story development that happens off screen towards the end of the book. It rather feels like there was an intention to expand this into something much more like a steampunk adventure novel, but that some editor (either external or in the author’s head) said, “No, this is much better as traditional fairy tale material.” Whoever it was, they were right.

There’s not a huge amount more I can say because this is a novella and therefore relatively short on content. I should, however, note that there is gay stuff in it, which I am sure will please many readers.

Title: Silver in the Wood
By: Emily Tesh
Publisher: Tor.com
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

BristolCon 2019

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 013, Convention Report

My final convention of the year was my local event, BristolCon. This year marked the 10th anniversary of something that I helped to start, and which has gone from strength to strength over the years. It is now a regular fixture on the UK convention circuit; and is attracting visitors from well outside the local area.

One of the things that makes BristolCon work is that it has a clear sense of its own limitations. There have been regular suggestions that it should grow to be a weekend event, as tends to be traditional for such things. However, the committee has consistently resisted the temptation, insisting that they are only going to do what they have the capacity to do, and not get over ambitious.

Part of that means not having to worry overmuch about hotel rooms. Quite a few people do now stay over on the Friday before the convention. Some stay Saturday night as well. But Bristol is superbly connected by rail (thank you, Mr. Brunel) and it is perfectly possible to do the convention as a day trip from places as far away as Birmingham, London, Southampton, Plymouth and Swansea. There are also good air links to Dublin, Belfast, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Another element is the capacity of the venue. BristolCon has been at the DoubleTree for most of its life. The hotel is very convenient for Temple Meads station. There are a number of other hotels not that far away, but this one has good function space, an excellent bar, a good restaurant, and staff that seem to be happy to work with us weirdos.

In the middle years the con seemed quite cramped as attendance had climbed rapidly and appeared to be stretching the ability of the venue to cope. However, the hotel has added more function space recently and that has eased a lot of the pressure. If you remember the con from the days when there seemed to be no room to move in the main foyer, you’ll be pleasantly surprised if you make a return visit.

A downside is that the fact that the new space is on a different floor. Registration, Programme Room 2, and the free tea & coffee service (one of the con’s best features) are now downstairs. I spent most of the day in the Dealers’ Room and didn’t see as many people as I expected. From the few programme items that I was on, I got the impression that the downstairs programme room was busier than the upstairs one, and that if people weren’t attending programme they were either drinking coffee or in the bar. I can’t complain, however. I sold a lot of books.

The main reason for that is that we were launching Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion II. The convention kindly allowed us to be the main book launch event and provided space and time for a few speeches and signing. They event supplied a lovely cake in the shape of the SS Great Britain, and helped pay for the wine. They did us proud, for which Jo, Roz and I are very grateful.

During the day I got wind of a small amount of frantic paddling beneath the smooth surface of the event, but another advantage of the small size of the convention is that it is hard for anything to go too badly wrong. There is a temptation, with a long-running event, to assume that everything will be OK because it was all OK last year, and that can lead to people forgetting to be paranoid about checking arrangements, but the committee know what they are doing and can recover from most slip-ups.

The only thing that didn’t really go according to plan was the Open Mic on the Friday evening. It looked like the tech crew had been told to run the thing while they were doing tech set-up in the main programme room, and they didn’t really know how it worked. Guys, you could have just asked me. You knew I would be there.

Plans for next year’s convention are already underway. The Author Guests of Honour will be Anna Smith Spark and Adrian Tchaikovsky. I’m assuming that an Artist guest will be announced in due course. The date is a week later than usual: October 31st. In the past the convention has avoided Halloween weekend because some authors wanted to be free to attend World Fantasy. However, that is now less of an issue than publishers insisting that authors go to the MCM ComicCon in London rather than to BristolCon. A later date will hopefully avoid a clash, and might also encourage more costuming. I might stay over on Saturday night for that. I’m certainly sad to have missed this year’s Saturday evening programming which appears to have been quite spectacular.

Of course it does mean that I’m likely to miss 2021, because I do miss my North American friends and I’m always up for a trip to Montréal, but that’s sufficiently far in the future in our crazy current timeline that anything could of happened by them.

What I will say is that I won’t be doing a book launch at BristolCon next year. If I do one it will be at the Eurocon in Croatia. But I do expect to be at BristolCon, and I hope to see some of you there.

The Dreaming Stars

November 29, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Archive, Book Review, Tim Melody Pratt

The people who complain that science fiction has been taken over by Social Justice Warriors often say that there is a lack of fun adventure stories. Obviously those people have not been reading Tim Pratt.

