Christopher Ruocchio's HOWLING DARK (Narr by Samuel Roukin)

I could already tell, less than halfway through the second volume of Christopher Ruocchio's Sun Eater series, that it's going to be one I'll enjoy returning to, even if it doesn't have a conclusion as satisfying as I currently believe it will. I still watch the first three seasons of Battlestar Galactica, the first four of Babylon 5  (and hope ardently that we get to see its reboot/revival), after all. 

As always, here there be dragons, by which I mean spoilers, except maybe I actually mean dragons, hmmm? Of a kind? Waving lots of pale and grasping human hands in the dark?

Howling Dark launches the story of Lord Hadrian Marlowe, renegade interstellar aristocrat, some 50 years into the future from where we left off in Empire of Silence. He's also a long way from the planet where he washed up after escaping his unwanted destiny as a cleric-cum-torturer for the repressive Chantry, the Sollan Empire's state religion. At the end of Empire Hadrian made contact with a small party of Cielcin, members of an alien race with which humanity has been at war for hundreds and hundreds of years. The Chantry and other local powers assumed these Cielcin had come as a vanguard to an invasion force, but Hadrian, the only person on the whole planet who had ever learned any of the Cielcin's language, discovered that they were actually there on a religious pilgrimage, to visit some intriguing ruins left by a long lost ancient civilization that long predated human or Cielcin exploration or conquest. And in so coming to understand that much, Hadrian saw a possibility to try for Peace. There's a being of some kind out in the dark who has a way to actually make contact with a leader of a major clan of the Cielcin (who are so predatory and warlike that they will prey and war on one another as soon as humanity) -- but that entity dwells on a mysterious and possibly only legendary planet!

And so Hadrian has embarked on a unique mission to try to find this entity, The Undying, on that planet, Vorgossos. With him are many of his friends from his gladiator days and one or two from his unpleasant time as a courtier on the backwater planet he's left behind - and a whole lot of new people, most of them military or mercenaries, representing not only the Sollan Empire but a few other human polities as well.

And here we're experiencing a few elements of the 21st century's revival of Doctor Who, and not just because we know that the Hadrian telling us his story is a Hadrian centuries old who has the guilt of genocide on his conscience; we also have elements specifically of Stephen Moffat's controversial habit of introducing new-to-us characters who have established long and deep relationships with our hero off-screen. For one thing, Hadrian has a lover, Jenan, who was originally part of a kind of pirate crew Hadrian's mission fleet tangled with, defeated and absorbed some time over the 50 years since Empire. And while Hadrian is nominally the Lord Commandant of the mission, it's really a career military officer, Bassander Lin, who is calling the shots. Their relationship is mostly cooperative and cordial, until Plot Things Start Happening!

But so, I found a sense of breathlessly having to catch up as Howling Dark opened, very similar to how I felt when I managed to read Malka Older's Centenal Cycle in the wrong order. I suspect that this will someday be an unusual experience, though; the Sun Eater series already has a few side-quels and it wouldn't surprise me a bit if a future novel or novella might be devoted to the early years of Hadrian's ragtag fleet. I would opine, though, that such would really not be necessary (but then, I'm also on Team Never Show Us Jim the Fish). The Sun Eater saga is wonderfully enriched by strong character relationships, but it's got a big looming plot question ahead, as the series' entire point is explaining to us how Hadrian Marlowe became the Sun Eater. How he unseated a tyrannical captain and recruited his crew isn't very important to the arc and these are all very long books already. 

I will say this, though: Ruocchio is way better than Moffat at this trick. I mean, Moffat just dropped the Paternoster Gang on us out of the blue and we never even really got to know much about how they met or why they were so fiercely loyal to the Doctor. Moffat just counted on the characters being too awesome for this to annoy us and just kept jingling the keys. Ruocchio made the new characters awesome and explained where they came from and why. And he did it well enough to make some early scenes of irrevocable parting between them feel earned and honestly affecting. Very affecting. No, you're the one who's crying.

Several unsavory encounters and gripping fight scenes and followings of clues later, Marlowe and his friends have found the legendary Vorgossos (orbiting a brown dwarf star!) and come under the jaundiced eye of its unnaturally immortal ruler, The Undying, whose name is Kharn Segara* (a figure of myth from the founding era of the Sollan Empire) and suddenly we're in yet another literary territory, once which I absolutely did not see coming even though our narrator is surnamed Marlowe! For the interlude on the lost planet whereat Hadrian seeks a contact through which to begin peace negotiations is straight outta Heart of Darkness, my friends, with Kharn Segara a 15,000-year-old Kurtz ruling a mad kingdom at the ass end of known space, and yes, my friends, it gets that dark. Actually, more so, because this heart of darkness is also a demented cyberpunk hell-hole where Kharn employs unspeakable means to prolong his own and his exclusive clients' lives and to satisfy the perversions common to bored playboys everywhere and I was bracing myself for this to get truly icky but Ruocchio is a tasteful writer as well as a talented one.

Unlike in Conrad's most famous tale, though, here Kurtz is only a first or warm-up boss; there is so much worse to come, even in his own realm, than Kharn Sagara, you guys!

Anyway, while we're in Kurtz Kharn's realm, we also get to watch Hadrian's relationship with a character I didn't mention last time, the enigmatic Valka, develop in a lot of interesting directions. Last novel, Valka seemed poised to be a love interest, if one whose levels of education and culture were dizzyingly above Hadrian's and then there's also the fact that she's from a civilization that doesn't share the Sollan Empire's maniacal Butlerian Jihad-esque distrust/hatred of computers and artificial intelligence. In many ways, Valka is straight out of a cyberpunk novel, with a headful of neural augmentations that make her that vital character in every Shadowrun game, the technomancer/hacker, but imagine that character who is also Indiana Jones because she is a xeno-archaeologist in the Dan Sylveste mode (though she wisely mostly stays out of politics). Or a (mostly) law-abiding River Song? Anyway, Valka rocks, and Marlowe knows he is nowhere near worthy of her but wants to try to be, even though he regards her with just enough superstitious dread to basically think of her as a witch -- and hey, she almost got burned as one near the end of Empire of Silence. She still hasn't forgiven him for fighting a duel to save her when she was well on her way to saving herself, of course. Anyway, they spend a lot of time alone in various flavors of guest quarters on Kharn's dark, weird planet trying to figure out the many mysteries of what Kharn is up to, how/if they're going to get what they want out of him, and what his intentions toward the Cielcin prisoner, called Tanaran, that he has stripped them of in the guise of entertaining their petition. Oops!

