The tale of the Destroyermen, World War II sailors and marines pulled from our world to an alternate Earth populated by sapient lemur-people and dinosThe tale of the Destroyermen, World War II sailors and marines pulled from our world to an alternate Earth populated by sapient lemur-people and dinosaur-people, has become a global war on this new world. With more factions being added in each volume, it's becoming as big as the real WWII, spanning from North America to Africa and Asia (I don't think we've reached alt-Europe yet). The heart of the series is still Captain Matthew Reddy and the USS Walker, but many chapters are told from other POVs in other parts of the world.
So to recap: we have the Grand Alliance, made up of Americans from Earth, mostly drawn from our World War II, the Lemurians, and the pseudo-British Empire made up of descendants of the East India Company. They have been joined by a handful of Japanese defectors and captured or rogue Grik.
Against them is the Grik empire, vast and stretching across most of India and Asia. They are being advanced both technologically and socially by Japanese soldiers also pulled from our Earth's World War II. When we first encountered the Grik, they were mindless monsters. Then we learned that Grik elites were intelligent. Now the Grik elite are learning to actually train their warrior hordes to function like a disciplined army. With ironclads, zeppelins, gunpowder, and vast numerical superiority, the war is now an existential one.
On the other side of the world is the Dominion, descended from a medieval Catholic Church fused with the Aztec religion. Long the enemies of the Empire and posing a lesser but still significant threat, the Dominion barely appears in this book except for a couple of short chapters featuring a Lemurian and an American destroyerman who were captured by them in the last book.
Iron Gray Sea features the Grand Alliance growing and learning the difficulties of managing a multiple theater war. Both Lemurians and humans make mistakes and find themselves for the first time experiencing conflicting goals, much as happened in our World Wars.
The book builds up to a couple of climactic battles. One is strategically insignificant but since it's Matthew Reddy and the USS Walker, it's obviously the most dramatic. Reddy has been hunting another rogue Japanese destroyer, the Hidoiame ("Terrible Rain") since the last book, so the cat and mouse game between them takes up many chapters in this one before the final battle.
The other battle is the big one between the human-Lemurian fleet and the new Japanese-Grik ironclads, led by the mad Japanese captain Kurakawa, who has become the scenery-chewing villain of the series, so evil and megalomaniacal even the Grik are starting to think there's something wrong with him.
There are also some side plots involving yet more "refugees" from different time periods of Earth, and even hints that maybe not everyone is coming from the same Earth.
This series is long, and each book makes only a little bit of progress in the timeline, but I've stopped complaining about the grind, because there's enough meat in each book to make it interesting, even the characters are often just archetypes whose major personality traits are repeated to us over and over....more
Destroyermen is like a TV series that has enough staying power to last for years, even though the basic story never changes. Captain Reddy and his oldDestroyermen is like a TV series that has enough staying power to last for years, even though the basic story never changes. Captain Reddy and his old WWII destroyer, arriving on an alternate Earth inhabited by sapient lemur-people and dinosaur-people, has changed the geopolitics of the world. Six books in, and we've learned that not only have previous visitors from Earth arrived here and formed new empires, but people are still coming, meaning there are several Allied and Japanese ships being yanked out of our world's ongoing Second World War and landing in this world, where some of them take sides with the Grand Alliance and some fall in with the evil Japanese-Grik empire.
Besides the Grand Alliance (the Destroyermen from Earth, the Lemurians, the descendants of a British/East-India company coalition, and an oddball assortment of "good" Grik and Japanese) and the Great Hive (the multi-continent Grik empire and the Japanese led by the insane battleship captain Kurokawa), there is also a Dominion run by a syncretic Catholic/Aztec religion ruled by torture and blood sacrifice. One breakaway group of Japanese sailors created a little mini-Lemurian/human Shogunate.
So there are a lot of factions in play now, and the story spans a growing cast of characters, both the guys who've been around since the beginning like Matthew Reddy and Dennis DaSilva, and new characters from the Empire and the Dominion. The war is taking place around the world, so we see battles and strategic planning from Africa to this world's North America and Europe and Australia and Asia. There are chapters from the POV of the Destroyermen and their allies, and from the POV of the Japanese and the Grik.
This is basically a continuation of the last five books, and it will be continued in the next. Taylor Anderson is writing a somewhat formulaic story; a few things change and a few characters die and the war progresses (each side is now starting to tech up, which puts more pressure on the Alliance since their main advantage against the numerically superior Grik has always been superior technology and planning) but you could drop into any book in the series and see the same familiar characters doing roughly the same thing.
This is not a bad thing if you enjoy war stories, and I'd call Destroyermen comfort reading for when you just want a war yarn. Part of what makes it comfort reading is that the lines are sharply drawn; there is a level of righteousness in the good guys that makes it clear they are the "good guys." More personality has been added to the Grik; they are no longer just mindless murderous hordes. And we've likewise gotten to know some Japanese, even on the enemy side, who are sympathetic. So it's not entirely black and white. But we can always be sure that Captain Matthew Reddy will live up to the glorious ideal of a red-blooded American naval officer, his sailors will follow him to hell, the Lemurians remain fierce, friendly, funny, and loyal, and the good guys will always do the right thing and win in the end. It's like a fantasy World War II with greatly reduced moral complexity. The lack of cynicism and playing everything straight is actually kind of refreshing if you're sick of books that always have deconstruct everything good and noble.
I'm not saying this is great literature, and I'm also not saying it's a children's good-vs-evil story. It's just fun and familiar and while at first I was getting kind of tired of book after book just continuing the story, now I am in for the long haul. I'd kind of like to see an end eventually, but I know what I'm getting with a Destroyermen book; a big helping of escapism and adventure....more
The Destroyermen series is a long-lasting product: a fifteen-book series that goes on and on, but so far each book has been entertaining enough to staThe Destroyermen series is a long-lasting product: a fifteen-book series that goes on and on, but so far each book has been entertaining enough to stand on its own while advancing the overall story only a little bit.
In an alternate Earth occupied by lemur-like Lemurians and raptor-like Grik, it turns out that the World War II destroy Walker and its Japanese pursuers were not the first humans from our Earth to stumble through whatever portal brought them here. There is already New Britain, descended from British ships that crossed over centuries ago, and the Dominion, descended from Spanish Catholics. While New Britain was introduced in the previous book, where Matthew Reddy and his crew figured out that they are based in roughly what is Hawaii on this world, the Dominion moves into the chief villain role in this book when the Walker arrives at the capital of New Britain.
Despite being very much a sea-going action thriller that is read by people who want battles and intrigue and banter between Lemurians and WWII sailors, Anderson does a good job of creating plausible alternate history empires. New Britain is very British culturally, but its politics have diverged significantly, as the East India Company has become a sinister "shadow government." The destroyermen and Lemurians also discover that (for reasons that kind of make sense but still seemed a bit tortuous), women are virtually chattel. Although the more salacious implications of this are only hinted at, there are a whole lot of British officers saying "Well, of course we don't like the system but what can we do?" while insisting they really love their wives.
