Jack Womack's ELVISSEY

I, too had been cut loose, bereft of work, of friendship, of love, allowed only to devote life and time to readying one in whom I didn't believe for one I couldn't believe to lull those who, against reason, did believe.

I'm going to noodle a lot about language and weird little questions this book inspired, but please don't think that because I do so means this book is not an exciting or eventful read. It is that and more. So much more!

I was last December years old when I realized that Jack Womack's amazing Random Acts of Senseless Violence was part of a series. Or at least a grouping of novels set in a shared Dryco Cinematic Universe. And that there are more than a handful of these Dryco books. Yippee!

The first-for-me* of these other books, Elvissey, is more or less a direct sequel to RAoSV, which I re-read at the beginning of this year. And, if possible, it packs some even bigger emotional wallops than its predecessor. As in buckle up. But also...

The characters in the Dryco universe speak an argot that is easy to understand if you don't try to do so, but gets more difficult to grasp the more you think about it. It's beyond how Lola Harte, the heroine of RAoSV, wrote in her diary that formed that novel, but not in the way I had figured it would be; the overlapping characters, Iz and Judy, are all grown up now but instead of speaking something more like the modern American English that we know, betokening the greater sophistication of adulthood in contrast to 12-year-old Lola's schoolgirl prose, Iz, Judy and all their colleagues sound like they come from Pohl and Kornbluth's Space Merchants world by way of Darmok's planet, with a lot of corporate jargon and buzzwords thrown in. Nouns are verbed, verbs are nouned, aphorisms are condensed (my favorite phrase: "You're mountaining this molehill" with "an exaltation of interpreters" a close second - in which "interpreters" is used in the sense of those who embody and act rather than render speech from one language into another, as a close second. The "exaltation" is one of Elvis impersonators!), all manner of portmanteaus and inherited malapropisms appear, and some terminology is so opaque as to constitute a mystery at least as compelling as any mechanisms of plot or character. "Regooding," for instance. How creepy and Orwellian is this neologism, really? It's baffling as the story starts, and we're left to soak up its meaning via context.**

This would be maddening and even a reason to DNF a novel if a lesser writer than Jack Womack were the author.

But so, what's Elvis got to do, got to do with it? I'll get to that, but first let's enjoy all the different things this title could mean. Perhaps it is an epic journey undertaken, not by Odysseus but by Elvis? Or maybe "Elvissey" denotes a thing or things associated with Elvis, as we might call, say, Graceland or a Las Vegas wedding chapel an Elvissey (like an abbey)? Though I at least would probably wind up sticking an "R" in there to make the stand-alone noun, as in an "Elvisry." Then again, maybe it's an adjective. Hey, that was Elvissey. How Elvissey? A little Elvissey? A lot Elvissey? The Elvisseyest thing ever? We eventually learn that it is none of these things but a completely legit other, proving that Womack thought about this even more than I did. 

See what you've done to my brain this time, Mr. Womack? I hope you happy. Happify?

"All Elvii bewail their lot... Digging oases of pain in deserts of comfort... Such jabbernowling frets and hinders," a character observes early in the story. This little speech is a perfect example of how this argot is both breezily simple and fiendishly complex. Leaving aside what the "Elvii" are for a moment, he's basically rephrasing our contemporary aphorism "some people'd bitch if their water's too wet" (or a yet more contemporary "now and then it's important to stop and bitch about the roses"), and we nod along because ain't that the truth, these Elvii have it great and they're still complaining but then what the hell is "jabbernowling" and is it something that frets, as in performs the act of fretting, or has the argot of Elvissey transformed the simple verb "fret," meaning something like "to fuss or worry about something" into a transitive verb, requiring an object, meaning something like "to cause someone to fuss or worry about something?"

I still haven't parsed what "jabbernowling" is, though I'm pretty sure it has something to do with pointless verbalizing, as in "jabber."

With all this extra musing on language waiting to pounce from every page, Elvissey is a very demanding book for its length and its pulpy plot. 

Because oh yeah, the plot. For there is indeed a plot taking place amid all the Fun With Language.

It's even easy to summarize: Iz, Lola's closest girlfriend from the harrowing second half of RAoSV, survived their teenage years as New York City fell apart and has married a wonderful but troubled man and the two of them have been "Regooded" by Dryco (the only corporate overlord you'll ever need, who have taken over most, if not all, of the functions of government, including the enormous project of rehabilitating New York City with an eye toward making it a utopian City of the Future... for a million inhabitants and no more) as a field team the company sends on vitally important but seemingly impossible missions, though ordinarily she is the administrative assistant to DryCo's second-in-command that being Judy) and her husband is a high-level security guard. 

In this case, Iz and husband John are to travel back in time/ visit a parallel universe and abduct one Elvis Aaron Presley from when he was at the height of his youth and beauty, and thus his value to Dryco... and bring him back to their post-collapse New New York to be the messiah for a cult that already exists (these are the Elvii mentioned above, so no, there are not multiple Elvises Presley running around. Or are there?).

This poses another interesting question, of course. This novel was originally published in 1993, when Elvis had only been dead for 16 years or so. I remember occasionally encountering people back then who staunchly believed that Elvis was still alive, had faked his death so he could be just another guy in the world who just had to deal with being made by his devotees every once in a while, but who had the whole publicity-industrial complex on his side to keep his secret. His fans who "knew better" were just harmless and amusing kooks, back then, decades before Q-Anon had people camping out at Dealy Plaza awaiting the second coming of JFK and JFK Jr. We didn't know how good we had it. 

But anyway, now in our own 2023, 30 years since the publication of Elvissey and some 45 years since Elvis died, with Elvis so long gone that even his only daughter has passed on, if Q-Anon had never happened, would there still be people running around who disbelieve in Elvis' death? Given that he would be 88 years old now and wasn't really looking too good at age 42, would his cult have persisted in our world? I would expect it to be much diminished at the very least, in a world without Q-Anon and all of its weird cultural baggage, but, would there be, or are there, many people in 2023 who are still fanatically devoted to the erstwhile King of Rock'n'Roll?

In Iz's contemporary universe of 2033, the answer to that question is enough to cause problems for John's and her employer, Dryco. Meaning its CEO, Mr. O'Malley is a god-king of a kind we found amusingly improbable back in 1993 but now, well, *gestures at universe*. I mean, people like to argue about whether we live in Huxley's dystopia or Orwell's, etc but a case sure could be made for it really being Womack's.

