Legends and Latte's - Travis Baldree

You know what, I'm late to the party on this one. People have been talking up Legends and Lattes for years, and I finally picked it up on sale the other day. And you know what, it's really very good. I'm hesitant to use the word "cozy", but I will say it has a delicious blend of gentle relationship building, action which if not epic in scale is extremely personally important, and  an overall, well, vibe of something comfortable. You're watching someone start fresh, build a new life, a new person, if you like, and deal with the consequences of that choice - and those don't always go the way you'd expect. 

Part of the reason for that is the person. Viv is a killer. Well, was a killer, an ex-mercenary adventurer who got up enough of a nest-egg to retire and do something else with her day. But instead of taverns or more hitting people with sticks, she's decided to do something different, and build a coffee shop. In a town which hasn't heard of coffee. Did I mention she's an orc, a species which make great adventurers due to being enormous and having muscles you could break rocks on, but who are perhaps underrepresented in the coffee sector?

Viv is, in fact, a charming protagonist. She defies our own expectations, as well as those from people around her. Always careful, thoughtful, industrious, Viv is less interested in combatting stereotypes than in reforming herself away from her past. If she has a penchant for wanting to hit someone over the head with a sword hilt when they're being annoying, she rarely ever does. And her interactions with the system around her are similar - when organised crime shows up for a bit of protection money, being seven feet tall with a huge sword is a good opener, but Viv recognises that cutting them all into teeny tiny chunks might not be the best fit for her journey of self-actualisation, so decides to do...something else. Anyway, she's smart and funny and seems thoroughly oblivious to a lot of personal emotional interactions - there's a romantic sub-plot in here that had me covering my head with a pillow at one point. Less "will they won't they" and more "Are they ever going to admit to each other...?" That particular plot point, by the by, is a work of art. Watching two adults figure out that they like each other and what to do about it like adults is (annoyingly) refreshing.

Speaking of which, something Baldree does well is build networks. Viv meets a lot of people, and at least some of them become customers, become friends, become people she'd put her life on the line for. And from that, we can see these friends as people, as something more than single-faceted voices. They're fully realised characters. My only complaint is perhaps that the antagonists are less well rounded, but you know what, sometimes you just have that one guy who's an arsehole and needs a comeuppance. 

This is, really, a fun book. It's telling a clever story that, if it doesn't twist at every turn, definitely has the capacity to surprise. It's telling a story with personal stakes and making them matter. It's a story about someone leaving their life behind and building themselves something better, building themselves into something more like the person they want to be. And it does that with warmth and love and humour that makes it deeply endearing as well as thoroughly entertaining.

Back next week!

 As we inch ever closer to the end of the year, it's been a longer one than usual, for various reasons. With that in mind, we'll be back next week.

Red Sonja: Consumed - Gail Simone

So, full disclosure. I know Red Sonja is a famous comic book character. And I know Gail Simone is a comics author with a strong reputation, and as someone with a highly entertaining Twitter feed. And I know she did some work on some recent Red Sonja comics. But that's all I knew going into this novel, and my expectations were, well, ambivalent. That out of the way...I was wrong. Red Sonja: Consumed is an adventure. It has blood and honour laced all the way through it, sure enough. And Sonja, as a protagonist, is largely focused on herself and her own needs, but she's also brutally honest about it. And its hard to judge her too harshly whilst she's carving up menaces in an arena, or getting into a fist-fight with a bear, or having the occasional unfortunate interaction with the forces of the nearest state. Sonja is who she is, a force of nature, a weapon, a killer. And sitting on her shoulder while she kicks arse and takes names is, in several senses, a bloody good time.

But also. Ah, but also, you see. Red Sonja isn't just a killer, a barbarian, a thief. I mean, yes, she is all of those things. And Simone manages to give her energy and fun with those things whilst not flinching away from what they mean. But Sonja is not just those things. She's a barbarian traumatised by a childhood that took a left turn into the horrifyingly unpleasant. A killer who still stands tall in matters of honour. A thief who has a near-spiritual relationship with her horse. There's more here than just a lone sword searching for profit and the next beer (and the next man). There's a depth and a history and a passion in here that make Sonja ring true, make her seem real. And at the same time, there's a flavour of the classic Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser about her - unapologetically fighting and screwing and drinking her way through today, and dealing with the problems that causes, tomorrow. Same as it ever was when Fafhrd and Conan did it, and more than equally entertaining. Sonja isn't a shy and retiring barbarian, contenting herself with daintily presenting her enemies with some mildly harsh language. This is a woman on the prowl, not afraid to get physical, and not afraid to make an end. She's a creature of passions, both sexual and violently visceral, and those do come up quite a lot in the text - but this is a story with the energy thrown all the way up to eleven, and the over-the-top nature of it all just makes it more fun.

