Ursula Whitcher's NORTH CONTINENT RIBBON

Sometimes there's a better way to show me the society, the world an author is imagining than via a single piece of narrative fiction. If you've created a truly richly developed culture that really differs from ours, it can be more effective, by which I mean both more efficiently communicative and more interesting for me as a reader, to show me facets, via vignettes or mini-biographies or, most gracefully, short stories about different characters occupying different roles in that society. And the stories need not necessarily overlap or interact, nor do they have to depict earth-shattering crises or huge personality conflicts or major civilizational turning points, either. An older example of this is Lucius Sheperd's story cycle surrounding the vast corpse of The Dragon Griaule; but I've found an even better one here.

Ursula Whitcher's phenomenal story suite, North Continent Ribbon, where, as the cover explains to us, "every contract is a ribbon, and every ribbon is a secret," depicts one of those imagined worlds that would feel like a fantasy setting if the tales within were read out of order; several of them involve no science fictional wizardry or even much-beyond-medieval era technology. Were it not for its opening matter, which declares that it comes from a larger work named Cross-Planetary Investment: A Practical Vraselian's Galactic Opportunity Handbook and informs us that the planet on which most of these stories take place is an important source for "faster-than-light vehicular components sourced from a high-orbit E-type singularity," the society on the North Continent of Nakharat would be all but indistinguishable from one of the weaving planets in Andreas Eschbach's The Carpet Makers, for instance.

But amidst its tales of ribbon-crossed lovers and sundered families and somewhat shady business dealings, we get hints that there's a lot more going on than just trade and agriculture and the many different ways love can come and go in human lives. There's the question, for instance, of how those aforementioned vehicular components, once assembled into faster-than-light vehicles that navigate through what this culture refers to as the deep*, are sourced. And what they even are. Which, it might seem as one pages through this slim little volume, are questions that might not get answered? At least not explicitly?

At least, not if you're not well versed in the kinds of science fiction and fantasy that I love best, where what's going on between the characters is not the whole of what's going on in the book, might even be a distraction from that, actually. See also Gene Wolfe and M. John Harrison and Frank Herbert and Alastair Reynolds.**

But even if you're not willing to plumb the weird and somewhat distressing secrets of this world, Whitcher still has plenty of rewards for your attention in store; these stories feature deftly drawn characters facing dilemmas that are delicately fantastic yet still mundane enough to be believable, from clandestine business machinations by rival corporations vying for profit, to local political scandals, to estrangement between children and parents, to inappropriate workplace love affairs, to secret labor union conspiracies, to the threat of imminent invasion by military forces that might just be coming to restore peace and safety, but might also come to impose new tyrannies over old -- all amidst some stunningly good line-for-line science fiction writing, like this in an earlier story, "The Fifteenth Saint":

The new text began with a litany: an electron's internal spin, the electron dancing around a nucleus, the shiver of atoms within a rock, all the way up to the slow rotation of the galaxy's arms and the slide of entire galaxies. Twisted behind and within and around all of these things was the deep, that other space where starships cut between stars. At every shift in scale, the book said, we experience a loss. But at every shift in scale there is the deep, thus at every shift in scale we find eternity; at every shift in scale there is the beloved, who has always been the beloved.

The text under discussion in the above, by the way, is a sort of samizdat that is buried in a book that has found its way into the hands of one of a district's hard-working political officials, who is starting to suspect that some of his co-equals in power and responsibility not only aren't holding up their ends -- he has just had to spend a whole day solving what should be a trivial problem for somebody else's constituent, only to be stymied repeatedly by layers of bureaucracy that he didn't even know had been imposed because things have been so compartmentalized -- but might actually be corrupt! But the culture of Nakharat is far too subtle for a samizdat to just come out and say things like that; far better to do so indirectly, poetically and above all memorably.

But also, and this is what makes Nakharat feel truly fantastic to a 21st century reader in most of the English-speaking world, the situation that official just had to deal with is really more of an exception than the rule, because Nakharat has a fundamentally different conception of how a civilized society runs. Among other things, the military forces on this world do not exist primarily to fight wars or extend or exercise the domination of a particular polity. No. As two characters in a later story, "Ten Percent for Luck," discuss as one explains to another why she's chosen the career path she has:

"But why the military?" Because it sounded like Inkar hadn't just taken a Contract with Otter Company. Her parents might have had actual shares. People with that sort of income didn't join up, not usually, not even with a paid commission.

"Because I wanted to build something."...

"Don't Companies build things?"

"For themselves. So they can take tolls. The army, we protect everyone. It doesn't matter who you are."

And I haven't even gotten into the lovely grace-notes present throughout these stories, like the whole ribbon thing. Almost everyone on the planet wears their hair in braids decorated with colorful ribbons that show their various personal and professional affiliations. Look at a person's hair and you can see where they went to school, to what professional societies they belong, if they are married and/or have children, if they're a high official in a Company or a public servant or a member of the military or a sex worker -- but only if you are on close enough terms with them to see them without their turban. Every contract is a ribbon, and every ribbon is a secret. And yes, there are some people who have no braids, no ribbons at all, and who flaunt this with loose, flowing hair not wrapped up in a turban. Those are very special people indeed, and yes, we meet one, kind of. But that person is maybe not as unencumbered as his hair suggests, hmm?

All in just 154 pages. My goodness!

Lots of people have had a good chuckle at the fact that North Continent Ribbon was short-listed for the 2025 Ursula K. LeGuin Prize for Fiction, and that the author is also named Ursula, as though the fix is in. But her own prose above and Your Humble Blogger are here to assure you that Whitcher deserved the honor, actually. And she's just revving up; this is her first book. And whether she chooses to continue writing, publishing and collecting Nakharat stories, or tries her hand at something else entirely, I'm here for it. Though I reckon I'll have to be patient, as she is a working mathematician, too.

I'm gonna choose to believe that she's taking her poet's ribbon at least as seriously as her math one, though. Because I definitely want to see more of her stuff. I'll put one in my hair, too, if need be. I've been growing it out again. And hey, it's grey now, so whatever color she chooses, it won't clash! Lemme know, Ms. Whitcher!

*Which I think is basically what most science fiction calls hyperspace or wormhole space or folded space. Use your favorite hand-waving term for how we cross the stupefying vastness of space without wasting human lifetimes in generation ships here. "The deep" seems just fine. I like, too, that it's treated as nothing special, so that it doesn't even get capitalized.

**What? You didn't know that the secret of the Revelation Space universe's Conjoiner Drives is explicitly revealed within that series? Tell me you haven't read Reynolds' short stories without telling me you haven't read his short stories. My goodness!

Alastair Reynolds' EVERSION

One of my favorite of Alastair Reynolds shorter works is a fiendishly gruesome little puzzler of a novella called Diamond Dogs. Set in his Revelation Space universe, it tells the story of a small party of mathematically inclined geniuses, two of whom are childhood friends who grew up at the highest strata of their society setting puzzles and traps for one another of greater difficulty than can even be imagined by us Earthbound, non-augmented humans of our own century. As adults, one's family makes an intriguing discovery on "the ragged edge of human space" where only one other human party has ever explored, only to die one by one of an unguessed-at number of various baroque and visceral "punishments" when they failed to solve a series of alien puzzles of increasing bizarre complexity. It's a compelling and memorable read, but not for its subtly drawn or complex or relatable characters. Those are found elsewhere in Reynolds' oeuvre (see especially his Poseidon's Children trilogy). But I always wondered what it would be like if Reynolds had held back the intense plot of Diamond Dogs for a longer work with more developed characters. 

Now I know. 

"The geometry..." he murmured. "The geometry! I think I can see it! Each quarter section is homeomorphic to a triangle!" He stared back to us, wide-eyed and uncomprehending of our own inability to visualize what was plain to him. "Can't you see it? It's beautiful! And hideous! It's... not right!"

Eversion, the master's latest, shows us not only what Diamond Dogs would be with better characters and actual stakes, but also takes another go at the intriguing ideas Reynolds explored in Terminal World, in which different levels of a city-state exist at different levels of technological development, those levels determined by the "resolution" at each level, i.e. how fine the grain of the very stuff of each level can get and what levels of precision it will allow. Except, again, the emotional and existential stakes turn out to be much higher in Eversion, for all that it, too, has a mathematical puzzle at its heart.