Anyway, O'Malley's fee-fees are hurt because so many Elvii worship the wrong god-king and thank Elvis for all the good (?) that O'Malley has done for them.

So obviously the solution is to kidnap alt-universe Elvis and let him deal with the Elvii -- but only after he agrees to promote O'Malley's aims and goals and ego. And tell them O'Malley has massive, manly hands, really. 

But then Iz and John cross over -- in a simply amazing car you're going to have to read the book to get to appreciate -- and find just how alternate this other universe is; the culture shock isn't merely that it's 1954. In this universe there was never a U.S. Civil War and slaves weren't freed until 1905, and while we think car culture is bad in our world, the interstate highway system in alt world has massive elevated 20-lane behemoths all over the place; even bigger swaths of the neighborhoods that were sacrificed to the Eisenhower system in our world were obliterated to the point of many of them just not existing anymore. And as for the culture off those highways, it's a gross QOP wet-dream of segregation, sexual harassment, revisionist historical interpretations even of stuff that it shares with Iz's universe, etc.

And so, its Elvis is nothing like what Iz and her people have expected to find. This Elvis is downtrodden and not at all famous (nobody in white supremacy Disneyland wants to listen to a kid who wants to sing blues instead of oom pa pa), more than a bit violent and entitled and wholly unready for what they're going to ask of him. He winds up complicating every aspect of the plot, from Dryco corporate dynamics to Iz's marriage to John, and sends it all spiraling off in unexpected but wholly satisfying directions. 

In other words, holy shit, this book is good!

*There doesn't seem to be a definitive order in which these books are to be read; they're cataloged like a series but without ordinal numbers. I thought of going in publication order but then I saw that this book tells of the adulthood of some characters from RAoSV so I chose this as my first deliberate read in the Dryco universe. 

**"Regooding" as a concept gets increasingly problematic as the Dryco world unfolds. At first it simply seems to mean something like "rescued from bad circumstances" or "rehabilitated" as a neighborhood might be gentrified or a person lifted out of poverty/ignorance/illness, but then a truly icky aspect kicks in: the existence of a drug called Melaway. The "mel" being the same prefix for darkness/blackness as appears in "melanin." As in this drug turns dark skin light, black hair blonde. Add in some blue contact lenses and Iz, a dark-skinned black girl from the meanest pre-Dryco streets, can pass as a white woman on her mission,  to the alternate universe which is, she is repeatedly told, way more racist than her own. But then, on the eve of her journey, she "concludes her bleach" and admires her naked self in the mirror: "Venus atremble at seaside, another regooded resident to best suit our eternal city." While some later language tries to imply that it is not a purely White ideal that is sought but rather a golden-toned racelessness but one is not sure whether that is the sincere aim and context of "regooding" or just lip-service to a less racist goal, you know?

Jack Womack is a brave writer. 

Svetislav Basara's THE CYCLIST CONSPIRACY (Tr by Randall A. Major)

Did you know, Pavel Kuzmich," Vartolomeyich said to his neighbor, "that I got here on a bicycle and that one man prophesied that I would end up behind bars.

One of my favorite things in reading translated literature is little passages like the above in which a good English pun comes at me out of nowhere and I get to ask myself a question like, so is 'behind bars/handlebars' a pun in Serbian* like it is in English? And I disappear down a linguistic rabbit hole trying to find out if it's the original author or the translator who gave me a good belly laugh. 

Svetislav Basara's delightfully weird The Cyclist Conspiracy is also the second book I've read in this weird little translated literature project I've got going on this year to give me powerful Illuminatus! Trilogy vibes, though it gives even stronger Foucault's Pendulum vibes because Basara writes international literature where Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson wrote weird hippie pulp, by which I chiefly mean, there's not a lot of porn-y sex scenes in The Cyclist Conspiracy -- because it's got much weirder and more erudite stuff to show us.

The titular conspiracy, more properly called the Order of the Little Brothers of the Evangelical Bicyclists of the Rose Cross, is a secret society so esoteric and occult that you could be a lifelong member without knowing it until another member reaches out to you by oblique means (a random postcard from an exotic locale, for instance) and you are informed that henceforth your dreams at night will be used to instruct you in the goals and practices and lore of your new seekrit club. Which has some even stranger beliefs than communicating oenerically, but we'll get to that.

The novel presents as a kind of scrapbook (a form also taken by War of the Newts) or dossier on the conspiracy, meaning it contains a hodge-podge of points of view and styles, a centuries-old parchment here, a newspaper clipping there, a lesser-known Sherlock Holmes story somewhere in the middle... needless to say, Basara's and translator Randall A. Major's command of all of these forms is brilliant and usually darkly, drily funny, but if you're looking for well-drawn characters or a coherent story arc, look elsewhere than The Cyclist Conspiracy. 

The Little Brothers of the Evangelical Order of the Bicycle believe themselves to have been organized in the wake of the scrambling of tongues at the Tower of Babel, whose architects the Little Brothers believe still exist in a form like their own, and seek to once again build that mighty, God-bothering edifice. The Order opposes this, though in a way their goal is somewhat similar since their own occult program aims to establish, at the end of history, a giant "World Insane Asylum" in which mental illnesses are not treated or cured but given free reign to be expressed and enacted, i.e., if you think you're Napoleon, you're given a uniform and a battlefield and an army against which to fight the army of a guy who thinks he's Wellington. 

There is a complex and theological justification for why this establishment is the preferred end of human society that is difficult to summarize, partly because it only made sense to me while I was reading it and partly because it is extremely, extremely complex and theological. But fun, if you're the kind of reader who enjoys Umberto Eco, or wishes Shea and Wilson had taken themselves a little more seriously.

What keeps the book from becoming a boring theological tractate is the variety of storytelling devices employed, the eccentricities of the characters introduced, and the interesting locales in which their adventures take place, from an undiscovered island in the North Sea to a Soviet-era gulag to the mystical and holy city of Dharamshala. Oh, and the fact that the Little Brothers conspiracy is enacted backwards in time. For instance, for (again, complex and hard-to-explain here) reasons, the conspiracy really needs Franz Ferdinand to be assassinated in 1917 and they plan it from the future, communicating with members via the medium of dreams to pass on instructions to be given to the proper agents in the past, i.e. even Gavrilo Princep's visit to the sandwich shop was carefully coordinated and not the coincidental detail conventionally believed. And of course, since the rest of the world doesn't understand the Little Brothers or, mostly, even know they exist, none of the assassination's actual planners is ever caught!