In an attempt to regain control of Tanaran and of their immobilized spaceship, Hadrian and Valka go exploring and Ruocchio explores a terrifying conjunction of ideas: what if the Vatic Fountain (Gene Wolfe) were a terrifying monster out of the deep past, and what if the Pattern Jugglers (Alastair Reynolds) gave swimmers the ability to See Through Time? Meaning Hadrian gets not one but two cryptic glimpses into his future in this novel, though the first was only really a preview of the second, into his metamorphosis from renegade nobleman/mercenary to figure of superstitious awe and dread? In a terrifying encounter made all the more intense by narrator Roukin's choices in how to voice a weird collective inhumanity waiting in the dark at the end of a cyborg-guarded labyrinth?

Yeah...

While all of this has been going on, the Sollan Empire has not been sitting idle, of course; nor have the Cielcin. We learn late in Howling Dark that the number of star systems the Empire has lost to Cielcin incursion has come to exceed 900, with billions and billions of human beings dead (and eaten!) (most of them) or brutally enslaved and mutilated (in a manner chillingly reminiscent of the fate of Father Sandoz in Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow, which, yikes).

And of course the conflict between the Empire and the Cielcin follows Hadrian to Kharn Segara's creepy dark planet, first according to Hadrian's design, because he can't start peace talks with the Cielcin without eventually meeting some Cielcin who aren't his prisoners, and then very much not according to Hadrian's design, and this is where Ruocchio goes bigger than big. And also displays a talent for manipulating reader emotions that I almost resent because of the devastating use he made of it here, leading us from baroque horror to tense diplomatic drama to huge boffo combat scenes to almost unbearable character drama (Hey, Hadrian has been warning us from the start that he has often been accused of having a taste and talent for melodrama!).

I suppose the game of spot-the-reference (and hey, we haven't even gotten to what amounts to Hadrian's possessing a light saber, which Ruocchio has managed to make even cooler than the Star Wars version by concocting a plausible-sounding pseudoscientific explanation for how the weapon works and, more importantly, what its limitations are) that I've played here makes it sound like the author has just cherry picked his favorite bits from other novels, is just a kid playing with a mismatched set of action figures and telling his babysitter the story as she indulgently smiles or blatantly ignores his babbling, but that's the least deserved criticism that could be leveled on these books. Ruocchio, who's had a pretty good career as a genre fiction editor, has impeccable taste in science fiction bits and bobs and wields them all with tremendous skill, maturity, intelligence and passion. Even the bits that seem to have no business appearing together are made to feel organically joined and earnestly communicated through Hadrian Marlowe's insightful, frank, erudite and compelling narrative voice. Hadrian is as complicated and well-rounded as a Dorothy Dunnet hero, enacting a Gene Wolfe plot (and occasionally using Wolfean vocabulary**)

through a Mary Doria Russell moral and Alastair Reynolds physical universe. I have, as the kids used to say, no choice but to stan.

Seriously, friends, don't sleep on these. Hadrian's story is already epic AF (and we've gotten the barest taste of how epic it's going to get by the revelation in this novel of why he bears the sobriquet of "Hadrian Half-Mortal) and it's only going to get more so. A fifth volume in the main narrative is coming out in December. There's plenty of time yet to catch up on the series in time to plunge into that with me and Ruocchio's other, too few by my lights, fans. Yeah, they're big fat books but they never get dull and never stop provoking thoughts and ideas and feelings and, well, what the hell do we read novels for if not to have those?

As for me, I've already started listening to Demon in White. And Ruocchio has already made me cry at least once.

*Whose name I was mentally spelling as "Khan" because narrator Samuel Roukin -- still absolutely perfectly cast as our protagonist-narrator, and if these books ever get adapted for the screen I hope it's soon so Roukin is still young enough to play Hadrian -- is very, very British.

**My favorite of Ruocchio's pseudo-Wolfean terms so far is "Xenobite," which Hadrian uses to refer to aliens the way Severian uses "Cacogens", though "Xenobite" is a more accessible and evocative word, employing the "xeno-" prefix to denote otherness while rhyming with "cenobite," which is more than just a name for the monstrous powers of Hellraiser fame. It also denotes monasticism, and those to whom Hadrian generally refers with the word are the Cielcin, whose social structure is fanatically hierarchical and to be a Cielcin's subordinate is by definition to be its (and that is the pronoun; the Cielcin are an asexual race) slave. Interesting, no?

Ada Palmer's PERHAPS THE STARS

Blogger's note: This post concerns the fourth novel of a quartet so it might not make a lot of sense if you haven't read my posts on the other three books. 

 We are the instruments that carve the path from cave walls to the stars.

And so I come to the very satisfying end of Terra Ignota, Ada Palmer's astonishing and astonishingly weird and unexpectedly timely quartet of 18th century-styled science fiction novels,  with Perhaps the Stars. Suddenly, Palmer has decided that there is no time to waste and turns the story arc into the incident-crammed War Story it's always threatened to become, with one huge change: [REDACTED] is understood to be dead with his place taken up by a character who has never gotten a name and who has barely appeared in the prior three novels unless one has been watching for them carefully, but is this really a new character? Or is it actually somebody else? Or possibly somebodies else? We sort of find out later, but can we trust what we're told? These kinds of puzzles are why I like these kinds of books, and why I consider Ada Palmer to be the literary love child of Dorothy Dunnett and Gene Wolfe.

There are lots of reasons why I now consider this the most satisfying series ender I've encountered in yoinks. And yes, that includes the one you're thinking of. It might, over time, come to be considered on a par with that one, but then again, it might end up ranking as better, for me.

The most exciting thing I have to say going into this post is that, at long last, we get to start learning about that most mysterious seventh hive, which has only gotten passing mention so far: the mostly-Moon-dwelling Utopian Hive, which has been busily engaged in a generations-long project to terraform Mars as so many "small u" utopian types long to do in so many other science fiction stories. Unlike any of those I've read (with the sort-of-exception of the Expanse novels), though, this terraforming project has always dwelt in the shadow of war, because on Earth another hive, a bizarre hybrid of the good old Mitsubishi corporation we know from our reality and the good old Greenpeace organization that we also know from our reality, has been steadily buying up every scrap of land on Earth for the entire life of this post Church-War 25th century civilization. Land, the Mitsubishi Hive believes, is the ultimate repository of wealth, and an individual's power within the Hive is directly related to how much land they own -- but what happens when suddenly there is a whole new planet's worth of land available that is not really within Mitsubishi's easy grasp? Won't its Earthly holdings lose value? And won't that be a swell casus belli? To, uh, go with all the other casus belli we've encountered in these books? 

This background is of paramount importance in the other three books in that it is inextricably intertwined with the lot in life of primary narrator Mycroft Canner, who alleges that he committed his crimes at least partly to avert a deliberately planned war his adopted family was committed to provoking -- on the grounds of war being better now, while Mars is still a project and not yet a reality, than later, when a war would be an interplanetary disaster that could actually annihilate the entire human race. Despite the importance of all of this, though, Utopia has been a cypher, until Perhaps the Stars, in which we finally get to hear U-Speak spoken, encounter its vast diversity of U-beasts (strange and fanciful hybrids of genetic engineering and cybernetics) and get to know at least one actual character from that Hive. And his awesome invisible black lion!

