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. 

Toshikazu Kawaguchi's BEFORE THE COFFEE GETS COLD (Tr Geoffrey Trousselot)

How could I spend a January in Japan without giving what seems to be the most popular Japanese novel in recent memory a try? Especially if it's a time travel story?

I mean, the elevator pitch for Before the Coffee Gets Cold, is dead captivating: a dingy little basement cafe's secret to modest success is that it can send you backwards in time, but the duration of the visit is only as long as it takes for a fresh cup of coffee to get cold. There are other restrictions even tighter, but this is the one that's in the cover blurb, indeed, the title; I'm not going to spoil the others except to observe that the usual quandaries of time travel stories don't apply here. You can't change the past from this café. But you can do some very special things if you accept the risk. 

Author Toshikazu Kawaguchi made his bones as a playwright and adapted this novel from a stage play, so there is also a limitation on where things take place. It's all about the cafe. And, still very play-like, most of the meaning is transmitted through dialogue, though some exposition is carried out the old fashioned way, too.

You'd think the results would thus be a bit dull, but they're anything but. For instance, among the stories this scenario lets Kawaguchi tell is one about a pair of regular customers, a husband and wife coping with early onset Alzheimer's. The husband has forgotten the wife completely, but with the help of the cafe and its kind-hearted staff, she discovers a kind of hack he concocted to communicate with her beyond the reach through time his failing memory could otherwise grasp. No, you're the one who's crying. I merely have something in my eye.

Kawaguchi's characters all have to be exceedingly clever to get any utility out of this very limited form of time travel. Watching them figure out ways to work within the limitations is as interesting as seeing the outsized emotional impact of their successes is moving. I can certainly see why this little novel has gotten several sequels. It's simply exquisite.

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?

Emily St. John Mandel's SEA OF TRANQUILITY

Ok, friends, I'm calling it: I'm officially over the Simulation Theory. It was interesting, even diverting, for a while, but now the Zoanthropes who can't be trusted to tell the difference between fact and fiction have gotten hold of it have added it to their quiver of arguments in favor of not being their brothers' keepers and they're thus absolved from giving a fuck about anybody else despite what their holy books tell them* and I just can't anymore. 

Ware spoilers for the book, by the way. I 

But it do keep coming up in the books I'm reading and even if it wasn't just a gussied-up version of "characters who know or realized they're in a novel" it's come up TOO MUCH and the next time I see it, even if it's a fucking prize-winning Instant Classic, I'm not gonna bother finishing that book. 

Anyway, Sea of Tranquility. Which commits another sin-in-my-book regarding books in that the main point-of-view character is a novelist.

I realize that I already sound like I hated this, but I didn't. Author Emily St. John Mandel has created a cast of characters, living in different periods of history and the Future, that I felt like I understood and quickly came to care about, and put them in interesting situations within their own timelines and experiences that kept me caring even when I realized that they were really just parts in a familiar Simulated machine, and the book is pretty short (by my standards anyway) so I didn't feel the need to put it aside or drop it altogether at the time, though about 2/3 of the way through it I started feeling like I'd read it all before fairly recently.

The book takes place in, in chronological order, frontier British Columbia, present day New York City, a book tour around the world in the 22nd century, and a colonized Moon in the 23rd, with the Moon being home to three domed cities (one of which is charmingly dilapidated to represent the diminished glamor of life on the moon when other planets in our solar system and in another solar system are now also settled by humans) and a Time Institute which, yes, is a giant time travel bureaucracy (yay!)... tasked with gathering evidence to finaly prove or disprove the Simulation Theory, because An Anomaly has crept up (yawn) which allows all of the aforementioned points in space-time to connect and bleed into each other, but just for a moment -- an arresting moment that has inspired, again in chronological order, a letter home describing a wilderness encounter with the Anomaly, a musical-composition-cum-video installation featuring a glimpse of the Anomaly, and a vividly described passage in a novel that can only be describing an enounter with the Anomaly (but written by someone who grew up on the Moon!).

The Time Institute has noticed these artistic coincidences, sent Time Travelers to investigate them, and has concluded that this strongly indicates a Glitch in the Simulation (yawn) that needs further investigation. Enter one Gaspery-Jacques Roberts, a somewhat wayward divorced man in his 30s who was named after a character in the Novel and whose name also appears in the initial stories of the other encounters with the Anomaly. Yawn. Of course he's going to be a Time Traveler. But, to Mandel's credit, for a long time this looked like it was going to be a different kind of coincidence -- a family name passed on to descendants, perhaps? 

*Which, those same holy books seem awfully prone as it is to persuading their adherents that this fragile little planet whose surface we cling to was given to us to dominate and so we don't bear any responsibility for taking care of it or making sure its habitable for other life forms who aren't of immediate economic utility to us. Why, yes, it drives me crazy that so many people consider these texts to be the Ne Plus Ultra of morality when they actually seem to demand the bare minimum of same of The Faithful. And that The Faithful, even as they scream for everybody to adhere to their idiosyncratic interpretations of holy writ, seem in their own conduct to regard these texts more as guidelines than absolutes. Slavish enforced obedience for others, freedom to cherry pick for me...

Annalee Newitz' THE FUTURE OF ANOTHER TIMELINE

It's been a while since I indulged myself in some fun time travel shenanigans, and my trusted guides to all things cool, the maginificent Prince Jvstin and the ever-correct Popqueenie, have often mentioned Annalee Newitz as a trusted source for the kind of shenanigans we like, so I kind of feel some egg dripping down the deepening crevices in my face that it took a big fat sale at Audible to get me to finally actually read them.

Better late than never. Even if it's time travel. Or especially if it's time travel?

The Future of Another Timeline starts off the way more cool science fiction adventures should, at a great big punk rock/riot grrl concert in the late 20th century. As described by narrator Laura Nicol, it's a thrashing good time that takes no prisoners or bullshit and just brings back all the great memories of wishing I had grown up somewhere where things like that actually happened in the late 20th century, instead of somewhere they have both kinds of music, country and Christian. It's so on the nose that at first one could easily not notice that this scene is not taking place in our world. My first clue was the Wonder Woman tee shirts celebrating the terrific Tim Burton Wonder Woman film that came out in the late 80s.

Oh. Oh...? Oh!