The conspiracy's other activities include stunts like tearing around Victorian London on a velocipede shooting out public clocks and window displays of timepieces, thus inspiring the plot of Adrian Conan Doyle's and John Dickson Carr's latter-day Sherlock Holmes tale, "The Adventure of the Seven Clocks" and an organized group bicycle ride-cum-pilgrimage from Belgrade, Serbia to Dharamshala, India, as well as parchment messages in bottles sent from the aforementioned undiscovered North Sea island and the entire life stories of various eccentrics described in various fragments of text, including a selection of free verse poetry by one, and the accounts by another of how, during World War II, the Nazis almost managed, via a hastily assembled corps of dream warriors, to destroy the Dream Cathedral in which the Little Brothers meet outside of time and space.

It's a weird and funny read that demands a lot of its reader but rewards her richly, and someday I hope to see what other gifts this author has brought us. Am I 100% certain that I understood The Cyclist Conspiracy completely? Uh, no. But I enjoyed the hell out of it anyway, and I think you would, too.

My Radetzky March isn't quite over. I'm still hoping to squeeze in at least three more books! Will I succeed? Stay tuned, true believers. And meanwhile, if you know a hard-working literary translator in your actual life, buy them a drink for me. I met one on Mastodon while we were all watching the World Baseball Classic! And got tipped off to some new books I'll be reading, and telling you all about, in a different month later this year.

*It might be more correct to say Serbo-Croatian since I'm pretty sure that's what the language was still called in the mid-1980s when this book was first written and Serbia was still part of Yugoslavia and lots of linguistic hairs were still waiting to be split? But I'm already out of my depth on this subject. What matters to me is the language's word for "handlebars" (specifically those of a bicycle) is управљач ("upavlach") and for "bars" as in those of a prison cell is  решетке ("reshetke") so, no, it's not a Serbian pun but now I want to know what this passage said more literally in the original! Was it as good as the implied handlebars/behind bars that Randall A. Major gave us? Given the overall quality of the book and Basara's international reputation, I suspect it is. 

Cole Haddon's PSALMS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

I thought I'd see a novel in which Phish's "Divided Sky" created the universe (because, well, it did) before I saw one in which David Bowie really and truly actually was the one and only thing that kept that universe together, but that was reckoning without yet another irresistible force in the universe: Cole Fucking Haddon.

This is another wild ride, friends. Buckle up. Or don't. You might prefer it in the alternate universe into which you get flung by weird forces you can't even perceive, let alone comprehend. I mean, you do you.

Haddon's debut in prose fiction* is pretty much what I had hoped Herve LeTellier's The Anomaly would be, and then some. Which means that yes, we're dealing with Simulation Theory again, but in a much cooler way that also encompasses the multiverse and time travel and I've already mentioned that David Bowie wrote the Music of the Spheres, right? David Bowie wrote the Music of the Spheres, you guys. And saved Ali from letting fear eat his soul just as a sort of side effect. Dammit, who's cutting onions in here?

I promise I'll settle down at some point. Maybe in the next review.

I kind of liked this book, you guys. It has everything I like best in speculative fiction, including some things I haven't encountered before in speculative fiction before but now slightly resent that I hadn't, like amazing lady scientists making huge differences in multiple centuries, I Am My Own Grandpa type character arcs, interesting answers to questions like What If Elon Musk But Worse, villains that turn out to be more interesting than they seemed at first and at least one teenage antihero who is building bombs destined to explode in multiple centuries because a bunny rabbit he believes is Allah himself has been telling him to with terrible urgency and persuasiveness and you will not believe where this teenager ends up as your favorite character in the whole cast of battered babies and misfits getting ground through the gears of Haddon's many interwoven plots. Which plots both do and do not neatly resolve themselves offscreen and subtly and with enough ambiguity to keep even the most discerning alternate reality snob/comics guy happy.

A word of warning, though, to those like me who read pretty much entirely in ebook format these days (as readers of this blog know, I have extraordinary difficulty physically holding print books, let alone turning their pages, these days, and it's only gotten worse over the years): a great deal of the David Bowie-esque material takes place off screen and is told in the form of things like newspaper clippings, which are embedded as graphics files in the ebook version, meaning the print is very, very, very small and closely formatted to resemble the content they represent and even with my very best cheaters on I struggled to read these bits. Fortunately, there are only a few of these, because you absolutely don't want to skip them; they are expertly done and add a whole extra, wonderful layer to the storytelling of Psalms for the End of the World.

Now excuse me. I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to find a way to break into the world where this book got all of the notice and acclaim and international translation attention that went to The Anomaly in this one. Who knows, maybe that's also the one where Gene Wolfe got a Nobel Prize.

*He is also an author of some kickass comic books, wrote a lot for Hollywood and even got to create a real live TV show for NBC starring the guy who played an alternate version of David Bowie in Velvet Goldmine. All of this and only then did he decide to publish a novel. Cuz why not?

William Gibson's AGENCY

Please, tell me I'm not the only person who's already imagining a white-haired Tilda Swinton as Ainsley Lowbeer if The Peripheral and/or Agency ever gets adapted for the screen. Even if it's a century hence and it's a digitally recreated Swinton loping around with an omni-use "tipstaff" protecting continua from hobbyists.*

I didn't realize until my second reading of this book's predecessor, The Peripheral, that Lowbeer was going to be the Hubertus Bigend of this trilogy. Partly this was because so many of the other characters were so interesting that Lowbeer kind of faded into the background a lot (a "problem" Agency doesn't have, but we'll get to that) but mostly because she didn't feel that much like a character yet, more a figurant -- kind of like Hubertus Bigend!

I speculate that William Gibson maybe noticed this and, with this new book, chose to dial back the other characters to let the spotlight shine on Lowbeer, which is laudable, because Lowbeer is cool as shit, but, ah, I'm not quite sure it worked. Because Lowbeer is still mostly a peripheral (heh) character, acting as a sort of dispatcher if not a commander, while most of the action is performed by really boring people.