It's about time!

Meanwhile, War. Of course, we have since seen that nothing so drastic or exotic as a sudden glut of Martian land on the market in the distant future is needed to touch off conflict in this world that has only managed to stay peaceful through a secret program of precisely targeted assassinations over its hundreds of years of history. The prior three novels have explored the much more mundane causes that will actually bring war to this idyllic-seeming world. All it has really taken is one jilted lover (and never mind they'd been jilted for a weird kind of faithlessness) with access to the right information and the will to expose that the leaders of this world have feet of clay, and the appearance on the world scene of a would-be dictator who might wind up a benevolent one but who really wants to take that chance except for fools and people who have been conquered by the dictator's personal anti-charisma?

And speaking of J.E.D.D. Mason, thank goodness for the Utopian Hive, and one character, Huxley, in particular. Huxley has been guarding our new/old narrator invisibly throughout the chaos, and in a moment of bared souls explained that there is a very good reason why J.E.D.D. Mason's sobriquet in their culture is The Alien; as far as Huxley is concerned, he is one:

 I believe we had no reason to assume First Contact would come to us in a ship of steel across the darkness that we happened to have senses tune to see. Why not a ship of flesh? Why not across a darkness as unknown to us as Starlight to the creatures of the deep sea? I believe a Being boundaryless and unfamiliar with time, accustomed to an existence where everything within Its perception is directed by Its thoughts, would find it very hard to understand our physics and experience, hard to explain Itself to us. And I believe that, if the first humans to teach this being language were Madame's it might well learn from them the word God.

For much of the novel, though, J.E.D.D. Mason is really just a J.E.D.D. Mason-shaped hole in the narrative, because an early salvo in the war was a masterful dual attack on the planet-wide system of flying cars, conveniently centrally controlled in order to maintain a truly impressive safety record, and the global communications system. Suddenly every human on earth has to confront the reality of Distance* again, and everybody is stuck where they were when the initial attack took place. J.E.D.D. Mason was in the Masonic capital city of Alexandria; most everybody else we're still concerned with (and mercifully a whole lot of characters that I have disliked thoroughly in the prior three novels have kind of dropped out of this one) is in the Alliance headquarters city-complex of Romanova on the island of Sardinia, or has been trapped elsewhere by circumstance or design. But without the ability even to make the 25th century's equivalent of a phone call, J.E.D.D. Mason is stranded and all but mute (remember, he speaks all languages and none, and only Mycroft Canner can understand him well enough to interpret his speeches for everybody else).

Meanwhile, Mycroft's fellow J.E.D.D.-fanboi and one of the series' enduring villains, Dominic Seneschal, made on J.E.D.D.'s suggestion the interim head of Mitsubishi since the previous one is under arrest for the crimes of the targeted assassination program that blew up and was exposed earlier in the series, is stuck in Japan, but that's not going to keep him from his idol. Seemingly the whole of Mitsubishi's resources have been bent to the single goal of "rescuing" J.E.D.D. Mason from Alexandria -- whether J.E.D.D. wants that or not -- and suddenly Mitsubishi has a huge and powerful naval force and, for all that the Hive owns most of the land on earth, suddenly controls the seas as well, commandeering other ships, interning their crews in prison camps or forcing enemy personnel to adopt one of a handful of other, rather ingenious means of guaranteeing their cooperation**, and generally terrorizing everybody. And that's not all!

A fact of this world that I've not talked much about before looms as potentially as big an issue for it as the existence and will of J.E.D.D. Mason, and that's the existence of a new type of human, created rather than born, very different from the standard model, known for reasons that I'm not going to get into here as a "Set-Set." Set-Sets are raised from infancy to interface directly with the intricate and omnipresent technological web that runs the world; for instance, two members of the family-unit that controls the global flying car system are Set-Sets as that is the only way a human being could manage the levels of complexity required to do that. Anyway, Set-Sets' biological senses are stunted in favor of the adapted ability to accept a much greater range of inputs via their interfaces with technology; their bodies are attenuated and weak. They're not regarded as cyborgs, but functionally, they are cyborgs. And a faction within this society is as angry about their existence as 21st century fundamentalist types are about abortion; to them the whole practice of raising Set-Sets is an abomination that should be outlawed and severely punished. And as Perhaps the Stars gets going, this faction, called the Nurturists, has greatly expanded its definition of what counts as a Set-Set. All of the people who grew up in Madame D'Auroet's brother, for instance, have been branded "Gender Set-Sets"*** -- but these, at least two of whom have grown up to lead or co-lead Hives, are not being targeted for "rescue" as they are to be regarded as irredeemable. They're to be put down.

Under cover of War, this can be pretty easily accomplished, they come to realize. If they can just get someone into proximity with the targets.

The other element that has really made this final volume of the Terra Ignota quartet stand out for me above the prior four, though, is none of the above. What stands out is its willingness -- indeed,  insistence on -- dealing with a fundamental question at the heart of science fiction that usually seems, very carefully and deliberately, to be ignored: is it worth it? Is the dream of space and discovering and settling other worlds, which is, after all, an experience that won't be open to us all or even to very many of us, worth the commitment of effort and resources and time and agony it would take to achieve? And, just because our ancestors thought so, or at least acted like they thought so, does that definitely bind us and our descendants to continuing in that costly endeavor? Life on earth is already no picnic, even in this idyllic 25th century, even before materiél and intellect and energy and, eventually, personnel that could be devoted to trying to improve the lot of humans already born and growing old and suffering and getting ill and making art and dying and mourning the dead... is diverted towards a dream that none of the billions from whom they're diverted will get to enjoy? Is Space the ultimate Sunk Cost Fallacy for the human race, at least as it now exists?

This tension is enacted as a secret war within the War that J.E.D.D. Mason terms "the Trunk War", the analogy describing the choice between exploring and colonizing Space or using our resources to make Earth better now for everyone as two great branches on a decision tree, each battling to become that tree's trunk. Utopia, of course, represents Space, and seems to be leading humanity in its direction with everybody's blessing,  but we discover in this last novel that many of the anomalies Mycroft and the gang have been encountering are very much due to the machinations of those who want Paradise on Earth Now. A whole Hive's worth of somebodies has been throwing incredibly subtle but devastating spanners into the works since even before the War began. Intrigue!