Before we know it, we have a woman folding herself -- well, not exactly, but she is observing the trail of effect caused by her own younger self in a world where time travel is not only real but also not a secret -- and in an incredibly intriguing way. Machines that make time travel possible are buried deep in ancient geological features in several out-of-the-way locations all around the Earth, including one on the border between Manitoba and Saskechewan, and another in the nation of Jordan, and are the subject of general knowledge. Nobody has to have that awkward conversation in which they have to try to persuade someone that no, really, they're from the future, not even in the late 1800s. AND... Nobody has to make the same tired observation about something being bigger on the inside. Etc.

I think this is a first, for me.

But, somewhat more conventionally -- because cool world building and neat set pieces do not a novel make, one needs a story -- there is a sort of temporal cold war between at least two factions over how much "editing" can happen and what kind of world that editing is to try to make for everyone. Agents from each side keep meeting up at different points in a history that is not, as currently understood by the "geoscientists" of this world (delightfully, since the time machines are buried in shield rock, time travel and its various academic offshoots are the province of geologists), governed by the "Great Man" theory -- someone once traveled back and killed off the tyrant who originally conquered almost all of Europe in the early 19th century, only to see some other guy named Napoleon rise up and take his place and do pretty much the same thing, for instance -- but can still be altered through patient nudging of social movements. A well-executed leaflet campaign can do more, in this world, than a well-aimed shot from a gun, whether that gun be period or anachronistic. I like this. So much.

But so, does this mean that Annalee Newitz has found a way to make the bog standard "time police" motif of science fiction into a fresh and new... metaphor for Culture War? In fact, they have. Meaning this is a hell of a novel to have been reading right when the United States Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe vs Wade, the law of the land for most of my adult life that has established abortion as a Constitutional right and done the most since the 19th amendment to uphold in no uncertain terms the right of a little over half of the human race to enjoy a certain standard of basic humanity to a greater degree than any generation born before us.

Which, along with other pesky ideas like offering education to all regardless of whether or not they have functioning uteruses, letting such people vote, choose their own marriage partners (or none at all) on their own terms, etc. (to say nothing of the rights of people who are not white, cisgender, heterosexual, or Christian) are very much in the crosshairs of one of the factions involved in this version of the Time War, the Comstockers (named for and kind of led by Anthony Comstock, of Society for the Suppression of Vice fame).*

I think he's rather well represented in this, the best book trailer, maybe ever, by the way. I'd like to think the real Comstock had nightmares just like this.

But, back to the Temporal Culture War. Its other faction, to which our time traveling concert goer, Tess, belongs, call themselves the Daughters of Harriet (as in Harriet Tubman, who in this world was once a U.S. Senator). Headquartered in California in the year 2022, they meet in secret to plan operations to preserve the freedoms they have gained, to extend them to other marginalized people, and to expand them. Operations in pursuit of this goal include missions such as sending Tess back to the famous Columbian Expedition of 1893 to hook up with some sort-of-Algerian belly dancers getting ready to take the Midway by storm and open a lot of closed minds -- unless the Comstockers can succeed in persuading the Respectable White Ladies of Chicago that the dancers are a threat to the good moral character of their city and must be shut down. While there, Tess befriends a dancer, a crusading young muckraker, and no less a personage than Sol Bloom, who all enthusiastically join her cause.

Meanwhile, there are shenanigans going on in the sixth century, BCE that have the potential to render all of the Daughters' efforts moot forever. DRAMA BUTTON PUSH ALL THE DRAMA BUTTONS YOU GUYS.

In lesser hands, this could be an awful, hectoring, didactic bore of a read, or a chaotic mess, or both, but Newitz maintains a high standard of storytelling, especially character drama, focusing on Tess's adventures in time but also on the somewhat ordinary suburban life of her younger counterpart, Beth, the Riot Grrl who originally went to that great punk show in 1992 but whose teenage years seem destined to have rather a higher body count than any teenager since J.D. met Veronica and all the Heathers in suburban Ohio back in 1989, if you know what I mean. How very.

The novel comes especially to life as an audio book, by the way; Nicol has just the right kind of California cool to her delivery to sell Beth's story especially, but imparts just enough gravitas to Tess's chapters to help us see her as the kind of woman Beth might could become if wibbly wobbly timey wimey all works out. As an extra treat we get something that only an audio edition can bring us -- a sound clip from fictional band Grape Ape's hit single from another timeline "What I Like to See", and an interview between Newitz and Desi Lopez about the making of the book trailer and the writing of the seriously catchy song featured in it. Popqueenie and I agree, if Grape Ape had been a real band in the 90s, we would have moved heaven and earth to be at every show.

All in all, The Future of Another Timeline is one of the most amazing balancing acts I've ever seen in book form. There are so many things that could go wrong with it, and none of them do, and it still has plenty of surprises for even the most jaded time travel reader. It's a tremendous accomplishment and has definitely turned me into a Newitz fangirl. Which, I really already should have been, because of Io9 and Charlie Jane and all...

I would (ahem) read any number of sequels to this if (cough) certain parties felt like making those a thing. As such.

*That jerk's best appearance in literature since his side-cameos in various Robert Anton Wilson joints in the 70s and 80s.

Kim Bo-Young's I'M WAITING FOR YOU AND OTHER STORIES (tr by Sophie Bowman and Sung Ryu)

There is only one story in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and it's a humdinger.

There are only two stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and they're both humdingers.

There are four stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and they're all humdingers.

There are nine stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and they're all humdingers.

There are 37 stories in Kim Bo-Young's I'm Waiting for You and Other Stories, and not all are humdingers but are still very good indeed.

There is only one story.

I sound gimmicky as hell, but those are the kind of thoughts that kept running through my mind as I marveled at what South Korean speculative fiction hot shot Kim Bo-Young and her two translators have achieved here. Including making me marvel at the porousness of the boundaries between the stories within it, how they relate to each other, and how the whole came together as, originally, an engagement gift written for a friend.

I suppose most usefully this book is talked about as a collection of four stories, though the first "I'm Waiting for You" and the final "On My Way to You" are really two point-of-view chapters in a shared story, with the middle "The Prophet of Corruption" and "That One Life" serving as a story and its sequel, though perhaps since "That One Life" is much shorter and more contained, it's really a story and its coda. But even so, not only do they all feel like they're set in the same story universe, they feel like they chiefly concern the same two characters.

I'll explain.