Of course they wouldn’t. Tim’s Axiom series does feature a plucky crew of misfits who happen to be in possession of some cutting-edge weaponry and who are trying to save the galaxy from a terrifying ancient race of aliens. There are some great characters, a lot of entertaining byplay between them, and just enough heart-stopping danger to keep us all reading. The problem is that some of the crew are women. Worse, some of them are lesbians; and some are disabled. There’s even a minor character who is trans. So despite the books having almost all of the features the whingers ask for, they won’t read them because they won’t read anything that has SJW cooties.

The rest of us, however, are in for a treat. This is comfort reading, but it is fun, clever comfort reading. Let’s meet some of the crew.

The captain of the White Raven is Callie Machedo. She used to be a freelance security consultant, but for reasons explained in the first book in the series, The Wrong Stars, she’s now the leader of the only group of people who know just how much danger the galaxy is in.

Callie’s life is made much easier by the presence of Elena Oh, a biologist who, in The Wrong Stars, was rescued from a lost colony ship. Elena and her fellow crew members had been in cryo-sleep for hundreds of years, so there are plenty of opportunities for “old people” jokes. Callie and Elena flirt regularly through book two, The Dreaming Stars.

We also have the engineer, Ashok, who is an enthusiastic early adopter of body modification technologies. If there is something he can plug into himself, he wants it. The ship’s doctor, Stephen, is a member of an obscure religious cult that believes it can find god through taking psychotropic drugs. The pilot and navigator, Janice and Drake, are literally inseparable, and they hate it.

Finally there is Lantern. She’s a Liar, a member of the only alien race that most humans know they have encountered. They are called Liars because they appear to be incapable of telling the truth about anything important. Ask five Liars the same question, and you will get five different answers, none of them correct. Liars have tentacles and rotational symmetry. One of the reasons they won’t level with humanity is that the truth about the universe is far too terrifying for us to handle. We wouldn’t believe it. We would poke our curious monkey noses in places where they should not be poked. And we would die. Horribly.

The other alien species in the galaxy are the Axiom. You’ll need to read The Wrong Stars to get up to date on who they are, and why they are so dangerous, but it is safe to say that there are no other intelligent species in the galaxy because the Axiom have wiped them all out.

The Axiom series is great fun space opera. I have really enjoyed the first two books and I’m very much looking forward to book three later this year.

Title: The Dreaming Stars
By: Tim Pratt
Publisher: Angry Robot
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Issue #12

October 30, 2019 Cheryl Morgan Issues

This is the October 2019 issue of Salon Futura. Here are the contents.

Cover: The Green Man’s Heir: This month's cover features Ben Baldwin's artwork for Juliet E McKenna's award-nominated The Green Man's Heir.

Editorial – October 2019: In which there is mention of a first guest article, and some thoughts on the future publication schedule.

The Warrior Moon: A review of The Warrior Moon by K. Arsenault Rivera

Interview – Ellen Datlow: An interview with the multi-award-winning horror editor, Ellen Datlow.

FranKissStein: A Review of FranKissStein by Jeanette Winterson

The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein: A review of The Plesant Profession of Robert A Heinlein by Farah Mendlesohn

Feeling Badgered?: Kevin Standlee goes deep in the question of what makes a good convention badge.

Alice Payne Arrives: A Review of Alice Payne Arrives by Kate Heartfield

Shadows of Athens: A review of Shadows of Athens by JM Alvey

David Mogo, Godhunter: A review of David Mogo, Godhunter by Suyi Davies Okungbowa

Brightfall: A review of Brightfall by Jamie Lee Moyer

FantasyCon 2019: Cheryl reports on the 2019 Fantasycon which took place in Glasgow

Cover: The Green Man’s Heir

October 30, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 012, Art, Ben Baldwin

This is the artwork done by Ben Baldwin for Juliet E McKenna’s The Green Man’s Heir. I am using it for this issue in honour of that book being a finalist for the Robert Holdstock Award for Best Fantasy Novel this year. It didn’t win, but I’m still very proud of Juliet and that book.

You can see what it looks like on the book below.

Editorial – October 2019

October 30, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 012, Editorial

Well, here we are again. I’ve managed three issues of the new incarnation of this thing, and the UK has had another stay of execution. I do wish I was living in less interesting times.

Still, we have books. I have reviewed a bunch of them. There’s also an interview with Ellen Datlow that I recorded at the Eurocon. You may have heard some of it on my radio show, but this version includes all of the insider stuff that I had to cut out for a general audience.