Only - need this be a zero-sum game, everybody realizes late in the novel? Doesn't the existence of J.E.D.D. and the Miracle Child Bridger and a bunch of cool stuff Bridger did before turning into Achilles maybe give everybody a chance at both? Especially since these mcguffins have put things like biological immortality for everyone very much within our reach? Which, wouldn't colonizing the stars be a lot less painful if we could attempt it as immortals instead of, for instance, sentencing several as yet unborn generations to living out their entire lives as passengers/cargo on spaceships, never even to know planetary life for even a moment?

As all of these thorny issues get careful consideration and occasional actual battle scenes occur, Perhaps the Stars attempts one more semi-innovation in genre fiction: making the transfer of power from one generation to the next an equal concern to all the other story elements; Mycroft is not the only major chess piece to be swept off the board for considerable periods of in-narrative time, and several key resolutions to crises are developed and executed by promoted pawns, as is emphasized in a fantastic instance of near-gloating when a narrator realizes that series villainess Madame's quartet-long plot to rule the world by bringing back Patriarchy was defeated by a whole bunch of, uh, decidedly not Patriarchs. And more explicitly, while 25th century society had already greatly empowered young people through things like creating a class of legislators that can only be minors but by giving the 25 Minority Senators the power of veto over any decision made by the Romanova Alliance Senate if all 25 of those Minor Senators agree, as "Peacefall" in its many forms begins the work of remaking society, the Minor Senators, who were raised with absolute faith in the institutions of their society and the infrastructure that made it a near-paradise and then watched their elders almost destroy it, get final say in how the perpetrators of the war are to make amends for what they destroyed. And the category of "perpetrators" includes both faction leaders and actual combatants, with even J.E.D.D Mason (himself still a minor while this whole epic takes place) sharing in the (incredibly fair and wholesome) sentence the young people mete out. Among the many, many ideas for thinking our way, as a species, out of our myriad of existential threats and dilemmas here back in the 21st century that Ada Palmer has suggested in this quartet, this last one -- empowering the kids to have a real say in how things are run -- is the one that makes me the most wistful, because probably the least likely ever to get implemented. And so I end this series and this post on a sigh. And the sinking feeling that I'm probably going to have to read this quartet again sometime.

Bravo!

*Personified by Palmer-as-Mycroft as the Greek god Poseidon, whose realm was the oceans, since it is the oceans that are the hardest for humans to cross and also most of the biggest stretches of distance we encounter, at least until we start thinking between planets or stars -- and by the way, brush up on your Greek and especially your Homeric mythology before starting these books, if you can, because this is a device Palmer/Mycroft just LOVES, just as the 18th century author/philosophers she and her characters look to as Authorities on Everything loved to do.

**A whole intriguing and imaginative thread in this narrative is how various factions come up with ingenious technological and sociological ways to mitigate the inherent cruelty of warfare. Some of them seem like they could actually be real someday, even if we don't ever get a Miracle Child who can wish things into existence. 

***There are lots of different kinds of Set-Sets already, based largely on how they're raised to understand the world that their interfaces show them, so this isn't quite as big a stretch as it first seems.

Ada Palmer's THE WILL TO BATTLE (Narrated by T. Ryder Smith)

 Ada Palmer did some interesting things as her weird and highly imaginative third volume of the Terra Ignota series, The Will to Battle, kicked off that I both admire and find frustrating as hell, which is my reaction to this series overall anyway, so let's just talk about that right away before I get around to the rest of the book.

As the story begins, most of her 25th Century society is in shambles. A 200+ year conspiracy of minutely targeted assassinations to keep the peace has been unmasked at the expense of exposing the complicity of three of the seven Hives (for more about these and the way this society as a function works as a whole, look at my posts on the earlier volumes, Too Like the Lightning and Seven Surrenders) in that plot. 

Furthermore, a grander plot to make one young man, the unbelievably strange J.E.D.D. Mason, the heir to the leadership of all seven Hives, has also been unmasked, exposing, yes, the complicity of all seven Hive leaders and numerous other high officials as compromised in some fairly icky ways. Plus, a very public attempt on the life of J.E.D.D. Mason that was actually successful also forced the "miracle child" Bridger out of hiding to bring J.E.D.D. Mason back to life (!) and pretty much shatter the ever-precarious commitment to secularity in this society; if a child like Bridger and a young man like J.E.D.D. Mason can exist, that's a Babel Fish caliber argument that there really is a God of some kind and that that God has been paying attention and chosen to intervene.

This is a hell of a read for the early days of Russia's attack on Ukraine, by the way. 

But so, everybody is in crisis, starting with the Congress of the Universal Free Alliance (the seven Hives), this society's ultimate deliberative/legislative body, whereat a whole lot of drastic measures have been put up for debate, up to and including dissolving the Hive that hosted and hid the assasination conspiracy. In order to force everybody to slow down and think things through, the head of the Masonic Hive, Cornel Mason, who bears the title of Masonic Emperor (and is also the adoptive father of J.E.D.D. Mason), takes the drastic step of joining the session and demanding the floor for a filibuster, in which we finally get to learn what "Black Law" and "Gray Law" and "White Law" mean both as modifiers for "Hiveless" (people who have chosen not to become members of any of the seven Hives) and as codifications of this society's laws in and of themselves, and reads out long-winded but carefully thought-out passages from the universal charter that governs all of Earth. For two long novels previously, hundreds and hundreds of pages and/or hours and hours of audio, we've encountered those terms -- Madame D'Arouet always wears her Black Law Hiveless sash over her elaborate 18th Century cosplay, for instance, and we've frequently heard other characters and officials as being Gray Laws or White Laws, but had to stumble along on context and our traditional (Western) associations for the associated colors. But now we finally learn what it all really means: Black Laws agree to be governed only by a bare minimum of the codified laws of the UFA, those that have universally been agreed to be undebateable over generations (like don't kill people, don't destroy nature, don't torture animals, don't interfere with emergency workers, don't break contracts, etc*); the Gray Law Hiveless and White Law Hiveless have agreed to be governed by further expansions of these laws, but we don't get to find out the details of these as Mason's filibuster is finally concluded when other delegates break in to announce that they have complied with his wishes and come up with a reasonable agenda for the session.

So on the one hand I really, really like how Palmer made the infodump of these laws an organic part of the plot instead of sticking them in as an appendix or just forcing us to cruise on context, but I'm also really, really annoyed that we had to wait until this third volume for this to come up. But there are other frustrations yet to consider and, yeah, bigger than usual spoilers in my very spoilery blog for TLTL and SS.

