Matt Wallace's SAVAGE LEGION

I've been a fan of Matt Wallace since the heyday of Podiobooks, a site where freely offered author-created audiobooks helped jump-start the careers of a fascinating and diverse cadre of genre authors. Back in those days, he was the Failed Cities guy and he and birthday-twin Mur Lafferty were also setting the gold standard in writing-advice podcasts, first on her wonderful I Should Be Writing and more recently on, Ditch Diggers.

More than a decade later, most people now probably think of him as the Fantasy Food Guy, for his outstanding five novella cycle chronicling the adventures of a catering firm with an elite and supernatural clientele, the Sin Du Jour series. He's entered the Middle Grade fiction market, too, with some charming work I'll probably be writing about in this space soon, because I still have a 12-year-old's heart (and no, you don't get to know where I keep it, how I got it, or to what use I put it).

And along the way, he has tried his hand at epic fantasy, a genre that I occasionally indulge in but don't love and am more likely to avoid -- unless it's coming from someone like Wallace, whose Twitter feed is as full of honest criticism of genre tropes and stereotypes as it is anecdotes about the writing life (and his former career as an honest-to-goodness professional wrestler). I trust him not to disappoint me with another Chosen One/Emperor of Everything/Thinly Veiled Manifesto About How Much Better It Was In The White Male Middle Ages.

Reader, he did not disappoint!

Savage Legion takes us to a fantasy world that could well actually be a science fiction one that is our own in the distant future, like Mark Lawrence's Broken Empire or the Urth of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Like both of things, whether it's a fantasy world or not is kind of beside the point, the sort of notion that might occur to you at some point but you're too busy breathlessly devouring the story at speed to care much. What's happening in this cool world to these great characters? What's going to happen next?

At the center of the story is an imperialist city-state named Craiche, which has a long history of struggling for utopia but at some point decided to settle for just looking like one to its citizens. Once upon a time it had problems like inequality and hereditary nobility and a primitive eye-for-an-eye justice system, but now it's a thriving and beautiful mercantile democracy, though it still has a class system and there are still poor people living in a slum called The Bottoms.

Power now mostly rests with a kind of guild system, though that term implies that the organizational principle is based on trades alone. The guilds, here called Gens, can be organized around trades, yes, but also around ideas like breeding the insects with a weird and useful life cycle that provide the artificial lights, indoors and out, that free citizens from the tyranny of nighttime darkness, or advocating for social justice.

Craiche also has a lot of other cool things to show us, like a sort of elevated rail system powered by the muscular strength of members of yet another Gen, and a central governing complex/amphitheater that is vast and complicated and also somehow all carved via arts now lost, from a single humongous stone; even the seating and tables and shelves -- I wanted to just say "furniture" but I've studied too many languages in which that category of object is explicitly described as something you can move around -- are of a piece with the edifice.

We get to know this world, of Craiche and its environs, through the experiences of, at first three and later four characters: rough and ready Evie, first found getting disgracefully drunk in a tavern, picking a fight with a guy who hits on her, and then getting arrested and thrown into the clink, where she meets our next point-of-view character, Dyewan, a young woman with crushed legs whose inability to walk upright has reduced her to a life of sliding around The Bottoms on a sheet of greased metal and living by her wits -- which turn out to be considerable; were this an ordinary fantasy novel, she'd look perilously like a Chosen One in the making, but what she is and becomes is much more interesting.

Meanwhile, Lexi, a member of a somewhat recently established Gen only a generation or two old, is dealing with the disappearance of her husband, Brio and the rumors being circulated, mostly by the governing body of Craiche through unofficial and not quite official channels, that he disappeared because he is some kind of traitor -- which many individuals in the government's ruling council think isn't so recent a development because Brio chiefly concerned himself with investigating the complaints and advocating for better treatment of those pesky poors in The Bottoms instead of doing something more convenient and productive. The disappearance and the rumors threaten the continued existence of their Gen, and Lexi is down to just herself and a fascinating non-binary retainer, Taru (who gets a point of view chapter at the end of the novel that bodes great things for the next book!), to make things right again. 

As things progress, Evie, instead of just being fined or serving some time in the cells, gets hauled with most of her fellow prisoners way outside the city, where they learn that they are now part of the Savage Legion, untrained and badly armed arrow-fodder in Craiche's endless and somewhat secret wars of expansion and conquest. If Evie manages to survive 40 battles (ah, but most are killed in their very first), she can go home to her family or whatever. If she runs away, though...

The Savage Legion's non-training camp is where we see our first bit of Is-It-Magic-Or-Weird-Future-Science, used to conspicuously mark and possibly track Savages who try to desert. Deserters are fair game for a set of terrifying and disreputable looking bounty hunters whom the Savages of course get to meet after the ordeal that marks them forever as the hunters' prey. So, there are not a lot of deserters, especially since they don't really know where they are and the territory in which they are soon to battle is so desolate and inhospitable that it makes Arrakis look like a vacation spot.

