Jodi Taylor's JUST ONE DAMNED THING AFTER ANOTHER

So for those of you who have been dying to know what would happen if Thursday Next and Doctor Who had a baby (perhaps, just for fun, midwived by the Librarians and maybe Connie "Oxford Time Travel" Willis), your wait is over! And your reward cup runneth over, cuz this is a series that is growing, Dark Tower/Expanse style, in all directions. As in later books/stories/novellas get decimal points and wedged in between existing books in series order and stuff.

But...

I'm not 100% sure that I'm along for that whole ride, because cool as the premise of this series "The Chronicles of St. Mary's" is, there are a lot of problems in its execution that make me hesitate. But I'll get to those. What's up with THIS book, right?

Just One Damned Thing After Another*, the first book in the series, starts off with our heroine fresh out of graduate school and still scarred from a very bad childhood that she's managed to overcome mostly, it seems, by ignoring it except when it's convenient to use as an emotional shield to Keep People At A Distance. She is a historian, and soon to be a Historian; she is recruited by what seems to be just another adorably ramshackle and barely-organized English think tank but is actually the most amazing historical research institution in the world because they have time machines! And they want our girl, Dr. Miss Lucy Maxwell (since everyone there has at least one PhD she soon drops the "Dr.") to do research for them! By which they totally mean travel through time and watch stuff happen and clear up nagging questions about fact versus fancy! Who wouldn't want to do that?

But so soon complications emerge. St. Mary's is a perfectly straightforward and innocent outfit, but it turns out there are other parties with time travel capability who are not, and they're amuck in History performing various nefarious deeds that usually tend to involve active threats to the lives and limbs of members of Team St. Mary's. Hmmm! And some of the people in the (staggeringly long and detailed) dramatis personae (except the author calls it Dramatis Thingummy because she's trying to be arch and  cute and funny and Douglas Adams-ish**) are Not Who They Seem.

And of course, our Miss Maxwell is way more important than we at first thought.

All of this should be, and sometimes is, awesome. Lucy's first real assignment, for instance, is genuinely exciting and interesting and moving. She and some teammates are trained up to impersonate nurses and orderlies at a French chateau/hospital in France circa WWI's action in the Somme, there to clear up once and for all exactly whose fault it is that the complex was destroyed with great loss of life and morale and property. This is good stuff, written, paced and felt extremely well, even as it introduces several elements of the larger plot quite elegantly. It's only the hope of more stuff like this that I consider continuing with this series at all.

But then there's the other stuff. The soap opera/softcore porn stuff. And the fact that most of the male characters are pretty sloppily developed and often exhibit behavior wildly at odds with their established personalities. We're to believe, I gather, that this is because of stress, but I dunno. And just to spell it out and maybe also issue a Trigger Warning, there's a surprising amount of attempted/implied sexual assault in a book that otherwise comes off as a light-hearted romp. And no, it's not historically rapey types being historical and rapey.

And these unpleasant scenes jangle unpleasantly against the fair amount of eye-rolling romance novel dialogue ("I just want you to say you love me sometimes" "I can't do that because I love you all the time" HURL) that is shoved into this novel in places.

But as I said, that crap is very nearly redeemed.by the excellent mission material. This is time travel the way you and I would do it. Not let's kill Hitler, but let's save knowledge! And find out for certain whether dinosaurs had feathers! 

So, in short, this book is a bit of a hot mess, with as much to hate as to love about it. I'm probably going to have a look at the second volume sometime, just in the hopes that ultimately this settles down and becomes the awesome time traveling white hats vs black hats silliness that it really wants to be, instead of a coverall-ripper. But since this first book was pretty much half-and-half, with a pretty generous helping of Mary Sue*** in our main character, I'm not going to rush right into Book Two.

*The title is taken from an Arnold Toynbee quote, in which he describes history as "just one damned thing after another."