A big concern as a handful of characters desperately try to hold everything together is with whom a new-old character is going to side, and it's not really Mycroft; nor is it Bridger the Miracle Child, except that it kind of is, because the heartbreaking climax to SS saw Bridger giving up his self and his body to become a much more limited but still amazing character who both is and isn't Achilles, and yes, I mean the Greek hero whose Rage touched off the Iliad (which one of Mycroft's murder victims was re-writing as a space opera with giant robots duking it out between the planets). The resulting new-old character, who not only carries the Greek hero's memories and personality (very much as imagined by Homer but also somewhat the actual man the mythical figure is supposed to have been based on) but also those of the kind of battle-hardened World War II-ish officer represented by the little green army men toys kids apparently still play with into the 25th century, and the re-imagined Achilles of the space opera rewrite of the Iliad. It's weird and complicated and I kind of wish more attention had been given to what existence must really be like for such a being, but what's important here is that he is the only human-ish being alive who actually knows how to do this whole War thing. So everybody wants him on their side, especially since he and Mycroft kind of come as a package deal, except for the whole problem that Mycroft is simultaneously both a) Everybody in the whole world's slave as a Servicer but also b) Very much a part of J.E.D.D. Mason's sworn staff, so, big thumb on the scale there. This storyline alone is enough drama and angst to fill a whole book but this is Terra Ignota so...

But first, I have to express one great big disappointment that is really more my problem than the book's but it greatly diminishes my enjoyment of this series in much the way the revelation that Niccolo/Claes in Dorothy Dunnet's House of Niccolo has at least one frankly supernatural ability in that he can totally douse for water and precious metals, which annoyed me so much that I still havent read past The Unicorn Hunt even though I 100% love that series and want to know how it ends. And yeah, five years is a long time to hold a grudge but there are so many other good books out there, you guys!

Anyway, J.E.D.D. Mason is a god.** Maybe Bridger was, too, only he didn't get to grow up and his transformation into Achilles divested him of his extraordinary powers, so we'll never find out, but J.E.D.D. Mason is totally a god, invited by what he calls The God of This Universe to visit here and have a Conversation after he's experienced existence here for a while. I really, really could have done without this, and if it wasn't for the fact that this novel ended on not so much a cliffhanger as a possibly misperceived tragedy every bit as devastating as the Bridgermorphosis that ended SS I might have just stopped but all the stuff that happened at the end there was just stunning and I had to find out what happens next, for all that really not a whole lot happened in this one; it's just that what little did happen was huge and had tremendous consequences that has put all of humanity and (as Mycroft points out) all of its history of sacrfice and achievement at stake, because what was it all for if humanity finally decides to end it all in a family spat after hundreds of years of peace?

But so, there's the prolonged parliamentary debate I mentioned above, and then a visit to the Blacklaw stronghold of Hobbestown which, again, is so interesting I would absolutely love to read a whole novel set there for all that it's basically Galt's Gulch with cooler technology, and along the way J.E.D.D. Mason not only reveals to everybody that yep, he's a god, but also declares war on everybody else and demands the unconditional surrender to him personally of all seven hives, but nobody seems to care too much about that because there's already going to be a war, until the guy that originally shot J.E.D.D. Mason dead decides he's going to make everybody care and a temporary planetary truce is declared so the Olympic Games can be held in Antarctica (!) and the Utopians rile the waters some more by whisking away everybody on earth with the knowledge and capability to build "Harbingers" (this world's term for any kind of weapon, nuclear, biological, cybernetic, whatever, that can end the world) so that nobody has the advantage that they pose and everything goes even more to hell than the reader has already been expecting and I'm IN.

Plus, except when he is voicing the two characters that are going to be annoying to listen to anyway, Madam D'Arouet and Thisbe, T. Ryder Smith has grown on me. I've still gone ahead and just squeezed my budget to get the ebook of the fourth volume, though, since my library still hasn't acquired it in any edition yet and I want to finish this series with it all still fresh in my head because otherwise I'll probably never bother.***

But, I am so not down with the god thing, you guys. Snarl. Anyway, onward to Perhaps the Stars.

*I found a great site that has transcribed the whole of the law code read off by Emperor Mason here. It's been a great resource for writing this post since one of the other annoyances of audio books is how difficult it is to go back and check on important passages like this.

**His only godlike power, though, is inspiring ridiculous, even slavish loyalty in those close to him, and being really, really annoying. He was raised by Madame D'Arouet, after all, who decided on top of everything else to basiclaly make him learn seven or eight languages at once, so he grew up speaking his own idiosyncratic pidgeon of all of them that only a handful of people can understand and needs Mycroft, who also happens to speak all of those languages from a systematic self-education he undertook as part of his Big Murder Plot as a young man, to translate for him. So I don't know if it's just meant to be J.E.D.D. Mason really being an annoying character or if he just seems more so because Mycroft has chosen to write his chronicles in the style of the 18th century, but J.E.D.D. Mason's monologues (which is the only way he speaks, generally; he declaims) sound something like this:

[My universe] differs greatly from this one… My universe does not have time, space, limit, ignorance, discovery, exploration, hope, solitude, or death… Your own Creator, the Maker of this universe, is My Peer. He made this flesh so that I might visit His universe and here perceive His works. It is a dialogue between Us. During My visit I have experienced some forms of human suffering, so I sympathize with what you endure for Our dialectic, but I know no other way for Us to communicate.

But so, anyway, I'm still not sure if he is "actually" a god or if he's just convinced everybody that he is a god, but they're functionally the same thing so, yuck. 

**Though I'm still going to finish House of Niccolo someday soon. Just, again, there's not going to be anymore new Dorothy Dunnett, so I'm rationing her out like I do Philip K. Dick.

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.

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.

Hilary Mantel's THE MIRROR AND THE LIGHT

History is always a spoiler for historical fiction, so I knew, as the virtual pages of The Mirror and the Light dwindled, that I was about to lose a beloved friend and I emotionally braced for it, but even so, I cried when it happened... in the book. Of course it really happened over 500 years ago.

Hilary Mantel definitely fills the role left empty lo these many years by the late Dame Dorothy Dunnet, and Mantel is a more than worthy successor, but she hasn't aped the mistress' achievements so much as inverted them. Dunnett wants us mystified by her heroes, guessing at their motivations and what they're going to do next, unable to penetrate their facades. Thorfinn, Lymond, Niccolo, all are observed from the outside; we get accounts of their deeds from the point of view of everbody else they encounter, spending a bit exploring the interiority of each of their friends, enemies, lovers, employers, lords. And nobody does this better than Dorothy.

This is not where she and Hilary Mantel overlap. What they share is a commitment to research and to world-building (as my friend Connor Wroe Southard explores in his latest) and an utter lack of fear of going long to create as complete a portrait of their ages and milieus as they can. Mantel just assumes a bit less erudition and command of languages on the part of her readers, is all, which can make her seem a bit more accessible than Dunnett, but beware: Mantel doesn't suffer foolish readers either. The first and, to a degree, second books in this trilogy were famously difficult for many readers (and, at first attempt, for me as I discussed on this blog long ago) due to Mantel's commitment to the tightest possible focus on her protagonist that didn't require an out-and-out first person narrator; we hover practically on his shoulder for hundreds and hundreds of pages, a bit baffled at times until it dawns on us (or is explained) that in Hilary Mantel's Tudor England, "he" means Thomas Cromwell 99% of the time, even if he is not named in a sentence or paragraph and someone else, say, King Henry VIII, actually has been. I found this incredibly off-putting the first time I read Wolf Hall, but have come to not only embrace it but possibly prefer it to the first person narrator to which authors usually resort when they want to achieve this level of intimacy with a protagonist.