A ship called, just like the one that carried Dracula to England, the Demeter, has been engaged by a boorish Russian oligarch/magnate to follow up on a magnificent discovery at the edge of the known world. The magnate, Topolosky (wink), spared no expense on equipment but values secrecy over quality when it comes to the mode of transportation and the crew who will get him, his burly assistant Ramos, and his pet mathematics prodigy, Dupin, to where the mystery awaits. Meaning the captain and crew are competent but not spectacularly so, but, Topolosky thinks, are less likely to ask awkward questions or make unreasonable demands for things like advance warning of hazards to life and limb, etc. This is a nice and meaty beast of a plotline right here, but this is Alastair Reynolds hitting new heights of narrative brilliance, so of course there is a lot more going on.

For starters, Topolosky isn't our point of view character; the ship's medical man, Silas Coade, is. It's Silas' first voyage and he is a terrible lubber as it turns out, so he spends most of his time cooped up in his digs until he is called upon to save Ramos' life after a terrible accident, after which time he forms a friendship with the man as the Demeter nears its mysterious destination and various tall tales and outright lies on the part of Topolosky can no longer be denied. It's the Age of Sail and they're way north of Spitsbergen and approaching a cove and a hidden lagoon where a bizarre structure they call the Edifice awaits them. No, wait, it's the Age of Steam and they're tramping along the coast of Patagonia looking for a fissure that will admit them to the interior of a vast glacier concealing a mysterious Edifice. No, wait, they're aboard a state-of-the-art airship approaching the hole at the bottom of Antarctica that will admit them to the interior of the Hollow Earth where a mysterious Edifice clings to the ice and rock above the Void. No, wait, they're plying interstellar space on a ship that would make Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers proud and approaching a... oh, no, wait, they're on a spaceship, but it's just moving within our solar system, following up on an earlier effort to explore what's under the ice on the Jovian moon of Europa...

Each iteration of the story unfolds gracefully and reveals a little bit more of the true nature of the Demeter and its mission. Silas is an aspiring novelist in addition to being a doctor, and he's keeping the crew entertained with his futuristic imaginings of what a more advanced version of their mission might be like -- or are they retro ones? Along the way, the crew's lone female member, the lovely Ada Cossile, keeps nagging at him to do better, to try harder, to get it right, damn it, hinting that their situation is way more dire than it seems.

Each iteration also comes to concern itself with a deeply deranged and near-insolvable mathematical conundrum; the Edifice is not of any known human manufacture and seems to have deformed itself -- to have turned itself partly inside-out or everted, toward an unknown but probably sinister end. And Topolosky's great wish is to explore it first, claim credit for discovering its secrets and, of course, to profit from any applications might result from the study of the Edifice -- even if it costs a life or two.

The final layer of the mystery is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking, and every tear it jerks is earned in a way that only the more recent of Reynolds' work has accomplished (I'm thinking from Poseidon's Children through the great Revenger novels, of course), because these are fully imagined people whose dilemmas and danger have real emotional heft -- but none of Reynolds' trademark awe-inspiring and cosmic scale is sacrificed in the process. He really does just get better and better, you guys! I can't wait to see what he's got for us next, and he remains my number one buy-on-sight science fiction author. Tremendous stuff!

Christopher Ruocchio's DEMON IN WHITE, Narr by Samuel Roukin

Two new characters introduced in the great sweep of the third novel in the main sequence of Christopher Ruocchio's Sun Eater series, Demon in White, give us an even greater idea of the enormous scope the author has imagined in imagining this universe. Both also quickly rose to prominence in my estimation, contending against protagonist-narrator Hadrian Marlowe and his beloved Dr. Valka Ondare* for the title of My Favorite Character so far. And one of them even survived the novel!

The first I want to discuss is Lorian Aristedes, a junior officer whose tremendous organizational talents and gift for strategy have been languishing unnoticed in a minor post in the Sollan Empire's legions for a long time because he is something the Empire abhors: a child of a member of the Palantine and some other caste. This isn't mere class snobbery, though; because Palantines, with their physical perfection, greater height and incredibly long life-spans, are as much the product of post-conception tinkering as of selective breeding to preserve the advantages originally bestowed by genetic engineering centuries ago; decanted as much as born, grown in vats to order. Hadrian himself is one such, and has several times had to face up to how this really makes him little different from the variously augmented (cybernetic, surgical and genetic) Extrasolarians he met in Howling Dark. Lorian had one such parent, but the other was not, meaning he's a sport, and all sorts of weird recessive traits that have lurked unexpressed in the Palantine genomes, removed by careful post-conception pruning in sanctioned children, have manifested in this man's body. He is short, has malproportioned limbs (much is made of how he needs what amount to ring splints to use his "too-long" fingers), is functionally almost an albino. He is, in other words, a living exhibit of how perfect the Palantines really aren't, and has had to struggle mightily all of his life to justify his very existence.

Miraculously, Lorian Aristedes does not exhibit much of a chip on his shoulder once Hadrian finds him and sweeps him into his orbit and gives him rank and responsibility in Hadrian's increasingly infamous Red Company. Most of the time he is quietly competent and matter-of-factly rescues his fellows' fat from the fire; occasionally he concocts brilliant strategies that combine with Hadrian's ever-expanding all-but-supernatural abilities (we'll get into that in a bit) to deliver successes that can only be described as miracles by the time word of them reaches the rest of the Sollan Empire, and never mind that it's going to be Hadrian, Valka, and the rest of their weirdly glamorous band of former gladiators, military misfits and exotic "homunculi" who both spread and share in Hadrian's growing legend.

My other favorite new guy is Udax, a member of one of those alien races humanity has conquered/colonized as we expanded into the galaxy to occupy billions of worlds. Unique (I think?) among these races so far, though, Udax's people presumably fought back, else how would the Sollan Empire come to recognize their martial prowess enough to be willing to incorporate units of them into its Legions? When Hadrian first meets Udax and his fellow colonial auxiliaries, the Not-Amarantin are finishing their training and are about to form the Empire's first non-human unit. Hadrian and his friends are fascinated to watch these raptor-like people at work, for yes, they have feathers and talons and huge wings that work; the Sollan Empire is about to gain a unit that combines infantry and air force! Or, as I kept thinking of them, Flying Sepoys. 

But, the Not-Amarantin are very, very touchy about being gaped at like carnival freaks or zoo animals and don't take too kindly to the Red Company's frank interest and Things Get Ugly, revealing, d'oh, yet another plot on Hadrian's life. Udax had been paid by, probably, a Chantry agent to pick a fight and try to kill Marlowe and as much of his entourage as possible! Their little mutiny is quickly put down and its hotheaded young ringleaders rounded up for disciplinary action straight out of the John Company's brutal past, but Hadrian decides that if he can talk Udax around, Udax might be worth sparing. This, of course, happens, and Udax and his fellow sepoys become a very important addition to the Red Company just in time for their next mission for "Earth and Emperor": to join the Imperial Fleet to help ward off a massive Cielcin attack threatening a strategically important system through which a great deal of commerce and military assets must frequently travel.

A good century or so has passed since the events of Howling Dark, and just as Hadrian and his friends have kept busy -- before the Not-Amarantin join the Red Company they have been on the Empire's library planet exploring Restricted Archives of Forbidden Knowledge up to and including meeting yet another leftover Artificial Intelligence left-over from the "Mericanii" whose machines enslaved almost all of humanity back when we just had the one planet and Hadrian's having another visionary encounter with the Ancient Aliens he calls "The Quiet" -- so have the Cielcin. Among other things, they've been trading with the Extrasolarians, whose scientists have happily accepted the challenge of building giant Cielcin cyborgs with extra limbs and Admantine exoskeletons and armor (Adamant being the only material that swords like Hadrian's light saber High Matter sword can't cut, and traditionally only used for space ship hulls). We learn that in events between Howling Dark and Demon in White, the Red Company encountered some early prototypes of these monsters and defeated them, and a second encounter with a better version of one opens Demon in White by way of showing us how much more badass the Red Company has gotten since Hadrian killed his first Cielcin prince and got his nickname of Half-Mortal, but they haven't seen anything yet!