Dyewan is spared this fate, however. She is kidnapped soon after Evie is, but where Evie is In the Army Now, Dyewan finds herself in what amounts to the Craiche Institute of Technology, an island off the coast full of craftsmen, inventors, scholars and assorted other nerds. Since the dean, Edger, is himself disabled (with a fascinating and bizarre form of assistive techno-magic I'm going to make you read the book to discover), he makes it a point to recruit the facility's support staff from the similarly disadvantaged. Dyewan, who renames herself Slider to divorce herself from her miserable past while still honoring it, is going to be a messenger and is given an ingenious wheelchair-like contraption to do so and is soon making friends and teaching herself to read -- and, unwittingly, showing herself more than capable of doing much more than hauling notes and materials around campus.

Everybody settled in their new situations, the real plot  starts unfolding, and it's a doozy, involving shady political manouvering, possible war crimes, wicked conspiracies, and the slow but relentless disclosure of the litany of crimes that really make Craiche work.

But lest this sound like a whole lot of politics, politics and more politics, remember, this is Matt Wallace, who could have written Write the Fight Right if our friend Alan Baxter hadn't already done so. There are great huge battlefield conflicts, brutal nighttime raids, assassination attempts and scenes of single combat a-plenty and they're all expertly conveyed even to the reluctant mind of a reader like me who usually skips over the action scenes. Part of this is just because Wallace is, of course, very good at creating characters I care about from the get-go and I'm worried for them every time swords are drawn, daggers readied or fire arrows nocked, but also because he writes his combat scenes with clarity and just the right amount of detail. My heart was in my throat every time.

And no, I don't trust the fairly hopeful note on which most of these storylines ended, for this is the first volume of a trilogy written by a guy who grew up on Star Wars. I'll be taking up the sequel, Savage Bounty, very soon. Freaking trilogies...

Ada Palmer's SEVEN SURRENDERS (Narr by T. Ryder Smith)

 Blogger's note: as this is the second volume of a quartet, my post is likely going to make no sense if you haven't at least read my post about the first, Too Like the Lightning. But you do you.

The thing about four-volume series/quartets is they have not one but two books that are in danger of developing middle chapter problems -- usually. I'm happy to share that I don't think that Seven Surrenders, the second in Ada Palmer's historico-futurist speculative fiction Terra Ignota series, encounters many of those problems, though I might still grumble about the switching of audio book narrators a bit more.

It does, however, create some new problems for itself before it rushes us pell-mell into the war footing that has been looming over Palmer's 25th century Golden Age since we first met its criminal unreliable narrator historian, Mycroft Canner, and the biggest one is tied up with Mycroft's very unreliability; even as Mycroft himself gets a partial rehabilitation/retcon as breathtaking as Jaime Lannister's, the most intriguing ambiguity with which he teased us in TLTL is blown up for us pretty quickly. It was fun to wonder how seriously to take Mycroft's claims about the wondrous powers possessed by the child he's helping to raise, Bridger, and how seriously to take Mycroft's claims about the overwhelming righteousness and near-divinity of J.E.D.D. Mason, but Seven Surrenders settles both of those questions unequivocably for us. Sigh.

So right away, there goes a lot of the Gene Wolfean fun of this read for me. Luckily, there's still plenty of Dorothy Dunnet fun to be had; everybody we've met (with the possible exceptions of Bridger and J.E.D.D. Mason) has had secret agendas all along, some of which we've known about and others that we've guessed, new villains take center stage, centuries-long conspiracies are elucidated and exposed -- and thank goodness for the final chapter of TLTL, in which one of several detective figures takes the time to clarify for himself, his superiors, and us readers that an even more cunning and terrible plot than the one we'd been following so avidly in TLTL has been exposed in the course of investigating the plot we were led to believe was the main one. Without this, I would have been thoroughly lost going into Seven Surrenders.

As matters continue unfolding, we get small helpings of background information on the crimes that caused our narrator to be the first man of his age for whom there was a public outcry to execute him and on the origins of the weird 18th century cosplay brothel which is patronized by almost all of the leaders of this world's seven "Hives" that have replaced the nation state and any other varieties of socio-political allegegiance. The story of this weirdass brothel also turns out to be the back story of how J.E.D.D. Mason became the heir-apparent to the entire Earth and also still looks poised to have some influence on the affairs of the Moon and Mars through secret dealings made before his birth with the only Hive not to have any visible interest in cosplaying/fucking in the past, the future-oriented Utopians, who are by far the coolest people in Palmer's strange Renaissance/Enlightenment-flavored future. I totally want a holographic coat that displays a real-time animated version of my personal idea of what the future will look like superimposed over whatever actual environment I find myself in! An animated Buffalo Commons would look dope AF on a duster, after all.