And intimacy there is, right up until the moment the axe falls, and throughout the account of the last, greatest and most troublesome act of Thomas Cromwell's career. He has been intimately involved in the getting of all of Henry VIII's replacement wives. Queen 2.0, Anne Boleyn, absolutely relied on him until she found, to her surprise, that she could not, and Cromwell took advantage of her fall to take down a whole bunch of men who had treated Cromwell's original Patron (Cardinal Thomas Wolsey) badly after Wolsey repeatedly failed to get the Pope to annul Henry's marriage to Queen 1.0. Anne's reign and downfall encompass the second novel Bring Up the Bodies, which ends more or less right as the headsman from Calais executes her publicly with a sword inscribed, as we learn in this third book, "mirror of justice, pray for us," the first of many references to mirrors and lights, here.*

The Mirror and the Light takes us through the reign of Queen 3.0, Jane Seymour, whose rise together with her family from Wolf Hall owes, again, a lot to Thomas Cromwell, and who might have proven a boon to the whole country had she survived after giving birth to Henry's only legitimate son, and then the campaign to find Queen 4.0 (who winds up being Anne of Cleves, but not with much success). But Queen Search is the least interesting plot here, as other events overtake the Henrician court, such as the famous Pilgrimage of Grace (the original astroturfing plot, generally thought to have been engineered by Europe's Catholics as a way to bully Henry back into the Roman fold), the future Bloody Mary's early stubbornness about her status, that of her mother, and whether or not her father could actually be the head of a church, and the continuous plots of various cadet branches of the English royal family to unseat the Usurper Henry and replace him with one of their own blueblood sons. Cromwell is in the thick of all of this, and his fierceness on Henry's, Mary's and also Margaret Tudor's (Henry VIII's niece, a princess of Scotland being raised in Henry's court) behalf earns him lots of new enemies and intensifies many old conflicts; many of his rivals, new and old, remind him throughout this book that since Cromwell owes all that he is and has (which has come to be quite a lot, as Cromwell even finishes his life with the title of Earl of Exeter -- a title that once was held by one of those cadet branches of the royal family until the last male of the line dies childless, and remember, Cromwell's dad was a scary drunken abusive blacksmith from the slums) to the king, if the king ever turns on him, he's done for. Cromwell basically just says, of course, and continues to do so right until the end, giving this book a greater air of tragedy even than the early scenes in Wolf Hall when the sweating sickness raged through his household and killed all the ladies and little girls.

Meanwhile, Anne Boleyn's family still seethes over her fate, for which they blame Cromwell, and they plant the final seeds of Cromwell's destruction with another daughter of the family, the vain and silly Kat Howard, who will be Queen 5.0 and gets married on the day of Cromwell's death. Queen 2.0 and 5.0 share an uncle in Thomas Howard (fabulously played by my beloved Bernard Hill in the TV adaptation, which showed that Hill is just as good playing a dick as he is a hero or a coward. Ahh, my Bernard!), who rages through the whole trilogy but has especially good scenes in this book as he and Cromwell occasionally seem on the verge of finally becoming friends, or at least calling a truce, until Howard's pride in his lineage always wins out; Cromwell is a Nobody and needs Put In His Place and nothing will be right in the world until he is.

Again, all of this is taking place in an immersively detailed world, which I was able to flesh out even more thanks to a lot of references to contemporary music of the time. There were enough of these for me to construct a pretty good playlist on Spotify, to which I added some other stuff that I'm reasonably sure would be familiar in Henry's court, and, of course, a selection of Henry's own musical compositions. Of course Henry composed music. He was a Renaissance Man if anybody was! Anyway, everything I could find that was mentioned by name is on there, along with some of my other favorites from Henry's lifetime in Venice, Florence, the Holy Roman Empire, etc. I listened to it a lot as I finished the book, and it was a great balm on my poor heart as I watched Cromwell arrested, imprisoned, questioned, impugned and executed.

Now, excuse me. I think I need some alone time.

*The overarching metaphor of the book is teased out there; before electricity and incandescent or LED bulbs, the light of a candle was often magnified by placing it in front of a mirror to bounce the rays back into the room. As Cromwell discusses often with his king, a ruler must serve as both things, mirror and light, setting a good example to his subjects and magnifying the benefits of good behavior into his realm. Um, about that...

Dorothy Dunnett's THE UNICORN HUNT

I've already had one bout of impatience with Niccolo, his opacity, his motivations and his less than stellar treatment of his companions, but things got much, much worse in The Unicorn Hunt, even though I once again got to see sights and have experiences that are really not available to me in meatspace life. Niccolo has just become a real jackass of a tour guide.

Of course this is all fallout from the knife-twist of an ending that Scales of Gold brought us (spoilers for that novel follow. What are you even doing reading this review if you haven't read that book anyway?). Gelis van Borsalen, once just the bratty younger sister of Niccolo's lover Katelina, took the virago route to better hound Niccolo about her sister's sad fate, for which she and all of Niccolo's other enemies still blamed him, and forced herself on him as a traveling companion, the better to simultaneously berate him and get the gory details about what became of poor Katelina. But of course, of course, of course, she wound up sleeping with him. A lot. And they decided that maybe they liked each other well enough to maybe get married when they got home from their African adventures. Which they did, but only after Gelis spent some time in Scotland as a maid-of-honor to Princess Mary. Where her orbit intersected with that of Niccolo's very estranged maybe-father, Simon de St. Pol*. Very intimately. Oh, look, she wasn't through trying to punish Niccolo, was she?

So now Gelis claims to be pregnant, but not by her shiny new husband. And her shiny new husband is still reeling from the news that Loppe (whom we now call Umar because that was his actual name all along) was killed along with his entire family in a massacre back at Timbuktu.