So that's Sonja. And she really is great fun to read. I will say, that whilst I got a flavour of some of the world she travelled in, a little of its politics and history and old stories, enough to give it some context and flavour. I was left wanting more. Some of that we get from a diverse smattering of points of view through the text, dipping into, amongst others, some of her varied antagonists. We get a sense of where the spirit of things is, if not the exact geography. This is a story that is concerned with the story, with the highs and lows and emotions that the characters go through. Its a book of flash and glamour over pain and raw emotion, and if it doesn't delve lovingly into the mechanics of its magic systems, it knows that you can absolutely slow down a wizard by putting a knife between his shoulderblades. This is a story that isn't afraid to give you a protagonist who has no chill and no filter, but who has a vulnerability and a complexity that we can live with alongside the fiery sword, the monster slayer, the troubled lover, the lost daughter.

Ah hell, at the end of the day, this one is just a whole lot of fun. It draws from the sword and sorcery tradition, but puts a unique spin and flavour on it, with the protagonist being as unapologetically self-centred and as skilfully violent as those folks ever were, but also not being afraid to show us humanity and character, rather than caricature. This is a viscerally (and potentially viscera-lly, sorry) entertaining read, and I look forward to seeing more from Red Sonja in the future.

Martians Abroad - Carrie Vaughn

Carrie Vaughn is a new one for me, but not, I gather, for a lot of people/. She put out the Kitty Norville series, about a werewolf who hosts a radio advice talk show, which I have to admit was a fun sentence to type out. Vaughn, in other words, has form. So I took a chance on her foray into science fiction, Martians Abroad, and it's...well, it's fun, I'll say that.

Polly Newton and her brother, Charles, are the titular Martians. They're being packed off to an elite boarding school on earth, so that they can glad-hand with politicians children and influential industrialists grandsons, and generally get themselves prepared for a life of visibility and influence themselves. Their mother is, after all, part of the social elite on Mars.  Unfortunately for Polly and Charles, the Martians are rather more egalitarian than those Earthside - they don't see themselves as special -and the folks down on Earth thing that the Martians and the rest of the riff-raff from off-planet are about half a step up the evolutionary ladder from Smallpox, and about as welcome an addition to the school campus.

We ride along in Polly's head, and she's...I want to say likeable, but relatable is probably something more like it. Her story plays out in a conversationalist style, from one viewpoint. But she's definitely a teenager being taken from everything she knows and everything she wants, and being dumped into a deep pool  without much warning. Cue culture shock, whinging, complaints ad nauseam (justified and otherwise). It can be a little exhausting, looked at from the outside. But Polly is also smart and funny and sometimes brave. If she isn't super-special per se, she's competent and willing to make decisions, commit to them and then ride out the consequences. If I occasionally wanted to roll my eyes at the theatricality of her antics, I also went along for the ride happily enough when she pushed back on prejudice, and on the need to be better expressed through owning things. Polly has an honesty to her that makers her work as a protagonist, a willingness to just be herself which probably sits well with the intended audience (it is a YA book after all). 

Having said that, Vaughn expertly draws a world that's living in a post-climate-crisis interplanetary era. We still have the same elites and the same prejudices, with different targets, different names, different faces. But there's a sense of the world having opened up just a little, onto the wider stage. The school and its routine and occasional casual brutality seem very well realised, as does Polly's sense of isolation from her classmates, her and the others from off-earth, as they try to work with different dietary and gravitational needs, with not much by way of accommodations. There's also some points trekking around on Earth that feel melancholic, feel genuine, and those were a pleasure; there was a particular piece in a museum that stuck with me thereafter.

Sadly for Polly, and Charles, and, well, everyone else, something odd is going on at their new school for the terminally rich and posh. Accidents are happening a little too often. Things are going a bit wrong. Issues are escalating. And nobody is really talking about why. This mystery threads its way through the book, and if the denouement wasn't entirely satisfying, it did deliver in terms of tension and catharsis. The story itself is paced well up to that point, slowly giving us more and more of an insight into what's going on and why, the who the what the why the where and the how. That said, the close feels a little abrupt, and like there's more to come, more to be said - perhaps in a sequel. 