Unfortunately, in this story the Utopians are mostly important simply because they have been giving sanctuary to the only survivor of Mycroft's original crime spree, and that survivor is hell-bent on enacting the terrible plan we've learned Mycroft's crimes were meant to avert (I did not invoke Jaime Lannister in jest, friends), which is nothing less than sparking off a new world war, which would be the first war of any kind in over 300 years. Much is made about how weird this is going to be since there hasn't been a professional soldier class in all of that time, nor do any military veterans exist who have any experience of war (foreshadowing Seven Surrenders' devastating finale); much is also made of how the machinations of the 18th century cosplay brothel and a program of pinpointed and nearly untraceable assassinations have kept war from breaking out before the survivor, whose name is Tully, starts stirring up trouble.

BUT, Dunnettian in the extreme, it is not the brothel's machinations that expose the assassination plot, but rather the revenge schemes of a character barely mentioned in TLTL, who emerges as secretly someone's father and as a sunofabitch to rival the nasty pieces of work we were already gnashing our teeth at last novel like Domnic Seneschal, and who executed his plan with the cold perfection and professionalism of a Lymond or a Niccolo. Except, you know, we're not rooting for him. But then, who are we rooting for?

Again, the big problem here, for me at least, is that the world these characters inhabit is pretty sweet. Nobody goes hungry; medical and mental health care are public benefits; most people only work 20 hours a week unless they're really driven and passionate about their callings; there's a steady stream of technological progress; a handwavium-powered system of flying cars means that no two points on the globe are more than a two-hour journey apart from one another; huge strides towards gender equality have left most of the population convinced that gender really just doesn't even matter anymore; violence is only ever a matter of small scale brawls over we-don't-get-to-see-what but it isn't economic scarcity that's for sure; the artificial and capitalism-imposed institution of the nuclear family has been replaced by a model for cohabitation and child-rearing that focuses on the kind of found families the most fortunate of us 21st century types find and create in adulthood when we bond closely with a peer group (say, your college friends -- but then imagine that the norm is that you all stick together after graduation); and religion, by law, is a matter for the individual conscience and the individual conscience alone. Um, sign me up!

But of course, human nature. Though the seven Hives mostly cooperate, there are still power games fed largely by the mass media. Remember, all of this was set off in TLTL by the theft and leaking of an early draft of a list ranking the ten most influential people on the planet, which everybody uses as a proxy for which Hive is the best/most/important/should control the most resources! People like power, and nobody likes power more than Madame D'Arouet, proprietress of the 18th century cosplay brothel, who long ago realized that in discarding gender inequality/oppression and religious bigotry, this society had discarded two forms of power that she could easily use to her advantage -- all the more powerful because, supposedly, the ease of 25th century life has left ordinary humans defenseless against the power and allure of gender-focused sexuality and religion, so she has rather easily ensnared all of the Hive leaders in a complicated web of romantic/sexual entanglements with her and with one another, with the fruit of her efforts being the walking and talking perturbation of every known orbit that is J.E.D.D. Mason.

As Seven Surrenders concludes, the title becomes the key to the whole: some Hives have been conquered since long before Mycroft began his narrative; others are still fighting to stay autonomous; meanwhile everybody is struggling with the question of whether it is still possible -- or even desirable -- to avert the inevitable conflict that is about to engulf everybody who is still Earthbound (the original argument of the faction Tully represents having been that 300 years of artifically maintained peace have actually been detrimental to human development and the sooner a war is fought the better the chances that somebody, anybody, might survive it); still others are just cackling and watching everything burn, and hoping that in the general chaos their crimes might go unaddressed.

But in the midst of these plots and conquests there is still the matter of the little boy, Bridger, whose supposed supernatural powers are no longer so very secret and who has been raised by people  who have been very frank with him about their hopes -- more, their expectations -- that someday he and J.E.D.D Mason will save the world. But, wisely yet also tragically, Bridger has learned that it's not his wonderful powers that are what is directly needed, but what one thing they can resurrect from the distant past, that is really called for, at terrible cost. His closing scene with daddy-figure Mycroft is a crushing heartbreaker. And this, more than anything else, is what is pulling me forward to complete the series despite the issues I have with how it is coming to me, on audio.

Having listened now to one book narrated by Jefferson Mays and one by T. Ryder Smith, I regret more than ever that Mays was not able to continue this series. His smoother voice and precision much better suit the storytelling style that Palmer is employing -- an excellent 18th century pastiche that should feel comfortable and familiar to fans of Henry Fielding and Lawrence Sterne as well as of Voltaire and De Sade. Mays was especially deft in the frequent "breaking of the fourth wall" when Mycroft not only directly addresses the reader but puts arguments in the reader's mouth. And, as I mentioned in my post on TLTL, he developed distinct character voices that stopped short of full-on voice acting but suited the flow of the prose beautifully.