The serious high drama and action of Demon in White takes place on the target system's planet, where the Red Company has been assigned to defend its chief city and its millions of inhabitants from the Cielcin provisioning runs that are sure to take place while the giant spaceships in orbit duke it out (remember: Cielcins eat humans with relish and poor table manners). Lorian and Udax both demonstrate their worthiness of my love, and Valka, who was literally fridged through a lot of the fighting in Howling Dark and hasn't stopped berating Hadrian for it, not only gets to fight but gets to prove her point that he would have taken a lot fewer losses if he'd let her fight last time; coming as she does from a culture with no taboos against implanting computer enhancements in human bodies, she has a head full of powerful circuitry that lets her hack the terrifying flying borers the Cielcin launch in combat to chew through enemy forces, armor and all. Which, good thing, because not only have the Cielcin cyborgs gotten even better since last they tangled with the Red Company, but also a whole lot bigger. Like 30 meters tall, with extra arms and implanted howitzer-type artillery and metal claws that let them do things like scale tall buildings, King Kong-style.

Fortunately, Hadrian has some new tricks up his sleeve as well, for "The Quiet", not content with outright resurrecting him in Howling Dark have now expanded Hadrian's very senses. He can now, when he concentrates properly, see all of the possible outcomes of an incident, choose the optimum and make it reality, all in a split second, allowing him to perform some feats that look impossible but are really just astronomically improbable, and are only really possible for someone with Hadrian's Palantine self-assurance and talent for melodrama. And yes, this marks him out as an even greater threat to the Chantry and to the Emperor (who wears the "whiter than white" color called Argent and could be taken for the Demon in White of the title, except ahh, Hadrian, whose close familial relationship as a cousin of the Emperor is also entitled to wear that color, is the one who gets the actual sobriquet) and his court (never get more popular than the boss), but he'll have to deal with that later! Because right now, his duty is ACKSHUN!!!!

What I'm saying is, these battle scenes kick all kinds of ass, once again enhanced by audio book narrator Samuel Roukin's bone-chilling rendition of the king hell cyborg's impossibly deep and hollow voice as it taunts Hadrian, and later that of the big bad Cielcin overlord who has been uniting the clans and introducing things like strategy and tactics to their formerly atomized and half-random attacks on human assets. I mean, the Cielcin overlord sounds a lot like Kharn Sagara, but Roukin's only one guy, you know? 

Meanwhile, in the big Sun Eater plot, more becomes clear to Hadrian and to us, through the same set of mind-bending revelations that have led to his new superpowers. The Quiet turn out to be even stranger and more unsettling than Hadrian had previously thought, and while he's previously proceeded on the assumption that what he calls The Quiet and the Cielcin call The Watchers are the same Ancient and Powerful Beings, much has thrown his assumptions into doubt. Ruocchio, through his ancient narrative persona of Old Man Hadrian who is recounting his centuries and centuries of life and warfare, does a magnificent job of balancing this overarching plot with the episodic natures of the individual novels, guaranteeing that I'm going to be very antsy after I finish Kingdoms of Death and have to wait for December and the new installment, Ashes of Man.

Space opera, guys. It sure is space opera.

*Once again, I hit that flaw that comes with enjoying these books as audio productions; I have to cast around the internet for other reviews or summaries in order to see how things are correctly spelled. I haven't found a proper spelling for Valka's last name, or for the bird-race to which Udax belongs, which is why I call them Not-Amarantin, referring to Alastair Reynolds similarly bird-like alien race from his Revelation Space universe. If pressed I would say the species name in Sun Eater is something like "Ektani"?

Christopher Ruocchio's EMPIRE OF SILENCE (Narr by Samuel Roukin)

Christopher Ruocchio cannot be reckoned an unambitious writer, if his debut novel, Empire of Silence, is anything to go by. Combining elements of space opera and epic fantasy (and yes, that includes neo-feudalism, never my favorite, but I'm setting that particular gripe of mine aside for the moment, though I'm sure it will come up plenty as I explore the half-billion planet spanning galaxy of the Sun Eater saga) as it does, it immediately invites comparisons with works like Frank Herbert's Dune and its dizzying array of prequels and sequels, certainly, but I first learned of Ruocchio and the Sun Eater series in a Twitter discussion about genre fiction series that might be worthy of being talked about, if not in the same breath, at least in the same general conversation with, one Gene Wolfe and his Solar Cycle. Buckle up. 

Empire of Silence definitely shares DNA with the works I mention here. The biggest political union in the thoroughly human-settled galaxy (our good old Milky Way) is an Empire that House Corrino would find familiar, complete with a Landsraad of aristocratic families, some of ancient lineage (we learn in the appendix to EoS that our hero's family claims descent from the British royal family we 21st century types know and thumb our noses at), some gotten up robber baron types who bought their way into the nobility by time honored atrocities like slave trading, and planetary populations enjoying various levels of material comfort on terraformed worlds of varying quality. And yes, there is a coveted and vital substance that holds the Sollan Empire and its neighboring republics and federations together in a plural galactic civilization, but it's nothing we 21st century types would regard as exotic or semi-magical, it's just good old Uranium.

So, nobody is going to metamorphose into a giant worm or anything, nor is anyone exhibiting supernatural or superhuman abilities like prophecy or telepathy. The highest class, the Palatinate (lots of echoes of the Roman Empire in the Sollan) has benefited from millennia genetic engineering and breeding and enjoy extraordinary attractiveness, health, height and life-spans, but it's just science. 

Our hero, Hadrian Marlowe, is the elder son of a mid-level planetary noble and the grandson of that planet's hereditary ruler, but as we get to know him on his home world of Delos, we see that he's neither his father's favorite to succeed nor is he exceptionally interested in doing so; he's more inclined to scholarship than politics or diplomacy, and only undertakes the rest of his training out of a sense of duty to the people who would otherwise someday be ruled by Hadrian's younger brother, who exhibits the martial temperament and bloody-mindedness that people expect of a ruler but has a cruel streak and a seeming disinterest in anything that isn't fighting or fucking.*

But when Hadrian takes a diplomatic matter somewhat into his own hands, unbidden, and makes a hash of it, his father decides to ship him off to the Chantry, the rigid religious order that generally seems to exercise greater power in the Sollan Empire than the Emperor and nobility do, and name Hadrian's brother as heir. 

Only Hadrian wouldn't be a monk so much as... a torturer; the Chantry enforces orthodoxy the nasty, Inquisitional way. And like I said, Hadrian is more of a scholar than a religious zealot.

The main plot of Empire of Silence, then, is what happens after Hadrian, his tutor and his mother hatch a plot to escape this fate, and what goes spectacularly and fascinatingly wrong with their plans. 

The galaxy we begin to explore with Hardrian proves to have a bit more diversity than we ever saw in the Herbertverse; in addition to human societies who owe no allegiance to the Empire, there are other species, though only one of them has attained space flight and reached out into the cosmos. More about them in a bit. The rest of the species humanity has encountered have been less technologically and (apparently, presumably) culturally advanced and you can probably guess what that has meant for them; colonization and, usually, enslavement. Thus a mysterious alien race native to the backwater planet where Hadrian winds up for most of this novel are reduced to manual labor and subservience and are considered by most to be little more than animals, though a few scientists have continued to study them, their unique modes of consciousness, and their means of communication. But these scientists are not Sollan Empire citizens and are themselves regarded with suspicion and hostility by their hosts, who all adhere to the rigid doctrines of the Chantry, which, OK, let's talk about the Chantry, for it is where the Sun Eater series most differentiates itself from the Herbertverse or the Solar Cycle.

The state religion of the Sollan Empire feels extremely and uncomfortably familiar because it's basically the settler-colonialist mentality as holy writ. Humanity has a Manifest Destiny to own and control the entire galaxy, maybe eventually the entire universe; any other races it encounters must be subjugated for their own good (and, of course, the good of their human masters). All the stars and all the planets and all the rocks and cosmic dust in between are there for humanity's use. Refreshingly, though, there is no messiah figure or religious narrative (at least not as appearing in this first novel); the object of worship is nothing more, nothing less, than the mother planet, Earth, which we've lost track of in our rush to expand and expand. Maybe it's a myth? But don't say that aloud, because the Chantry will get you and punish you as a heretic. Oh, and the Chantry has elements of Dune's Butlerian Jihad, too: cybernetic implants, artificial intelligence, etc are absolutely banned. Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind, etc.