Also I have an article by Kevin in this issue. It has always been our intention to run articles about conrunning here. Earlier this month John D. Berry wrote blog post about convention badges that got widely shared on social media. It is a great post, because John is an expert on typography and can talk authoritatively about how to design a readable badge. But there’s a lot more to convention badges than readability, so I thought this would be a good time to update Kevin’s article on that topic which he first wrote for Steven Silver’s Argentus many years ago.

I should also say a little bit about schedule. Right now I am doing one issue a month. With Emerald City I did ten a year, with deliberate extended breaks for Worldcon and midwinter. Both of those things are less of an issue for me now, so I might be able to manage a 12-issue year, but I need to see how things go for a while. My life is way more hectic than it was when I was doing Emerald City.

The Warrior Moon

October 30, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 012, Book Review, K Arsenault Rivera

This book is the third and final instalment in what has become one of my favourite fantasy series of recent times. It began with The Tiger’s Daughter and continued in The Phoenix Empress. In these books K Arsenault Rivera has constructed a fascinating fantasy world based loosely on Japanese, Chinese and Mongolian cultures. She has also given us the most adorable pair of lesbian demon hunters in literature. Barsalai Shefali and Minami Shizuka are beautifully drawn, far from perfect, and passionately in love. As the series has been neatly wrapped up I don’t see how we’ll get more stories about them, and this makes me rather sad.

I didn’t do proper review of the other two books, and it is hard to review the third part of a trilogy without giving any spoilers for the first two volumes. I will do my best, but if you are highly spoiler-averse you might want to stop reading now.

Rivera has chosen a very interesting structure for the books. Both The Tiger’s Daughter and The Phoenix Empress are told in flashback as Shefali and Shizuka tell each other how their lives have gone over the past few years since they have been separated. This sets us up for the climactic conclusion in The Warrior Moon.

The story more or less begins with two other remarkable women: the Hokkaran Empress, Minami Shizuru, and the Qorin clan leader, Burqila Alshara. Their friendship puts an end to a long enmity between the Hokkarans and the Qorin. Their daughters are of a similar age and are raised together. Both of them prove to have extraordinary abilities, and they become inseparable.

The true story, however, begins generations ago with the arrival of The Traitor, a powerful demon with mysterious ties to the Minami royal family. The Traitor now controls much of the north of the country. His ability to infect mortals with blackblood, and thereby possess them, gives him massive armies. He preys particularly on the Qorin as their steppe-lands are adjacent to his territory, but his ambition is always directed towards the Hokkaran Empire whose throne he covets.

As The Warrior Moon opens, Shefali and Shizuka are finally in position to launch an assault on the north. Shefali has persuaded her mother to bring the Qorin clans to war, and Shizuka, now Empress, has the Phoenix Guard at her command. They aim to march on the Lost City of Iwa and put an end to the threat of The Traitor once and for all.

Time, however, is of the essence. Shefali is very sick, and a prophecy tells that she will not live past her next birthday. That is now mere weeks away. It is by no means certain that they will even reach Iwa in time. The two women had vowed to go into battle together, and now it seems that opportunity may be ripped away from them.

There are many things that I love about this series. The characters of Shefali and Shizuka are but a start. There is also a great supporting cast. I’m disappointed not to have any more of Ren in the final book, but we have a fine replacement in Minami Sakura, Shizuka’s long-long cousin who was abandoned at birth, raised in a brothel, and has become the Imperial Historian. I’m also very fond of Shefali’s cousin, Dorbentei Otgar, who gets her own moments of glory in the final book. These two represent the mortal people of the Hokkarans and Qorin, bearing witness to events that rapidly escalate far beyond mortal ken.

I also love the way Rivera has used her demon adversaries. They are cunning, duplicitous, and very snarky. Once beyond the Wall of Flowers, the combined army is trapped in a world where the weather and terrain can change rapidly and unexpectedly. Even time itself flows differently in The Traitor’s domain. To defeat him, Shefali and Shizuka must become as gods.

Finally, I love the ending. War is brutal. The Hokkaran Empire values beauty over all else. The Qorin value family. Both will be ripped apart in the final conflict. There is no happy ending that can erase the pain. Unlike many fantasy writers, Rivera understands this and is prepared to face up to it. In any case, what place is there for gods among mortals? Once their legend is written, all that they have is each other.

The golden Sun burns.
The Moon shines silver. Lovers,
Like two pine needles.