T. Ryder Smith, though. Sigh. I've already mentioned that he re-characterized many of these voices, which made starting Seven Surrenders a very jarring experience until I got used to it.* And he did it like a voice actor, rather than a narrator. Ryder is very good at accents and there are lots and lots of accents for him to show off with in this world, but his choices meant that every character who had, say, a French accent (and he gave one to several characters who didn't really have to have one) sounded exactly like every other character with a French accent, and to make matters worse, he gave two characters speech patterns that aped the intonation of the stereotypical French accent but with conventional word-attacks that left it really just sounding like every single sentence either of them spoke was being almost farcically coy and flirtatious. It borderline worked for the character of Sniper, an intersex celebrity and model for sex-dolls who basically does flirt with the entire world, but it was obnoxious as hell for Thisbe, one of Bridger's many informal parent-figures, who is a powerful and imposing figure with such an outsized influence on others that Mycroft calls her a witch -- definitely not the kind of person who has to flirt to get her point across.

But, as I observed last time, I am pretty much stuck with these, so I'm gritting my teeth and moving on with them because I really want to see where all of this is going. Onward, to war! Stay tuned!

*I had to listen to the first five or six chapters multiple times in order to do so, which was a drag.

Yasmina Khadra's MORITURI (Tr by David Herman)

When Ghoul Malek ordered me to come and see him at 13 rue des Pyramides, I nearly drowned in my glass. An influential member of the old, ruling oligarchy, Malek had been particularly feared in the days of the single party. When he appeared on TV, it was enough to make people want to barricade themselves behind their curtains. Among his prerogatives were: the summary execution of 'undesirables,' changing the laws, making women abort and aborting social projects: in short, he had the power of day and night.

The classic noir detective character is either an ex-police officer, a hard-bitten veteran of one of the World Wars, usually World War II, or both, who Saw Some Shit on the mean streets or overseas and has lost what faith in humanity he had, which is why the narrative voice and prose style we associate with the genre are so distinctively harsh, brilliantly described without mincing words, vividly imagined, tough.

But there's a type of dude out there who could go toe-to-toe with any American Noir Guy and probably not even chip a fingernail, and that's the Disappointed Revolutionary, which is who we get when we transfer the classic noir plot to a place like late 1990s Algeria, barely ten years since that country's proto-Arab Spring, the October 1988 riots.

We don't know for certain whether Brahim Llob, the hero of Yasmina Khadra's Morituri , took part in those riots or on what side he would have if he did (he turned out to be an older man than I'd been reading him as at first, so likely he was already a police officer? But that doesn't indicate his actual sympathies, just what he was required/paid to do), but he is a disappointed revolutionary at least inasfar as he has seen that the uprising accomplished very little for all that it unseated a one-party oligrarchy somewhat. Our man circa 1997 is both a police superintendant and a moderately famous novelist, but that doesn't translate to him getting... really any respect at all, from anyone, even his supposed fans. 

Take how he gets the assignment that drags him through most of the plot of this short little novel: summoned to the home of the guy described above, one of those important kinds of men who combine the power of a government official with that of a crime lord without officially being either, he is rather contemptuously handed a photograph of the Missing Girl, told she's been missing  for a few weeks from the house she hardly ever even leaves, and given absoutely nothing else by way of clues how to even begin finding her. If Llob is a good detective, the photo will be enough, he is told, and really, he should be grateful that the important man even bothered to tell Llob the girl's name, which is Sabrine.

Llob starts looking for her in all the old familiar places and then some new ones. The scale of cynicism, corruption and moral decay that he encounters on a daily basis is on a whole 'nother level than what we get in good old American noir, stuff that would make even Phillip Marlowe blanch to behold:

The Cinq Etoiles is a brand new hotel. All bay windows with stained glass. With its eleven floors overhanging the hill and the city it resembles a futuristic mausoleum. They say that at the start a hospital was envisaged, but that by the time they reached the sixth storey the good intentions ran out of breath. Characters in high places got into the act. Before the ninth story the documents changed hands and content radically, to the extent that at the dedication, instead of the national anthem, the guests were treated to an evening of popular Algerian rai music.* The result: the poor continue to die in unbelievably filthy pigsty-like dispensaries... Bah! what good does it do me to bring her back, me, a roast chicken cop, a big mouth in a pinhead for whom the only fitting status is that of a cardboard target.

I mean, shit, man! But of course, Llob so cynical that at one point we learn that his standard for disrespect for authority is a Deputy of the Assembly.** And really, almost every paragraph of the novel is like this; for once my severe physical limitations when reading paperback books (the only way this translation is available, apparently) were actually a bit of a benefit, because they forced me to take this book in slowly and really savor its brutality, both in terms of the circumstances under which Llob works (his office gets carbombed! And the bombing isn't even investigated; that's just part of the Life of a Cop in Algeria!), what he thinks about them internally, and what he says to pretty much anyone who isn't his wife -- who is barely a character but at least he behaves decently toward her, so, while it might occasionally feel like we're straying near it, we're not in Albert Cossery territory here. Phew!

The book is incredibly tightly plotted as Llob and his partner Lino investigate opulent but shady nightclubs, humble shops and the homes of the elite, seemingly getting nowhere in the quest to find the missing girl until, of course they stumble across a very active terrorist network, one that fears cops about as much as you or I would fear the mail carrier, and then suddenly the plot noose tightens as much as possible; the last 20% or so of the book is one of the tensest  games of cat and mouse I've ever read. 