"I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way to You" are each epistolary stories of 15 letters each*, with "I'm Waiting for You" presenting a bridegroom's and "On My Way to You" his bride's experiences as the pair each struggle with the consequences of fateful decisions that displace them in space and time. Our bride embarked on a trip to Alpha Centauri before her wedding that will delay that momentous day by a few months, in her subjective time, but nine years would go by back on Earth. It's the ultimate escape from her family (and there are suggestions that it's an abusive one); they are emigrating to Alpha Centauri and she's riding out with them and then coming straight back because doing so qualifies her somehow for better jobs and there are tax advantages as well, so on paper this seems like a great idea. 

Our bridegroom, for his part, has decided to shorten those months with a spaceship journey of his own, on a sort of voyage to nowhere that is undertaken solely so that people like him who have been Left Behind Because Relativity can keep up with those who have left them. As the bride explains it, 

...you came in with an armful of pamphlets on interstellar marriage and said that if you saved up for about four and a half years, you'd be able to buy a ticket to take what they call the Orbit of Waiting. You explained that it was a ship that circled around the sun at the speed of light so that the passengers could get to the same time as other people traveling in from other stars.

This is already plenty weird and engaging even before things inevitably go wrong on both trips, and not just messages go astray and get out of sync. Poignantly, our groom returns to Earth several times in his struggles to re-sync with his beloved, only to see destruction and decay advancing to the point where he is only able to return to his lonely time-delaying journeys, ultimately aboard a one-man ship, through improbable luck and what sometimes feels like divine help. Which, I'll get to that. 

Meanwhile, in "On My Way to You" his bride has her own struggles more or less re-enacting the story of Aniara, except instead of cults and existential despair she encounters class war and megalomania as the captain of the ship she is rescued by devises a scheme to keep visiting the disintegrating port in Korea, seeding it with families each time until there's a population there that will regard he and the upper echelons of the ship's personnel as gods and will rebuild civilization per His direction.

The other story-pair at first seems to have nothing to do with these most star-crossed of lovers, concerned as it is with a sort of speculative fictionalization of Buddhist ontology. We find ourselves among a protean collection of characters in "a" bardo rather than "the" Bardo that we have occasionally encountered when western SF writers play with these concepts (cough, Kim Stanley Robinson). Each character (and I'm using the term very, very loosely here, as you'll see) has their own bardo in which they reflect on the lessons learned in their most recent lives in the Lower Realm and regain their memories of all of their other lives, all the way back to when they first divided into a small number of individuals from an original single all-encompassing consciousness. Which they can choose to undo at any time if everbody consents except for those occasions on which somebody's consent really isn't necessary because all of this malarkey about separate entities is really just an illusion anyway. I am me, this grass is also me (and I can divide myself into millions of other little entities that are all blades of grass anytime I want, or reabsorb all of those blades of grass on the ground right now that are also really just me).

Our main character in these is a being called, most of the time, Naban, who being one of the small number of original entities that were the result of the first division, has a lot of power and responsibility. Naban interacts with several others at this level as they try to figure out a source of corruption that has emerged in the Dark Realm (where the bardos are), with "corruption" essentially being defined as "persisting in the belief that separate things are actually separate things". At first it seems that the problem rests with one of Naban's original "children" (also called "students"), Aman, who really digs being their own being, resists merging or sharing, and has persuaded all of their own children that the Lower Realm is real and their separateness is real and Differences Matter -- and seems to be in the process of convincing many of the other Aman-level and even maybe some Naban-level beings of the same. But is Aman really the source of corruption, or, since Naban originally "created" Aman, is the ultimate corruptor Naban? All of this is explored in a series of sort-of-chapters that could almost stand as stories in their own right, some of which, as Naban deals with yet another possibly corrupted entity, take place on a bardo formed as a spaceship that is later docked on an asteroid (and an asteroid impact on Earth seems to have been part of the problems besetting the world in "I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way to You". Hmm. There are lots of little motifs like this that unite the stories artistically), and have Naban considering the use of lasers and torpedos to get through to that stubborn Aman. Who is Naban. And yet doesn't think they're Naban. Or anything but Aman and Aman's children. Who are not Aman. Except they are.

Really, this story gave me a bit of a headache, but it never gets boring if you're willing to meet it at its level, which is, as you see, incredibly heady and challenging and rich. I had to take a day off after reading it before I proceeded with "That One Life", which takes Naban down into our own Lower Realm, but one in which the corruption from the Dark Realm and the Lower Realm have developed a wicked feedback loop and a whole lot seems to be going wrong. Naban themself is exhibiting this in their very nature in the Lower Realm as they've incarnated as a 15-year-old-girl who is immortal, the better to watch the corruption and decay, and the better, also, to continuously pursue Aman through many incarnations in which Aman is Naban's spouse or child or friend or lover or boss or commander, until one of their fellow entities, Tushita steps in and explains what Naban has forgotten from the previous story and it all sort of works out?

For I am Naban, one who remembers the beginning of time. For I know nothing in the universe is not me. For I know that no one part of a whole is more valuable than another; one is simply larger or smaller. For I know corruption arises when one tries to exclude another from a world. For I am not corrupt now.

I mean, this would be a great lesson for all the people who are least likely to take up a speculative fiction short story collection written by a Korean woman that was also translated by women** (and while both translators have done a beautiful job -- Sophie Bowman helps give both the bridegroom and bride distinctive voices in "I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way To You" -- I'm really just stunned at how Sung Ryu handled all this to-me-incredibly-unfamiliar material and made me feel, at least while I was reading it, that of course I understood it and it just felt like a neat spec fic story until I was done and it punched me in the brain). But it's not really much fun to read for all the feeling that one has earned some kind of merit for doing so.

At least it's not very much fun until you realize how the piquant Buddhist ontological filling of this speculative fiction sandwich really informs and is almost just another iteration of soft and tasty starship-crossed lovers bread. I find myself now, having read the whole thing, feeling like the bridegroom and bride are Naban and Aman in one of their lives. Possibly more than one of their lives. Because everything is Naban and Aman, and it's only dumb decisions and silly delusions that ever keep them apart, right?

I did not go into this book expecting a giant profound take on St. John-of-the-Cross (Songs Between the Soul and the Bridegroom)****, but I sure did get it!

Clicking around on the internet, I see that Kim Bo-Young has actually been tickling my brain for quite some time, as she worked on a little old hit film that became a TV series called Snowpiercer, and that this is far from Kim Bo-Young's first collection, and isn't even her first collection in English. She's already a Big Deal in Korea, and deserves to be one everywhere else, too.