So what with one thing and another, The Unicorn Hunt is one giant traveling temper tantrum on the part of Niccolo. As we travel with him from Bruges to Scotland to the Tyrol to Egypt to Cyprus to Venice, we are meant to understand that a very elaborate and subtle game is going on between our hero and his crafty wife, but it really just looks like Niccolo has gone right off the rails, picking fights with former friends, viciously attacking old enemies in unconscionably harsh ways, lying to his companions (well, he always does that, but it's usually in some way for their own good? Or at least not seemingly just for the sake of being a jerk?) and generally just causing trouble for everybody. There are allusions strewn throughout the narrative to things being "steps" in a "plan"  but I could never figure out what the plan really was or even what it was supposed to accomplish, save finally flushing out Gelis, who hid herself away after their wedding night, claims to have given birth but keeps spiriting away the alleged child before Niccolo can even lay eyes on it, but if that's all that was aimed for, it's the most unnecessarily convoluted Rube Goldberg machine of a plan, maybe ever, and it didn't work too well anyway.

What saved this novel for me was a new character, a sort of proto-Phillippa Somerville named Katelijne, niece of Niccolo's one time good friend and protector Anselm Adorne, whose antics in Niccolo's train and wake are highly original and entertaining and who takes no crap from anybody, even when she's mortally ill. That and my love for many of the secondary characters in Niccolo's company, especially physician Tobie, sailor Michael Crackbene, Grigorio the lawyer and his mistress, Margo... I'm always happy to see any of them in a Niccolo novel (and many of the others besides, but some got left in Bruges, or Scotland, or Venice, etc.).

And believe me, this novel needed saving, because not only has its hero turned into a world class asshat, but he's also, midway through an eight-volume series of highly realistic, plausible and naturalistic historical fiction, suddenly manifested a supernatural talent that then serves to get him out of all of his plot difficulties: he's a diviner. Not just a water witch, though he is that; he can also divine seams of precious metals waiting to be mined, find stashes of already coined precious metals, and even, via the trick of tying an object to a string and swinging it over a map, find people who are hiding from him. Dudes, I'm about ready to give up right here.

But still, it's Dunnett. And despite all of the things that made me want to tear my hair out, there are still wonderful things to be had from this novel. Her ability to evoke exotic settings and celebrations, her descriptions of places I'll never see and places that don't exist anymore, and the cultures that inhabit-or-once inhabited them, is second to none, and no matter how much she wound up cheating us of an amiable hero and a plausible plot resolution, she did not cheat us on any of her scenery porn.

So I'm going to keep going in a while, but right now, I need a break from Niccolo and his tantrums. He can still and think a while about what he's done. I've got a summer of Wolfe to get on with.

*Who, for his part, is unknowingly raising a child born to his late wife, Katelina, that is not, in fact, his, but was sired by one Niccolo.

Dorothy Dunnett's SCALES OF GOLD

Oh, Niccolo, Niccolo, Nicollo. It's been too long since I followed your adventures. So long that I had to catch up again by listening to all of the books I'd already read as audio books*

There is a stinger of a surprise ending to Scales of Gold, the fourth in the House of Niccolo series, that threatens to blot all that comes before it from memory. I'm not going to give away that ending, because it's a doozy, but in so resolving, I'm making this a harder blog entry for myself.

The machinations of Niccolo's enemies (his very estranged supposed father and grandfather, and the rival mercantile house, the Vatochino, chief among them) have left Team Niccolo cash poor but rich in responsibilities, so the need becomes immediately evident that the gang needs money. Hard money. The very hardest. And where, before the New World ripened for the plundering, did gold come from?

Africa. And where does Niccolo's best friend and maybe sometime lover (last novel the King of Cyprus said sooner or later Niccolo would either have to send him away or make him his lover), Loppe the polyglot omnitalented African, a former slave who has mentioned betimes that it would be swell if he could go home and show Niccolo the sights and they could maybe get some gold...

But meanwhile, other fallout from Niccolo's previous adventures is falling out. His maybe-father, Simon de St. Pol, has a sister, who had a Portuguese husband that died last novel (and of course some people blame Niccolo, but we know the truth), leaving behind a young son and half of a trading company (Simon owns the other half, dun dun DUUUUUNNNN), and it, too, is on the brink of failure, but Niccolo has a plan to maybe save it and blah blah blah everybody is on the island of Madeira (not yet famous for its wines) but oh, they're too late -- Simon has been there and decided to sell off his half of the company to... The Vatochino! His sister and nephew will be destitute, unless Niccolo and Loppe can save the day!

But wait, they don't think they're going alone, do they? Because no. The nephew, Diniz Vasquez, must go with them. And so must... Oh jeez. So must one Bel of Cuthilgurdy, Simon's sister Lucia's best friend and traveling companion**, and also... Gelis van Borsalen. Last seen as Katelina van Borsalen's bratty little sister back in Niccolo Rising. She's all grown up now, as attractive as her late sister, and pretty damned sure that, whatever the official ruling, Katelina's death is also Niccolo's fault. And she's not going to give him any peace, going to follow him wherever he goes like a buxom young Fury.

Many of Niccolo's other friends are involved in this venture as well, but the significant one aside from those already named is Father Godscalc, originally the house chaplain to the Charetty Company (Niccolo's original employer as well, whose widowed owner he married by way of positioning him to help her to expand its scope and get him a good start in business in his own right, and from which he wound up inheriting many excellent advisers, partners and helpers, some of whom are keepers of various of his secrets and some of whom can barely stand him and some of whom are just in it for the money. Of these, Godscalc is one of the secret keepers, of course), who also wants to go to Africa, but not for gold; he wants to find a land route from the continent's western coast to Ethiopia, believed to be the true home of that legendary Christian king, Prester John. Goldscalc envisions a great evangelical pilgrimage to Prester John's kingdom, saving souls and making converts all the way, and securing from that great king a pledge of money and manpower to help save the rest of Christendom from the Turk. Niccolo, Niccolo kind of owes him one.

But so, adventures. Lots and lots of adventures, including an entertaining sea battle on the way from Madeira to the mouth of the Gambia, in which a ship that Niccolo was given by Emperor of David of Trebizond back in The Spring of the Ram but was originally owned by, you got it, Simon, must attack a ship sailed by the Vatochino without being recognized as both companies race for the gold. Whoever gets there first has the upper hand in contacting the natives and making the deals for that season's haul.

But all of that's just preamble. The heart of this novel is in, that's right, Timbuktu, a city of clay and mud that dissolves when it rains, only to be built again because it is a city of scholars, holy men and entrepreneurs, and its position makes it the crossroads for much of western Africa's commerce circa the 15th century. Everybody in Niccolo's party has something to learn there, as well as things to acquire (like copies of scrolls from the impressive libraries repositories of Timbuktu). The interlude here is as lovely as anything Dunnett has written, and as satisfying. But Dunnett is never satisfied merely with being satisfied, and Prester John beckons.