Ostensibly, the protagonist of Agency is Verity, a young woman in the middle of an exciting if precarious career as a sort of "app whisperer" in 2017.** She's just been hired to test an exciting new product that lives in a Google Glass-ish set-up but is startingly un-app-like to the point of pretty much laughing itself to death at the mere thought of being administered a Turing test. That's right, William Gibson has finally made an Artificial Intelligence into an actual character! But one so awesomely powerful and resourceful and such a quick study that our Verity basically becomes a Lemmiwinks.*** Which could still be cool, only pretty soon the cool AI (named Eunice because the actual name is an acronym I can't remember but corresponds to EUNISS) is absent, and Verity is just left to enact Eunice's plan to Save the World only no one ever, you know, tells Verity the plan (an, to be honest, I still don't understand how all this to-ing and fro-ing Saved the World), so she's just ferried around on motorcycles by surly coffee shop waiters or in funky helicopter-type things owned by her Tech Billionaire ex-boyfriend or, in one ridiculous scene, actually disguised as a dummy and hauled up many stories in a sling, and at this point I just decided Gibson was trolling us with this title. I mean, Lowbeer works for an Agency in the future and there are a few agents of an Agency or two sort of lurking around in Verity's present, but also there is a fully autonomous AI (the world's first!) exercising bucketloads of Agency but, like Lowbeer, only at a remove and meanwhile our heroine has so little Agency she has to hang there in the sling and not move while she is ratcheted up to the penthouse suite via the building's exterior.

Oh, and kind of the least interesting character from The Peripheral shows up and does some stuff, which, whatever, but also the most interesting character from The Peripheral shows up and let's talk about Coner for a moment. Spoilers for The Peripheral, obvs. but it says Ware Spoilers right in this blog description text.

Coner is from the "stub" explored in the first book, which is basically a near-future West Virginia in which 3D-printing has become commonplace but also so advanced that it can be used to manufacture drugs, so think of the Opioid Crisis dialed up to 11 and in this world, in addition to the rather delightful heroine of The Peripheral there is Coner. Coner is a veteran of an unspecified war but we can just assume, really, that it's still in the Persian Gulf area only now there are "haptic recon" units, i.e. soldiers with implanted technology that allows them to, e.g., operate drones a continent away in a very intimate fashion. Except, you know, it was still imperfect tech, so most veterans like Coner are a bio-mechanical mess even with the implants out, and also still have PTSD. But then there's Coner, who also managed to get himself actually blown up, and lost all but one of his limbs and a good bit of his torso and now depends on very advanced nearly-full-body prosthetics to live a very limited existence in his backwater timeline. He gets a taste of other possibilities in The Peripheral, in which the quantum computer that allows contact with The Past from Lowbeer's world doesn't just allow conversation but a limited degree of action via the control of, in Coner's world, dopey telepresence drones that are basically an iPad stuck to a Segway, and in Lowbeer's the full experience of running a vat-grown nearly-human body as though it were your own. In The Peripheral Coner gets to spend some time in a top-of-the-line martial arts training body, and since he was originally a military powerhouse even without his implants, well, just imagine. There's a great line in Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer, in which a "console cowboy" who's been neurologically maimed and can no longer access cyberspace falls "into the prison of his own flesh." Now imagine if that flesh consists of, like, one messed up arm, your chest and your head. That's Coner, after.

But Lowbeer is a benevolent goddess, as well as one that needs mortals to do her bidding, so she has made sure that Coner still gets opportunities to be in better bodies via the mysterious quantum computer.**** As long as he does her bidding once in a while; here he is dispatched to Verity's world, but of course her world doesn't even really have very good iPads on Segways yet, so he's controlling, e.g. hobby drones and various smart devices, while still being very much the Coner that I grew to love in the first book. He gets some fantastic scenes and pulls off some exciting stunts and, really, his bits are the best in this book. I would absolutely read a book from his point of view, telling his actual story. Hint to the universe.

Having him as the POV character instead of Verity would instantly have made Agency a better read, at any rate. Not that, and I feel I must stress this because I feel like I'm bitching a lot, not that Agency isn't a pretty good read. It has lots of interesting ideas and poses lots of interesting questions and contains both Ainsley Lowbeer and Coner, plus a bit of Eunice, so, you know, it's fine. I was never in danger of DNF-ing it. BUT, I didn't risk sleep deprivation and un-done chores to devour it, either. It's not Gibson's best work, is all. But it's still more than worth the reading, and I'm still in for a sequel or two, but please, Mr. Gibson, some more Lowbeer? Please?

*If you're new to this series, and it seems many are opting to go ahead and plunge into Agency without having first read The Peripheral, in Ainsley Lowbeer's far-future post-apocalyptic time, someone has stumbled across a mysterious quantum computer that can connect to digital communications technology in the past, but every time contact is established it creates a new timeline, because Lowbeer's timeline is not one in which contact was ever made. Certain people in Lowbeer's world are so rich and bored that they connect to and interfere with the past for fun. These newly-created timelines are formally referred to as "continua", informally as "stubs" (as in Wikipedia perhaps?), and the people who fart around with them are the "hobbyists" I referred to above. Most just act like tourists but there are a special few who treat the past as their personal Let's Game It Out and deliberately try to ruin everything for everybody.

**Not our 2017, though. See, a continua hobbyist, one who makes Josh from Let's Game It Out look like a merciful angel/fairy godmother who can't coddle his NPCs enough, manipulated events so that in 2016 Secretary Clinton, and not Game Show Host Trump, won the presidential election, only, get this, it was part of a strategy to lead to armagedddon, meaning somehow the outcome I think the lion's share of Gibson's fan base and Gibson himself would have preferred is painted as the Darkest Timeline, an intriguing idea that did not get nearly enough exploration here.

***A South Park joke, referring to a character who has little or no, umm, agency, but is simply bossed around and sent on fetch quests by others. A fetch quest is... why am I explaining all this shit anyway? This is the internet. You can look it up. I've been spending entirely too much time with octogenarians who believe stuff on Facebook (and yes, 80+ year olds use Facebook. It's 2020. Hi, I'm Kate, and this is 2020, and honestly, this is the first time I've made that joke. I get a turn, too, right?).