Inspector Llob is a popular character, though***, and I knew going into this that he's in three other novels, so he's in Doctor Who jeopardy, but hey, occasionally the Doctor's companions get hurt or killed, as do endearing bystanders, so I was still reading between the fingers stretched across my eyes, as it were.

This has probably ruined me for American crime fiction, though. If a gang of demented fundamentalists aren't hunting you while you try to find a bad guy's missing daughter, are you even detectiving? On the other hand, I do read the news...

*You know me; a book mentions music and I have to go check it out if I don't already know it. I went looking for some rai music from the late 90s (contemporaneous with this novel) and fell in love with this rather famous example by Rachid Taha:

**The People's Assembly is the lower house of Algeria's Parliament, so when he speaks of himself striding into his boss's office "As denuded of respect for the Republic as a Deputy of the Assembly" that's like saying "As denuded of respect for the USA as a Congressman." HOWL.

***So popular that, in addition to getting three sequels (all of which I have acquired thanks to good old ABEBooks; the English translations aren't available as ebooks, so I'm stuck with trade paperbacks, the most painful physically for me to read, but Morituri was so good that I'm going to find a way to endure), there's also a feature film. Nobody is streaming it with an English translation, but if you've read the book and studied any romance language, you can probably follow this YouTube presentation of the film with French subtitles. I didn't find it too difficult to follow, watching it right after I finished the book, anyway!

Ada Palmer's TOO LIKE THE LIGHTNING: A NOVEL OF THE YEAR 2454 -- with an excursis on recasting audio narrators in a series

Ada Palmer writes and plots like Dorothy Dunnett, imagines future politics like Malka Older, and plays mind games with her readers like Gene Wolfe. Holy shit, I think I'm in love.

 Too Like the Lightning serves up all of these qualities on a Roccoco silver platter and expects you to know exactly which piece of tableware to use for each bite of the meal. Don't be gauche.

The novel, the first of a quartet known as Terra Ignota, is set in a 25th century that seems impossibly utopian to us now (for all that it contains actual Utopians who have strictly defined what that term means with that capital "U"). The nation state is an obsolete bygone, as is organized religion after "The Church War" almost destroyed the world. Humanity is now organized into and sort-of-governed by seven different "Hives" who each has a different philosophy of how life is best lived; what freedoms are to be enjoyed to the full and what discouraged; and how people who have strayed from the righteous path are to be treated. There is a sort of pseudo-aristocracy composed of a few genuine aristorcrat/royals (the King of Spain is not only still a thing but is an almost universally beloved figure who has served as the Prime Minister of the European hive with distinction) and some genetically engineered specimens of such perfection and delicacy they are revered and honored with aristocratic titles just because they're so awesome; an almost complete lack of gendered language or clothing with an emphasis on biological sex as really the least important facet of personal identity; and religious discussions in groups larger than three people are against the law, to prevent the revival of old and the formation of new forms of organized religion. Everybody has freedom of conscience but is still entitled to spiritual counsel provided by experts in threading the needle through the secular and the spiritual without getting dogma or granfaloonery involved. I think I'd like it there.

But all is not quite what it seems. For one thing, the leaders of six of the seven Hives are much better acquainted and enjoy much closer relationships with one another than I'd feel comfortable with and they totally have a secret Eyes Wide Shut-ish hangout, ruled by a woman who considers herself so very much the spiritual if not actual descendant of the 18th Century Enlightenment as exemplified by Jean Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot and Voltaire that she styles herself Madame D'Arouet (Voltaire's actual surname) and requires everybody on her premises to engage in note-perfect 18th Century French cosplay down to the fiendish requirements of ettiquitte and, of course, Performance of Gender. Which everybody finds incredibly erotic compared to the egalitarian androgyny of the outside world. Which is to say, this book has a lot of scenes that prudes like me do not love, but they're in there in the manner of another of Madame's idols, the Marquis de Sade, who wrote brutal porn as a vehicle for communicating lofty ideals and posing weighty philosophical dilemmas. And, I mean, at least nobody is slicing beating hearts out of other people's bodies and shoving those hearts into their vaginas. So far. At least, not on screen, as it were. 

Our guide through all of this is the age's greatest criminal, one Mycroft Canner, whose crimes were so infamous that he was the first person in this Golden Age to have a signicant proportion of humanity screeching to revive the death penalty for, but who is so talented that killing him would be a waste, the oligarchy has decided, so he is instead sentenced to become a "Servicer" -- basically, the entire world's slave, who may own nothing, wear only a very distinct uniform that marks them out as one, and is required to do all kinds of Task Rabbit/Gig economy type things for the benefit of society as a whole and for individual as needed/allowed. Which is mostly what he goes around doing, except the oligarchy occasionally needs his somewhat unique abilities -- among other things, he is the world's greatest statistician/data scientist -- so he winds up at the heart of an incredibly complex story of intrigue, strategic murder, sexual politics, political gamesmanship, and, most forbidden of all, sometimes, theology.