I think I'll be attempting to merge with some of her other books very soon in This Life.

*And yes, each of these letters feels like it's own little story. See what I did there in that ridiculous introduction to this piece?

**And hey, by the way, August is Women in Translation Month! And bonus: there is an exchange of letters between the two translators (as well as a lot of cool other supplementary material, including a glossary of terms and names in "The Prophet of Corruption" and "The One Life) that gives us a glimpse of their relationship with one another as real life friends, and the interesting challenges posed by Kim Bo-Young's work, including matters of gender and the prayer-like cadences of some passages, that are super fascinating reading for fans of translated literature.

***I wonder how this, my favorite bit from that, in an old translation by Roy Campbell, would come across in Korean: 

Diffusing showers of grace
In haste among these groves his path he took,
And only with his face.
Glancing around the place,
Has clothed them in his beauty with a look.

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.

Doctor, Doctor: Christopher Bulis' CITY AT WORLD'S END

I'm not a huge fan of the First Doctor, on television or in prose, so my enthusiasm was on the low side as I started City At World's End, though the premise looked good: the TARDIS crew land on a planet that is doomed to utter destruction when its moon, recently knocked out of its proper orbit by a passing asteroid, crashes right into it. It looks superficially like the world's inhabitants are prepared. Superficially.

All is not as it seems, of course, as if ever the case in a Doctor Who story. The city, Arkhaven (nudge nudge nudge NUDGE NUDGE NUDGE NUDGE), has indeed built a giant spacecraft that can take a huge number of people to safety, and there seems to be an orderly evacuation plan, BUT, as the Doctor quickly susses out from his unfortunate position as an internee in a refugee camp, there's an awful lot about this situation that doesn't make sense. At all.

Wait, refugee camp? Yes. Wait, you didn't think they were going to evacuate the entire planet, did you? Save everybody? Give everyone an equal chance? Ha ha ha ha ha ha, then why would the Doctor be there?

For this doomed planet is hopelessly class-ridden, in so many ways. There's a hereditary aristocracy. There is a seriously powerful religious institution. There have been terrible wars that have driven the population to drastic measures that made for refugees even before the meteor showers began to randomly devastate huge swathes of the planet. And there are nasty secrets. All over the place.

So this is a perfect early Doctor Who-era story. Even the rocket as described just screams 1960s sci-fi. The social criticism, too, is of its era: no concerns about racism, sexism or ableism, just about how the Elites and the Church are so myopically concerned about preserving their privilege that they're hampering the technocrats' efforts to save the human race.

Meanwhile, the TARDIS crew. Of course they get split up early, so that Susan can get borderline fridged (but only for a little while) and Barbara can get put through hell. This launches both of them into pretty admirable Self-Rescuing Princess routines (though Barbara's is unquestionably the harder road) while the Doctor harumphingly Consults with the rocket builders and Discovers Secrets and Ian, well, to Ian's credit, at least this time around (unlike in the first First Doctor novel I read, Byzantium!) he spends most of his time trying to rescue one of the women (whom this novel persists in referring to as girls, I guess because history, or something?).

Like a lot of Doctor Who stories of any era, this one suffers a bit from just having too many adversaries/complications stirred into its plot. A setting of inherent jeopardy and difficulty, which is already hiding layers and layers of secrets, is also stalked by a weird monster called The Creeper, AND there is a weird but ultimately satisfying sub-plot around Susan's fridging, which sub-plot winds up being what propelled me through some of this novel's duller bits in the middle. Kudos to author Christopher Bulis for pulling that off! This lands him just above the middle in the Arbitrary & Mercurial authors list:

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds
Una McCormack
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss
James Goss

Christopher Bulis
Terrance Dicks
Gary Bulis
Mark Morris
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Gary Russell
Keith Topping

As for the Doctors, no change. The First Doctor is going to have to show me something more before he budges ahead of the Fifth. Or the Fifth is going to have to really tick me off. Time will tell (hee hee).

Doctors:

Twelfth
Ninth
Sixth
Eleventh
Third
Second
War
Fourth
Eighth
Seventh
Fifth
First
Tenth

And the answer I know you've all been waiting for, did Ian redeem himself out of last place? And the answer is, yes, to a degree. It's good that he actually went looking for Barbara (and later, Susan), but before he had that to do he was useless and really kind of a worry-wart spoil-sport, but that's not enough to leave him below Perpigilliam. In fact, he nudges ahead of Rose, Adric and Vicki! Woo! As for Susan, she didn't get to show me a whole lot, but what she did was pretty excellent, so she debuts on the list right after to Barbara, whom I picture emerging from the storm sewers and rubble with her fantastic 60s helmet hair perfectly unmussed and just the mandatory artful smudge of dirt marring her fantastic 60s make-up, because Barbara.

Companions:

Ace
Amy
Romana II
Rory
Jamie
Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara

Susan
Clara
Nyssa
Samantha
Martha
Bernice

Ian
Vicki
Adric
Rose
Peri

Doctor Doctor: George Mann's DOCTOR WHO: ENGINES OF WAR

While I'm never now, thanks to Justin Robinson, going to be able to look at the War Doctor without thinking of the kind of old man who has definitely bought alcohol for a teenager at some point in his life (it's the fauxhawk), I loves me some War Doctor. His appearances have been slight -- one and a 100th of a TV episode, some great Big Finish audio stories, and now this novel -- but he's distinctively awesome, and not just because he's portrayed by the great John Hurt.

So I went into Engines of War with a bit of trepidation, because I just wasn't going to be able to bear it if it wasn't awesome.*

I needn't have worried.

A War Doctor story that's not just going to be another Doctor Who story that happens to feature this incarnation is a tall order, if it's going to be done at all decently. Where the 50th anniversary TV special that is still the only thing most people have encountered the War Doctor in went horribly wrong was in portraying the Time War as a shooting conflict seemingly taking place on just one planet. But this is supposed to be war on an unbelievably massive scale, in which "all of time and space are burning." How the hell do you portray that?

George Mann did a better job of it than the TV writers did, at least.**

The novel opens with a terrific battle scene, in which a giant fleet of "battle TARDISes" (think of a TARDIS with guns, basically) dukes it out with a Dalek stealth fleet that has been quietly waiting to ambush anything that passes through its part of the Vortex, and actually, to a certain degree, uses those battle TARDISes as TARDISes! Meaning time travel is a bit of a factor in the skirmish. Cool.