Title: The Warrior Moon
By: K. Arsenault Rivera
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
Amazon UK
Amazon US
See here for information about buying books though Salon Futura

Interview – Ellen Datlow

October 30, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 012, Ellen Datlow, Interviews

This interview was recorded at the 2019 Eurocon, TitanCon, in Belfast. Cheryl talks to Ellen about a range of topics including how she got her start in the business, how the industry has changed since she started, what “best of the year” anthologies mean, and who is the only horror writer ever to have scared her.

Parts of the interview were broadcast on Cheryl’s radio show earlier this month, but this is the full version with all of the industry gossip that wasn’t comprehensible to a general audience.

FranKissStein

October 30, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 012, Book Review, Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson’s latest book is a pastiche on Frankenstein, and also very much a science fiction novel. Even if it didn’t have a trans main character, it would deserve a review here. Given that additional fact, I really can’t ignore it.

Once upon a time a group of young friends rented a house on the shores of Lake Geneva. The weather was awful and, being mostly writers, they set themselves a challenge of producing a story each. John Polidori, Lord Byron’s physician, wrote a short story called The Vampyre which kickstarted our passion for toothy bloodsuckers. And 19-year-old Mary Shelley invented science fiction.

Well, if you ignore Margaret Cavendish, and the more bizarre satires of Lucian of Samosata. Whatever your views on the origins of science fiction, Mary Shelley wrote a book that to this day is one of the best-known works of English literature. Despite not sucking anyone’s blood, Victor Frankenstein’s monster seems to be able to live forever. And so, by extension, does his creator.

Fast forward now to the 21st Century and FranKissStein. Britain is in the grip of Brexit fever, but that can’t stop the march of science. Ron Lord (Lord, Ron, get it?), the Alan Sugar of sex dolls, is establishing himself as a player on the world stage. His little business founded in a Welsh village now has factories in China and customers all over the globe. He’s in the USA at a technology fair hoping to pick up tips on the latest developments in AI.

As an aside, there is indeed a village in Wales called Three Cocks. It is just north of the Brecon Beacons, and not far from Hay-on-Wye, which is doubtless how Winterson came to hear of it.

Professor Victor Stein is a technology guru of similar stature to Ray Kurzweil. He is the king of AI, the man who will bring us the Coming Race (I’m disappointed that Winterson didn’t use that pun) of artificial beings. He also has a strong interest in cryogenics.

Polly D is a journalist for Vanity Fair (journalists, bloodsuckers, yes they do have something in common). She’s an outspoken feminist and she’s sure that Stein is up to no good. She finds Lord repugnant. If the two of them end up working together (and you know they must) it will set off all sorts of alarm bells in her conspiracy-detector mind.

Into this mess walks Dr Ry Shelley. Everyone assumes that Ry is short for Ryan, and most people call him that, but it is actually short for Mary. Ry is an assigned-female-at-birth (afab) trans person who has undergone top surgery, but nothing down below. Though he lives as a man, and uses he/him pronouns, he identifies as non-binary. He is both the poet and the novelist in one body, the perfect married couple.

With this set-up, Winterson takes us on a tour of the current state of transhumanism and robotics. The book came out too soon after Kate Devlin’s Turned On for Winterson to have used that as a source, so I guess the two of them were reading the same research material at around the same time. Devlin’s book is a factual survey of the field. Winterson’s is an hilarious romp.

Well, it is hilarious as long as you are not a man. If you are you may well have an attack of the man-feels on reading it; and have to send a bunch of dick pics to random queer women on Twitter in order to reassert your masculinity. But this is Jeanette Winterson. What did you expect?

Also it gets a bit serious and woo-woo towards the end, which is all well and good from my point of view.

Being neither afab nor non-binary, I can’t give any opinion on whether Ry is a good portrait of such a person. I would love to see reviews of the book by such people. What I can say is that it isn’t a bad portrait. Winterson is clearly sympathetic to trans people, and that’s despite being a lesbian and a member of the British literary establishment, which is pretty much the definition of a transphobe these days. She makes a point of illustrating the constant microaggression that people like Ry are subjected to (in Ry’s case mainly from Lord, who thinks he’s being clever). There is one point (Content Warning!) where Ry is the victim of sexual assault. And frankly his relationship with Stein is deeply dysfunctional and exploitative. Stein, of course, exploits everyone, but he makes a special case of Ry.

There are a couple of points where Winterson’s research on trans people is a little behind the times. (If you ever read this, Jeanette, it turns out that the whole thing about trans women’s vaginas being wounds that will never heal is yet another lie made up by doctors to discourage us from transitioning. Bodies are remarkably adaptable.) I’m sure there will be trans people who like the book less than I do, especially if they are people who will immediately identify closely with Ry. But it could have been so much worse, and it isn’t.