So yes, there is a lot of world-building going on in this first novel, but, refreshingly, it never feels like the reader is getting info-dumped upon. Hadrian is a fine narrator of his experience and incorporates all of this exposition very naturally into his story -- and he hooks us in right away by revealing, right at the very beginning of the book, that his long, long life (spanning thousands of years, though he's only something like 18 years old when he leaves Delos) has made him famous to some, infamous to others. In pursuing peace with an enemy I haven't mentioned yet, he has been forced by circumstances we're not going to get to know much about in this first novel to destroy an entire inhabited star system. Hadrian is the Sun Eater of this series' title.

Lordy do I love a villain-hero, almost as much as I love an unreliable narrator, though I'm not sure that Hadrian is the latter. His narrative voice is introspective, honest about his faults and failures, anxious about his shortcomings, guilt-ridden, self-critical, all the things that the genre reader's favorite unreliable narrator, Severian, much more concerned about justifying himself and persuading us that he is a really good guy and irresistible to women, etc. is not. Hadrian doesn't care what we think of him; indeed, is resigned to never being able to improve or alter the opinion of him his imagined readership is understood to have already. Sun Eater is no apology, nor is it a parable. To diminish it a little, I could compare it as justifiably with something like Piers Anthony's Bio of a Space Tyrant as with Dune or Book of the New Sun. It's big and sprawling and ambitious as hell, but it's not set before us as a puzzle to solve or a tractate on What is Humanity; it's just a great big story of great big events with lots of action, emotion and satisfying character relationships. And a few mysteries, starting with pretty much everything about the only other spacefaring race in the galaxy, the Cielcin, with whom humanity has come into armed conflict over territory, and what, if any, the Cielcin's and some of the other subjugated species relationship might be to a dead civilization that has left mysterious and sophisticated ruins on many of the worlds to which Humanity is the Johnny-Come-Lately.

I haven't even gotten into the other characters sharing Hadrian's journey but this is getting long and my hands are seizing up (I can't use Dragon Naturally Speaking very well in the summer because the only way my attic office is bearable is with a loud old swamp cooler noisily rattling day and night, so I'm actually having to type this!). But there are some wonderful ones, a beggar girl who rescues and befriends Hadrian when he washes up on the backwater planet of Emesh instead of the planet-sized university analogue he thought he was traveling to, friends beside whom Hadrian fights as a gladiator, courtiers in the palace of the parvenu nobility who eventually yank Hadrian out of the arena, and the aforementioned foreign scientists from other polities who don't truck with hereditary nobility or Manifest Destiny or banning cybernetic implants and who expand Hadrian's mind. 

And, by the way, these are men and women and there don't seem to be gender roles as such in Sollan society? A gladiator or a planetary ruler or a Grand Inquisitor or a scientist can be either, and it's no big deal. And at least one of the alien species seems not to have sex or gender at all that we can determine so far, and that's also no big deal except occasionally grammatically as Hadrian tries to wrap his head around their not-quite-language to better understand them. And it's these elements as much as anything that make me not mind the neo-feudalism, and want to continue through this whole series and its several sidequels, which I will continue to enjoy in audio form because the narrator (who seems to be in for the entire run), Samuel Roukin, simply is Hadrian. I first encountered him in the American Revolutionary War TV drama Turn, in which he played the insufferable redcoat villain Simcoe, and it's impossible not to imagine Roukin as Hadrian himself in the movie in my head. Roukin gives Hadrian just the right combination of aristocratic self-assurance, self-criticism and wonder, though I wish he'd cut back on the Shatnerian pauses in the middle of phrases, which are not merely annoying but at times interfere with comprehension because Ruocchio is not a great user of dialogue tags, meaning that sometimes what starts of sounding like mere narration is actually someone's dialogue and not necessarily Hadrian's. But I quibble. As I said, Roukin is Hadrian, and I'm already diving into the direct sequel to EoS, Howling Dark. The title alone is irresistible and makes me think, of course, of Alastair Reynolds and his Inhibitors. Arooooo!

*We get hints that there might be more to this brother than we or Hadrian give him credit for, and he gets a spin-off novel that I'll have a look at when I'm through the main series.

Alastair Reynolds' REVENGER

I had a few false starts with Revenger, I won't lie. I think it was mostly because my brain insisted on trying to turn it into a Revelation Space book, even though it patently is not. There were just enough similarities between the superficial character traits Reynolds gave to his red shirts and those of characters from his earlier books to make that a temptation, though. Any of the crew of Monetta's Mourn could fit right in on board the Nostalgia for Infinity, is what I'm saying.

But there are no Ultranauts in this universe; the setting is very much our own solar system (I think), although it is changed beyond recognition by thousands (millions?) of years of natural processes, alien invasion and re-engineering, decay and resettlement. Humanity lives on a system-sized version of the Glitter Band/Rust Belt; lots of space stations and somewhat terraformed asteroids and planetoids -- but, apparently, no planets like you and I know them. There have been at least 13 "occupations" and all of them were long ago. Valuable and bizarre and bizarrely useful relics of all of those occupations can be found inside chunks of rock surrounded by force fields that open up an somewhat predictable intervals. Some people make a living exploring these "baubles" and selling off what they find.

Among the weird Roadside Picnic-esque treasures to be found are alien bones and skulls, which, studded with implants, can be "read" by young people with certain neurological traits and used as a kind of system-wide radio communications system.

Enter our protagonist, Fura, a young woman who, along with her slightly older sister, is found to have the talent for reading these bones and thus has a chance to escape her privileged but kind of creepy life on one of those barely terraformed rocks by signing on to read the bones for a crew of bauble miners.

So, I mean, of course she does.

And then terrible things happen. Terrible, violent, pirate-y things. Some people aren't into doing all the work to get loot to sell; some would rather lie in wait for other people to do the work and then rob them. And some like to get all Reaver-y about it.

The rest is the story charts Fura's journey from helpless fugitive to cold-blooded embodiment of revenge. We get to explore a little more of the world she ran away from and see more of the creeps who wanted to keep her there, spend some time on a brand new but less ambitious ship that she and a fellow survivor decide is their best vehicle for vengeance, and see Fura's plan unfold. It's all by turns creepy, exciting, violent and might remind you more than a little bit of a Jack Womack novel. Don't want to cross this young lady, no, no.

So this is an Alastair Reynolds who is exploring something new. Absent his galaxy-spanning atmospherics, the story is very tightly character driven, with mixed results. We get to know Fura very well, but no one except her friend Prozor gets terribly well-developed -- but I, at least, didn't mind this a bit. The tight focus on Fura's teenaged single-mindedness felt like the right way to go. No distractions, no stupid romance plot, just Find My Sister and Make Those Bastards Pay.

Hey, the Count of Monte Cristo didn't develop a lot of characters beyond Dantes, did it?

Scott Sigler's PANDEMIC

What if Alastair Reynolds' Inhibitors found us back when we lived on just the one planet, and instead of harnessing the destructive power of stellar physics to destroy us, were masters of biotechnology instead and just hijacked our own brains and bodies into doing it?

Such is the malevolent force Scott Sigler has created for his Infected series, my fondness for which I have covered elsewhere. The machines working to wreak apocalyptic havoc on humanity refer to them as The Creators, but we could really maybe call them Space Republicans, for their knee-jerk reaction to the idea that the universe might contain sentient life other than themselves is to seek to destroy that life utterly before it evolves to the point of developing space travel and the ability to destroy The Creators. See also Douglas Adams' Crikketers.

The result is a combination of first rate body horror and disaster porn, rather than space opera, but the comparison stands. As Reynolds draws on a prior career as a professional astronomer, Sigler draws on the expertise of his rabid fanbase (known as "Junkies" the ranks of whom include the likes of Bad Astronomer Phil Plait, who gets a hilarious cameo-tweet mid-story) and his own formidable attention to scientific detail, again almost to a fault. Reynolds' books occasionally threaten to drift into becoming astronomy primers; this series of Sigler's has passages that might stand up in a college biology textbook -- but it's all the service of selling the story. And lots of people are buying, including your humble blogger.