The War Doctor is the field commander for this conflict, more or less, but in the process he takes a hit and crashes onto a planet that is... Kind of special. Modox is one of a dozen or so human-colonized worlds in a system dominated by a strange-but-beautiful space-time anomaly referred to as the Eye of Tantalus, and the Daleks wanted it very badly.

Soon our man is exploring its secrets with the help of a don't-you-dare-call-her-plucky young Dalek hunter named Cinder (who is the most badass teenage girl in the history of ever, and a more than suitable companion for him, and even tougher than he has become) and what he finds is terrifying, gross and has huge implications for the Time War.

Which means, alas, we end up spending a good chunk of the novel on Gallifrey, which you know I find a tiresome proposition at best, but there you go. Borusa, a former teacher of the Doctor's who later made an ill-advised power play and got trapped for eternity as an embellishment on the tomb of Time Lord founder Rassilon, makes his third appearance in my personal novel-reading time line (he was also in Divided Loyalties and The Eight Doctors), but at least this time he's interesting. Ish.

Look, I find the Time Lords kind of one-dimensional and tedious, and think it's a mistake to base too much of a story on their society, politics or deliberations, but I get why we had to do it, here; it's nice to actually see them through the War Doctor's eyes and see that they more than live up to the hindsight glimpses we've had of them in wartime via the Doctor's later incarnations. As this novel's tag line says, war changes everything, even the Doctor. But, well, the Time Lords don't seem all that different to me, except in that they are now talking about deploying some truly heinous weapons and wreaking destruction on a truly heinous scale. Because Delenda est Carthago the Daleks must be stopped or the whole universe yada yada.

But still no Nightmare Child, etc. Which is both smart, in that they could never live up to the build-up those things get when the Tenth Doctor rants about them on TV, but also a tiny bit disappointing.***

What does get deployed, though, is fully timey-wimey, as is the way the Doctor deals with it, which is very, very satisfying.

And so, ultimately, is this book, Gallifrey scenes aside. And even those Gallifrey scenes? Way better than those in The Day of the Doctor.

As for my Arbitrary and Mercurial rankings, they're maybe not living up to that second adjective so much, for little changes.

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds
Una McCormack
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss
James Goss

George Mann
Terrance Dicks
Gary Bulis
Mark Morris
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Gary Russell
Keith Topping

Doctors:

Twelfth
Ninth
Sixth
Eleventh
Third
Second
War
Fourth
Eighth
Seventh
Fifth
First
Tenth

Companions:

Ace
Amy
Romana II
Rory
Jamie

Cinder
Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara
Clara
Nyssa
Samantha
Martha
Bernice
Vicki
Adric
Rose
Peri
Ian

Next time: another First Doctor novel! Can Ian possibly redeem himself enough to at least move ahead of Peri in my companion rankings? Where will Susan land on this list? And what about the First Doctor, whom I always want to like but who always annoys me and lets me down? Stay tuned.

*And because author George Mann has written more Torchwood fiction than anything else. Torchwood! I mean come on, except for Children of Earth, that's just foolishness!

**I know, I know, he's got the unfair advantage that all novelists have over makers of  film and TV, an unlimited special effects budget. But still.

***Though it lets me hang on to my pet theory that that creepy and tantalizing phrase, The Nightmare Child, might actually be a reference to the Doctor in this incarnation. I thought maybe it would be a new appellation for him bestowed by the Daleks, for instance. But the one used by them in this novel is fine.

Doctor, Doctor: James Goss' THE BLOOD CELL

And so now my first cycle through the extant Doctors as of this writing is complete with this, The Blood Cell, a novel featuring the Twelfth Doctor (hooray!) and Clara (eh). Do please pardon me while I have some feelings.

OK.

The Blood Cell, part of an early spate of novels featuring this duo -- officially published in September 2014, it appears to have hit NetGalley before most of us had even seen a full episode with Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. And yet author James Goss had figured out exactly what the Twelfth Doctor was going to be like, and did so long before the TV writers seem to have done! And this is not to say that Goss just binged on episodes of In the Loop and projected Malcolm Effing Tucker onto the character of the Doctor; he got a lot more right, too, as I'll discuss in a moment.

Nor is this the only thing to admire about The Blood Cell, which also features two other things that I just love when they are done well: a locked room mystery, and an unreliable narrator. I mean, who's been peeking at my Christmas list, right?

The Blood Cell opens in an extremely high security prison, wherein a prison official is interrogating the newest inmate. There is some nice ambiguity in the first page or so as to which of them might be the Doctor, and I'm going to try really hard not to spoil that for you, but...

One of the things that really makes the Twelfth Doctor shine is his perfect self-assurance, which is so perfect that the man genuinely has nothing left to prove. He so absolutely does not care what anyone else thinks of him that he is perfectly free to disappear into the roles he assumes, with utter conviction, even if they are the lowliest of figures (yes, I'm thinking of "The Caretaker" here). He doesn't mind being completely misunderstood, even reviled, and that aspect of his character, which I tend to think is unique to this iteration of the Doctor (but am willing to discuss*) really shines in this novel. Everybody but Clara (and this is a fairly Clara-lite story, though the bits that do have her are way less annoying than I'd ever have suspected they would be) is working under the misapprehension that the Doctor is a truly reprehensible figure, with a past not so much checkered as nearly completely black. And he just rolls with it.

Meanwhile, of course, mysterious stuff is happening. Dead and broken bodies start turning up while the prison -- which is on an asteroid at the edge of a star system -- and its cobbled-together-by-the-lowest-bidders operating systems start going on the fritz in ways big and small. What's behind it? Who's hiding secrets? Who's to blame for all the chaos? Is it the same person or persons to blame for the bodies?

Some of the answers are telegraphed from the very beginning, but there are still some nifty surprises, and the final act is genuinely horrifying, making The Blood Cell yet another great page-turner of a Doctor Who novel.

And so the Aribtrary & Mercurials do shift a bit, with, for instance, Clara debuting on the companion list at a much higher spot than she might have otherwise. When she's good, she's very very good, and she's at her best -- challenging, a bit mysterious, no-nonsense, executing her tasks perfectly -- here.