****Which, I'm trusting there's a third volume of this Lowbeer series in the works, and I hope we get some answers about this tech. Nobody in Lowbeer's world knows where it is or who originally found it, let alone who developed it or how it works. An undercurrent I could have just imagined faintly suggests that maybe Lowbeer's native continuum isn't the "original" and is just as much of a stub as the ones its hobbyists play with, but I'm hoping it's not quantum McGuffin turtles all the way down, you guys.

Ian Tregillis' NECESSARY EVIL

So, here's me, tucking into the third volume of Ian Tregillis' Milkweed Triptych after having thought for two volumes that I was reading a trilogy of cool Lovecraft-flavored alternative history where bio-mechanically engineered Nazi uberpeople were pitted against heroic British warlocks, only to finally, finally penetrate the fact that what I've really been reading this whole time is the ultimate Phildickian exploration of what it would really mean to the world as a whole if an actual honest-to-Yog pre-cognitive had surfaced in our midst, by whatever means, ca the early 20th Century. Well, that and a little time travel thrown in, so said pre-cog can correct some things she missed the first pre-time pre-around. As it were.

Gretel, Gretel, Gretel. The Romany girl who was warped into being able to see all of time, but was so warped by the very people who were busily exterminating entire races of people, including her own, so developed an extreme instinct for self-protection and so searched every possibility in all of World War II for the best possible outcome for her except WHOOPS there was one WORLD ENDING WHOOPS end result that she hadn't really seen (or hadn't really taken seriously) and so for her last trick she manipulates another of our main characters, poor old Raybould Marsh, into making HIS last trick a trip into a whole new universe that... Look, I'm spoiling bits of the first two books here, but like the warning on the very top of this blog says, WARE SPOILERS.

Anyway, suffice it to say that in this new universe, it is World War II all over again, and, in this universe, there are now two Marshes, the one "born" in this universe and the much older, spectacularly scarred, embittered, sad, lonely and really kind of hopeless Marsh that survived Bitter Seeds and The Coldest War. To assist the reader, sad old Marsh's passages are told in the first person, while era-approriate Marsh stays in the third person. But to further twist the reader's brain, we get long passages from Gretel's multiplied points of view -- a difficult narrative feat that Tregillis pulls off very well, which is good because otherwise this book would just be a hot mess instead of a satisfying conclusion to this series.

What really sells me on this last book is that this brave new world is pretty much exactly our world, as far as historical events go. In Gretel's and Old Marsh's world, for instance, the Little Ships never happened, and Britain lost an entire army at and around Dunkirk. Which means that we really are seeing that the world Gretel couldn't mess with is the "real" world*. I dig this. I dig this right to the hot melty bits.

*Except there are still warlocks and Enochian and Eidolons and stuff in it. They've just been circumvented by, uh, [REDACTED]. He.

Ian Tregillis' THE COLDEST WAR

I was hoping that The Coldest War would at least be as much about the Cold War as Bitter Seeds, Ian Tregillis' first Milkweed book, was about World War II (I mean, look at this cover!), but, well, we don't always get what we hope for, do we?

Unless, of course, we're Gretel, the Nazi-engineered precog whose machinations are at the heart of this second book (and, I guess, the first, more than seemed the case at the time), about whom this book is much more deeply concerned than about any mere historical backdrop, alt- or otherwise. She pretty much always gets what she hopes for. She just doesn't really hope for that much. Or so it seems. As such.

A lot of this novel wound up being a bit of a tough slog for me, to be honest. I even put it aside entirely to devour the previous novel covered in this blog, and returned to it more out of a sort of determined resignation than any real desire to see how it ended. Gretel's sparse but significant scenes aside, the first half, perhaps even two-thirds, is bogged down in a lot of dreary domestic soap opera as we see some of the more quotidian consequences of the events of Bitter Seeds. Marriages and families have fallen apart. Glamorous damaged antiheroes have found redemption in the love of good women to whom they get forced to lie. Etc. And just the tiniest soupçon of the promised hints of good old Cold War secret service drama, but not enough to flavor anything.

The Sandbaggers with warlocks this ain't*. But man, it could have been. Ah, me.

Fortunately, there is Gretel, whose motives remain inscrutable and whose near-omniscience remains irritating as hell as she flaps her greying be-wired braids through an escape from a Russian magic-gulag (yes, as hinted would be the case at the end of the prior novel, the Soviets are mighty keen on continuing Westcarp's work, but no, there's not much of that stuff in this novel, except as something from which Gretel and brother Klaus can escape, and as can function as a sort of paper tiger-cum-red herring when things finally get going) and back to England, where she was once a prisoner of war and now hopes for asylum (and, of course, gets it, because duh, omniscient precog precogs her way out of everything).

And there is what's left of Milkweed, when it's not having sad little kitchen sink tantrums at home. It's been no more idle than the Soviets, but just as the Soviets have sort of out-Westcarped Westcarp, the New Men of Milkweed have found an even crueler and creepier way to raise a new generation of warlocks.

Which leads us up to the last third, in which things finally start happening, and boy do they happen. I'm still not sure if this last section redeems the earlier plodding. It certainly would have had there been, say, even one Soviet character in the book, even a cardboard baddie, to provide some actual tension and, you know, villainy beyond the faceless, unknowable threat of the Eidolons**. As it was, well, while the very ending is plenty interesting and satisfying and does give a certain poignancy to all the tedium that preceded it, The Coldest War wasn't really what I'd wanted it to be at all.

That being said, I'm still keen to read the third book, Necessary Evil, sometime soon, just to see where all this is finally going.

I just hope it gets beyond the drawing room a bit sooner.

*But DUDE I WOULD READ THE SNAPE OUT OF THAT SO SOMEBODY PLEASE MAKE IT A THING.

**The Lovecraftian Old One analogues who are the source of all magic and have to be cajoled and bribed-with-bloooooood by batshit crazy human wizards into letting pesky little humans break the laws of physics.

Ian Tregillis' BITTER SEEDS

If Tim Powers and H.P. Lovecraft somehow managed to reach out to one another across the dark and malevolent vastness of time and space to write a cosmic horror story set in World War II, the result might be something very like Bitter Seeds, the first volume of Ian Tregillis' Milkweed trilogy (or triptych, as the marketers of these books seem to insist on calling it).