The Dominion seems to have combined the worst aspects of the Inquisition and the Aztec empire, and the one Dominion character we meet, the Dominion ambassador to New Britain, is the Big Bad of this book. In previous books, the Japanese and the Grik both began as essentially faceless orc enemies, but later became individual characters with some diverging from their "racial archetype," so it remains to be seen if the Dominion will remain unambiguously evil or if there will turn out to be some nuance and dissent there as well.
Speaking of the Grik and the Japanese, much like the last book, we only get a few chapters showing cameos of our old foes and what they are up to on the other side of the world. Rising Tides is primarily split between Matthew Reddy and the Walker in New Britain, and his girlfriend Nurse Sandra and Princess Rebecca and their fellow survivors out on the seas, who have to survive hostile natives (of the non-human variety) and volcanic eruptions.
The Destroyermen is a series for people who like the premise and the action and don't mind the story being dragged out for many, many books. A little bit gets added in each book, there are usually a few new characters introduced, but long-running plot threads like the war between the Grik and the humans and Lemurians, which side the Dominion will be on, and for that matter, when Reddy will finally be reunited with his nurse gal who was abducted two books ago, get stretched out across several volumes....more
This an Audible Audio production, so it's more like a radio play than a book, narrated by an ensemble cast.
Space: 1969 is a wild, somewhat kooky alterThis an Audible Audio production, so it's more like a radio play than a book, narrated by an ensemble cast.
Space: 1969 is a wild, somewhat kooky alternate history tale where JFK survived his assassination attempt, ran for a third term, and now the US has a moon colony. Meanwhile, Richard Nixon, who narrates the story, has faded into obscurity as an estate lawyer in New York.
It's the glorious space future we never got, Nancy Kranich is a brassy nurse from Midwest who's just arrived at the Liberty Bell space station, where Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin are performing. Things go sideways (literally), Jerry Lewis dies under suspicious circumstances, and Nurse Nancy is suddenly caught in a conspiracy that involves JFK, a mysterious moon metal, and Tricky Dick Nixon.
I'm not a big fan of sci-fi humor, but this was a funny, amusing journey through a space-faring 60s that never was, with a plot that doesn't bear too much pondering but did eventually tie all the weird and unrelated people dragged into it together. We get the Beverly Hillbillies in space. We get Richard Milhous Nixon as the manager of a Shakey's pizza parlor on the moon. We get a wisecracking nurse who's also worth twice her weight in Green Berets. There's a Soviet space dog and JFK dropping acid while planning galactic domination.
The voice acting was good (especially the guy narrating as Nixon) and the story was silly but kinda sorta made sense in the end, if you suspend your disbelief in orbit....more
I've enjoyed all the Destroyermen books. They're not deep, and they're not particularly well-written. They're just brain candy. Tasty, tasty candy. NaI've enjoyed all the Destroyermen books. They're not deep, and they're not particularly well-written. They're just brain candy. Tasty, tasty candy. Nautical military adventures in a land of dinosaurs, reptile men, lemur-people, and a bunch of historical Earth cultures thrown together in a big pulp setting.
The series started with an old WWI destroyer, the Walker, outfitted to fight in World War II, being sucked into an alternate Earth, along with, it turns out, a Japanese battleship. The past three books had the crew of the Walker making friends with the Lemurians, who evolved from lemur-like creatures, and waging war against the Grik, a genocidal race evolved from dinosaurs. The Japanese (or at least, the mad commander of the Amagi) allied with the Grik.
These stark lines between good guys and bad guys do get blurred a bit. The humans and Lemurians learn that there are different races of Grik, and have made friends with one. Some of the Japanese changed sides after having second thoughts about the Grik (and their crazy commander). And of course the Lemurians have their own internal political divisions. We were also introduced to a neo-British empire in the last book, descended from Dutch East Indies ships that arrived in this world centuries ago, and in Distant Thunders, much of the conflict revolves around trying to form an alliance with the suspicious Imperials, who are themselves divided into factions. And there are hints of at least one other human empire, called the "Dominion," about which we'll undoubtedly learn more in future books.
The author, Taylor Anderson, does a decent job of portraying the Lemurians as relatable but non-human. The Grik, even the "friendly" Grik, are more single-note, and all the villains, human, Lemurian, and Grik, are pretty much 100% evil cackling monsters. Anderson is a historian and artillery expert, and as is common in military fiction, goes into abundant detail about the technical workings of the guns, ships, and planes that the humans build to try to recreate technology from Earth.
The writing is very workmanlike, and the characters are all pretty flat. I don't like the head-hopping third-person omniscient POV, and the main human and Lemurian characters don't even encounter the Grik in this book, so they are an entirely offstage threat who we see only with chapters devoted to their eeeeevil scheming on the other side of the world.
There is some adventuring and romancing, some exploring, some treachery, and some naval battles, and then a bunch of things to be continued in the next book.
I could just go ahead and devour the rest of the series. I'm sure it stays fun, if a bit repetitive. But it totals fifteen books. (Supposedly volume 15 is actually the last.) I'm not sure if the fun factor will last for eleven more books of humans and Lemurians waging war against the Grik, even with empires of Conquistadors or Aztecs or whoever else thrown in....more
I picked this up because of its resemblance to Ken Grimwood's Replay. The premise is a similar: a man dies and gets reborn into the same life he just I picked this up because of its resemblance to Ken Grimwood's Replay. The premise is a similar: a man dies and gets reborn into the same life he just lived, finds out that this will keep happening over and over, and that there are other people like him.
Replay was much smaller in scope, though, focusing on the life and experiences of the protagonist. Claire North has written a true science fiction novel with much more exploration of the implications of people who have centuries of accumulated experience, living the same years over and over.
Harry August is an ordinary bloke born in a train station restroom in the early 20th century in northern England, the bastard son of a minor aristocrat and a serving girl. The first few chapters tell about his very ordinary life, living through World War II and the latter half of the 20th century, dying a natural death... and then being reborn as a baby back where he started, but with all the memories of his last life. He goes insane and spends much of his second life in an asylum.
His third life goes a little bit better, and then he starts to get the hang of it. He eventually learns of a society called "The Cronus Club," made up of other people like him, called "Kalachakra," whose lives repeat over and over. They have existed throughout history; those whose lives spanned earlier eras leave messages for the later ones, who are encouraged to create funds and occasionally perform rescues for their later-born comrades. But fundamentally, the Cronus Club is a bunch of dilettante immortals who've concluded that they can't fundamentally change history. Until someone decides to break the rules.