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds
Una McCormack
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss

James Goss
Terrance Dicks
Gary Bulis
Mark Morris
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Gary Russell
Keith Topping

Doctors:

Twelfth

Ninth
Sixth
Eleventh
Third
Second
War
Fourth
Eighth
Seventh
Fifth
First
Tenth

Companions:

Ace
Amy
Romana II
Rory
Jamie

Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara
Clara

Nyssa
Samantha
Martha
Bernice
Vicki
Adric
Rose
Peri
Ian

Next, I'm reading one of the "extras" -- in this case, the War Doctor novel I mentioned last time. Will he hold on to his place just above the universally beloved Fourth Doctor in my A&M rankings? Tune in soon....

*But really, can you see the First Doctor, say, cleaning up vomit with that pink sawdust stuff? The Tenth? The Seventh? Any of them? No.

Doctor Doctor: Una McCormack's THE KING'S DRAGON

I'm just going to say this up front: the only way this book could have been any better would have been if it contained Brian Williams, father of Rory Williams (present), gonna-be father-in-law* of Amy Pond (also present), and gonna-be-grandfather-in-law** of The Doctor (duh). But pretty much every Doctor Who story, maybe ever, would be at least slightly improved by the presence of the elder Williams, and I just have to live with that fact, while still resenting that he's never gotten closure on-screen and probably never will. Ahem.

But that's neither here nor there. Here and there is The King's Dragon, which has shot right up there next to Harvest of Time on my list of best Doctor Who novels, largely because Una McCormack, unlike Amy's creators, actually gets what Amy Pond is all about and stays true to her from page one. But also because it's a good, complete and interesting story, told with elegant economy.

I'd like to visit the parallel universe where Ms. McCormack, and not Mr. Moffat, was the showrunner who took over when Matt Smith and Karen Gillan did. I can't promise that I'd come back, mind.

But so, The King's Dragon. The Eleventh Doctor (one of my favorites, recall), Amy and Rory have come to visit one of the universe's greatest civilizations, the city-state of Greath, a realm that has enjoyed over twelve thousand (12,000) years of peace, harmony, vigorous democracy, and restrained good taste. What a delightful locale to spend part of Rory's infinite stag night!

Of course, decades of Doctor Who watching/reading/listening has taught us all that no high and lovely culture visited by the TARDIS crew is ever going to be encountered at its height. No, no. If the Doctor & co. are going to land there, something is going to have gone horribly off-course. If it's not the TARDIS itself, its the place/time at which it stops. Duh.

So in place of a tastefully decorated and refined civic space of classical elegance, the TARDIS crew finds itself in a gaudy, blinged-out Las Vegas nightmare of a city. And instead of a thriving democracy steeped in humane tradition, the TARDIS crew finds a newly-minted monarchy-cum-cult of personality, centered on an impossibly charismatic and handsome king, Beol*** and his partner The Teller, and the impossibly gorgeous golden dragon idol they've brought into the city.

Plus an intangible but pervasive aura of impending dread, of course.

The best Doctor Who stories are mysteries of this kind. What's gone wrong with history? Why are people X behaving so unlike themselves and why don't they realize it? Something Is Interfering And It's Probably Aliens. Only the Doctor can set things right.

Except, mostly, it's not the Doctor who does so. It's Amy. And, to a degree, Rory. And a few key citizens of the visited world, notably the former democratically elected leader of Geath, a slightly cranky and unimpressed older woman (who I absolutely could not help picturing as played by Diana Rigg in her Queen of Thorns get-up), Hilthe, who seems to be the only person who remembers Geath as it was just months ago. The Doctor is just there to advise, really.

Don't get me wrong; this isn't a "Doctor-Lite" story. He's there in all of his lanky, absurd, slightly cranky know-it-all glory, on pretty much every page. But the plot is driven by his Companions and by the locals.

And especially by Amy. Amy Pond is at her nosy, stubborn, willful, smart, wise and capable best, as we've really not seen her since, say, The Beast Below.*** Even when she is under the influence of this story's Alien Menace (because of course there is one. This one is really, really interesting and original, by the way. Bling!), she's her own person, and that person learned long ago, when a certain Raggedy Man failed to come back for her, that she's really the only person she can count on (though Rory is going to be Rory and thus pretty damned reliable, but he's not yet the "wait until he gets here and I'll just wait and watch while he does all the heavy lifting of punishing you for making me cross" substitute for her agency that Moffat is going to make him), but that that's okay, even if she is pretty much lost in time and space and probably In Over Her Head. Amy can swim.

And again, like all the best Doctor Who stories, while there is plenty of ak-shun and things blowing up and existential peril and whatnot, it's ultimately about getting two opposing sides to understand each other, or at least try to empathize with each other, once those two opposing sides are finally discovered by the TARDIS crew and friends' careful sleuthing and thinking and deducing.

I read this in a single sitting, in a single night. Yes, it is a short work, but McCormack has packed a lot into it (again, like the best DW stories, like the best science fiction, Here There Be Allegories, but they are deftly and subtly handled) and hasn't wasted words. Its length might suggest that it's a lightweight, perhaps even juvenile, read, but don't be fooled.

And now for the Arbitrary and Mercurial rankings. I don't think they're going to surprise you much. The Eleventh Doctor moves up a spot because I just love his silly enthusiasm for things (combined with his old man crankiness and ridiculous physicality) and how he wisely gets out of the way and lets his friends handle things once in a while.

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds

Una McCormack
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss
Terrance Dicks
Gary Bulis
Mark Morris
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Gary Russell
Keith Topping

Doctors:

Ninth
Twelfth
Sixth

Eleventh
Third
Second
War
Fourth
Eighth
Seventh
Fifth
First
Tenth

Companions:

Ace

Amy

Romana II

Rory
Jamie
Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara
Nyssa
Samantha
Martha
Bernice
Vicki
Adric
Rose
Peri
Ian

Now onward to a Twelfth Doctor novel, then holy cow, I just found a War Doctor novel, and then I'll start the cycle anew with another First Doctor novel. I'm going to keep going in this fashion for as long as there are enough novels for each Doctor, but alas, I'll run out of Classic Doctors much sooner than Seventh and Eighth Doctors, and then my enthusiasm might wane. We shall see.

*This story takes place before their wedding.