**And to be fair, sometimes she succeeds at this. Sometimes. But she's no, say, Howard of Warwick.

***I dislike this gender-specific, often misapplied and definitely overused term, but it kind of applies here, I'm afraid. She's adorable! She's important! Everybody wants to "get in her knickers"! She totally saves the day a lot! She finds the organization's True Purpose! And the guy in charge (well, I guess he's the second in command, because there's one guy they call "Chief" and another they call "Boss" and he's the Chief) is her One True Love! So yeah, a bit Mary Sue. A lot more so than, say, Rey Skywalker/Solo/Kenobi/Whatever is, anyway.

Paul Elard Cooley's THE BLACK: OUTBREAK

In The Black: A Deep Sea Tale, literary horror author (and good friend of Your Humble Blogger) Paul Elard Cooley sic'd an ancient and mysterious and unique monster on a too-enterprising crew of roughnecks and scientists on an offshore oil rig. In The Black: Arrival, Cooley began exploring the implications of this entity's arrival on the mainland as it wreaked havoc on the testing laboratory to where the first novel's crew sent samples of oil that happened to also contain that entity, which results as harrowing and disastrous as those on the rig.

In this third novel, The Black: Outbreak, Cooley now shows us what happens when the entity, mistakenly treated as a disease organism, becomes the problem of a nearby hospital, the Centers for Disease Control, and members of Houston PD's SWAT. This means the reader is being asked to invest in a whole mess of new characters, and Cooley as usual does a fine job of deftly sketching them in, so a few words conveys a whole lot of information about who we're following through his labyrinth of nasty doom. But we've learned, we have, that more than half of these people are basically just monster chow.

Confession time: I found this one a tough slog compared to the first two. The middle of the book is basically just a long round of set 'em up and knock 'em down, as character after character succumbs to the basically unstoppable Black even as an isolated hero in the CDC mobile command unit finds the entity's weakness. It got a bit repetitive, there for a while, but then the tension (will the (very few) survivors be able to implement the solution in time? Especially since The Black has knocked out all of the hospital's utilities, even unto the backups?) between plight and solution kicked in to regain the book's momentum.

The ending is basically satisfying, even (bizarrely, for a Cooley novel) hopeful, while still setting up another sequel. And this one should have some character continuity, which makes me happy because I've grown attached to a few of the characters in this one.

I'm sure I went regret that at ALL.

James S.A. Corey's ABADDON'S GATE

The Expanse series almost lost me with this one, guys. It took me a whole lot of false starts to get into Abaddon's Gate, the series' third novel, and it was only partly because of the very strong feeling I had from page one that I'd already read a superior version of it written by Alastair Reynolds and intermixed with a lot of other, cooler stuff in the three-and-a-sidequel Revelation Space series.

But the book does have its own charms that eventually became evident to me.

Abaddon's Gate is pretty much just a giant thought experiment in zero gravity combat-and-movement-and-injury-and-recovery-and-pain, wrapped up in a bog standard battle-for-a-territory-in-a-confined-space plot only somewhat enlivened by the circumstances under which said combat and battle are taking place, which, maybe I'll get to that, but I don't want to be too spoilery.

But so, Abaddon's Gate. The title, like its predecessors, is all kinds of highbrow, here referring to a place of ultimate destruction and dread which the protomolecule that wrecked everything in the first two novels has created outside the orbit of Uranus and which the puny humans have taken to calling The Ring. It's enormous, it's mysterious, humanity's first contact with it ends spectacularly badly, and it appears to have reanimated a beloved* character from Leviathan Wakes in order to reach out to a slightly less beloved* but still conventionally animate star of both Leviathan and Caliban's War and issue via him a warning: All these worlds are yours except Europa Leave the Ring alone and don't piss it off.

But of course, nobody's interested in this message or its import, and for plot reasons, all our characters old and new wind up heading out to poke at the Ring and I'm bored just typing this much synopsis. But then A THING HAPPENS, and the giant thought experiment in what happens to bodies when various high-powered forces interact with them way the hell out beyond Uranus and the next couple of hundred pages are gruesome and sad (because there are, again, some wonderful characters thrown into this mess; Naomi and Amos and Alex [and yeah, yeah, Holden] from the first novel and new favorites Anna [a Methodist minister who's part of a religious expedition to explore the Meaning of the Ring] and Bull [second in command of the Outer Planets Alliance's jerry-rigged and recommissioned giant mother of a spaceship, Behemoth, which was originally built to be a generation ship to take a colony of Mormons to settle another solar system before being repurposed into a military, well, behemoth]) and tense as everybody struggles to deal with the aftermath of the THING THAT HAPPENED and the things that are probably inevitably going to happen now (the stakes wind up being no less than the survival of the entire Solar System and all of humanity with it) unless the ragtag fleet of affected people can somehow pull together, stop fighting, and do what they're supposed to do according to what Holden kind of thinks is what the reanimated Miller was kind of trying to tell him...?