Harry August's good friend and mortal enemy, Vincent Rankis, is a man who decides he wants to unravel the secrets of the universe and control time itself. He dedicates himself, lifetime after lifetime, to accumulating enough scientific knowledge to build a "quantum mirror." Each time, he gets a little closer. In one life, he sets himself up as a commissar in the Soviet Union and builds it deep in the Soviet boonies; in the next, it's in America under the Eisenhower administration. But he undertakes it as a very long-term project, knowing that it may not reach completion in any given lifetime, but each time he learns a little more and is able to get it up and running a little faster next time, and in the process has the world building lasers and nuclear power plants and studying quantum physics decades earlier than scheduled. Harry learns, through warnings from other Kalachakra relaying messages back through generations, that the end result of Vincent's project will actually bring about the end of the world.
Since the Cronus Club is opposed to this meddling, the villain also figures out how to wipe out the Cronus Club across multiple lifetimes.
While Harry's repeated sojourns through the same life might have become tedious for the reader (as they frequently were for him... imagine having to come back to relive your childhood for the eleventh time, with 800 years of actual life experience), his "duel" in later incarnations with Vincent, taking place as a sort of deep undercover espionage mission with plots having to take into account friends and foes "upstream" and "downstream" of one's own timeline, was tense and well thought out, and emotional as well, as the two men really have developed a kind of bromance despite each knowing they have to destroy the other while one doesn't know the other one knows, but thinks he knows and the other one doesn't know.
This is a very thinky novel about time travel (kind of) with a really interesting premise, and while it might not have explored every possible implication of the Kalachakra, it hit enough of them that it was clear the author had thought through everything very well. Well worth reading....more
I have not read any of the Sookie Stackhouse books, nor seen True Blood, but I knew Charlaine Harris's name and this first book in a series looked kinI have not read any of the Sookie Stackhouse books, nor seen True Blood, but I knew Charlaine Harris's name and this first book in a series looked kind of interesting, so I decided to give it a try.
An Easy Death is set in an alternate history where the assassination of Franklin Delano Roosevelt caused the United States to fall apart. New England went back to Britain, Mexico reclaimed most of the Southwest, Canada claimed much of the north, and Russia gobbled up most of the West Coast. "Texoma" and "Dixie" are independent, basically third-world countries. Also, there is magic, though apparently only the Russians use it openly.
Suspend your disbelief about the U.S. collapsing because FDR died, and everyone else strolling in to peel off chunks of it. An Easy Death is a fairly paint-by-numbers Western crossed with a modern Urban Fantasy, so even though racism and sexism still exists, no one really raises an eyebrow at multiracial, mixed-sex crews of mercenaries, or a 19-year-old woman plying her trade as a gunslinger/bodyguard. But it's an entertaining story with lots of action.
Lizbeth "Gunny" Rose is hired to look for the bastard offspring of a Russian sorcerer who is very important to the Russian Royal Family. The two "Gregoris" who hire her are a bitchy British sorceress named Paulina and her hot Russian partner Eli. Lizbeth spends most of the book brooding about how much she hates Paulina and how annoying she finds Eli so that the inevitable betrayal and equally inevitable sex scene will be extra-dramatic.
The worldbuilding was not deep, mostly just an excuse to stick sorcerers in a Western with an America not quite like ours. The cast of characters was Harris's strong point, as she developed quite a web of relationships and established enough secondary characters and subplots to carry us into the next book, while mostly tying up the main plot of this one.
I liked it well enough that I'll probably check out the next book in the series....more
This short novel is a fun romp that bounces back and forth between semi-serious commentary on arms races and the morality of killing civilians to end This short novel is a fun romp that bounces back and forth between semi-serious commentary on arms races and the morality of killing civilians to end a war, and copious shout-outs to monster movies and SF fandom.
The premise is just this side of ridiculous, the sort of plot you'd find in one of the monster movies referenced in this book: as the War in the Pacific grinds to its inevitable denouement and the U.S. seeks a way to force the Japanese to surrender without having to invade Japan, there are two doomsday weapon projects running in parallel. While physicists develop the atomic bomb, a team of biologists have successfully irradiated mutant iguanas and created giant, fire-breathing monsters capable of destroying cities, if ever awoken from their drug-induced coma. The Navy, wanting to beat the Army to the bomb, wants to set up a demonstration of these fearsome monsters to a Japanese delegation, who will then run back to the Emperor and convince him to order a surrender before Japanese cities are stomped beneath giant, radioactive lizard-feet.
Scientifically, it's pretty silly, but author James Morrow takes this idea and plays it straight, incorporating the kaiju plot with the actual history of World War II and the negotiations and speculation and multifaceted considerations that the U.S. and Japan took into account as they struggled towards the end of a war whose outcome everyone knew was already a foregone conclusion.
The main character is Syms Thorley, a B-movie actor famous for stomping around Hollywood sets in a rubber monster suit, which is why the Navy hires him to put on a show for the Japanese delegation. There is a whole contrived set-up to explain why they think this will work, and why Thorley has to pretend to be a baby giant radioactive lizard, and the U.S. government building spectacular, detailed mockups of the Japanese cities that Thorley will stomp on, complete with tanks, Zeroes, and the Battleship Yamato, all of which will fire live ammo at Thorley in the big climactic rampage.
Shambling Towards Hiroshima is narrated by Thorley as an aging actor making a living on the sci-fi con circuit, appearing at autograph sessions to rant about abolishing weapons of mass destruction while still haunted fifty years later by his participation in the top-secret WMD project the world never saw, the one that failed to prevent the nuclear age.
While I got the impression Morrow was sort of serious about wanting this book to be read as an allegory, it was hard to take too seriously. It is, after all, about an actor trying to end World War II by pretending to be Godzilla. But Morrow isn't that serious about it, and his humor makes this book also a pleasure to read for fans of Godzilla movies and monster movies in general. There are self-aware winks at the genre and fandom throughout.
As an alternate history novel, this was quite an unusual little gem....more
This book has an inventive premise, if not a very original one for readers of fan fiction. An author creates a world which is brought to literal existThis book has an inventive premise, if not a very original one for readers of fan fiction. An author creates a world which is brought to literal existence, and then has to enter it to deal with the problems he wrote. Kind of.
Henry Lytten is, it's implied, one of the , an Oxford literary circle that included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Lytten disdained Lewis's preachy religious allegory and Tolkien's elves and wizards, and instead created a fully realized fantasy world that was devoid of fantasy. A carefully constructed society of scholars, civilians, royalty, and maybe the occasional bandit for excitement.
The problem with Lytten's fictional world, "Antewold," is the problem I had with this novel - it's boring.
I know Arcadia has gotten rave reviews from many of my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friends. It is very well written and the plot is grand in scope and imaginative in execution. It blends three distinct threads - there is Henry Lytton, a tweedy professor in post-war England who turns out to have a bit of a bad-ass past as a commando and spy. Now he's writing an epic (non)fantasy novel while occasionally being called up by his old intel chums to do a bit of side work.