**No screaming about spoilers. It says so right at the top of my blog, right there in the header, "ware spoilers."

***I.E. since Moffat remembered that she is a woman and needed to be put in her place.

Doctor, Doctor: Mark Morris' FOREVER AUTUMN

Sweet Jeebus, there's a lot to like about Forever Autumn. A lot! Like, it would be a great seasonal read, a fun horror novel, all on its own, without its being a Doctor Who novel. But, sigh, it's not only a Doctor Who novel, it's a Tenth Doctor, Doctor Who novel.

Forever Autumn -- and see, I even love the title! -- blunders right into Lovecraft territory (albeit modern day Lovecraft territory, a smallish* New England town with a history of weird stuff, a mysterious black tree, etc.) and acts like it owns the place. Kids have the wild hair to dig at the roots of the mysterious black tree, which is so ancient there are Native American legends about how it got there, and dig up a mysterious, creepy, kind of "fleshy" book full of strange names and lettering. It emits a weird green glow, and soon the town is enveloped in creepy green mist. Then tall, thin, tree-like skellingtons are walking around town at night throwing the whammy on unsuspecting citizens. I mean, hell yes!

But then the Tenth Doctor, and his beautiful but boring-as-paint-drying companion, Martha Jones, show up, and start mugging for our attention. And here's the flaw. Novels and Big Finish have rehabilitated Doctors that I've not been too fond of for me, so I had at least some expectation that maybe this, my first Tenth Doctor novel, would maybe do the same. But no.

This book managed to make the Tenth Doctor worse! As portrayed by David Tennant -- who has been marvelous in everything else I've seen -- the Doctor is frenetic, twitchy, disconnected (if the Ninth Doctor is the PTSD Doctor, the Tenth is the ADHD Doctor. Unmedicated) and shouty. He's a distraction rather than a star or a protagonist.

As written, he's all of these things, but turned up to eleven (heh). Author Mark Morris must have been under special orders to emphasize all of these qualities, because in these pages the Doctor can't stand or sit still for even 30 seconds. Maybe because, without an actual actor with biology and whatnot to accommodate, there really are no limits to how spastic he can be? When he doesn't even have to take a breath?

I dunno.

What saved this book for me -- remember, to date I've only ever DNF'd one Doctor Who novel -- was the setting, and the incidental characters. The kids are kind of stock characters, but have personality enough to be enjoyable; the early victim of the novel's main monsters is compassionately portrayed (bonus that one of the kids knows better than to take him lightly as a figure of fun), and the novel's temporary companion, an elderly woman whose family has always had something a bit witchy about them, is a delight. Like I said, this would have been a fine, possibly Bradbury-ish read without the Doctor Who elements.

The climax is fun if kind of telegraphed from a long way off (*cough* Chekov's Evil Clown Costume *cough*), the monster-aliens, a delightfully weird riff on the Pumpkinhead, are cool and genuinely creepy and the book quite a good read. I would have absolutely adored it with pretty much any other Doctor/Companion team; as it is, I merely liked it a lot.

As for my Arbitrary & Mercurial rankings, they don't change a lot. I just get to add a few elements.

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss
Terrance Dicks
Gary Bulis

Mark Morris
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Gary Russell
Keith Topping

Doctors:

Ninth
Twelfth
Sixth
Third
Eleventh
Second
War
Fourth
Eighth
Seventh
Fifth
First
Tenth

Companions:

Ace
Romana II
Jamie
Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara
Nyssa
Samantha

Martha
Bernice
Vicki
Adric

Rose
Peri
Ian
*Most of you would probably drop the "ish" but I'm from a town with a population under 1600 souls, and spend a lot of time in even smaller burgs, so this town, which is apparently populated enough to allow a year-round dedicated costume shop to not only survive but flourish, it's small-ish. In a true small town, you make your own costumes, or you buy them at the nearest big box store (well over 100 miles away) or luck into them at a second-hand joint if your town's business community manages to support such a thing.

Doctor Doctor: Justin Richards' THE CLOCKWISE MAN

Happy sigh. As anyone who's been paying attention to my Arbitrary & Mercurial rankings knows, the Ninth Doctor is my favorite Doctor. This is partly because Christopher Eccleston, but also because this Doctor has an angry edge we haven't really seen since the Sixth Doctor (another one that's high in my lists) but is still hilarious with how he handles it (bananas are good), and he's basically the PTSD Doctor, which I can relate.

Indeed his only flaw is his taste in Companions. I wish he'd met Mickey first. Or Jackie. But nothing's perfect, not even the Ninth Doctor.

But I'd love, love, love to read a an adventure of his without Rose Tyler along. I don't know if I'll ever get one unless I write it myself (call me, BBC Books!), but meanwhile, there are a these New Series Adventures that have Nine and Rose, and of these The Clockwise Man was the very first.

The place-time this time is London in 1924 and right away as we meet a domestic servant getting the crap beaten out of him for mysterious reasons and then follow the Doctor and Rose in escorting the servant back to his employer's house, there are definite vibes. Upstairs, Downstairs, tail end of the Forsyte Saga vibes. Oooh lovely!

But those vibes dissipate rather quickly, because in the master's house are... White Russians. No, not as in Lebowski's favorite cocktail. I'm talking exiled Russian aristocrats who, even though the Tsar and his family are long dead, are still plotting to overthrow the Communists and restore the old regime. And they've got a little boy on their hands whom they claim is the heir to the Romanov dynasty. Which little boy immediately decides that Rose is just the greatest, probably because she's the only person he's ever met who doesn't treat him like he's made of glass and actually encourages him to do stuff, like go see the Imperial Exhibition (the ostensible reason for the TARDIS Twosome's visit).

Meanwhile, domestic servants keep getting assaulted, sometimes even killed, and a mysterious masked woman is making the rounds accompanied by a man who speaks rather mechanically and ticks and tocks audibly when he moves about. They Are Sinister. And the TARDIS disappears. Think these all might be connected somehow?

And what's up with all the identical black cats? Is there a glitch in the Matrix?

But so anyway, Late Steampunk. And another "aliens messing about with Earth history" story. I'm longing for a straight-up adventure out there in space. The Daleks menacing some gleepglorks. A human colony has gotten addicted to the secretions of a giant space lizard. Something. But here we go.

Which is to say that I found The Clockwise Man a bit dull for stretches, though things picked up quite nicely at the end, which in a bit on-the-nose fashion takes place behind the scenes in the Tower of Big Ben. The final confrontation in there is a neat bit of intricate plotting, though it would have been even better if the characters enacting it were more developed. There are too many of these, and they've spent most of the novel feeling dully interchangeable until suddenly they aren't! Oh my! But I didn't really care to make the effort of keeping them straight at that point.