Overall, this is a fun short read, and one I rather enjoyed; I hope you do the same!

Away this week!

 We're away this week, we'll be back next week!

Overcaptain - L.E. Modesitt Jr.

So, here's the thing. L.E. Modesitt has written, at this point, twenty-four books set in his world of Recluce. Twenty-five if you include the short story collection I reviewed a couple of years ago. It's a sprawling universe that covers a sweeping amount of geography, but also a vast amount of time. Different stories have happened earlier or later in the history of Recluce, and we can see yesterdays's heroes reflected as villains in the past of today's protagonist. Or, in the case of Overcaptain, the latest story, the reverse. Because the protagonist of this story, Aliyakal, is as early in Recluce's history as we've ever gone, all the way back to near the founding of Cyador, who have largely been antagonists in other books. Seeing the beginnings of an Empire that we've often seen as enemies, seeing the way the systems that maintain it are constructed and maintained out of necessity and by good people trying to do the right thing, we can get a different perspective on a system that we've also seen very determined to incinerate a few of our protagonists "later" in the timeline. 

Cyador, you see, is something a little different. At first glance, it's a fantasy empire. Everyone's riding around on horses, with swords. Everyone is very interested in politics, and Emperors. There's a whole caste system between soldiers, traders, and people who can do magic. But, but they also have hints and asides and historical notes that say they used to be something else. They're an Empire founded by "The First". They have "firelances", which spit raw chaos energy at the aforementioned barbarians. They have "firewagons" and "fireships" which sound suspiciously modern, not quite battleships and APC's, but certainly with enough heft in them to flatten ports, and make fighting with the Cyadorans an unpleasant prospect. They have a history that says, in fragments, that they come from elsewhere. They have "chaos towers" that contain the enormous forest that used to be where their Empire now sits. And they have, increasingly, no idea how any of it works. Cyador is an empire built on technology that is slowly failing, while those in charge try to keep everything together under tremendous pressure - both internal and external. Because all sorts if people want what they have (running water, regular meals), or are more than happy to rule an Empire from behind the throne for personal gain, regardless of what's best for everyone else - because, after all, when you're a mage, and you can turn someone into dust with a word, why would you take crap from any of those little people? I've always enjoyed Cyador, a place which seems to have become increasingly sclerotic and unpleasant as it ages, and its fantastic to delve into the near origins of the place here. Looking at it through Aliyakal's eyes, we're inside of a system which seems to promise a better world for, if not everyone, at least everyone inside the system, but he's not blind to its flaws, to the abuses that are hobbling progress, the way that the military, the magi and the merchanters are always at odds, and what happens when they're not. Anyway. It's a fun place, a civilisation coming off the back of some science-fiction beginnigs, trying to build something self-sustaining. Interestingly, Modesitt does this again later with Fallen Angels, when survivors of the other side of a war in which Cyadors forebears were involved find themselves stranded on Relcuce, watching their tech also slowly fail. Its a solid beginning, and here it gives a flavour and a texture to the world,makes it a little different to your standard fantasy setting. 

As an aside, I maintain that both sides in the conflict that drove Cyador's ancestors and their eventual antagonists to Recluce is the one from Modesitt's sci-fi standalone The Parafaith War, and one day I'd love to know if that's true. 

Aliyakal is, well, this is going to sound weird, he's a Modesitt Recluce protagonist. He's smart, and also thoughtful. Having a military background makes him stand out a bit, but he fits into the mould of a lot of the others - someone who is practiced and focused on his craft, even where that craft is helping defend an empire by occasionally fighting a lot of people. He also has (ooooh) some magical power, which as a military officer, he has decided not to mention to anyone, just in case they decide he's a threat, and incinerate him. Probably a wise move, under the circumstances, because he does have a penchant for annoying important people. In fairness, that's due mostly to his actually being competent at his job, fighting off border incursions and encroachments from other local powers with minimal casualties. He's a smart person, trying to build a career and a relationship in a space where having a relationship is tantamount to stalling out your career. There's a conflict there, between two parts of his world, which we have yet to see play out - perhaps in the upcoming sequel - but the tensions are woven through his interactions, and add a nice complexity, even while we enjoy his emotionally uncomplicated burgeoning love for a long-time correspondent, and his no-nonsense approach to holding together military outposts in various degrees of collapse. Aliyakal is a decent person, and it's fun to ride around in his head for a while - and where the book allows, he's able to see the complexities of his own world, both in the strangeness of some of the things he's ordered to do, and in the web of politics clearly happening offscreen that's making his life difficult. Like all Modesitt's protagonists in Recluce though, he's a decent guy, trying his best - and if the story beats and characterisation are in a way familiar, they're also as comforting as a warm bath, and there's enough strangeness in here to make you sit up occasionally and go "Wait, what now?"