Then there is another timeline, a far future dystopia which is interesting in the same Antewold is in that there are no fantastical or futuristic elements and the society isn't particularly spectacular in its oppressiveness. It's just an authoritarian state that keeps everyone pacified and happy by more or less providing security and plenty while occasionally crushing the few "dissidents" who are still around. Except one woman in this vaguely capitalist dystopia, a scientist, rebels when credit is stolen from her. She is working on a machine to travel to parallel worlds (or so everyone believes), and ends up escaping to Henry Lytton's world.
This leads to the creation of a gateway to Antewold, Lytton's fictitious creation, where the characters takes on lives of their own, and where a teenage girl who befriended Professor Lytten finds herself the unwilling heroine of a new story.
This all reads a bit like a Cloud Atlas written by one of the Inklings. The problem is it just never takes off as a story. Sure, the plot is tight and the characters, so many of them, are impressively handled, and I was impressed by some of the twists the author engineered. But as a novel, Arcadia just did not leave a strong impression on me. It was like a stroll through a very literary writing exercise....more
The second book in a series, set in an alternate-history steampunk England. This time, Richard Burton and Algernon Swinburne are up against ghosts, faThe second book in a series, set in an alternate-history steampunk England. This time, Richard Burton and Algernon Swinburne are up against ghosts, family curses, Professor Charles Babbage, and manipulators of time and space, in what seems to be unwinding as an epic story presenting an existential threat to the British Empire. It reminds me a lot of Ian Tregillis's Milkweed Triptych trilogy.
This is a thick, meaty adventure in a genre I'm not usually that interested in (steampunk), but I enjoyed it, though I thought sometimes the author just threw in extra historical references and characters in to pad it out. The big reveal of the secret arch-villain was entertaining, followed of course by an even bigger Big Bad. There is a meta-story about how their timeline has been changed and that a handful of people (including Burton and Swinburne) know they are living in a altered timeline and all these psychic powers and strange science inventions aren't supposed to work.
Mostly Hollywood-style entertainment, but a good read....more
I love the German language (what little I remember of it). But my experiences with German literature, at least in translation, have not been salutary.I love the German language (what little I remember of it). But my experiences with German literature, at least in translation, have not been salutary. I bounced off Thomas Mann, and this is my second attempt with Hermann Hesse. I found Steppenwolf to be interesting and bizarre, but mostly full of pretentious wankery, and The Glass Bead Game, which is ostensibly a future biography of the master of an intriguing game and intellectual order, was more like 19 hours of boredom which I finished only out of a completionist desire to mark it on my checklist of books finished.
Supposedly set in the 23rd century, this book is in no way science fiction, except under the loosest definition, as the world described shows no evidence of advanced technology or social advancement - it is essentially our world in an alternate history in which an academic order known as the Castalia coexists with the Catholic Church and produces philosophers and intellectuals who engage in abstruse dialectics and subtle social positioning for reasons that only matter to the internal mental states of the participants. The "glass bead game" after which the book is named is really just a plot device to seed the premise of the book - inasmuch as the book has a plot, which it doesn't, really.
The main character is a man named Joseph Knecht, and most of the book is a fictional future biography of Knecht, who (in the 23rd century) became revered as as the Magister Ludi of the glass bead game and Castalia. Following his progression from gifted young student to Magister Ludi, who then steps down from his exalted position, over the opposition of the Castalia, The Glass Bead game might be read as a bildungsroman, though I have read elsewhere that it's actually more of a parody of a bildungsroman. I can see how this book could be satirizing the form of the bildungsroman, but as far as wit or humor, there was none evident to me. The lengthy, detailed accounts of Knecht's upbringing, his interactions with fellow students, teachers, and mentees, who engage in long-winded philosophical exchanges with him, and his decision to eventually retire as Magister Ludi, when there is no mechanism or precedent for a Magister Ludi to retire.
Castalia, as described in the book, is the very epitome of an ivory tower - academics go to Castalia, are supported by taxes from the outside world, and spend all their time pondering heavy thoughts or playing the glass bead game. Knecht is eventually swayed by arguments with a schoolmate from his younger days, and a Catholic clergyman later in life, that Castalians should not withdraw from the world, but use their intellectual gifts for the benefit of others.
Very deep and intellectual. Also very, very boring.
As a casual, lapsed go player, who loved the novel Master of Go, I was more interested in the glass bead game itself. Hesse must have been inspired in part by go when he created this fictional game, but the glass bead game is only described abstractly - like go, it is a "lifestyle" game for those who truly dedicated themselves to its mastery, and it embodies everything from philosophy to mathematics, and music. The actual rules and mechanics of the game are never described, though, and despite being referenced throughout the book, in its relationship to Castalia and the outside world, the game really doesn't have much to do with the story.
The biography of Joseph Knecht ends abruptly, and the latter part of the book contains several poems and stories supposedly written by the fictional protagonist. The stories are alternative incarnations of Knecht, written as if he had been born as a prehistoric shaman, an early Christian hermit, and an Indian prince.
All of this was very detailed, thoughtful, literary, and intellectual. And very, very boring.
I'm sure I missed oceans of meaning, but The Glass Bead Game just disappointed me on every level. I'm giving it 2 stars because 1 star would be an insult - I can recognize the literary merit of the work. But as far as enjoying it or ever wanting to revisit it, I find that about as unlikely as my ever wanting to read another book by Hermann Hesse....more
This venerable classic read very much like the era in which it was written, the 80s, when big multi-character epics with convoluted plots and worldbuiThis venerable classic read very much like the era in which it was written, the 80s, when big multi-character epics with convoluted plots and worldbuilding that didn't have to make much sense were all the rage.
A bunch of Egyptian sorcerers in the 19th century try to summon Anubis to throw off the British yoke. This doesn't work, but instead it opens up a bunch of "gates" through which those able to detect them are able to time travel. In the 20th century, a millionaire finds out about the gates and recruits a bunch of rich poetry fans to pay him for a trip back to the 19th century to hear Samuel Taylor Coleridge speak in person. Except it turns out the millionaire actually had another plan - he wanted to meet a body-swapping werewolf who was running amok back then, to bribe him into letting him switch out of his terminally diseased body into a new one.
The main character is a classicist conned into going back in time as the subject matter expert with all the rich time travelers. He gets stranded when one of those Egyptian sorcerers sees the time travelers appear out of nowhere, figures out something is going on, and abducts him to interrogate him. Soon the sorcerer has his own plans, figuring he can use time travel for world domination too.
There is also a woman masquerading as a man while she hunts the werewolf serial killer who murdered her fiancee, a thieves guild, and various other dastardly characters mixing magic, time travel, and ancient gods in an alternate Victorian England.