I will give the novel bonus points for using the Sonic Screwdriver in ways that actually matter. But otherwise, hmm, yawn. It didn't suck, but it's pretty forgettable, even just ten minutes or so after I finished reading it.

Nonetheless, onto... a Tenth Doctor novel. Oh, I'm not a Tenth Doctor fan, not at all. But maybe, just maybe, without the mugging and the shouting and did I mention the mugging, he won't annoy me quite so much. We'll see.

As for the Aribitrary & Mercurial, nothing much has changed, really. The Ninth Doctor is still my favorite (and he did get some good moments in this novel). I still don't like Rose very much. And Justin Richards gets a meh for now.

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss
Terrance Dicks
Gary Bulis
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Gary Russell
Keith Topping

Doctors:

Ninth
Twelfth
Sixth
Third
Eleventh
Second
War
Fourth
Eighth
Seventh
Fifth
First
Tenth

Companions:

Ace
Romana II
Jamie
Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara
Nyssa
Samantha
Bernice
Vicki
Adric
Rose
Peri
Ian

Doctor Doctor: Terrance Dicks' THE EIGHT DOCTORS

Terrance Dicks is perhaps THE name in Doctor Who fiction. Crafter of novelizations of uncounted (by me) television episodes from the classic series, former script editor for the show, gentleman, scholar. So who else would get to launch a series of further adventures for the poor isolated Eighth Doctor, wonderfully portrayed by Paul McGann, utterly wasted in a bad American TV movie and in danger of just being swept under the rug forever.

BBC Books and, later, Big Finish Audio to the rescue! The Eighth Doctor has become beloved after all due to some great prose and audio adventures, of which The Eight Doctors is the very first. Er, sort of.

Possibly out of concern that their British/Commonwealth readers were not prepared to accept the Eighth Doctor as part of Doctor Who continuity, the powers that were decreed that this first "novel" would basically be a very thinly constructed "plot" that forced the Eighth Doctor to hang out with each of his seven prior incarnations to accept a piece of the relay baton, and, er, reassemble it so he could get on with being the Doctor in other stories.

Yeah, it's pretty lame. But this is Terrance Dicks, so it's very professionally and well-informedly lame, so much so that at times, if you squint, it can look a bit less lame and maybe it's just walking through really thick mud or something. Except it's also maybe a little bit clever (though it could have been a bit more clever, about which more below), as each but one of the Past Doctor encounters serves as a sort of post-credits continuation of a famous TV episode. Thus we see the First Doctor towards the end of "An Unearthly Child" (after a silly frame sequence that just happens to take place in a certain junkyard in Coalville), the Second in "The War Games", the Third in "The Sea Devils", the Fourth in "State of Decay", the Fifth in/after "The Five Doctors", and the Sixth in "The Ultimate Foe" (aka the last serial in the infamous "Trial of a Time Lord" season). The Seventh is seen pretty much between "Survival" and his date with regeneration at the beginning of the TV movie, which is a bit of a gyp but o'well.

There's a lot going on here, chiefly in the form of Terrance Dicks doing the most Terrance Dicks thing he possibly could. As in long before there was the continuity-obsessed Stephen Moffat, there was the continuity-obsessed (at least for the writing of this novel; I dunno how much so he might have been during his time as script editor) Terrance Dicks, who must have had a checklist a mile long of stuff that had to be in here before it was the Doctor Who Novel That Made The Eighth Doctor Canon. And had obviously been tortured for years by little inconsistencies and plot holes and whatnot that this particular storytelling gimmick gave him a chance to fix and/or explain.

But so, this could have been a bit more fun for the kind of reader who likes this sort of thing. I would have enjoyed having had to do a bit more work to figure out at what point in each Doctor's timeline the Eighth was meeting them. The bit with the First Doctor at first seemed like it was just going to be the sort of nostalgic look at the show's origins with the Coalville stuff, and so I didn't notice that we'd plunged right into "An Unearthly Child" until I realized what was going on in the Second Doctor encounter. And then the Third encounter goes and blows it all by outright naming the episode on the very first page of that chapter. And the rest of them are so obvious that I don't feel at all bad about "spoiling" them by calling attention to this cute little device of Dick's. Pah.

I will say that, with Dicks being the practiced craftsman that he is, this all hangs together rather elegantly, especially once the Sixth encounter gets going. Dicks manages to broaden the issues at stake in the silly trial stuff and make it all more meaningful, which was very gratifying. BUT.

Ain't there always a but?

But, the framing device is ridiculous. It's not inherently silly to go back to Coalville, as Stephen Moffat et al have proven, but in The Eight Doctors we're going there solely to meet and pick up a new Companion for the Eighth Doctor, without really introducing said character, Samantha Jones, at all. We know she's a Coalville student, that she's principled and brave and... um. Because, you see, she only appears at the very beginning and the very end. She plays ZERO part in the Doctor's past self encounters. Boo. I'd much rather just meet her organically in a proper Doctor Who adventure, that's just telling one new story instead of retelling seven old ones. But hey.

Not much change to the Arbitrary and Mercurial lists. I was tempted to bump Dicks down a spot out of pique at the lame idea, but he did execute it well, so he stays at #3. The Eighth stays where he is. I almost nudged Romana II up a spot because (unlike the other companions appearing in this novel), she actually did some cool stuff in the "State of Decay" coda, but even so I still don't love her more than Ace.

As for new companion Samantha Jones? I've seen even less of her than I have of Bernice Summerfield, but what little I saw of Samantha was more interesting than Bernice, so in she goes above the professor.

As always, these'll change and change and change like a TARDIS with a functioning Chameleon Circuit.

Authors:

Alastair Reynolds
Kate Orman
Mark Gatiss
Terrance Dicks
Gary Bulis
Jonathan Morris
Justin Richards
Gary Russell
Keith Topping

Doctors:

Ninth
Twelfth
Sixth
Third
Eleventh
Second
War
Fourth
Eighth
Seventh
Fifth
First
Tenth

Companions:

Ace
Romana II
Jamie
Ben and Polly
Tegan
Jo
Barbara
Nyssa

Samantha
Bernice
Vicki
Adric
Peri
Ian