Of course, Powers did write a World War II novel all his own, the wonderful spies-and-genies romp Declare, of which it was difficult not to think while following the adventures of Milkweed (itself so very reminiscent of Mike Mignola's Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, of Hellboy fame) and their unspellable (I'm lazy and lacking bandwidth so I'm not gonna look it up) Nazi German counterparts. Fortunately, I was not making the comparison to Tregillis' detriment; Bitter Seeds is as enjoyable as any Powers novel, and as well written, even though it's telling a very different tale.

The story begins at the tail end of World War I, when unsavory types are scouring the battle-ravaged countryside of Belgium and surrounding lands, harvesting orphans like so many rotting cabbages. Some weird doctor, one Westcarp, is paying good money for young children delivered to his orphanage. Several children, including a brother and sister, Klaus and Gretel, are so delivered to their sinister and mysterious fate.

Meanwhile in England, a boy about their age is subjected to mysterious and unsavory experiences under the supervision of his noble grandfather, a duke, whose son one presumes was a casualty of war but at least died with the requisite heir and a spare. The boy getting experimented with -- Will -- being, of course, the spare.

The Germans, led by Westcarp, it turns out, are trying in their mechanized and industrial way, to duplicate the magical milieu of Will and his grandfather, who, we learn, are warlocks. Warlocks being humanity's self-appointed negotiators with the Eidolons*, who arrange the "blood price" that has to be paid whenever somebody wants to break the laws of physics. Usually it's just a fingertip, occasionally it's your sanity, etc. -- really just depends on how big a violation you're wanting to effect.

The negotiations are carried out in a terrible, mind-bending language called Enochian, which you can only learn if you start really, really, young -- hence Will's weird childhood.

But Westcarp is not down with that ish. Westcarp has decided that electricity can take the place of Paranormal Pimsleur. And so Gretel and Klaus and their fellows wind up with wires surgically implanted in their skulls, connecting their brains to batteries they have to tote around in order to use the powers they have honed through years of unspeakable experimentation.

So yeah, English wizards versus Nazi cyborgs. What's not to love?

And I'm not even touching on the character drama, of course, which is where Tregillis comes closest to Powers' style and substance. If you love Powers' stories, you're going to love this. If you love mid-century settings. If you love wizardry. If you love war stories. If you love Nazi Weird Science schlock. There's something for pretty much everybody here.

And it's all set up for the next novel, in which, naturally, the Soviets are obviously going to be much more involved. They want to violate the laws of physics too, you guys. Which path will they take? Or will they forge a new one as we head into a Lovecraftian Cold War.

I'm so down to find out. So very down.

Many thanks to the wondrous Paul Weimer (@PrinceJvstin on Twitter), who told me about these books over a cup of coffee on a whistle stop visit last summer.

*This is where the Lovecraft comes in, of course, in that the Eidolons are basically Great Old Ones, unknowably vast alien inimical Others who exist on such a scale that we are like bacteria to them, and they're pissed off because they're all out of hand sanitizer.

Ian Sales' ADRIFT ON THE SEA OF RAINS

Now that I know that alternate history Cold War Apollopunk is a thing, I want more of it. Much more. Good thing Ian Sales' Adrift on the Sea of Rains is but the first of a quartet of novellas, then!

As the story opens, a small band of astronauts manning a permanent American base on the Moon (established as part of a natural progression from the Apollo missions, in that time frame and with that technology) find themselves marooned there when the USA and the USSR decide to go ahead and fight out World War III and destroy the planet Earth, rendering its glorious blue-white marble a desolate grey rock to match its satellite. The astronauts have (nuclear!) power, and thus life support, for 20 years, but only have freeze-dried astronaut chow to last them about two! Oh noes!

Fortunately, one of their number is not really an astronaut but a mad scientist plucked from Nazi Germany and secretly put to work continuing his experiments travel between parallel universes. He's obnoxious as hell but he's their only hope once he's completed his masterpiece (which would only work in a vacuum, hence his presence on the Moon), allowing them to start jumping from universe to universe in search of one where nobody ever actually decided to play a game of Global Thermonuclear War.

And then the fun begins. Because our astronauts have to jury-rig and re-start all that wild old Apollo-era technology to try to get themselves to their new home!

The story of this mighty effort is intercut with the previous test piloting-and-espionage experiences of the Moon Base commander, Vance Peterson, in a series of cleverly arranged flashbacks that also tell the tale of how the disaster came to be. It's good storytelling, no doubt, but what makes this novella really stand out is its visceral conveyance of the experience of trusting the analogue tech of the late 1960s and early 1970s to keep people alive and hurl them across space. Famously, the Eagle that landed in Apollo 11 had less computing power in it than the smartphone in your pocket, but that's just the beginning. Paper-thin hulls. Huge banks of switches. Ring binders full of gnarly math and densely printed instructions. Slide rules and pencils. It's utterly, utterly glorious.

Ned Beauman's THE TELEPORTATION ACCIDENT

No book that I actually finished has ever made me want more to take a shower after the last page (no, not even one by Chuck Wendig. I KNOW!) more than Ned Beauman's debut novel, Boxer, Beetle. It was therefore with a trepidation only partly assuaged by my knowledge that my best reading pal SJ loved this one that I began The Teleportation Accident.

The cover helped.

Misleading as it is as to its contents.

What's inside is often unspeakably foul, vaguely misogynist (at one point early on the phrase "non-mercenary vulva" is used to describe a theoretical female who might be kind enough to sleep with our protagonist) and reads a lot like one might imagine a (wildly unlikely) collaboration between Robert Silverberg and Douglas Adams would, if it were set in pre WWII Berlin, Paris and Los Angeles (with a little -- a very little --  and the wrong bits of -- Henry Miller thrown in). I was craving a shower before I'd even finished one chapter. But...

But...

Well, I did not mention Douglas Adams lightly, except instead of gentle absurdist/parodic humor, the humor one is slapped in the face with every few lines is nasty and sordid and really pretty repugnant, but funny nonetheless. Funny enough to make even the most umbrage-taking feminist keep on reading, even if she winds up hating herself for it. As in chock full of lines like "the moon over Berlin shone bright as a bare bulb in a toilet cubicle." Ha ha ha and eww.