Pandemic, the third and final volume in the series takes all of the bio-medical creepiness, apocalyptic threat and heroic angst of Infected and Contagious, turns the volume up to 11, and rips off the knob. With each novel, the Creators' semi-sentient minions have learned more about human biology on both the individual and the social levels and have exploited that knowledge to nearly destroy humanity, only to be barely thwarted by the combined efforts of a team of scientists, soldiers and politicians who contain the threats posed in the nick of time, and through the individual bravery of a few early victims like washed-up football hero Perry Dawson, patient zero in the first novel, who still looms larger than life after death in this third one.*

Dr. Margaret Montoya, the woman who failed to save Perry, but who saved a lot of other people at great cost, is more or less the hero of this one, or at least she's supposed to be, but once again, despite her scientific brilliance, her strength, her crippling guilt and her marital problems, she's the least interesting character in the book. But this isn't because she's a badly drawn or boring character; she's just got a lot of competition, not the least of which from the disease itself, whose "point of view" Sigler relates in several interludes of frightening plausibility and maximum grossness (seriously, trigger warning for you germophobes out there. If someone blowing his/her nose in your presence squicks you out, if you're one of those people whose hands are constantly drenched in hand sanitizer, this is maybe not the book for you). And the other characters, including Ancestor's Dr. Tim Feely, still yucking it up even as he fights to save the world again. And the plot. And the colossal world-wide scope of the problem she faces, a plot so apocalyptically epic that the most vivid and compelling character in the world would pretty much get lost in it.

The fact that she doesn't, nor do the new characters introduced in this novel, says everything about Sigler as a writer; he achieves a near-flawless balance between character moments, dire exposition and insane-to-the-point-of-thigh-slapping ACKSHUN. The result is a compelling and ickily plausible read even before the climactic hijinks.

I expected nothing less.

*As well he should. He and his chicken scissors are unforgettable.

Alastair Reynolds' ON THE STEEL BREEZE

Caveat lector: I'm not sure I can be wholly rational just yet in discussing On the Steel Breeze, Alastair Reynolds' astonishing sequel to last year's Blue Remembered Earth. I'm still coming down from the high. And the tension. And the intensity. And the tiny soupçon of disappointment that one element of this dense yet sprawling, intricate yet straightforward, staggering hunk of novel didn't get quite as much "screen time" as I would have liked, but which I feel safe in expecting will get a lot more play in the next volume of Poseidon's Children oh please I hope Mr. Reynolds thank you sir.

As such.

Where Blue Remembered Earth introduced us to Poseidon's Children's First Family of Space, the Akinyas, and their sort-of-deceased (it's complicated) matriarch Eunice, and then sent Eunice's grandchildren traipsing all around the solar system on a high stakes treasure hunt, On the Steel Breeze sends us in two directions as we follow the triple life of Eunice's great-grandaughter Chiku Akinya, daughter of Sunday of Blue Remembered Earth's cosmic punchline. Faced before the novel's narrative begins with a decision she decided she refused to make -- whether to hare off alone after great-grandma's missing spaceship, the Winter Queen, to join the crew of millions aboard an early wave of generational starships setting to colonize a promising exoplanet that just also happens to offer the most tantalizing mystery ever to tease a Kepler-ish space telescope, or to stay home and live a sort-of-ordinary life standing for the Family on Earth -- Chiku has had herself not only cloned twice over, but paid to have the three clones neurally linked via implants and other cyberpunk hoodoo so that they can routinely swap memories and all three of them share in their triple adventures.*

So right away this novel sings with tension as it threatens to split off into three stories, but really we only get two. Chiku Yellow (they designate themselves by colors)'s path keeps her mostly confined to Earth until circumstances force her to start roving around the solar system a little bit like her mother and Uncle Geoffrey had to in the prior book; Chiku Green is off to ride the inside of a re-engineered comet like a high-tech Whorl (c.f. Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun) heading for a planet named Crucible, roughly half of which is covered by an artificial structure/design carved right into the substance of the planet, which humans have named the Mandala, and upon which there are to be cities and other facilities already there and waiting, built by self-assembling giant robots that were sent ahead at a much faster speed than the pokey asteroid arks, for the tens of millions of humans caravaning through interstellar space to their exciting new home.

But of course, the plot has quite a lot to say about that, and it's a doozy, involving artificial intelligences that have sort of accidentally arisen out of the 31st century's giant super-internet (I'm oversimplifying, but also trying to avoid spoilers) and are stone paranoid about being discovered and exterminated, the prior novel's panspermian-versus-machines-and-robots culture wars, the desperate race to develop new technologies on the fly (as in the generational ships' engineers developed engines that let them speed up to 13% of light speed but nobody bothered to figure out how to slow them back down at journey's end until they'd all been on their way for quite a while. Trust me, this thinking makes sense within this weird range of cultures Reynolds has imagined for this far-future anthropocene), political coups and counter-coups within and among the rag tag fleet caravan of generational "holoships", and Akinya family dynamics..

Plus the powers that are already there at Crucible. Something made that Mandala, you guys. And it's attracted attention before. Dude.

PLUS...

Elephants. As in descendants of the herd the Panspermians were raising in secret on the Moon in Blue Remembered Earth (Elephants on the Moon, you guys! And now elephants on an interstellar spaceship? What next, a shark in a spacesuit? Well, close...) But this is where my tiny soupçon of disappointment comes in because while we get the joyous image and idea of elephants traveling on a spaceship alongside humans, and are teased with the idea of David Brin-style "uplifted" elephants that have the potential to just basically become another sentient race out in space, it's just bare glimpses of them that we get in On the Steel Breeze. This is understandable with everything else that's going on, to a point, but like I said, a bit disappointing. BUT, there is hope. As in hints that an uplifted elephant, a Tantor to use the phrase they themselves prefer, to distinguish them from the ordinary elephants that are also along for the ride, might at last become something besides cargo, however unusual and precious; might be a full-fledged point of view-ish character in the next novel. Or at least a supporting one like, say, a Remontoire. And that would be glorious indeed. So the soupçon of disappointment really just enriches the flavor of the overall recipe. Marmalade ain't marmalade without that bitter orange peel...

And really, I'm just scratching the surface here. There is all of this, and all the atmospherics, the grand sweep and sense of awe at the vast scale of the universe that we always expect from Alastair Reynolds -- plus, I'm delighted to say, some of his best characterizations yet. In the various Chikus, we get fully developed, flawed and 100% relate-able women who bear extraordinary burdens, sometimes falter under them, sometimes heave them up and hurl them at their foes like champs, and are always, always believable, even when dealing with the unbelievable. I've liked a lot of Reynolds' characters before, but this is the first time I really and truly cared and empathized, so that as events came to a head in the novel's last fifth or so I started referring to this novel as On the Steel Stroke because I was so stressed and distressed by what the Chikus Three were dealing with.

You will be, too.

And now, I think I need to go have a lie down.

*This is the first of many things in this novel to just give me the shivers. The good kind. The envious kind. The I wish I could do that right now kind. Just think of it! Who wouldn't want to get to experience each possibility that branches off from a major life decision like that? Not only would it take the sting out of tough life changing decisions -- ok, one of me marries this guy and one of me stays single... or one of me goes off and teaches English abroad and the other stays here and does the community work I've been doing... or one of me stays in college and gets that probably useless PhD in Classics and the other goes out and gets a damn job... whatever it is, you could try it. This would be a way to have it all, people. The good and the bad. See? Shivers.

Alastair Reynolds' THE SIX DIRECTIONS OF SPACE #ReReads2013

A prized possession of mine is a limited signed edition of The Six Directions of Space in hardcover, and not just because it is a limited signed edition, my only signed Alastair Reynolds (to date; hope springs eternal while there is life, etc.), but because it is one of the coolest stories ever, and I do not engage in empty hyperbole there.

Three words. MONGOLS. IN. SPACE.

Yes, that's right, oh my blogettes, this story concerns the future that sprang from an alternate past in which the Mongol Empire did not fall apart after the death of Temujin, better known to history as Genghis Khan, but went on to conquer the entire world, which became known simply as Greater Mongolia. Sure, there are still pesky pockets of, e.g., Buddhists and Nestorian Christians and the odd Muslim here and there, but basically the Mongol culture, horses and all, dominated everything right up to and including humanity's journey to the stars.

A funny old thing, though, Mongols in space. The culture transmits to a space-born empire pretty well, if one can imagine people taking their steppe ponies with them on their spaceships (and hey, Reynolds has depicted a people who plan to take elephants into space with them, so why not ponies?) and still functioning without the Zero, which these Space Mongols still insist is a fruity Arab affectation they'll have no truck with, even though it makes their science and engineering a bit clunky and cumbersome. These are people who get drunk on fermented mare's milk and found a way to sing more than one note at a time, folks. They do stuff their own way. Even in space.