I’m also fairly pleased with the book as science fiction. Winterson is definitely not slumming it. She doesn’t make any grandiose predictions about the future of humanity, but she has done her research on the current state of the technology. She also appears to have left a little Easter Egg for us.

Later in the book we are introduced to a character called Jack Good, who was once a friend of Victor Stein’s. He’s a gay man, who fled England in fear after the Turing disaster, who lived on into his nineties, and who was involved in the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Sir Arthur C Clarke was not Jewish; he worked in radar rather than at Bletchley Park with Turing; and he wasn’t a pioneer of cryogenics; but his life history is otherwise remarkably similar to Good’s. I don’t think this was an accident.

The book is a piece of literary fiction, so don’t expect a neatly resolved adventure story. As long as you are OK with that (and not troubled by jokes at the expense of men) there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy it. I was a little disappointed that Winterson didn’t manage to work in Mary Shelley’s friendship with the trans man, Walter Douglas (who wrote as David Lyndsay), but you can’t have everything. These days I’m very relieved simply to read a book by a cis woman about a trans character that isn’t horrible.

Title: FranKissStein
By: Jeanette Winterson
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
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The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein

October 30, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 012, Book Review, Farah Mendlesohn

In my time I have read rather a lot of academic studies of science fiction, but I don’t think I have read anything that comes close in depth and breadth of analysis as Farah Mendlesohn’s study of Heinlein. I’m by no means an expert on Heinlein myself, but I am seriously impressed with how exhaustive this book is. That does of course make it rather exhausting as well. It is very long, and I can see why Mendlesohn opted for crowdfunded publication rather than cut it down substantially as had been requested by the original publishers. Heinlein had a long career, had a huge influence on the field, and was a very complex person. You need a book like this to do him justice.

I am of course somewhat biased. I have known Mendlesohn for many years. When I read The Pleasant Profession of Robert A Heinlein I can hear her saying the words. I’m having to concentrate to stay professional and refer to her as Mendlesohn here rather than as Farah. However, the book has been favourably received by many other people, so I don’t think my estimation of it can be too far off base.

Because I know Mendlesohn, I happen to think that she’s an ideal person to write this book. Although she is best known as a scholar of science fiction, her original training was as an historian and her specialty was American history. That gives her a head start in understanding the political background against which Heinlein’s life and opinions need to be understood. She has also very successfully navigated the patriarchal world of academia while remaining staunchly feminist which is something I think that Heinlein would have admired, even if the two of them might have disagreed significantly over other issues.

The structure of the book is relatively straightforward. Mendlesohn begins with an overview of Heinlein’s life, concentrating on key experiences that shaped his career and political opinions, and preparing the reader for the fact that those opinions will not stay static through his long career as a writer. She then has a chapter covering his entire output at a fairly high level, and two chapters examining how Heinlein constructs his fiction. The rest of the book looks in depth at a variety of themes that are common to Heinlein’s writing, all but one of which are political in some way. There are sections on how Heinlein thinks that society should be organised, on how the individual should behave within society, on racism, on sexuality and on gender. The only non-political section is one on how Heinlein uses characters’ relations to cats as an indicator as to whether they are to be seen as good or bad people.

One of the things that shines very clearly out of Mendlesohn’s analysis is that Heinlein’s actual politics were very different from those of the people who have since fetishized his work. He is very much a believer in community (but not Communism), and that is strongly at odds with the extreme individualist ideas of many American Libertarians.

Heinlein is also very clearly liberal in his views on sexuality, albeit with a bit of ick factor when it comes to male-male encounters. There is a lot of queerness in his work, and a great deal of polyamory. He’s a huge advocate of the importance of consent in sexual relations, which is very different to the dominance narrative of the Alt-Right.

Against that Mendlesohn illustrates where Heinlein’s attitudes are coloured by the times in which he lived, and would be seen as much less liberal today. Part of this, it seems to me, is that he is strongly influenced by Protestant ideas of individual responsibility which conflicts with our modern understanding that people can be victims of oppressive social structures and cannot simply haul themselves up by their own bootstraps. Also Heinlein’s feminism seems to me to be rooted in the idea that Patriarchy is a given and that the right course of action for a woman is therefore to navigate it to her advantage, rather than to kick against it. Mendlesohn doesn’t state either of these two points as conclusions, so I may be mis-reading here her, but they are clear messages that I took from the book.