Which, of course, is not easy, because the survivors of the THING THAT HAPPENED are about equally divided (apparently) between heroes and assholes, and the assholes have a whole other wrong plan for how to deal with the Ring and are willing to kill to implement it, which means lots and lots of zero gravity combat in the confines of the Behemoth. Which means that when the TV show gets to this bit, it might well wind up being a whole season's worth of Bottle Episode (OR will manage to compress all of this text into just a couple of Bottle Episodes) but hey, the special effects guys will really get to go to town making all these floating globules of blood and tissue rotating and coming together to form little planets of gore and whatnot in addition to all of the impressive zero gee effects they've already hit us with, so you know, I'm down.

I say that again, I'm down. Because so far this is looking like I didn't like the book, but I actually did. Especially I admire Abaddon's Gate from a technical standpoint: the thought experiment is brilliant, brilliantly presented, and brilliantly evocative of all of the challenges that await us in space even if there aren't ancient and powerful and inimical civilizations waiting to turn us into goo. Space, as we're reminded every time one of our sad little efforts to lift a cargo out of our gravity well goes wrong, is hard. It's gonna get harder. It might still prove impossible. But I choose to believe it is possible and that someday we'll prove it. And so books like this one are super important and exciting even as they're also gross and depressing.

I'm especially down to explore this with these characters; I love the truly diverse range of people that populate this literary universe. Not just racially, not just gravitationally, but also representative of a broad range of callings. How many sci-fi franchises give a significant role to a preacher out in the black? This one and Firefly (sort of; Book could have stood a lot more screen time and we just have to take it on faith [hee] that he was going to get it later on) and... uh...? And Anna doesn't play her role by dropping her bible and picking up a gun; from start to finish, she is what she is, she works how she works, and it winds up mattering quite a lot that she's out there at the Ring. I really, really dig that, just as last novel I dug the two-woman punch of Bobbie and Chrisjen. Hooray for fantastic characters!

But man, I was glad to finish this one so I could move on to other things. So many other things, you guys. Like, I probably have to start all over again on the Doctor Who novel I was reading when I also picked up this book. And stuff.

Speaking of which, there's a second episode of Thrawn and On and On for your listening pleasure. Make with the clicky and explore the Star Wars Explengendary Universe with us!

*These are, of course, in my humble opinion, your mileage may vary, blah blah blah. I loved Miller and I tolerate Holden because he has cool friends.

Justin Robinson's EVERYMAN

I mostly know of Justin Robinson as a cleverly goofy writer of fun stuff like his Mr. Blank books and City of Devils -- imaginative, occasionally silly romps that take an entertaining premise and run buck-wild with it.* I only vaguely knew that he wrote more traditional genre fiction, too, with a bent towards horror.

What I didn't know was that when he does so, if Everyman is anything to go by, he achieves even more impressive results.

Everyman goes on my virtual shelves alongside the works of Tony Burgess (Pontypool Changes Everything, The N-Body Problem), Ben Marcus (The Flame Alphabet) and Colson Whitehead (Zone One).** What do these have in common? They're ostensibly horror, but they transcend the genre in various amazing ways.

Superficially, Everyman is treading through Tim Powers territory, and I don't just say this because it so lovingly traces its way through the geography of Los Angeles. Its monsters (well, at least one of them) would be at home in a Powers novel, as would its depiction of the warm and happy but doomed marriage at the heart of its narrative, and it has chills similar to those that Powers occasionally offers, but Everyman has emotional beats and trappings that are entirely its own thing.