I'm ever astounded at how Reynolds managed to convey the scope and sweep, not only of a galactic Mongol Empire, but of what is essentially a multiverse, in just 85 tight pages.* And it's not just this empire he's describing, but its unique settlement of inhospitable worlds, like in this passage:

"There were no fixed communities on the moon. Instead, immense spiderlike platforms, mounted on six or eight intricate jointed legs, picked their way across the ever-shifting terrain in awesome slow motion."**

 And oh, there's a tight and nifty little plot that still manages to convey a sense of grand scale, too. It involves a secret government agent, a woman named Yellow Dog (one of a series of Reynolds' ass-kicking female characters who would not pass a Bechdel test so much as beat the crap out of you -- literally or metaphorically -- for suggesting it to her) whose mission is to investigate a series of phantom intrusions into the empire's (found and scavenged, a la the Gateways in Frederick Pohls' Heechee books***) interstellar transport network, and who runs afoul of a petty official who turns out to be anything but -- and discovers some mind-blowing secrets about the way things really work out there.

Truly a marvel, this one.

*Anyone who accuses him of bloat obviously hasn't had a look at this story (or any of his short fiction for that matter).

**Shades again of Volyova's Spider Room on the Nostalgia for Infinity in Reynolds' Revelation Space universe.

***Thus perhaps a bit too neatly solving the problem of how a zero-less science and society would someday achieve faster-than-light travel, but I don't care. It's awesome. Did I mention it's Mongols in Space? It's Mongols in Space, people. Drop everything and take the time to listen to Dan Carlin's awesome multipart podcast on the Wrath of the Khans and imagine all of that in space, minus the diminishing/loss of empire bits. Would I want to live in that universe? Hell no. I wouldn't have been allowed to grow up, most likely. But I can admire them from afar, especially their women (Borte!). And cheer them on. And stuff.

Alastair Reynolds' DOCTOR WHO: HARVEST OF TIME

Right out of the gate, Doctor Who: Harvest of Time has two things going for it: it was written by Alastair Reynolds, for whom my enthusiasm is well known by now*, and it's not just a Doctor Who novel but a Third Doctor/Jon Pertwee Doctor Who novel. Pertwee's Doctor being a fantastic (if asexual) Jerry Cornelius-type dashing 1960s action hero interpretation of the Doctor, whose performances and poise transcended his epoch's earthbound scripts and rather drab settings. And whose foils, especially Nicholas Courtney as the Brigadier and Roger Delgado as the Master**, were more than up to the task of sharing screen time with Pertwee.

But that's all just happy TV memories. How's the book?

Well, so, two questions persisted in my mind as I started reading here: how well can Alastair Reynolds do Doctor Who, being one, and, more importantly, how well can Doctor Who do Alastair Reynolds.

That Alastair Reynolds can do Doctor Who, especially the Third Doctor, becomes immediately plain. His grasp of the characters and milieu are note-perfect. All the best bits of that era are here: the Roger Delgado Master, all half-daft over-complicated schemes and the overwhelming need to brag about their infallibility (just before they fail); Jo Grant with just the right combination of pixie charm, shrewd social intelligence, and keen determination; Captain Yates and Sergeant Benton carrying their spears well and being generally good helpmeets; and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart, ever reliable as the steady, sensible if somewhat befuddled dad to the Doctor's madcap grandpa (remember, Doctor Who was originally a kids' show, so these are exactly the proper roles for these two characters to play in the viewer's/reader's imagination). There is the traditional underlying theme of the struggle between the urge to use military force and blow things up versus that to employ science and finesse to think one's way out of the problem. And yes, there is the requisite drabness of the setting -- military bases and bleak northern beaches and an offshore oil drilling platform full of big grey analogue equipment out in the North Sea. Oh, there is no doubt that Alastair Reynolds can do Doctor Who; one can see the teenybopper fanboy he once was sketching all of this out in loving detail long, long ago between cliffhangers.

Whether or not the Doctor could do Alastair Reynolds remains an open question for most of the book, however. I don't read Reynolds for confined gunmetal grey spaces and military jargon and busloads of old ladies being controlled by weird metallic crabs from outer space. I read Reynolds for vast atmospheric starscapes, cosmic ideas, staggering epic time scales, big ideas and mysterious alien artifacts of stupefying mystery and antiquity. And for cool noir-ish plots mixed in with all the astro-awe. These qualities are mostly lacking here as Reynolds romps through his childhood dream of taking charge of the Doctor and his pals.***

But note that "mostly." For the book splits into two storylines about halfway through, with the Doctor and the Master journeying into the future -- farther into the future than anyone has gone to with a time machine -- in a complicated scheme to prevent a hostile and sinister race, the Slid, from themselves accidentally preventing the very possibility of time travel. Reynolds just can't leave things like Fermi's Paradox (or whatever the time travel version of Fermi's Paradox would be) alone, can he, even when he's writing fantasy. The chapters dealing with this adventure of theirs are quite satisfyingly Reynoldsian, with an added bonus in that they spin out a new dimension to the Doctor/Master backstory.

But interspersed with this big cosmic stuff is more plodding earthbound UNIT action, in which Jo and the Brig and Yates and Benton are fighting a sort of rearguard action against the Slid on the oil rig, and these chapters are rather tiresome. Though as reminders of how it must have felt to be a Time Lord confined to earth in the 1960s they work marvelously, oh yes they do -- we want to be out in the universe with the Doctor and the Master, but no, we're stuck battling alien metallic crabs with plain old fashioned guns and bombs -- which would probably be fun, admittedly, if we didn't know what was going on Out There.

But of course, that's the essence of the Third Doctor's milieu, isn't it?

Ultimately, therefore, the answers to my two questions are "brilliantly well" and "well kind of." But the book is a hell of a lot of fun and were it the work of anyone but Reynolds I would just chalk it up as a fun bit of science-flavored fluff. But it is Reynolds, from whom I expect substantially finer stuff, and I didn't quite get it.

I look forward to his return to Reynolds doing Reynolds. As in the next Poseidon's Children book, On the Steel Breeze. Just a few more months!

*I say "for whom" rather than "for whose work" because in addition to appreciating his fiction, I find him, via Twitter and his blog, to be rather a wonderful fellow.

**As the very best Master, I should add, though I so would have enjoyed seeing Derek Jacobi continue in the role†, once he knew he was the Master and all. Le sigh.

†I would also accept his return to be a foil for this weirdo John Hurt version of the Doctor next year, whatever Hurt gets up to, because I ,Claudius, you guys.

***A dream that, let's face it, most of us share. Even I have proved incapable of resisting the allure of writing Doctor Who fiction. I'm writing, Bob help me, a novel featuring the Ninth Doctor but not Rose, thank you very much. And of course he's visiting some of my favorite long-forgotten locales and cultures from the show's deep past. I have no control over this. It's happening without my consent. When someone asks "Are you a god" you say yes. When a Doctor Who plot no one else has thought of yet comes knocking at your brain, you open the door and let our favorite Time Lord seize control of your writin' hand for a few weeks. Watch this space for details.

Gareth Roberts' DOCTOR WHO: ONLY HUMAN

So, here I've been lo these many months, out of my mind with excitement that soon (but not soon enough), I'd be holding a Doctor Who novel written by my favorite living science fiction writer (that would be Alastair Reynolds*, duh, and may he live long and prosper**), and one that concerns one of my favorite Doctors (that would be the Third, portrayed by the inimitable Jon Pertwee), and I realized, hey, I've never actually read a Doctor Who novel.

So I went hunting. Concurrently with a recent mania to watch the whole of the Ninth Doctor's single TV season and an accompanying wild hair to write a novel starring said Ninth Doctor, because Christopher Eccleston is another favorite.*** And Only Human had the best blurb. This might be Jasper Fforde's fault for making me sympathize so with Neanderthals. I'm just not sure on that.