Where there is a clear message is when Mendlesohn is discussion Heinlein’s attitudes to race. There are times when he very clearly makes an effort to include a racially diverse cast of characters (Mendlesohn provides a list of the names of characters in Starship Troopers as an example). There are also examples where black characters are portrayed as clearly more moral than the white characters in the books. These are things which, if an author does them today, will have the reactionary fanboy crowd screaming “Political Correctness!”. However, Mendlesohn also shows that Heinlein is largely unaware of racist cultural assumptions that he grew up with, and which creep into his work even though he is trying to present himself as liberal.

The one area where I am not entirely agreement with Mendlesohn is her discussion of gender, and in particular trans issues. I Will Fear No Evil and Friday are both books that I know fairly well, having read both more than once. I also have a fair amount of lived experience on trans issues, and have to be fairly expert on the diversity of the trans community in order to do the training work I do.

On the other hand, I can see that I got off on the wrong foot with this section. Though I try very hard to avoid policing language with regard to trans issues because it is so much in flux, I still find that the use of “transgender” as a noun or verb sets my teeth on edge. Also Mendlesohn cites Alice Dreger on several occasions, and while I haven’t read the book she’s using I’m immediately on the defensive given what I know of Dreger’s views on trans people.

Unfortunately I don’t have the time right now to make an in depth critique of this section, nor would it be appropriate here as it would be a lot longer than the rest of the review. Hopefully I can get that done in the near future.

In the meantime I warmly recommend this book, both to anyone with an interest in the work of Heinlein, and to anyone who wants to see just how comprehensive a work of literary criticism can be.

Title: The Plesant Profession of Robert A Heinlein
By: Farah Mendlesohn
Publisher: Unbound
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Alice Payne Arrives

October 30, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 012, Book Review, Kate Heartfield

I think I first met Kate Heartfield at the Montréal Worldcon in 2009, but we’d been corresponding before that. She was still working as a journalist and I was delighted to find someone of that ilk who was both a feminist and interested in science fiction. Since then she has become a published author. Her novel, Armed in Her Fashion, was one of the most imaginative and daring fantasy debuts I have seen in a long time. It is set in a version of mediaeval Europe that could come right out of the mind of Hieronymous Bosch, and it features an excellent portrayal of a mediaeval trans man. I am delighted to see that it won the 2019 Prix Aurora for the best SF&F novel from Canada.

This current review is of something very different. Alice Payne Arrives is a steampunk time war novella. Yes, time war stories are a thing right now. But first, a little introduction.

It is 1788. Colonel Payne has returned from the war in the Americas “much changed”, for which read, “not entirely in his right mind.” He also has serious debts. His daughter, Alice, is at her wits’ end trying to make ends meet. Some of the servants have had to be laid off, but there are really only two ways out: marriage, or a life of crime.

Marriage is unlikely to be an option, because Alice was born in Jamaica and takes after her mother in skin colour. What’s more, she has recently embarked on a passionate affair with her companion, Jane Hodgson. Jane is an ingenious maker of automata, and this proves rather useful in Alice’s new career as a highwayman.

Meanwhile, in the 22nd Century, war is raging. It is known as The History War, and at stake is control of time itself. Yes, I know, we’ve been here before this year. There was Kameron Hurley’s The Light Brigade, and This is How You Lose the Time War from Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. There must be something in the water. Either that or agents of the various factions involved in a real Time War are softening us up by seeding ideas into our timeline. Look, 2016 was a clusterfuck. Everyone knows that. It isn’t surprising that time travellers are here trying to undo the mess.

In Heartfield’s story, however, 2016 is really only a symptom of a much larger problem. Rapid social change began long before that. Which is why Major Prudence Zuniga of the faction known as The Farmers has taken an interest in events in 1788.

This being a novella, there isn’t a huge amount of plot. However, there is a sequel (well, at least one) so the various threads have been left nicely dangling. On the way there we get some interesting musing on the difficulties of actually changing history, and a fair amount of feminism. Alice and Jane make an interesting couple: the one headstrong and fearless, the other calculating and cautious. There is an added complication in that Alice is bisexual and seems to have a strong interest in her father’s friend, Captain Auden, who inconveniently happens to be what passes for the law enforcement agencies in their little part of rural Hampshire.

Fortunately I already have the second book. I shall be reporting back on that one next issue.