As for what it's about, well, it's sort of a companion piece to Boxer, Beetle in that it, too, is largely concerned with Germany in the 1930s, but where many characters in that book are obsessed in various ways with the Nazis, those in The Teleportation Accident, even though unlike the Boxer, Beetles they are from Berlin, are pretty much oblivious to them. Egon Loeser and his friends are more concerned about parties and pussy and scoring some decent cocaine -- or a corkscrew -- no, an actual corkscrew, jeeze -- than about world or local affairs. Politics is for people who can't handle art.* "History happened while you were hungover," the tagline says. And for these people it's so true that it's only when Loeser chases his ill-chosen anima projection, one Adele Hitler**, to Los Angeles (via Paris) that he gets even an inkling of what is happening to the Jews in his home city and country, and this only in that people he meets in LA assume he's a refugee like everybody else -- and assume he knows why they might think this.

So this book could almost be an exploration of how people could remain carefully, willfully ignorant of one of history's greatest crimes right up until it was too late for them to do anything about it. So described, this book becomes somewhat admirable (I'd posit it's this quality that got it listed for the Man Booker prize). But that makes it no less tough to take. But I suppose I'm supposed to admire that as well.

The book does, though, get a few bonus points for playing a bit with an amusing conceit -- that H.P. Lovecraft's fiction wasn't really fiction but just sort of veiled/fictionalized references to staggeringly difficult concepts in particle physics and dimensions and whatnot -- but like so many of the neat ideas tossed around in here, it doesn't get the attention it deserves. It's kind of like Randy from A Christmas Story opening his presents. Wow, oh neat, wow, yeah, and RIIIIIIIP into the next package. Except the Lovecraft stuff is not the toy zeppelin we see the kid asleep and cradling at the end. The Lovecraft stuff is the socks.

And speaking of the end, or rather, the four ends, the words "Scooby Doo Ending" kept coming to mind. And even though the very last bit where [REDACTED] turns out to be [REDACTED] in [REDACTED] is pretty cool and amusing, that last of the four epilogues is really the most interesting bit of the book. So interesting, in fact, that I wound up wishing I'd gotten to read that book instead of this one.

Ah, me.

*Of course, in no small part that proved to be quite true, as Adolph Hitler was famously a failed artist.

**No relation to Adolph, we learn in very casual passing.

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.

100 Books #92 - Harry Turtledove's HOW FEW REMAIN

It was a near miss for the Confederacy when General Robert E. Lee's aide recovered a document he'd lost, that detailed Lee's entire plan for the invasion of the Union in 1862. Just imagine the disaster that would have befallen those brave Southern boys had that document fallen into Yankee hands! Mercy!

Oh wait, that's not how it happened? Pardon me. I'm from Wyoming. Our school system teaches Wyoming history, to which accounts of the War Between the States are merely an ancillary in that they explain why a lot of members of the U.S. Calvary charged with protecting Manifest Destiny-enacting white settlers against Red Indians in the West had fewer than their original compliment of digits or limbs, or raging cases of PTSD. I'm hazy on details.

No, not really. But the Civil War still isn't something I've studied too terribly closely, which may be a shame, but then again may not be, as far as my ability to appreciate what Harry Turtledove has achieved in this founding document of his sprawling alternate history of North America, the departure point for which is the aforementioned recovery of Lee's invasion plan. Without that vital intelligence, Turtledove says, the Union might not have won at Antietam, which means President Lincoln would not have had that victory announcement to serve as his springboard for announcing Emancipation, which means Great Britain and France don't have a clear moral choice in deciding whether or not to continue supporting the Confederacy, which means the Confederacy winds up winning the War and North America winds up with four internationally recognized nation states instead of three (well, okay, three nation states and one Dominion).

That premise established, the action proper of this novel starts up about 20 years later. The Confederacy is buying the provinces of Sonora and Chihuahua from Mexico in order to acquire a Pacific port and the land access to extend its railroads to it. The USA has elected its first Republican President since Abraham Lincoln's one and only term ended in the disgrace of losing the War; this new President needs to look tough and declares war (Lincoln has taken to the railways to travel the diminished United States of America as a quasi-Marxist labor agitator*). Frederick Douglass is an old man, still hopeful that someday, someone is going to give a crap about the countless slaves still in bondage in the Confederacy. Old Yellowhair, George Armstrong Custer, is charged with containing a Mormon rebellion in Utah. Samuel Clemens (whom real history knows better as Mark Twain) reports and editorializes on events in the pages of the San Francisco Call and has uxorious sex with his wife (yeah, I could have done without that mental image too, guys). Jeb Stuart is in charge of moving Confederate troops into the newly-purchased territories as a first step towards colonizing them for the C.S.A. Teddy Roosevelt, Montana rancher, watches events unfolding and hopes the new President will hold fast, but decides his own help is needed to do it and forms up his own Unauthorized Regiment. Etc.

It's always fun to play "What If" over a few beers or whatever, but who else has taken that game to such lengths? Turtledove went on to write ten more novels in this universe he created. Ten. Am I going to read the rest of them?

Well, I'm not sure. This was my first Harry Turtledove, and I did find it diverting and moderately absorbing, chiefly because it was fun to imagine these historical figures in circumstances so radically different from what they're famous for, but, well, those reviewers who have described How Few Remain as historical fan fiction are kind of right. I'm told subsequent books in the series are much, much better than this first book, which news I always greet with irritation; I've just endured 596 pages of this solely so that I understand what's going on in better future books? I'd say that if those future books were solely about Turtledove's own characters, I'd be disinclined to continue, but I can't help but be curious about, e.g. Lincoln, Twain, Roosevelt and Custer** in this alternate timeline. Especially after enjoying the mental spectacle of Custer with Gatling guns. And Lincoln delivering stonking Marxist rants. And Douglass...

Ah me, Douglass. Despite his advanced age, he dons his journalist hat*** and accompanies a Union flanking attack that brings him onto Confederate soil for the first time (he doesn't count his years as a slave because it was still part of the United States then), and when he sees that the little structures he sees burning all over the place are slave shanties, it's impossible not to share his rage. "May they all burn, and all the big houses with them."

Which is to say that, where most of the other historical figures and characters come off as tremendously unpleasant, if not outright assholes, Lincoln and Douglass (ha ha) shine as the novel's only real heroes, both of them old men, generally despised if not outright hated, bowed but not broken, sad but not embittered by the Union's defeat in the first war, only sort of hopeful that a second might change anything but doing their damndest to bring about the changes they hope for regardless of what happens on the battlefields. They make up for any number of disappointments (Turtledove succumbs to a failing that is one of my great pets peeve as a reader, the impulse to use "amber liquid" as a synonym for beer or scotch. Why do you do that, writers? Why do you always pick that beverage as a point to vary your vocabulary, and why must you always invoke the image of body fluids when you do? WHY, WRITERS, WHY?) and ick moments (for some reason, sex scenes involving Mark Twain and his wife, and George Custer and not-his-wife, have scarred me for life). They might even lead me to look into more of this series.