The book can be read as an extended ad absurdam metaphor for identity theft; its antagonist, Ian, can do so with frightening completeness, just by rooting out what thing among all of a person's possessions actually carries the most of his victim's emotional identification and stealing it. Possession of this possession allows him to mimic the person so completely that even those closest to the victim believe that Ian is the real person and their loved one is a bad and terrifying imposter -- even if both of them are in the room.

The victim is quickly expelled from his paradise, and finds that not only those who know him or her, but everyone, reacts to him or her with a deep lizard-brain level of hostility.

Such happens to our first protagonist, David, in the first act, and we spend a lot of time with him as his new unreality sinks in. He is suddenly friendless, homeless, loveless -- his own mother, his friends and neighbors, even, most importantly, his truly beloved wife, Sophie (who winds up the real hero of this novel in lots of poignant -- and kickass -- ways) threaten violence or law enforcement involvement at the very sight of him. This material is every bit as gut-wrenching as you might expect, but never strays into melodrama, remaining merely deeply effective, and eventually, quite Kafkaesque.***

And then things get bad.

Ian's power works in weird and grotesque ways, ways that Robinson spent a lot of time and effort reasoning out (again, in a very Tim Powers way that I can't applaud enough. Yes, it's supernatural/magical, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be internally logical!). Ian's victims don't just wind up lonely and homeless: there is a far sadder, weirder and grosser fate awaiting them. And their chosen objects. Yuck.

I am seriously impressed.

*And as a hilariously snarky lover of television and movies of questionable quality, which he loves (?) to share with us over at The Satellite Show.

**I suppose Doris Lessing belongs there, too, but I've only read The Fifth Child and don't want to read any more as a result.

***I mean, really, is anything more Kafkaesque than a well-constructed doppelganger story? To be truly Kafkaesque I suppose our heroes would have to have gotten tangled up in the justice system's red tape, but still.

THRAWN AND ON AND ON: A STAR WARS LITERARY PODCAST

With the release last year of the long-awaited Star Wars: The Force Awakens, a couple of my internet buddies and I naturally got to talking about the Star Wars Expanded Universe, no part of which is included in the film (that whole sort-of-canon has now been shunted off as Star Wars Legends, to much grumbling in some communities). As followers of this here blog know, though I've been a Star Wars fan since movie houses first went pew pew pew in 1977, to date I've only sort of explored said universe -- I've played a lot of KOTOR, read the Storybooks when I was a wee one, and I have read Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire, and that's about it.

Well, that's about to change. We're going to swim in the bathwater that J.J. Abrams and Disney threw out.

Because those friends -- Shawn Duke, Rachel Acks and Sarah, the redoubtable tweeter we know as Bookworm Blues -- and I decided not only were we going to read, eventually, ALL THE STAR WARS together, but we'd podcast it, too.

And we just recorded our first episode, in which we talked about, yes, Heir to the Empire.

It's going to be lots of fun. We've got a diverse set of viewpoints on the EU -- Shaun and Rachel are both hardy long-time explorers of same, I've dipped my toe in some but am thoroughly steeped in the original trilogy and its game offshoots, and Sarah was a complete Star Wars innocent until The Force Awakens awakened her.

We're going to have guests, including author guests, and special features (including, yes, sonnetry from yours truly) and who knows what other craziness!

We'll be releasing it under the Skiffy and Fanty imprimatur, so we should be easy to find, but I'll also share a link as soon as the show goes live.

Oh yeah, and the name? Totally from an Abba song. Because we're not just dorks, we're shameless dorks. Represent.

James S.A. Corey's CALIBAN'S WAR

The first Expanse novel, Leviathan Wakes was a Belter punk detective story in space opera clothing, and entertaining as hell, entertaining enough for me to set aside the books I was intending to read next and plunge right into the sequel. So what's the sequel, Caliban's War?

Man, the sequel is pretty much a horror novel with a sprinkling of military fiction in space opera clothing, innit? In fact, on reflection, it reminded me more than a bit of two favorites: the earlier Alien films, and Paul Elard Cooley's horror/petroleum punk The Black novels and, of course, Scott Sigler's Infected series. In fact, imagine a possibly omnipotent, physics-defying combination of those three menaces and set it in a human-settled solar system and you've pretty much got the protomolecule that is the main background threat of the Expanse series thus far.