The story was interesting and Tim Powers cleverly wound all the different threads together, handling the time travel well without worrying about the physics of it or potential paradoxes. Likewise, the reader must simply accept that magic and ancient Egyptian spirits exist, because. It all blends together into a lengthy and imaginative epic.
I only gave it three stars because in the end, the characters wouldn't have interested me in reading more of their adventures, and the plot sometimes seemed to be a circus performance for the reader's benefit, without even a pretense at worldbuilding. But it was a fun listen and I might try something by Powers again....more
An alt-historical novel set in England, 1949, in a world in which Britain negotiated a "peace with honor" with Germany, ending the war and resulting iAn alt-historical novel set in England, 1949, in a world in which Britain negotiated a "peace with honor" with Germany, ending the war and resulting in a continental Europe controlled by the Nazis, and an England in which everyone breathed a sigh of relief after the bombing stopped and life went back to normal. Except for the Jews.
With that historical backdrop (which is really the only "science fictional" element of the book), Farthing turns into half thriller, half murder mystery. Lucy Kahn, the daughter of an important family in the "Farthing Set" that negotiated the peace with Hitler, is the rebellious daughter who married a Jew, much to her parents' dismay. They barely tolerate her husband, but invite the two of them to a weekend in the country, in which the very man responsible for negotiating the end of the war is found dead, stabbed through the heart with a yellow star (like the kind they make Jews wear in Europe) pinned to his chest.
Obviously, it's a set-up, and fortunately for Lucy and her husband, David, the Scotland Yard inspector who is sent to investigate smells the set-up and is reluctant to go along with it, even though very powerful forces are obviously pressuring him to arrest the Jew and call it a day.
The mystery is fairly obvious, but the thriller aspects take center stage as we learn the reasons for the murder. The author makes her points rather heavy-handedly at times, and as the book ends (obviously to be continued in a second volume), England is sliding into fascism just like Germany.
I'm somewhat curious to see where the author intends to go with this - will we see England eventually throwing off the new fascism and turning history back on its proper course? It seems rather unlikely with the world the way it is. I was also bemused by every other character being gay or bi and having a same-sex lover in the closet.
3.5 stars. It was a pretty good read, but remember it is more English manor murder mystery than alternate World War II thriller....more
I really enjoy the Destroyermen series, but man is Taylor Anderson milking this or what?
In book one, the USS Walker, an obsolete coal-burning destroyeI really enjoy the Destroyermen series, but man is Taylor Anderson milking this or what?
In book one, the USS Walker, an obsolete coal-burning destroyer dragged to an alternate Earth from 1942, along with her Japanese battlecruiser adversary, allied with a race of peaceful lemur-people against the reptilian Grik. In book two, the war against the Grik continued, with a few chapters told from the POV of the crazy Japanese captain and the evil Grik.
Book three, Maelstrom, is basically the next chapter, and it's literally just another chapter in the story, albeit a 400-page chapter. The Americans and their Lemurian allies continue to prepare for the massive Grik invasion, the captain of the Amagi continues to chew scenery as a megalomaniacal psychopath, and the Grik continue to chortle and salivate at the thought of eating all their enemies.
There was a little bit of extra characterization, as it's hinted that the Grik are actually capable of learning and evolving. And the Walker meets more wayward visitors from Earth, and descendants of even earlier ones. Which is cool except it seems likely to be a recurring shtick - whenever the author needs to add a twist, hey, let's discover another ship or lost civilization that got yanked to this world from the old one.
Despite my griping, I still really enjoyed this book. It's full of sea battles, dashing heroism, mustache-twirling villainy, and all the stuff a fan of military SF should enjoy. You could make this a typical space opera just by moving it to space and making the Grik and the Lemurians aliens instead of products of an alternate evolutionary history on Earth. The Destroyermen series is almost in the planetary romance genre, except for all the emphasis on military tactics and nautical terminology.
It's great fun, but I'm looking at the six or more books ahead of me in the series and wondering if we will be plodding through this same war with the same adversaries for all of them....more
This short story is an alternate history mashup piece of Sherlock Holmes/HP Lovecraft fan fiction. All the familiar faces - Lestrade, Holmes (kind of)This short story is an alternate history mashup piece of Sherlock Holmes/HP Lovecraft fan fiction. All the familiar faces - Lestrade, Holmes (kind of) and his loyal doctor sidekick - are present as they are brought in to solve the case of a murdered member of the royal family, with the only clue being the word "Rache" written in green ichor at the murder scene.
Green ichor, because the royal family isn't human and this is an alternate history in which eldritch things arrived centuries ago to bestow their benevolent rule upon humanity and relieve us of the necessity of determining our own fates.
That isn't the only twist in this retelling of "A Study in Scarlet," it's just the non-spoilery one revealed in the first few pages.
Honestly, I think Neil Gaiman is a wee bit overrated - his stories are interesting twists and he writes well, but while he does a very good job incorporating myths and legends into modern stories, over and over, and writing what's basically literate fan fiction, I haven't found anything of his to be truly genius since Sandman and Good Omens. Still, I keep reading his stuff because it never fails to be entertaining....more
This is clearly a bit of filler between trilogies, and a contrived excuse for Larry Correia to write a battle between a giant robot and Godzilla into This is clearly a bit of filler between trilogies, and a contrived excuse for Larry Correia to write a battle between a giant robot and Godzilla into his Grimnoir trilogy, but like the rest of his magical-superhero alternate universe stories, it's fun and action packed pulp adventure that just doesn't bear too much thinking about.
Taking place about twenty years after the end of Warbound, Tokyo Raider stars Joe Sullivan Jr., a chip off the old block. Having joined the Marines, just like that he is whisked off to Japan at the direct request of the President (who is not a historical figure but instead a familiar face from the previous books). Even though the US and the Imperium are clearly headed for war, at the moment the Imperium is at war with their mutual enemy, the USSR. Stalin's sorcerers have summoned a giant monster that's devastating Japan, and Imperium scientists and mages have built a giant robot that, conveniently, none of their own magically-gifted warriors can operate. Somehow our old friend Toru, now in charge of the Imperium, figures his old frenemy Jake's son is the man they need.
This doesn't really make sense, but like I said, it's just an excuse for a battle between a giant robot blazoned with a rising sun pumping the Star Spangled Banner from its speakers, and a Godzilla-sized demon with the Soviet hammer & sickle burned into its chest. Fix that image in your head and have fun. It does make me look forward to the next Grimnoir series....more
I found book one in the Destroyermen series to be fun and entertaining, if a bit flat and cheesy, style-wise. Book two, though, actually had me wantinI found book one in the Destroyermen series to be fun and entertaining, if a bit flat and cheesy, style-wise. Book two, though, actually had me wanting to stand up and cheer. Not that it's any less flat and cheesy, but there are some quintessential qualities that Taylor Anderson brings to this series that I've been missing in sci-fi and military fiction lately.