Perturbing his orbit the most are two young people, a young boy named Bridger and a young man named J.E.D.D. Mason*, both of whom exhibit extraordinary gifts that are basically supernatural. Mycroft believes that one day the two of them could radically transform and improve the world, but Bridger isn't ready yet to deal with the extraordinary personal magnetism and moral force of the powerfully ethical but overwhelming J.E.D.D., and so has spent most of his time and energy helping to raise the former and serve the latter, while also keeping the two of them from ever meeting or even knowing about one another's existence.

Meanwhile, there's a larger plot afoot, involving the theft of the latest edition a list of the ten most prominent/important people in the world, one of a handful of such lists that different influential newspapers publish periodically as a sort of shorthand indicator of the relative strengths of the seven Hives -- and it's having been planted in the trash can of a very important member of a very important family that just happens also to be unofficially fostering the miracle child, Bridger. When news of this leaks into the outside world, and then when news leaks that Mycroft is not only still alive but has been living and working among the Servicers this whole time, more kinds of hell break loose than a normal reader could be expected to keep track of (fortunately, I am not a normal reader. I read Dorothy Dunnett and Gene Wolfe. Do you?) as the greater geopolitical situation threatens Mycroft's health and safety, freedom of movement, privileged position with regard to all of the world's most important people, and his special secret mission of making sure that Bridger and J.E.D.D. Mason, the two baby superheroes, don't meet until they're on an equal footing.

There's not a lot of action and really not that much plot, but there are lots of intricate and puzzling scenes in which exchanges between characters have many levels of meaning, some of them hidden, some that won't make sense until you're many, many hours into the audio book later, and some of them.... kind of gross.

Look; many other writers on the internet with more skin in the game than I've got have called attention to some icky things that Palmer has done with gender and sexuality in this series. At first it all seems egalitarian and kind of lovely; everybody uses they/them pronouns and nobody seems to care much about how they present -- but our narrator, insisting that it matters, uses gendered language all over the place, always to some very intended effect (Mycroft is most certainly an unreliable narrator and has his own agendas in how this story is understood by this world's imagined posterity). Many of the characters we meet, most of whom are at or near the very top of this society's hierarchies, have decided that the equality of the current system of the world isn't actually worth giving up the power imbalances that come with gender roles, and exhibit a near-compulsion to rebel against this society's norms (we learn late in the novel how this contrariness has all been inculcated by one person who insists it's more civilized to emphasize gender and never mind that trans and non-binary people probably still exist in this world) and several insist on presenting unambiguously as one particular gender (whether or not it corresponds to the anatomical sex they were born with or chose later on) in a somewhat weaponized fashion. Furthering the ickiness of this is the universally accepted (at least by the characters who must deal with those who are flaunting one gender or another for Reasons) idea that emphasis on gender is irresistibly sexy, the sexiest thing possible, and so intoxicating and captivating that no one who goes, for instance, to Madame D'Arouet's sex club and engages in her required 18th Century cosplay can ever enjoy regular sex with someone dressed in 25th Century clothing again.

Then, too, there's the way Mycroft keeps switching pronouns to describe an important character in the series, Carlyle Foster, who is the closest thing this world has to a cleric, a Sensayer (one of the experts at threading the needle I mentioned above), and as member of a Hive called the Cousins, is by courtesy and tradition always referred to with feminine pronouns to honor the roles the Cousins play in society.** Most of the time, Mycroft holds to this tradition and calls Carlyle "she/her" but insists on dropping unsubtle hints that Carlyle is in fact anatomically male, and is to a certain degree important this way because it means Carlyle has the equipment to father children and continue his family's genetic legacies -- except Carlyle was, himself, a foundling and furthermore one whose geneaology and gentic information is under a kind of high tech gag order to protect the identity of his parents from even the closest of scrutinies. Carlyle is thus a mystery as well as a person in a position to mess up Mycroft's happy little world when he is assigned to be the Sensayer to the family that is fostering Bridger, and is thus likely to find out what is so special about the boy sooner rather than later -- which means that it is very much in Mycroft's interest to very carefully control how his readers perceive Carlyle, so while we've guessed that something is up with Carlyle's gender identity (which, remember, we're not supposed to care about as the readers of this history) we don't get the real answer until very late in the story, by which time Mycroft has called Carlyle "he" as often as "she" and I suppose I'm going to have to go back and listen to this again sometime to see if I can find a pattern in when Mycroft does this and why.