So while I enjoyed meeting up with (almost) all of the characters I'd come to enjoy in the last novel, and my introduction to three new ones, it was really the horror/suspense elements of the plot, and the characters' (largely post-traumatic) reactions to them, that really kept me advancing the pages of Caliban's War. Especially the reactions. This book so successfully evoked the PTSD experience (at least as experienced by Your Humble Blogger) that it actually gave me quite a bit of trouble mid-novel. I won't say I had a full-blown attack, but I was pretty much a mess for the middle third of the story. Part of me is very upset about this, because triggering someone's PTSD is not at all nice, but the rest of me admires the effectiveness this had in absolutely freaking riveting me to what I was reading.**

But so, your mileage may vary there. A lot of people have whined that this book isn't as good as its predecessor (and they're not totally wrong in that lots of it does rehash/recycle elements from LW, right down to the Find the Missing Girl plot), but I don't see it. I was able to put the first one down, sometimes for days. This one, this one I barely slept.

But I wasn't just scared, reading CW. I also just enjoyed. I really dig all the characters from the first novel that carried over into this one (though I sure do miss [REDACTED]), and the new ones introduced here are just as great.*** Everybody gets a very satisfying character arc (well, except maybe Naomi, who has diminished into a stock girlfriend character who only occasionally gets to do something kind of important behind the scenes with her magical technological skills. Fix that, Coreys!) and their adventures with the Caliban-esque**** (in that they are supernaturally powerful beings imperfectly subjected to human will, only to of course throw off their chains and raise hell) protomolecular monsters are amazing, of course.

There was something else, though, that really fascinated me in CW, and that's the depiction of how Ganymede functions, and how it falls apart. Here the two-headed Corey monster really went to town, fully and convincingly realizing a complete world, a total artificial ecosystem on which not only its immediate inhabitants depend but on which most of the Outer Planets and the Belt do, too, and then tearing it all down in excruciating detail. It's kind of like watching a giant domino display of doom going down. Yes, I realize I'm probably a big ol' jerk for enjoying this aspect as much as I did. But I'm sure I'm not alone.

Now excuse me. I have to start on the next one. Because of [REDACTED] showing up at the end and not being [REDACTED] but instead [REDACTED]. Dude!

*Which, Bob help me, I always want to type -- and say -- as Leviathan's Wake. I'm sure there's something Freudian there but I don't care. It's just something that simultaneously amuses and annoys me.

**Much as in a full-blown event, I knew perfectly well that nothing was actually happening at the time and I was perfectly safe in my comfortable home and so was everybody else I care about, but knowing intellectually that nothing is wrong is not enough to stop me feeling it in my gut and shaking and crying, or to let me tear myself away from the horror show in my head. Because who wants to stop and do EMDR while reading a freaking sci-fi novel?

***Though man, the TV show sure did improve on Avasarala (even as the TV writers had to create her story out of whole cloth for the show, because she's not in the parts of the books that the first TV season covered). Not just because Shohreh Aghdashloo is fantastic and lends the character considerable gravitas and grace, but because she had to do something to get her point across besides swearing. I have no particular problem with cursing usually, but book-Avasarala relies entirely too much on the harmless-looking little old lady shocking everybody with F-bombs to get her point across. Jeebus!

****Read your damned Shakespeare.

James S.A. Corey's LEVIATHAN WAKES

So, a lot of people who are talking about these books and the rather good television adaptation they've recently spawned* seem to be very interested in having the argument over whether Leviathan's Wake and its sequels count as Space Opera or not. And maybe I should wait until I've read further into the series before I form my opinion, but I have an early contender for an answer to the question, and that is: it's not. Because it's its own thing, and the two-headed monster that writes as James S.A. Corey already done named it: it's Belter Punk.