Duty, honor, bravery, sacrifice, and heroism. Men acting like men. (Yes, the women - both human and Lemurian - are pretty brave too.) A war that feels like a war.
This book is very similar to an old WWII movie - the ones made before we got cynical and stopped presenting Americans as the good guys. The USS Walker and its sister ship the USS Mahan have allied with the Lemurians, a civilized race descended from lemurs in the alternate Earth in which the two destroyers find themselves. They face the Grik, an almost mindlessly violent race descended from reptiles or dinosaurs. In Crusade, we learn that the Japanese battleship Amagi, which chased the two American destroyers into the storm that brought it to this world, followed them, and is now allied with the Grik.
This makes the two sides pretty starkly black and white: Americans and friendly lemur-people vs. Japanese and evil crocodile-people.
But, the Americans and Lemurians are not universally good, and the Japanese are not universally evil. There is in-fighting among the various land-dwelling and sea-going tribes of Lemurians, some of the Americans get themselves into trouble with bad behavior, while in addition to Lieutenant Shinya, the captured Japanese officer who has now become effectively a part of the Walker's crew, Anderson also writes some scenes from the point of view of the Amagi's crew, and specifically, its unfortunate executive officer. The Japanese are Imperial Japanese. They have a duty, and an enemy. But while their captain is evidently going mad, the rest of the crew is starting to have doubts about whether they'd really rather be allied to cannibalistic lizard men than Americans.
Crusade is a series of battles, political alliances, and chases, with the tension ramping up as they discover that the Grik are invading the home of the Lemurians in a massive swarm, and worse, accompanied by a Japanese battlecruiser. The climax, in which the Walker faces a vastly more powerful ship it can't possibly defeat, is worthy of the most rocking naval adventure. As they are trying to evacuate thousands of Lemurians in the face of the Grik invasion, and no matter what they do, they must cope with the inevitable losses of thousands more, the tragedy and heroism of both humans and Lemurians is rousing, inspiring, a real edge-of-your-seat adventure.
Removed from the geopolitical considerations of Earth, the Americans in this world are a little pocket of America all their own, and it's what they make of it. And so far, they are what you'd expect from a red-blooded US Navy crew - sailors, heroes, not untarnished with the occasional scoundrel, but good men worthy of respect and admiration without the author doing a lot of jingoistic chest-beating.
The technical details all seem to be authentic and well-researched, from the advantages and disadvantages of the two American "four-stackers" vs. the huge, ultra-modern Amagi (which is struggling with damage of its own and the difficulties of getting repairs and fuel from its Grik "allies") to the aerial duel between a salvaged seaplane and a Japanese spotting biplane, to problems with American torpedoes. Throw sailing ships and the Lemurians' giant seagoing "homes" into the mix, and you've got a blend of Horatio Hornblower, Battlestar Galactica, and Midway.
I'm giving this book 5 stars because it was exciting all the way through, and I was worried about the heroes at every step of the way - when the Amagi shows up, you really feel the "Oh, shit" moment as Captain Reddy realizes how badly they are screwed. This book improved the last by adding depth to Lemurian culture (including more, ah, relations between humans and Lemurians - some good, some very much not), and even a little bit to the Grik, although so far they're still pretty much just a mindless horde of barely sentient monsters led by evil overlords.
It's not literary, it's just the modern version of a pulp adventure, but damn, I like it, even if I am looking at the length of the series (9 books and counting now?) and reviews of later books in the series that seem to indicate that the author is no hurry to wrap it up....more
This short story, set after Correia's Grimnoir trilogy, was an Audible freebie, and will be quite enjoyable to anyone who enjoyed the previous GrimnoiThis short story, set after Correia's Grimnoir trilogy, was an Audible freebie, and will be quite enjoyable to anyone who enjoyed the previous Grimnoir books. Jake Sullivan is back, and by fairly arbitrary plot manipulation, he's hanging around in Casablanca doing a bad Bogie impersonation when his old "friend" Dr. Wells, the sociopathic mastermind who's now running China's organized crime syndicates, asks if Sullivan wouldn't mind hopping a ride on his expensive new zeppelin full of international high-rollers and figuring out who's brought a bomb on board before it blows up.
Sullivan agrees, with the sort of reasoning that makes sense when the GM is telling you, "Look, if you say no, we're just gonna have to play Munchkin or something tonight instead." Thus semi-railroaded into the plot, the Player Character proceeds to sniff out the villains, of whom there are plenty to choose from, since Wells's zeppelin is carrying Imperium agents, NKVD spies, a mysterious German working for a more mysterious organization which is apparently being set up as a future nemesis for the Grimnoir Society, and various other rich, powerful scoundrels.
Correia enjoys inserting historical figures into his alternate history: here, Lavrenti Beria (one of the original Soviet secret police chiefs) makes an appearance. The story is short but of course ends with a super-powered battle and hints of future conflict with the real Big Bad (or rather, the minion of the real Big Bad) getting away. Nice to see that the Grimnoir series will continue....more
A collection of tales of "beauty and strangeness." You can find brief summaries and ratings for each story below, but because that filled up Å·±¦ÓéÀÖA collection of tales of "beauty and strangeness." You can find brief summaries and ratings for each story below, but because that filled up Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ' word limit for reviews, go to my first comment for a final verdict on the anthology as a whole.
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The Gospel of Nachash, by Marie Brennan (4 stars)
What Brennan does most successfully here is pull off a work of Biblical fan fiction that actually sounds Biblical. Written like an apocryphal version of the Garden of Eden story, The Gospel of Nachash rarely betrays any "tells" of its origins as modern fiction. At times it does remind one of the World of Darkness, and I was really worried that the punchline would be vampires!, but that's not quite where it goes, though I can't say I was too far off.
In the beginning God made the world, and on the sixth day he made creatures in his image. Male and female he created them, and they were the bekhorim, to whom God gave dominion over every herb bearing seed, and every tree bearing fruit, to be in their care. Mankind he formed from dust, but the bekhorim were made from air, and their spirits were more subtle than that of man.
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Tomorrow is Saint Valentine's Day, by Tori Truslow (2.5 stars)
Although full of imaginative flights of fancy, this story of a parallel world in which mermaids live on the moon (Shakespeare's "moist star") seemed overly laden with excerpts from fictional newspapers and scholarly journals, leaving not much of a story underneath.