Title: Alice Payne Arrives
By: Kate Heartfield
Publisher: Tor.com
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Shadows of Athens

October 30, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 012, Book Review, Juliet E McKenna

Those of you who follow such developments closely will know that Juliet E. McKenna now has an alter-ego, a seemingly genderless person known as JM Alvey who writes murder mysteries set in Ancient Greece. Juliet has written a bit on her own blog as to why this happened, and why she has now unmasked Mx Alvey. I don’t want to add to that save to note that Juliet has a degree in Classics from Oxford and knows far more about Ancient Greece than most people (especially male politicians who fetishize the Spartans).

There are two books under the Alvey pen name: Shadows of Athens and Scorpions in Corinth. I don’t publish them. Of course Juliet is a dear friend so you may think that my views are somewhat biased, but here goes with a review of the first one anyway.

One thing that struck me about the book is that it reads quite similarly to the Green Man books. They are all mystery novels, and both series star a male protagonist who is a decent fellow rather than a tortured loner. Daniel Mackmain does have to keep himself to himself much of the time, but he’s still a very sociable bloke. In contrast Philocles, the star of the Alvey books, is very sociable indeed because he’s a playwright and has to be.

McKenna hasn’t adopted a new voice for these books. When reading them, if you are familiar with her past work, you will know that you are reading a McKenna novel. I think this is probably wise. Trying to maintain a Greek voice throughout would have been quite challenging, and almost certain to attract accusations of pastiche. Besides, who knows what ancient Athenians really spoke like?

There are related issues as well. At one point in the book McKenna mentions the Etruscans, and notes that they live in a place called “Italy”. Now of course no one in the Athens of 443 BCE would use that term. However, none of the terms that they would use would be familiar to a modern audience. So the choice is either use an anachronistic term, or turn the book into a history lesson. McKenna has opted for the former, and I think that is a wise choice.

Besides, there are other areas where the casual reader is far more liable to yell “unrealistic!”, and be utterly wrong. To start with many of the Athenian men have sex with other men, and in particular young boys. Yes, this was entirely common. McKenna doesn’t make much of it, but it is a very real part of the culture of that place and time.

What McKenna does emphasise is the multi-cultural nature of Athenian society. The books are set between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars. Athens is becoming a hugely important trading nation, and people from all over the known world visit. Philocles himself is an Athenian citizen. However, his girlfriend, Zosime, is Cretan, and her father, Menkaure, is Egyptian. Philocles owns a slave, Kadous, who is from Phrygia, a state in the centre of what is modern Turkey. The city of Athens employs a group of Scythians, horsemen from the steppes of Asia, as a sort of police force. And Aristarchos, Philocles’ patron, owns a slave/bodyguard from “some mountainous land far beyond the Black Sea” (what we now call Georgia). All of this is perfectly reasonable, as is the fact that the villains of the story are probably being paid by the Persians to stir up trouble.

I have mentioned slaves. Yes, Athens was a slave-owning society. The social position of slaves was rather different to that of people of colour in Antebellum American, but they were still slaves. Athens was also one of the most misogynist ancient cultures I know of, and part of this comes through in the story as well. One of the probable reasons why McKenna has made Zosime a Cretan is precisely to allow her more agency than any respectable Athenian woman would dare to claim.

And yes, childbirth is deadly.

I mentioned earlier that Philocles is a playwright. To be precise, he writes comedies. McKenna studied the works of Aristophanes and the like at Oxford. Shadows of Athens is set against the background of the Dionysia Festival, part of which is a number of play-writing contests. Philocles and his troop of actors have an entry in the comedy section and are looking for their first big break.

McKenna brings all of her knowledge of Athenian theatre to this. She knows the sorts of plays that they would stage, the types of actors and musicians required, and the often political nature of the subject matter. This has allowed her to draft an outline of the play that Philocles has written for the contest. We don’t get to see the whole thing, but we do get the general idea and it sounds very like the real thing.

I have not said much about the plot because this is a murder mystery and I don’t want to risk dropping clues. What I will say is that, like most of McKenna’s fiction, this book has a political subtext. It is the best book about fake news that I have read this year. And yes, it is set in Ancient Athens, but the machinations of politicians and greedy businessmen don’t change much down the millennia.

So, if you like a good murder mystery, and could like to learn a lot about Classical Athens along the way, do check out these books. This is Juliet McKenna, you know they are going to be very readable.

Title: Shadows of Athens
By: Juliet E McKenna writing as JM Alvey
Publisher: Orion
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David Mogo, Godhunter

October 30, 2019 Cheryl Morgan 012, Book Review, Suyi Davies Okungbowa

We are in Lagos in the near future, and the gods have fallen to Earth.