Speaking of listening to this, sigh. The narrator for Too Like the Lightning is the wonderful Jefferson Mays, who gave Mycroft in particular a very distinct voice that was unmistakably Mycroft's even when it didn't necessarily matter who was speaking, and gave voice to the dizzying array of other characters with equal attention and skill (and, yes, without resorting to falsetto or breathiness for female characters, hooray!). I perhaps didn't appreciate him even as much as he deserved because I assumed he'd be with me throughout the four volumes of Terra Ignota. Alas, though; he turned out not to be available when time came to produce the sequel, Seven Surrenders, which I'm already listening to as of this posting and for which, instead of waiting for Mays to be available, the powers that be just recast. And T. Ryder Smith is fine, equally as talented as Mays, but Smith has a very different voice and has come up with very different speech characterizations for the characters in the sequel, all of whom, at least so far, have carried over from Too Like the Lightning, which wouldn't bother me so much except for that author Ada Palmer, daughter of Dorothy Dunnett and Gene Wolfe that she is, eschews dialogue tags much more than is traditional in English language prose fiction, and so I have found myself utterly lost and having to replay entire chapters of dialogue-heavy scenes in which I no longer have any idea of who is who. This is frustrating as hell and makes me not want to continue with the series in audio form except that's all that my public library has and I am a poor semi-disabled retired old lady on a very modest fixed income, so if I want to continue with this series, and I do despite the gender/sexual ickiness because I have to see where all of this insanity is going, I'm stuck with the audio versions that my public library has, and just have to keep plugging away until my brain finally groks the new way everybody sounds now (and the particularly icky way a character, only mentioned in Too Like the Lightning but now very much a part of the action in Seven Surrenders, is voiced, which is almost farcically epicene -- which is even ickier once one realizes that now that that character has been revealed to be anatomically intersex, Mycroft, still narrating this second novel, refers to with the pronoun "it."). 

I am very not happy about this.

However, as I said, I am super invested in this world and what's going to happen to it, and in where this story is going to take it, even though I don't like very many of the characters, all of whom (except the innocent baby supermen_, seem hell-bent on ruining this society in one way or another, very much.

To be continued.

*The Masons, and yes, exactly who you're thinking of right now, are one of the world's seven Hives, originally allegedly formed out of the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons that everybody thinks secretly already ruled the world but really, guys, they don't, but largely amplified by folk belief and expectations into something that meets those expectations and moreso. They affect a modernized/futurized spoken Latin in all conversation, are the most hierarchical of the Hives to the point where their leader is referred to as the Emperor, and in as many ways as they can ape the conduct and the structure of the good old SQPR, except the Emperor is not styled First Name Caesar, but First Name Mason.

**Founded by a group of barely-connected individuals all over the world who had the travel bug but didn't have regular traveling companions, who agreed ahead of time to act as unofficial "cousins" to members of their little club who came to visit their home regions; something like David Foster Wallace's famous "Native Companion" in his famous essay "Ticket to the Fair." Eventually this group grew in number but never wanted to be much more organized than they already were, so as of the time of Too Like the Lightning the closest thing they have to a government is a bureau that manages efforts to address and comply with what comes into the Hive's Suggestion Box. Grown from this club and loose organization, the kinds of people who elect to join the Cousins hive are in helping professions -- social workers, organizers of charities, first responder types, teachers, etc.

Leah Angstman's OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA

I don't always immediately wish a novel I've been reading to be made into a Major Motion Picture, or even a minor one, but when I do, I really, really do! Such is the case here: Leah Angstman's debut novel, Out Front the Following Sea, set in an America so early they're still bickering over the borders of the 13 colonies, has everything anyone would want from a fun historical romp: kissing, fighting, accusations of witchcraft, more fighting, desperate battles against nature at her worst, bravery and more kissing! 

Furthermore, I demand that Julia Garner dye her hair auburn red and be cast immediately as Angstman's amazing heroine, Ruth Miner, and I swear it's not totally because Garner has achieved fame playing another character named Ruth, that's just a coincidence. But if you love Ruth Langmore in Ozark, imagine her in an adventurous historical romance that up until now we've just had to re-read Louis L'Amour's Sackett and Chantry novels to get -- and in which she is absolutely the hero of the tale.

I'm serious. To call Ruth Miner plucky would be to sell her short. She could go toe to toe with anybody from the Aubrey/Maturin books (though this is set about a century before Jack and Stephen take to the seas), with anybody from the Sackett novels, and very possibly not even get singed, because even the officers in His Majesty's Royal Navy were still pretty superstitious, except for Maturin. Maturin would just fall in love with her, though. Diana who?

As our story begins to unfold, 16-year-old Ruth Miner is living on the bitter edge of starvation or freezing to death, for all that once upon a time her family was respected in the small Dutch-settled coast of what would become New Jersey. Her parents are dead (we don't find out how or why until much later) and she is desperately trying to keep herself and an ailing grandmother alive with less than no help from the community in which she grew up, because they all think she's a witch. No fool, she, she winds up trading on this reputation to get passage on a cargo ship that's soon to make a stop where she's lived her whole life -- by threatening to call down the mother of all curses on the customs officer who is not willing to let her book herself as freight (because passenger berths are way beyond her means).