*A lot of people are nonplussed by Turtledove's version of Lincoln, but I think it makes a lot of sense, provided one never forgets that this Lincoln is one who not only did not get assassinated but lived to a ripe old age in a world in which the institution of slavery persisted in North America, and no one in the defeated North gave much of a damn about them (and many blamed the war on them, as alt-Frederick Douglass' story illustrates). So, as Lincoln observes to himself as he prepares to address a fairly unreceptive crowd in Great Falls, Montana: "Without more than a handful of Negroes to exploit, it [the country] battened off the sweat of the poor and the ignorant and the newly arrived and the unlucky." Which is to say that those people wound up having it even worse in Turtledove's alt USA than they did in ours, with no newly-freed slaves to soak up the really dirty jobs. Potentially, this could even have retarded the development of the middle class whose interests and abilities so characterized the 20th century in our world. So yeah, I buy Lincoln as a golden years Marxist under these circumstances. For great justice.

**Though I've got to say that Ol' Yellowhair -- and a lot of other Union military leaders -- comes off as a considerable jerk, even before he gets to Utah, where he's hell-bent on stringing up all the leaders of the Mormon Church ostensibly for inciting the Territory to rebel while the Union wages its second war with the Confederacy, but, one suspects, really over polygamy. Everyone is really obsessed with polygamy in this novel, and perhaps that's true for the times, but man, did the multiple wives jokes get old after a few hundred pages. Also: I didn't think anything could ever really make me hate Teddy Roosevelt, but this book did. I had to keep gritting my teeth and reminding myself this is just a character kind of loosely based on Roosevelt. As were all of the historical figures, of course, even the ones who kept their pants on.

***But somehow never encounters, say, Matthew Brady, whose absence from this novel is glaring. I would have accepted at least a passing reference to how he had died or something, you know?

100 Books #51 - Anne Lyle's ALCHEMIST OF SOULS

Some books are just made for readers like me, ticking off so many boxes on one's personal checklist that one sits there screaming "hey you book, why aren't you already published and in my hot little hands!" when one hears about them.

Alchemist of Souls is one of those, for me. Tudor/Elizabethan England? Check. Alternate history*? Check. Alien species coexisting with humans? Check. Theatrical politics? Check. Shakespearean cross-dressers, onstage and off? Check.

The world of the novel is one in which Elizabeth I not only married but had children; England's Crown Prince is her son Arthur (by, of course, Robert Dudley. Aww!). That's all just background, though, because this book isn't about Elizabeth or her children except in a distant way; our heroes and heroines are more or less ordinary Londoners dealing with the consequences of an extraordinary event: for the first time ever, a tribe of Skraylings (the aforementioned alien species, the conceit of them being that the New World contained not only the people we know as First Nations/Native Americans, but also a magical, sort-of-elfin race who became trading partners and allies of Britain) are sending a formal ambassador to Elizabeth's court. So of course, intrigue on every level follows, because France and Spain are still Britain's enemies and seek to break up that alliance, by whatever means they might. By which I mean spies, assassins, saboteurs, the usual rabble of mischief-makers.

Enter Maliverny Catlyn (loosely based on an actual historical figure), mysterious swordsman with an intriguing past of which we're only given hints, who is singled out by the powers that be to serve as this ambassador's bodyguard. He has theatrical connections through a sometime love affair with a copyist and forger and thereby winds up coming into the orbit of our other protagonist, Coby, sort of a young majordomo for a theater company who happens to be fluent in TradeTalk, the Skrayling/English pidgeon Mal will have to learn in order to do his new job. Coby, of course, being a "real life" Shakespearean girl in disguise**, half Viola, half Rosalind, falls in love with Mal, though she would have wound up sucked into these intrigues anyway, since her theater company is one of many competing in a special theater contest which the ambassador shall judge, Skraylings being wild about the theater.

Got all that? Good, because there's even more. I have proclaimed on this blog and elsewhere that I would love to read a version of A Song of Ice and Fire that's all about the little people instead of the unpleasant, immoral bigshots jockeying for power. I seem to have gotten my wish. There is a dizzying array of plots and counter-plots, both in the meta, literary sense and in the sense of espionage and political struggle. Coby's is not the only secret identity. The Skraylings have lots of secrets, and not just that of how they make light out of puddles of mystery liquid. There is, of course, magic, and while a major plot point does hinge on this magic, it's otherwise pretty unobtrusive, a mere and minor fact of the world, because Anne Lyle is interested in people, not fantasy tropes. To which I say hooray!

A sequel, set in the Venice of this alternate world, is planned for later this year, and shall land on my ebook reader as a matter of course due to my Angry Robot ebooks subscription, which I shall be renewing immediately this month. I think of all my purchases over the last twelve months, that subscription has given me the most return on investment in terms of sheer pleasure. I am now never without something to read; indeed, I have an overabundance yet, including many books that came out before Alchemist of Souls but didn't promise to capture my imagination and anticipation quite the way this book did. And yes, that promise I count quite fulfilled. Whot larks!

I'm still puzzled at the title, though. No alchemists were harmed in the making of this book. No alchemists appeared at all. The title is pretty much just a rather deep metaphor for plot points I shan't reveal here. Shh!

*Very, very alternate. This Elizabethan England is way more accepting of, e.g., homosexuality, than the real period was, for instance, to say nothing of a whole 'nother sentient race. There are mentions of sectarian Catholic/Protestant tensions but they're just that -- mentions. Much of this can be forgiven (if forgiveness is needed) because of the subculture in which so much of the story takes place; theater/arts circles are always a bit more progressive than the rest of society. Still, I sometimes found this a little hard to swallow.

**This is just one of many Shakespearean motifs, overt and subtle, appearing in the novel. I think Lyle is probably a good old Shakespeare nerd. Funny the Bard himself never appears. That's rather a huge absence, especially since it's not explained. Perhaps in the sequel?