That may bring to mind Aliette de Bodard’s Dominion of the Fallen series, but the gods who have arrived in Lagos are very different from the Biblical demons that haunt Paris. They are Orisha, the gods of West Africa. You may be familiar with some of their incarnations from North American Vodun, but these are the originals. This is a new thing in Western-published fantasy. This is David Mogo, Godhunter.

Your immediate question should be to ask what the author knows about West African religion. Well, his bio says that Suyi Davies Okungbowa lives in Lagos, so I’m guessing that he knows a damn sight more about it than I do. This also means that he knows the territory. The book has an awareness of local geography and politics that you would not get from a carpetbagging Western author.

So who is David Mogo? Well, he’s an orphan, and a demigod. He was raised by a wizard whom he calls Papa Udi, though the man is clearly not his father. His mother, he has been told, is a goddess. He’s inclined to believe that because he has abilities far beyond those of mortal men. He makes use of those abilities to earn a living. Many of the minor orisha are harmless and rather foolish. They get lost, or wander way from the part of Lagos in which they live, causing problems for their human neighbours. The police are useless, so David has a consultancy business rounding up stray godlings and taking them back where they belong. He is the orisha ‘daji, the god hunter.

That, in a city whose economy has been wrecked by the arrival of a bunch of vagrant supernatural beings, is probably the best he can hope for. He’s well paid when he has work, but it is intermittent, and he has to deal with the corrupt police. Then a powerful wizard offers him a massive fee to kidnap two of the higher gods: the Ibeji twins, Taiwo and Kehinde. David knows this is a mistake, but he can’t afford to turn the job down.

The plot develops from there. The book has something of the feel of a fix-up. David conquers one opponent, only to discover that he now has to fight someone even more powerful, and so on. There is an overall story arc of his hero’s journey, but the structure does feel a little repetitive and predictable. There’s an interesting contrast to be drawn between David’s story and that of Thor in the Marvel movies. Thor begins as a powerful warrior and slowly adapts to being an ordinary guy. David goes in the other direction, eventually meeting up with his mother as anyone who has read a few fantasy novels knows that he must.

The most interesting thing about this book is the handling of the orisha. They are a pantheon that will be unfamiliar to most readers, and the cultural attitude towards gods in West Africa seems somewhat different from what we are used to in the West. Yes, they are worthy of worship, but also they live alongside us. I did at one point think that Okungbowa was going to reveal that his gods were some sort of alien species who have recently arrived on Earth, but no, they really are gods. It is more like they have arrived from a different dimension.

There are many ethnic groups making up Nigeria, let alone the whole of West Africa. The specific pantheon that Okungbowa is working with is Yoruba, but some of the gods he mentions are worshipped elsewhere too. This causes interesting problems. As we know, gods acquire power from being worshipped. But what happens to a god when two rival groups of worshippers both claim him? It gets complicated.

It is entirely possible that Okungbowa has played fast and loose with some of the mythology. I was pleased to see him naturally use non-binary pronouns for the sea god, Olókun, who is canonically multi-gendered. One of the other gods may have been given a gender swap.

One thing that does work very well is Okungbowa’s use of what I assume are traditional Nigerian witchcraft rituals. These are how the orisha have always been dealt with by humans, and those methods work just as well now that the gods are living next door. The techniques are a little reminiscent of how characters in a Tim Powers novel might deal with ghosts, but there are references to actual herbs that I assume are from traditional recipes.

The book works well as a traditional male-centred urban fantasy. One of the blurbs characterises it as “A Nigerian Harry Dresden”. But personally I found the orisha much more interesting than David and his hero’s journey. I’d like to see more of them, get insights into their characters and so on. There must be plenty of stories about them.

Of course there may be issues with that. I remember from my time in Australia how badly the Aboriginal community reacted to white people wanting to use their religion as a basis for fiction. Worship of the orisha may well be a living religion in Nigeria, and if it is some people might be deeply offended by fiction using their gods. I will have to leave that to Nigerian people to comment on.

The other thing that struck me about the book is that, although it is essentially a story about a war in heaven, and of a young hero playing a crucial role in that war, it is not a book that glorifies combat. There are occasional references to the Nigerian Civil War, and to Boko Haram. Nigeria is a country that has first-hand experience of being fought over. It knows what war is really about. That’s a lesson that we in the West badly need to re-learn.

Title: David Mogo, Godhunter
By: Suyi Davies Okungbowa
Publisher: REBCA
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