I am now dangerously close to writing a blog post that is longer than the actual novel, which is short and sweet but packed with goodies to satisfy the wibbly wobbly timey wimey longings of any Who fan, new or old, with offerings ranging from a Neanderthal lost in 21st century England (whom Captain Jack, of all people, must help to acclimatize) to a population of technologically advanced modern humans living in a Prisoneresque village in prehistoric England but strangely uninterested in the Neanderthal and Homo sapiens sapiens populations nearby unless their "popper packs" (basically a ripoff of the Penfield Mood Organs from Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) compel them so to be, even though studying these populations and the charismatic megafauna that share their world is why said H.s.s. are there and then (for of course, they are time travelers, using a cheap and dirty version of time travel so cheap and dirty as to make Captain Jack's vortex manipulator look like something from the pages of Inhabitat).

But so, the Doctor and cavemen of various species. Who doesn't love a combination like that? I'm certainly in for a go, even if Rose has to come along, too, which she does, but no tale is perfect, right?****

Anyway.

Like I said, there's a lot packed into this short little book. While Captain Jack is training the displaced Neanderthal, Das, in 21st century living, the Doctor and Rose travel back to Das' time (to which Das cannot return because of reasons. And cheap and dirty time travel tech. Wibbly wobbly) to find out how/why Das got when he is and put a stop to whatever's going on because it is Bad. And they find the aforementioned Penfield Mood Organ junkies. Who are all enslaved via their Poppers by a charismatic and devastatingly (and artificially) intelligent, ruthless scientist named Chantal. Everybody wants to please Chantal. And Chantal is up to no good. Basically a Master/Rani hybrid, is Chantal. Except a bit more effective; at one point even the Doctor is drug-boozled into wanting to please Chantal -- and were this not a Doctor Who story, one might well have come to believe the jeopardy in which this places him. As it was, it was not at all easy to see how he was going to get out of his predicament. While Rose was off cavorting with cave men.

So, I wound up enjoying this little romp rather a lot. And I'll say this for my fellow Rose haters: book Rose, at least this book Rose, is rather more enjoyable than TV Rose -- not because Billie Piper did a bad job on TV or anything, just that the kind of stuff Gareth Roberts put her through would not be easy at all to pull off on TV, and is very likely way more satisfying for people who consider her dominance of the early seasons of NuWho to be their flaw rather than their glory.

Heh.

*I say this not only because it's true, but also because Reynolds occasionally reads my blog and my saying this makes him blush, and I'm just sadistic enough to enjoy making him blush. Especially when, for reasons that blast out my logic circuits, right now Britons can enjoy Harvest of Time, but I as an American not legally do so for another month. Harrumph.

**Heh.

***For those who will surely ask, my current (because they fluctuate, because I'm only human (heh) order of favorite Doctors is: Ninth, Third, Eleventh, Sixth, Fourth, First, Seventh, Second, Tenth, Fifth. Usually Eleventh is higher, and he's like to regain a higher spot on my list after the bravura performance in the most recent Neil Gaiman-penned episode in which Matt Smith got to pull a Gollum/Locutus of Who thing. But I'm all about the Pert right now because of Alastair Reynolds. Duh.

****And there I've outraged all the Rose partisans out there. Bring it. I've been dealing with people who aren't down with my dislike of Perpugilliam Brown† for decades now, and Al Bruno III and I are still even friends.

†I wasn't going to nerd out quite so much for this post, but dudes, trying to choke the life out of Peri on his very first day beneath Colin Baker's blonde curls is a huge part of why the Sixth Doctor is so high on my list. That and I'm just generally a bit partial to Bastard Doctors.

Winston Graham's ROSS POLDARK: A NOVEL OF CORNWALL

I first encountered the romantic (and Romantic) figure of Ross Poldark, veteran of the British side of the American Revolutionary War, on television, via the glorious BBC adaptation that PBS aired when I was a kid. I knew that someday I'd have to get my hands on these books to read them, because I could just tell that stuff was getting left out.

Oddly, though, this does not seem to be the case, much; the television show has proven to be very faithful to the books, or at least to this first one*. Which is to say that all the melodrama of the returned, wronged veteran plot is here, with just a dash more melancholy in the form of a prologue concerning Ross's father and uncle as the former lays dying and the latter lays plans to marry his son to the girl Ross has always fancied. Because everyone presumes Ross to be dead, of course.

Oh, Ross! The odds are stacked against him from the start. His father being a younger son, what patrimony there is for him is meager at best -- just enough to qualify as "landed gentry" with all the responsibilities of a country squire, not enough to afford to live at all well. The tin mine from which his father's fortune was drawn has sucked it all back down again, and a rotten pair of no-good servants have let the family pile get so run down that they're housing chickens in the living room... welcome home, war hero!

Oh, and yes, his childhood sweetheart is indeed marrying his cousin, son of the older son who got all the money and the original estate and the tin mine that's still worth a damn! Did I mention melodrama? Because melodrama.

But melodrama isn't all that's on offer here. There is also some wonderful nature porn, of which author Winston Graham was a gifted practitioner. In the high Romantic tradition, weather is often a stand in for/emphasizer of emotion, so, for example, a solitary figure standing quietly still and watching the sea can be understood as in turmoil if the waves are being especially powerful and crashy. But sometimes it's just there for the sake of being there. I'm already half in love with Cornwall, between growing up watching Poldark on television and having recently enjoyed the excellent Doc Martin series, exteriors of which were shot in Port Isaac, Cornwall (which, take a look at SF superstar Alastair Reynolds' relatively recent photo odyssey there, tracking down Doc's house and whatnot), and it's obvious that Graham was, too. With good reason.

But Graham does interiors, too, like that of a cottage in which dwell a family under Ross's care, and how the family spends its exhausted evenings. Graham gets the whole "world lit only by fire" and turns this shack into a mysterious abode of shadows and half-secrets: "On the floor Matthew Mark Martin's long bare legs glimmered like two silver trout; the rest of him was hidden in the massive pool of shadow cast by his mother."

Winston Graham is one cinematic writer, no?

But he is also, as it turns out, a writer with a real gift for honest, ordinary human emotion. Especially -- and this is quite rare -- happiness. For example, a scene, one that really just concerns Ross and Demelza rowing out to watch the yearly pilchard catch, is one of the loveliest I've read in a long time, not so much for the scenery (although that is nice) as for the rarity it captures: a moment of quiet, slightly awe-stricken joy, joy that is recognized and savored by our usually troubled hero. It's a total grace note, this scene, but I'm so glad it's there.

For Ross is a most turbulent, even exhausting character. A member of a family so ancient and steady they would probably have regarded the Cecils as gotten up parvenus, he shuns the local gentry in favor of the miners and farmers and poverty-stricken villagers who are his tenants, not out of any hipster-ish disdain for the manners and mores of the former so much as an inborn sense of decency (sharpened by the memory of his reprobate, skirt-chasing-and-catching father), which gets him into plenty of trouble when his proteges get caught poaching or when he rescues an urchin from a beating and makes the life-changing decision to adopt said urchin as a member of his household staff even after said urchin turns out to be a 13-year-old girl... and everyone in Cornwall starts thinking what you're probably thinking right now, unless you already know Ross and his story...

All in all, this first Poldark book is one of the loveliest things I've ever read; even the love story, which  sort of element usually makes me retch, is a thing of beauty. I suspect this is because Graham focused on the friendliness and companionship rather than on the passion. Ross Poldark spends most of the second half of the book hopeful and happy. And Graham found a way to make these states of mind anything but boring.

For pure pleasure in reading, Ross Poldark cannot be beaten.

*Though this is, of course, in plot and tone, really, this faithfulness. One way in which the TV show is lacking is in the way it portrays the relationship between Ross and Demelza. Robin Ellis did not really sell Ross's tenderness and genuine love for her, or the sheer happiness she brought to him. But could anyone, without a lot of cheesy voice-overs?

Ramez Naam's NEXUS #OneBookAtATime

I think I do a pretty good job of keeping up on developments in art and science via my RSS feeds, but somehow I seem to have missed the news that Ray Kurzweil and Robert Ludlum had a bastard child together and sent him back in time to grow up as a little Egyptian boy. But, you know, I can't keep track of everything. And better late than never, on such discoveries, I say.

Fortunately for me, I'm not dependent on myself alone to stay on top of matters. I have people like Lee Harris and the rest of the gang at Angry Robot books on my team. And boy, am I glad they found this Ramez Naam guy.