No sooner is she on board ship than she is causing trouble there, too; the first mate is an old family friend who feels an unspecified sense of obligation to her and also may have a crush; ruthlessly (wink) she uses his feelings against him to keep her safe on a ship full of filthy louts who seem to think that an unmarried woman on board ship is basically community property. The first mate, Owen Townsend, while charming and handsome as the dickens, is barely tolerated on board himself because he is half-French at a time when the mother nations of England and France are at war and their conflicts threaten to spill over into their colonies; even knowing a few words of the French language or possessing books written in French is kind of against the law. Childhood friends who are well aware of the liabilities they pose to one another, they nonetheless team up in the struggle to survive the outbreak of what we know as the French and Indian War.

Along the way, Ruth bullies the local land office in the Connecticut village where she debarks into letting her have an unpromising piece of marsh land abutting the property of the kindly old couple who take her in and have her toiling to fence out, stone by stone. Soon she's not only getting the fence built but also building a house for herself, growing a few crops in her marsh, and has begun a tentative but promising friendship with a semi-outcast member of the remnants of the Pequod nation, whose land the white settlers have, of course, appropriated from them at gunpoint.

It all sounds a bit far-fetched and Mary Sue-ish, doesn't it? But trust me, you're not going to care. This book gallops along at a breathtaking pace and it's all fascinating and fun. Plus, Angstrom, whom I believe is a professional historian by trade, knows her way around a Dutch-style fluyt and writes a mean combat scene aboard one:

He leaped onto the3 fallen foremast and felt the throb in his thigh, then swooped from above with his dagger downward, driving it between a pirate's shoulderblades.* The pirate went down without seeing what hit him. Own retracted the blade and swiped it across the neck of the next advancing attacker, before stepping to thte side of the man's descending sword, leaving the falling edge to lodge itself into the planks of the deck. the opponent fell forward, his throat opening like a sluice gate, a stream of crimson onto the floorboards.

I mean, who doesn't want to see that on the big screen? Or at least your big TV in the rumpus room?

Seriously, it's been a while since I had this much plain old fun reading a novel. And there's room for a sequel, right? Right??? Please?

I mean, how many freaking Sackett novels got cranked out over the years? And the women were mostly just trophies in those. In the Ruth and Owen adventures, both of them get to be badasses. 

*Of course there are pirates. 

Peter Watts' THE FREEZE-FRAME REVOLUTION

I love generation spaceship stories, but perhaps even more so I love the idea that a crew, using whatever science-fantastical suspended animation technology combined with science-fantastical light-speed or faster travel, can live for centuries, millennia, or, in this case, spans of time that make geologic time seem like the blink of a may-fly's eye. Especially when they're written by masters like Alastair Reynolds, or, in this case, Peter Watts.

In The Freeze-Frame Revolution, a genetically engineered offshoot of the human race called "Spores" that I can't help but compare to the nebbishes of T.J. Bass' Half-Past Human and The Godwhale (and perhaps prefigured by the early Genesis scorcher "Get 'Em Out by Friday") are on a galaxy-spanning mission to build "gates" so that the rest of humanity doesn't have to spend thousands of years in hibernation between work days, just to travel between stars. As the story opens, the Eriophora*, her A.I. pilot known as the Chimp, and a crew of 30,000 Spores have been on this mission for some six million years.

Our heroine, Sunday Ahzmundin, is wrapping up a shift awake with a few other members of her "tribe" (the designers of the mission having kept an idea similar to good old Dunbar's Number in mind while establishing its sociology) when one of them has a full-on mental and emotional breakdown, fixated on the idea that the mission for which they were bred has been a failure for all that thousands and thousands of gates have been built, because when was the last time they had any contact with any humans other than themselves? And also, sometimes, when a gate is brought online, various dangers lurk on its other side, ready to attack. Sunday gets her to settle down and get in her coffin and writes it off as something like Spaaaaace Madness (you coveteth my ice cream bar!) It's only after Sunday has been through another long sleep that she learns that her friend and crewmate who freaked out was awake during the only known attack on the ship that actually did damage. D'oh.

The rest of the story unfolds a few days at a time over the course of more millennia, as Sunday, who has always had a closer-than-usual relationship with The Chimp to the degree that Sunday gets awakened with greater frequency than pretty much anyone else when there's a problem The Chimp can't quite handle alone, starts piecing together enough unpleasant facts about the reality of their mission, its parameters, and how reliable The Chimp's memory and personality really are, to reach the conclusion that not only is an extremely slow-motion revolution absolutely necessary but has already been going on!

The conspiracy that unfolds/is constructed is the coolest thing about this very cool novella, as Sunday discovers the ingenous ways its members have developed to communicate with each other across the eons, and how some of them have managed to hide and stay awake to steer their plan through its final stages.

The audio book, as narrated by Emily Woo Zeller, carries an emotional wallop that I think it would be easy to miss in print. Zeller emotes all over the place; some have complained about this, but I think this adds a necessary depth and urgency to the characters/ predicament, so if you're going to check out this nifty little gem, I highly recommend doing so this way.

A devastating few hours of goodness await.

*A hollowed out asteroid straight outta Book of the Long Sun, iykwim. In fact, this is a lot like a condensed and more traditionally science fictional version of Book of the Long Sun!