After the lecture tour and all the controversy that bubbled in its wake, it was suggested to Wynn by his colleagues that he leave England for a time. Not surprisingly, he embraced this advice and made preparations to visit the Tychonic Institute in Denmark. Before he could leave, however, came the announcement that was to open a new door for him, one that would lead to so many captivating insights and the promise of lasting good relations between humans and merfolk. Had he lived longer, history might have followed a very different course. But whatever did happen to Elijah Willemot Wynn? Previous biographers have latched onto wild conspiracies, but in the light of cutting-edge new research, the facts speak for themselves. We are now entering a darker chapter in his life: the academic alienation and the increasingly bizarre theories leading up to his disappearance—but alongside that, the unorthodox personal life, and at the start of it all, New Year’s Day, 1880.
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Crow Voodoo, by Georgina Bruce (3 stars)
This is one of those stories where the author tried very hard to craft her words just so, producing an artisinal effort that one can admire for its beauty and polish and yet, as in the previous tale, fail to find all that much substance underneath. Crow Voodoo is essentially a changeling tale, with a woman who makes a bargain with a crow and pays a price. It has a nice urban-yet-traditional fairy tale feel to it, but the emotional impact was, to me, blunted by the self-conscious prosiness - an experience I have sometimes had with Cathrynne Valente and her lesser imitators.
Mortimer Citytatters is a midnight crow and a sinister spiv, but he knows what people want in wartime is a story. So he tells them: spine-chillers, bone-warmers, knee-tremblers, colly-wobblers, stories that drill your teeth, that perform open-heart surgery, stories that make the blind walk and the lame speak. It’s a good all-weather business, combined with a spot of common or garden begging, that makes ends meet.
No one should trust Mortimer Citytatters, but Jenny is paying him to write letters to her sweetheart in the war. The crow writes scathing love letters, without a lick of sympathy in them.
Dear Robin, he writes in scratchy midnight ink, Now that the nights have turned longer, I barely think of you.
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Your Name is Eve, by Michael M. Jones (3 stars)
Clancy and Eve meet every night in the dreams of other people, dancing, dining, and enjoying the scenery that is generated by sleeping minds, leaving something as a gift for the dreamers whose dreamscapes they borrow. There is little background explaining how these two came to meet, and the development of their relationship is narrated, the actions of Clancy, who turns out to be the central protagonist, is described entirely in exposition; there is no dialog. This read as if we're simply being told what happened, and although I sense it was meant to capture the feel of a fairy tale, I found it too remote. The descriptions of dreamscapes were nice, but overall it felt very derivate of Neil Gaiman's Sandman.
When Eve vanished into the mists, Clancy remained behind, surrounded by the evaporating wisps of the dream, hands buried in his pockets. For several long moments, he stood still, lost in thought, and then he too faded. In the waking world, their host startled awake, and it took several minutes before the pangs of nostalgia and lost youth faded. Her memories of youth, normally hazy and fuddled, were crystal clear for the first time in years. This was Clancy’s gift to her for time well spent.
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Hell Friend, by Gemma Files (4 stars)
A Chinese ghost story with a touch of Twilight � in a self-aware, ironic way. Jin-Li Song is a thirteen-year-old girl, half Korean and half Chinese. Her grandmother does not at all approve of her son's Korean wife, causing family tension and some identity issues for young Jin-Li. So of course she's ripe for seduction by a magical boyfriend living in a paper house who makes her feel like the most special girl in the world...
They want me dead, like them, Jin thought, horrified. Then looked Mingshi straight in the eyes, equally appalled by what she’d finally caught looking back at her, and blurted, out loud�
�You want me dead, too. Don’t you?�
Mingshi shook his head. “No, never. I love you, flower.�
“But…you’re not even real. You’re…�
(His perfect teeth shifting askew in that kissable mouth, even as she watched; perfect hair already fire-touched, sending up sparks. His face, far too gorgeous to be true, a mere compilation of every Clearasil ad, every music video, every doll Jin’d ever owned, or coveted.)
“…made of paper.�
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Braiding the Ghosts, by C.S.E. Cooney (5 stars)
This was the first story in this collection that seemed both truly original and more than an exercise in weird fiction, yet still grounded in recognizable legends. It's about a girl named Nin whose mother died, leaving her in the care of her terrifying grandmother, Reshka. Reshka binds and enslaves ghosts to do her bidding, and she has little use for the living.
Reshka is not a nice woman. Nin's apprenticeship under her grandmother is cold and unloving. When she realizes that she is not willing to follow her grandmother's path, though, she proves that she's very much of the same blood.
Nin played the lure perfectly. But it was very, very hard.
Reshka never told her that it would hurt. Or of the horrors.
Her lips burned. Her tongue burst into blisters, which burst into vile juices that ran down her throat. The sky ripped open and a bleak wind dove down from the stars, beating black wings and shrieking. Reshka never said how a greater darkness would fall over the night like a hand smothering heaven, how every note she played would cost her a heartbeat, how the earth shuddered away from her naked, dancing feet as though it could not bear her touch.
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Surrogates, by Cat Rambo (3 stars)
A vaguely cyberpunkish story about a future in which everyone lives in a Building (some sort of arcology, I gather), has an android surrogate to handle menial chores like housework and fucking, and the main character has an Insanity Chip installed which makes the world surrealistic and bizarre to her senses, but which causes friction in her new marriage. While the ideas and imagery were creative, I didn't find myself that interested in the characters or this tale of sci-fi domestic disharmony.
Floor 13: Government Offices
They were married on a Monday in the Matrimony office. A poster on the wall said, “Welcome to your new life!� Belinda signed the forms in her careful penmanship, but Bingo simply spit-signed, letting his DNA testify to his presence. There were three rooms processing couples and triads—larger family structure required even more complicated licenses than the one they had secured. This room was painted blue, and one wall was an enormous fish tank.
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Lucyna's Gaze, by Gregory Frost (3 stars)
This was really a war story with some thin sci-fi trimmings. The narrator, who runs guns and other contraband in an unnamed country dealing with some sort of internal warfare, falls in love with a village woman named Lucyna. Then they are all rounded up by government troops and put in concentration camps. Things go about the way these things do, and while the story is narrated with suitably horrific attention to detail and the behavior of prisoners and guards, it's really not particularly fantastical until the end.
Another woman saw me standing there, unable to make myself approach but unable to back away, and she came up. “Do you know her?� she asked me. I told her that I did, that I knew her from the bakery in her village. The woman asked my name and I gave it. She walked up to Lucyna and said that I was here to see her. The fog seemed to clear a bit from her eyes then. She looked my way but there was little recognition. Maybe none at all. It might have been nothing but my hope of recognition. And so I stepped forward and said, “I wished to buy a loaf of bread from you.� Her eyes welled with tears then, and her chin quivered, and she threw her arms around me. I held her. For minutes, hours, it could have been forever. We all stank like rotting meat, even though we had been allowed showers earlier, but not our clothes of course. I reveled in her closeness, my face to her neck, seeking the smell of her underneath that stink. She cried and cried. She muttered names—again and again she said, “Janek.� She never said mine, not knowing it, nor asked it of me. She started to kiss me, kissed my mouth, my face, all the while saying, “Janek, my darling, my love, Janek.� While she clung to me, the other woman said, “He was executed that day—you remember that escape attempt. Did you know him?�
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Eyes of Carven Emerald, by Shweta Narayan (4.5 stars)
This was a finely spun tale-within-a-tale of an alternate history in which Alexander the Great conquers even more of the world than he did in ours, and humans share the world with clockwork automatons. Despite his invincibility, he finds a foil in a mysterious clockwork bird.