Nexus is that rare treat, a serving of what I can only call neuropunk, a still unusual genre, the best other example I can come up with is probably Bruce Sterling's Distraction (which just happens to be one of my all-time favorite novels), though a case could certainly be made for Alastair Reynolds' Conjoiner-heavy Redemption Ark as well.* Like Distraction, Nexus concerns itself with human enhancement technology that poses some sticky ethical, legal and political questions but is out there in the world regardless, and gaining traction. But where Distraction takes place in an America that is so close to being a failed state as makes no odds, and deals at least in part with political figures who are exploiting the tech for various ends, in Nexus, the American government is still iron-strong and opposes the tech with all its military might, repressive policing and scare tactics. It's impossible, therefore, not to see parallels to the "wars" on drugs and terrorism in which our country is still engaged.

Which is where the Robert Ludlum/Tom Clancy DNA comes into the equation, for while one hero, Kaden Lane, is a neuro-hacker extraordinaire, who has, with the help of a small team, added so much functionality to a mindlinking nanotech street drug (that would be Nexus) as to make it a whole new thing, our other is a government agent Samantha Catarenes, herself cybernetically and biotechnologically enhanced to the eyeballs because sometimes to fight monsters one has to become a bit of one, who is so ideologically opposed to what Kade and his people have done that it's a wonder she doesn't claw his eyes out on their first meeting. Nexus has already shown tremendous potential as a tool for coercion, after all. The irony of a government using old-fashioned forms of coercion to suppress a new coercion tech that they don't control is addressed, but only barely; the tension is mostly between those like Kade and the ambiguous pseudo-villain Su-Yong Shu (a Chinese neuroscientist who seems suspiciously way smarter than everyone else on earth) who value its potential to liberate and enhance and transform humanity, and those like Sam and her masters, who are hung up on how much worse it could make life for those who don't choose to take advantage of its offerings. As if anyone wouldn't, am I right?

But never fear, the novel rarely sinks to didacticism. It's too busy also being an action thriller! There are lots and lots and lots of fight scenes, with everything from fists to stealth helicopters. Being the sort who twiddles her thumbs through big explosive action scenes in movies, I could have done with a bit less of this, but I understand why it was there; most other people twiddle their thumbs through the parts I find interesting. And some of the action scenes are quite important to the plot, and to the plot of the book's sequels, to which I am eagerly looking forward.

Some of my friends have complained that there is too much infodump in Nexus, but aside from the unnecessary and distracting "Briefing" interludes**, I didn't see that. Briefings aside, it was just right, balanced out by some nice character moments and some themes I wasn't expecting to encounter here, like the potential dovetailing of Buddhist practice with neurotech (most of the story takes place at a giant international neuroscience conference in Bangkok), though this last element made the excruciatingly long and over-the-top fight scenes all the more jarring.

This first novel is obviously just laying the groundwork for potential big, big stuff in Crux***, due out in September. And a lot of how I'll ultimately evaluate this novel will depend on what Naam does in the sequel. If it's just another violent technothriller with cool transhuman elements, I might be disappointed. At this point, though, I have faith that Naam has something more interesting in mind, that he's brave enough to try really exploring how tech like Nexus (which is not as far-fetched as some might think, as anyone who follows a science blog or two, or who reads Naam's non-fiction More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement [which I declined to finish because I sing in the choir he's preaching to there, and because his publisher apparently blew the editing/proofreading budget on whores and coke or something, but which you might still want to check out if that doesn't bother you as much as it does me] will know already) might fundamentally change our world. All signs point to that being the case, so far.

*In fact, one could read Nexus as a sort of earthbound version of the origin story of the Conjoiners without doing oneself any great mental violence. Har har.

**Why are so many authors relying on this device of fictitious "documentation" these days? It looks to me almost like a lack of confidence in one's storytelling chops, if not an insulting attitude towards readers who "aren't getting it." Authors, once you've earned that willing suspension of disbelief (and Naam did, right away, with a gloriously bizarre and hilarious first scene that I'll remember for a long, long time), readers happily fill in the blanks themselves. They might not fill them in exactly the way you want them to, but that's not your call! Give it a rest and just tell us a damn story.

***And I, for one, am grateful that the sequels won't be Sexus and Plexus. What whaaat?

Re-Reads: Alastair Reynolds' REVELATION SPACE #OneBookAtATime

Oh, the memory of the chills that ran up and down my spine when my sweetheart-at-the-time handed me this book. I couldn't tell you whether the cover art or the title thrilled me more. And then to find that the contents were worthy of both! Suddenly I had a new favorite living science fiction author. And this was his very first novel!

That was ten years ago. And I've lost track of how many times I have re-read Revelation Space since. Each time, I get completely lost in the atmosphere of awe, and the intricate noir-ish plotlines of Dan Sylveste, a noir Indiana Jones in space, Ana Khouri badass military bee-hatch and assassin, and Ilia Volyova triumvir of the giant lighthugger spaceship, the Nostalgia for Infinity. To say nothing of the grotesque, baroque horrors of the Melding Plague, a hybrid of biological and computer virus that corrupts flesh and machinery in equal measure and, as its name implies, melds the one into the other, resulting in a captain that is becoming one with his spaceship, and a city full of buildings that have warped to resemble giant vertical pieces of driftwood. I mean, wow!

And the book holds up to multiple re-reads, both in its own right and as the first in a trilogy. As is so often the case with my favorite novels, re-reading only enriches Revelation Space. To read it for the first time is to be distracted into focusing on Dan Sylveste and his travails of leading a vast program of space archaeology and holding political power on a distant research planet, losing that power, and being induced to reveal his lifetime of staggering secrets. All of this forms the main plot of the novel, but it is the stories of Ana Khouri and of Volyova and the rest of the crew of Nostalgia for Infinity that continue onward in Redemption Ark and Absolution Gap. Sylveste's deeds and revelations are just what sets them in motion.

So this time, as Sylveste realized just how important the extinct alien race, the Amarantin*, are, and the greater theme of what came to be known as the Revelation Space Trilogy (coming up with a frankly chilling explanation for the Fermi Paradox) gets teased out, I focused more on Ana, whose story is frankly tragic: a soldier, wounded and temporarily cryo-suspended; shipped light years from home through a clerical error and separated from her husband, probably forever; manipulated first into acting as a sport-assassin for what amounts to a far-future reality TV show and then -- by two completely different parties -- into joining the crew of the Nostalgia for Infinity. She is the only character to appear in all three volumes of the trilogy and its side-quel, Chasm City, but is kind of the Frodo of the piece (though she gets some moments; see below), mostly manipulated by others and only just keeping a piece of herself back -- though with such manipulators as she faces, that's probably quite heroic right there.

And our Frodo is thrown up against some of the most magnificently bitchy characters in all of science fiction: arrogant, selfish scientists (some of them acting from beyond the grave!), singleminded obsessive jackasses, would-be murderers with cosmic vendettas, sociopathic and psychopathic maniacs in charge of weapons that could destroy whole planets without even needing a change of batteries. The dialogue among these characters is just the best:

"You prick," Khouri said, spitting in the process. "You narrowminded, egotistical prick."
"Congratulations," Sylveste said. "Now you can progress to words with six syllables."

And this is before she has a plasma rifle pointed at her sort-of-ally's crotch!

And then there are the set pieces, which never get old -- the discovery of the ancient Amarantin city on the planet Resurgam; the Shadowplay chase through Chasm City and its "Mulch";  the unbelievably cool spacesuit-cum-shuttles by which Volyova and Khouri pull a Baumgartner to the surface of Resurgam: the vast baroque bulk of Nostalgia for Infinity and its haunting secret, which is also the secret not only of the Amarantin but of yet another and even more mysterious alien race from Sylveste's past. Like his fellow "New Weird" author China Mieville, Reynolds thinks big -- but Reynolds was a working astronomer, still at the European Space Agency while writing this book, so his weird is cosmic in scale and scientifically plausible. He hit me like a piece of space debris at hyperspace speeds and he's never disappointed me, as numerous entries on this blog demonstrate.

All that and he's a lovely bloke on Twitter. You'll probably hear a lot more about him from me this year

Also, check out this boffo cover for the Serbian (or Croatian?) language edition of the novel! Why couldn't this be the cover art for the American -- or any -- English language edition? It's even better than the one that originally gave me the chills! So much better. Look, that's totally Cerberus under attack by the bridgehead. The spaceship is maybe not as cool, but so what!

*And coming off of Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men as I am, I couldn't help but imagine the Amarantin as his Seventh (Flying) Men. Hey, why not? It's my brain.