At least this first book is. There are hints throughout, of course, that the series as a whole is going to have that galactic sweep and scale and sense of awe and alienness that people go to Space Opera for, but this book right here, this is Belter Punk, which within the text of the novel refers to a genre of (presumably) grungy and loud and unlovely but passionate music favored by residents of the asteroid belt/minor planets out between Mars and Jupiter, where they live inside hollowed-out rocks and aren't quite self-contained but sure do try but meanwhile they're still dependent on Earth and Mars and various shipping vessels to make sure they don't run out of air or water. It's an unglamorous life out there in the Sol system, and the people who have adapted to it have gotten a tad strange, and not just because a general lack or low level of gravity have made them tall and skinny and big-headed and knobby-jointed and a tad resentful.

But so it's mostly Belters we're dealing with, here at the beginning of the Expanse series, chiefly in the persons of James Miller and Naomi Nagata, he a terse, embittered gumshoe straight out of a Dashiell Hammet, she a tech wiz who starts out her novel-life serving on the crew of a space-freighter hauling water to Ceres, the minor planet in/on which Miller has spent his whole life...

But there are planetary types, too, out there among them, including Earther Jim Holden, the Executive Officer of the freighter on which Naomi serves, who grew up in some kind of official polyamorous group marriage in Montana and was supposed to take over/save the family's ranch there someday but instead headed for outer space; Amos Burton, also an Earther, and a smarter and more useful (and even more quotable) version of Jayne Cobb if ever there was one, who serves as a mechanic on the freighter; Alex Kamal, he of East Indian descent and Texas accent that mark him out as a guy who grew up on Mars and quite the pilot; and Fred Johnson, he of the colorful military past who is now the somewhat shady "unofficial prime minister" of the Outer Planets Alliance.**

It's a not-too-surprising combination of noir detective plot (enacted by Miller) and a mystery/assassination/perils of Pauline plot (enacted by the freighter crew) that bring them all into each other's orbits, as both investigations eventually lead the parties to the same place, where they make a creepy and potentially system-shattering discovery involving the secret origins of one of Saturn's moons and a nasty "protomolecule" that is a sort of weaponized version of the noocytes of Blood Music (Greg Bear) fame.

There are lots of space battles and starship chases and space station explosions and squicky evil to enjoy as the plot tosses the characters around, making this a fun as well as a politically interesting read, but what really sold me on it was the character of Miller, the washed-up detective who is tossed a case that's pretty much meant to be unsolvable but decides to give it his all anyway, with melancholy as well as explosive results. He's in every way a literary cliche that should make one yawn, but his background as a guy born and raised in space gives him just enough freshness to make all that old, sad stuff feel new again. And I'm not just talking about the fungal whiskey he drinks (though maybe more than a bit is due to what watchers of the TV series have waggishly dubbed the "Space Fedora of Justice" even though it is very clearly named several times in the text as a porkpie and not a fedora, but anyway). His story is absorbing enough on its own, but when it becomes entertwined with those of the freighter crew members, it all gets wonderfully complex, until there is a moment when the essential natures of Miller and Holden so perfectly clash and transform each other, and with that the plot, and I just sort of sat there stunned for a while and had to stop reading and unpack more boxes (I recently moved to a new house).

I have no idea if the other four books in the series so far are going to hold my attention as well as this one did because of [REDACTED], but the way my Own Dear Personal Mother is tearing through them (she's already on the fifth novel and sort of tapping her foot at me, but hey, she still hasn't read any of the Song of Ice and Fire yet, just seen the TV show, so, you know, that.) I'd say it's an even money bet at what's left of the casino on Eros that they will. I've already started on Caliban's War...

*And yes, once again, the TV people caught me flat-footed. I've had this series on my to-read radar for years now, but kept getting distracted by shinies, and now they've gone and made the first half-or-so of this novel and chunks of later ones into a whole season of high-quality TV! It's The Last Kingdom all over again. D'oh!

**One of several factions rubbing up against each other and not-quite-fighting over resources in this human-settled Solar System, with Earth and Mars the inner planet superpowers, the Belt a somewhat chaotic mess of colonial outposts and outright corporate properties, and the at-times seemingly terroristic Outer Planets Alliance, aka OPA serving as a catch-all for further flung outposts' interests and meddling a good bit in the affairs of the Belt, too. Which is to say that if you don't like a lot of political plottery in your sci-fi, these books might not turn out to be your favorites, but I'd still give them a try for the reasons I've outlined above.