Alexandros� eyes narrowed with the first glimmerings of interest. What might this mechanism be, if not Persian? Surely not Northern barbarian work; it was too fine, though it wore around its neck a ring of shining gold, as they did. It looked old, but shifted without noise or stiffness. And it spoke Greek like a Persian; badly, but with meaning beneath the words.
And that last mystery implied a challenge worth taking. Alexandros said, “To whom do you belong? A king who is long dead, it would seem, or else one who neglects you.�
The bird rustled its feathers. “The last king who tried to own me died of slow poison while his city burned.�
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Dragons of America, by S. J. Hirons (4 stars)
Another interesting fantasy story mixing magic and technology and alternate history. An alchemy student named Anselm Einarsson lives in the city of Arrowstorm, and dreams of getting past the American soldiers to see the dragon breeding grounds. The worldbuilding is all by inference, doled out a bit here and there with few explanations - where is Arrowstorm? How did the Americans come to guard the entrances and exits from the city? What is the role of the dragons? Interesting, and the story moves along, though it never quite becomes entirely coherent as a setting.
All through winter and spring the dragons of America had flown in Anselm Einarsson’s dreams. When summer finally came, and the first flight of them passed over the city heading for the eastern desert, he was so used to the idea of them that he almost slept through the crossing of that flock, mistaking the sound for low thunder. But they brought with them the odours of the semi-mythical land they came from: hamburgers, hot dogs, buttered popcorn, and beer. Green as dollar bills they would be and just as crinkly. So big they blocked out stars. Swift enough to turn on a dime, and change direction fleetly with the winds.
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Where Shadows Go at Low Midnight, by John Grant (3 stars)
This is one of those stories with a "twist" where you figure out by the end (though enough clues are dropped during the story) that things are not quite as they appear. A couple taking a moonlight stroll discusses the nature of sunlight and moonlight, with references to a lost civilization of "Ghosts" that preceded them.
“It’s strange the Ghosts should have organized the days so well and the nights so very poorly,� she sighed as she rose again to her hind legs.
I shook my head, grinning, and looked at her. Her eyes were red from my brand’s glow as she gazed back. She was grinning, too.
“What I mean,� she said as we began to jog across more level ground, “is that the Ghosts created daylight so we could move around safely during the day. Why didn’t they create nightlight so we could do the same at night?�
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Lineage, by Kenneth Schneyer (3 stars)
Framed by the meta-story of a future researcher finding evidence of an improbable historical figure who seems to have appeared in many different times and places, this is a series of vignettes in which some supernatural force intervenes in times of crisis and despair.
Instantiation, substantiation, manifestation, possession? I am no one, if more than nothing; years pass, but not for me. Then I feel, like an embrace, the fear and devotion—the lifeboat overflows, the enemy surprises the patrol, the burning wall begins to collapse, the asteroid approaches the shuttle, the dike bursts.
And I walk the earth again.
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Murder in Metachronopolis, by John C. Wright (5 stars)
It takes a really good writer to put a new spin on time travel. Wright's tale uses a lot of familiar tropes, and his protagonist, a noir detective brought to the city of Metachronopolis by its autocratic, egomaniac Time Masters, hangs a lampshade on quite a few of them. Drafted into solving a murder in a city ruled by time travelers, you can expect paradoxes, loops, and twists galore, and this story has them, yet ultimately it wraps up in a coherent fashion. Especially impressive is the non-linear storytelling, which manages not to be confusing despite the out-of-sequence narrating of events.
“I don’t take cases from Time Masters, see? All you guys are the same. The murderer turns out to be yourself, or you when you were younger. Or me. Or an alternate version of me or you who turns out to be his own father fighting himself because for no reason except that that’s the way it was when the whole thing started. Which it never did, on account of there’s no beginning and no reason for any of it. Oh, brother, you time travelers make me sick.�
He drew himself up, all smiles gone now, all pretense at seeming human. My guess was that that was not even his real body, just some poor sap he murdered to have his personality jacked into the guy’s brain. Perfect disguise. No fingerprints, retina prints, no nothing. Just another flatliner dead for the convenience of the Masters of Eternity.
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To Seek Her Fortune, by Nicole Kornher-Stace (2.5 stars)
Honestly, steampunk does very little for me, and this was a beautifully written steampunk story that did very little for me. We've got your somewhat cliched "strong female character" Lady Explorer who managed to claw her way up to command of an airship, and she's on what seems to be an endless quest around the world to visit every psychic, fortune-teller, medium, and tea-leaf reader to hear each one's version of how she'll die. I found the prose to be working a little too hard, and the mommylove moral almost got it knocked down another full star. Nice writing, but would not read the novel.
In the land of black salt and white honey, the Lady Explorer bartered a polar bear’s pelt, a hand-cranked dynamo, her second-best derringer, and three bolts of peach silk for her death.
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Fold, by Tanith Lee (2 stars)
I know a lot of people love, love, love Tanith Lee. I must confess I've only read one or two of her books, so long ago I barely remember them. She writes gorgeous prose (a common theme in this anthology), but this story about a man who lives in a high apartment complex and writes mysterious love letters to the men and women who pass within his view down at ground level was... not really a story, more like an exercise in poetic imagery. Yes, there is an ending, when he finally leaves his apartment, but that too seemed a nonsensical straining effort at metaphor. Maybe I was just in a grumpy mood reading these last two stories, but word-bling, in the end, sometimes feels like an author's attempt to distract us with shiny objects.
Jintha wrote letters from a tower. They were letters of love.
The tower itself was quite high, probably of thirty storeys, but Jintha had long forgotten. He himself resided on the fifteenth floor. He had forgotten this too.
Beyond his apartment there were always various sounds in the tower, which had made him fantasize that he lived in a sort of golden clock, inside the mechanism of it. All who lived there, accordingly, would have their own particular functions, Jintha’s being, (obviously) to write love letters. This kept the clock accurate, made it work. Sometimes the clock struck. That was the silvery clash of the elevator doors. While the smooth ascending or descending purr of the murmurous elevator was like the movement of an intermittent pendulum. Birds often alighted on the broad sills of windows, or the elegant gargoyles which adorned the building. The clicking of their claws or whirr of their wings provided the clock’s ticking—now loud, now soft, now stilled—and now restarted.
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