I won't spoil the story, as usual. But Aliyakal gets to visit a whole new and exciting section of the Empire of Cyador, where even more people try to get him killed than they did in From the Forest. You'll get some sharply observed, incisive military action here, and a lot of discussion of patrols, logistics, and how and why things should be done the way they are. But there's also wonder, in magic, yes, but also in the relationships Aliyakal is building, and fear and politics out there in the background, and an exploration of love and duty and honour. It is, in short, a Modesitt book, and a fine addition to the Recluce corpus. I look forward to seeing where Aliyakal goes next!

Citadel - Marko Kloos

Marko Kloos has been turning out military sci-fi for years at this point, I've been reviewing them for about as long, and I have to admit, his stuff is always a pleasure to read. It's reliable in that it always gives me characters I can empathise with, interesting worlds to delve into, and some adrenaline-shot action, usually when I'm least expecting it. His Palladium Wars series continues this trend, and has been a lovely comfort read until now. I saw the third book on sale recently, and snapped it up. So, does Citadel deliver? Basically, yes.

The book largely takes place on Gretia, a world under occupation by the remaining planetary powers in its system. Unusually, it's under occupation because it started a war, and then had the poor grace to lose it. The occupiers are struggling to contain a civilian population that doesn't want them there, and to rebuild a shattered economy without enabling the every people they fought a war against, and the Gretians want to get out from under the occupiers, and ideally never talk about that war business ever again. They're definitely not happy to have their administrative centres under military occupation, or to see armoured troops marching around like they own the place. Even if they, you know, do. And into that volatile mix have come a group of rebels, of schemers, who refuse to let the last war die, who refuse to accept that Gretia has changed its place in the universe, who are so embedded in the past that they refuse to look past it. And those people are out on Gretia, blowing up buildings and orchestrating massacres - to destabilise both the surviving power structures, and try to drive occupying forces off their world. They are very much not good people, with a penchant for civilian casualties, but they're probably familiar. This is Gretia, ruled by corporate cliques and aristocracies, trying very hard not to live with guilt, or think about it too much. Well, some of them. And this is the other powers, so sure in their virtue that they live in arrogance and pride, not reaching out to help those they can to build a better world, because of their own trauma and memory. 

If that sounds complicated and like it's going to get bloody, well...yes. The last book ended with the antagonists deploying an orbital nuke on one of the other planets, with predictable crackdown results. And so, here we are. This is a world, a system in turmoil But it makes sense. It has the seething layers of politics and personal advancement that make it real, and it has the shining stars of duty and integrity that make it true. We're spread across familiar viewpoints, including one of the occupying troops, the heir to one of the corporate Gretian dynasties, a navy captain for one of the other powers, taking a new ship on a shakedown cruise. And then there's the lost boy, a man who spent too long in the uniform of Gretian intelligence, did some things he regrets, and is now living as quietly as he can on a space freighter, trying not to let his past (and his corporate family) overwhelm his future

They're a fantastically diverse range of people, and it's to Kloos' credit that they don't all sound the same. That the corporate knives in the dark in the Gretian glass towers are as different and as sharp as the high powered recoilless rounds pouring down on our trooper and her squad. They're all people, trying to make the best of things and do the right thing. While Kloos manages to avoid the traps I find a lot of the genre falls into (the government, it turns out, are not entirely incompetent buffoons, and we aren't all better off having some aristocrats running things, and so on), he does tend to reify duty, honour and service. That's fine actually, in context, and I appreciate it here, letting us know who our heroes are. They're unapologetically decent people, which is nice. 

And they're decent people having a rough time. The action isn't unrelenting, but when it happens, it's always a shock. And that shock is often dark and bloody and kinetically charged. You can feel the tension build and seep into things, a moment of quiet turned into a bloody streetfight in a word or two. It's snappy, its gritty, and the moments between the action serve to give it room to breathe and make the meaning that keeps it embedded in the real. 

In other words, this is good stuff, and if you're looking for a quick, compelling read, this is one for you.