A lot of people point to this novel as a turning point in Niccolo's development as a man and a character, and they are right to. Up to this point he has been largely passive and protean, exercising his talents in mostly hidden ways, often only when others have forced him to. Here he finally takes his fate and that of others deliberately into his hands, realizes he is an adult and that his life doesn't have to be solely one of avenging the circumstances of his irregular birth. He leaves Africa interested in finding for himself the pleasures of family life, which he has tasted with the Charetty company -- his late wife had two nearly-grown daughters who eventually came around to being okay with having a stepdad just a few years older than they -- but now wants for real. And now I'm not going to say anymore about that because it's all tied up in the twist ending, a real emotional cliffhanger that had me plunging straight into the next novel, the Unicorn Hunt.

Dorothy, Dorothy, Dorothy!

*Which, these are pretty good, but I could have done without all of the accents, especially on the female characters. Most male narrators don't do female voices well anyway and really shouldn't even try, but they sound much worse when they're also given comic Italian or Flemish or Greekish accents.

**Which, get ready for Bel. She's late middle aged, fat, Scottish, fiercely intelligent, stubborn and altogether awesome. She may be my favorite Dorothy Dunnett character yet. I love her so much I had to consult the oracle of internets to make sure she appears in later books, because if she got killed off (spoiler: not in this novel) I was going to be very, very angry.

Guy Gavriel Kay's FIONAVAR TAPESTRY

This post is going to concern itself with not one but three books, because once I'd finished the first volume of Guy Gavriel Kay's Fionavar Tapestry trilogy, The Summer Tree, I immediately plunged into its sequel, The Wandering Fire, and when I finished that (in a little over a day and a sleepless night), I plunged immediately into the concluding The Darkest Road and then I had a good cry but did not wish for more because everything wrapped up so satisfyingly that I did not need more.

This pretty much never happens. Especially with epic/high fantasy, a genre for which my lack of love is pretty well known.* Hey, I'm as surprised as you are (though my love for Kay's A Song for Arbonne should have given us all a clue, I do suppose). And yet right now, I'm happily also in the middle of that Broken Empire stuff, too. It pays sometimes to ignore your prejudices, eh wot?

Anyway, I started off, a week or so ago, prepared not to like this one so much. Alarm bells started ringing right away as I settled down to read the first book, which starts off with a lengthy and detailed dramatis personae, a thing that always makes me roll my eyes because it so often suggests to me that either someone doesn't trust me enough to keep track of all the characters contained in the story such a list precedes, or someone's publishers don't think the author did a good enough job making said characters vivid and distinct enough for anyone to be able to keep track without a handy guide. Either way, my hackles go up, and yes, I had the same eyebrow raising experience the first time I cracked open Dorothy Dunnett, but her books are so damned intricate and complex that those lists turn out to be (occasionally) necessary even for an attentive reader because hundreds of pages sometimes go by between encounters with some characters in Dunnett, oh yes. But Dunnett has been an exception for me in this, as in so many regards.

Guy Garviel Kay, turns out, is another. Except I didn't need, ever, to refer to the dramatis personae, because as in Arbonne, so in Fionavar (to which I'd seen a reference in Arbonne as "Fionvarre" and had been wondering about since, to my happiness): Kay's characters, both his own creations and those he borrows from mythology and legend, are alive and distinct and unforgettable and captivating. As is their world, their struggle, their story.

The trilogy's focus is on five of them, more or less, young university students who come from our world (and from Toronto, my very favorite city), who attend together a lecture on Celtic myth by a world-famous expert and then find themselves whisked into said expert's company after the lecture under the guise of showing him a much better time than would all those dreary academics who are expecting him at their post-lecture do. But it is the lecturer, who turns out to be a powerful mage from another world named Loren Silvercloak (and yes, that name gagged me at first, as so many names in the d.p. gagged me, because I hate epic fantasy, remember?), who whisks them away -- to another world, where they are "needed" as ceremonial guests for a king's golden jubilee. By magic, he and his "source"**, a dwarf named Matt Soren, transport the five to Fionavar, the first of all worlds, kind of like C.S. Lewis' Aslan's Country, the world of which all other worlds are just sort of imperfect copies echoing its motifs and patterns.***

And then it turns out, of course, that the Five -- handsome, playful, emotional Kevin; helpful, kind, wise Kimberly; wounded, stand-offish, moody Paul; beautiful, proud Jennifer; and big, strong oddball Dave -- aren't just there for a party. There are roles and very important work for all of them to fulfill in Fionavar, if they're willing, or maybe even if they're not.

And those roles are deeply archetypal, a Jungian parade of quests and tasks and ritual enactments and sacrifices that could all get so hokey, so in-your-ribs and on-the-nose, but don't because Guy Gavriel Kay is some kind of wizard. Even someone who knows the archetypes he's playing with very, very well has surprises in store for her, reading these novels. They might not be plot surprises per se, for such a reader; the surprise is how deeply felt and emotional these developments can be, how necessary they are to make the overall story work, and how they raise lumps in the throat, make tears sting in the eyes such that one could all but short out her ebook reader. Excuse me for a moment.

And yes, the girls' stories matter just as much as, sometimes more than, they boys', and no, it's not because the girls strap on boobplates and are suddenly strong enough to wield giant claymores or because they develop preternatural skills at archery or in any way, really, do anything remotely like what the boys do. Kay laughs at the Bechdel test. Kay understands women and men and honors them both. Kay writes people. Extraordinarily.

And he writes extraordinary fight scenes, including one single battle between a larger-than-life hero and a giant unkillable demon that goes on for some ten pages and is riveting not just for the well-described action but for the scene's staggering emotional content, deft shifts of point of view, and barely-hinted at future importance. As I said over on Goodreads after finishing that scene, "Jesustitsfucksake, Lancelot!"

Yes, that Lancelot. Arthur and Cavall are in this, too, drawn in from their eternal twilight afterlife just as Kevin and Kim and Paul and Jennifer and Dave were from theirs, but not quite given their interiority. Kay knows well enough to leave his most archetypal characters as just that, archetypes, icons, who nonetheless are integral parts of this story and who interact with Kay's own characters in a myriad of ways without in any way ceasing to be icons to be regarded with awe and reverence. Neat trick, that.

 I'm still in awe myself from the experience of reading these books. And this is a trilogy with a flying unicorn in it, for Pete's sake.

Yes, boys and girls, a high fantasy trilogy with a flying unicorn made me cry. Go outside and check the skies for falling crabs and periwinkles.

And read these books, if you haven't.

*Nor are those detailed in that sonnet the only reasons I generally roll my eyes at the genre, as I'm sure my long-term readers figured out long ago, and as I'm sure I've made even more clear in this post.

**I'm not going to get into the details here, but magic in Fionavar is different, yo. As in it takes two, a mage and a second person who is the source of his energy, to do it. And the relationship between a mage and his source is a powerful one even when they are not already otherwise best friends or lovers or both or all of the above, i.e. it's quite fraught.

***Look, the trilogy is referred to as a tapestry. So much weaving/fibercraft metaphor in this. So much.