Minimum Wage Magic - Rachel Aaron

Minimum Wage Magic is, basically, a good time. It has mages (as you might expect) and monsters, and an interesting setting. It has a feisty heroine who isn't afraid to get into a scrap when she needs to, and a soupcon of romance simmering away in the background. It's a fast, entertaining read which hits a lot of beats and manages to keep them compelling in a relatively small package. I tore through it in a day or two, and had fun the entire time - its a snappy, entertaining read.

Ok, so that's the tl;dr, but, you know, what is it? Well, for one thing, it's Opal's story. Opal is a magical Cleaner. She buys the right to clean out the apartments of those behind on their rent in the rather law-optional Detroit Free Zone (more on that later). Sometimes those apartments are full of valuable magical artifacts and interesting knick-knacks. Sometimes they're full of rats and interesting (in a different way) magical traps. After a run of bad luck, Opal owes someone a rather large amount of money, and she needs it sooner rather than later. Yesterday, for preference. And Opal is a protagonist whose shoulder it's fun to sit on. She's smart, thoughtful, and has a mortal grounding at odds with her externally cynical demeanour. There's a suggestion of long-runnung Issues in the background - having gone to a prestigious school for mages, she's somehow at the bottom of the social and business ladder. And who she owes that money to and why it's so worrying is another question. But Opal also has energy, and a willingness to keep moving, to pick up the ball and run with it in an unexpected direction. Sometimes thgat's to her detriment, as she's pushing toward running on empty, but the flaws she has, the grudges and old pain she bears are part of what makes her feel like a fully-realised person, and one it would probably be fun (albeit dangerous) toi hang out with. A woman determined to make herself an island of splendid isolation, she cares about her friends too much to make it stick - and is charming, awkward, funny, and also willing to kick her enemies in the pants from time to time. 

After all, she does live in the DFFZ. The Detroit Free Zone, run by a colossal spirit which cares more about the wildlife of what was once Detroit, rather than its human and other magical inhabitants, is an area where laws are optional. Where police arrive on a contract basis only, and where everything is open to negotiation.  It's a seething cauldron of magical creatures, at least some of which are inimicable to people in general, and some of whom seem to dislike Opal in particular. There's spirits wending through the open-market organ trade, and worse than dragons stalking the back-alley cyber-parlors. The DFZ is a place where anyone can become anything they want, if they're skilled enough and ruthless enough and willing ti fight every inch of the way for it. It feels like Casablanca but without the moral compass, a place where anything is possible, but also, unfortunately, anything is possible. For all that though, it has the grime and shine of a real city, the power structures and complexities that make a place feel lived in, feel alive.

And the story...well, I shan't spoil it. But it kicks off very quickly, and then never really slows down. Opal moves from crisis to crisis, just trying to put food on the table, make her monthly payments and survive the results of the last crisis. And in doing so she gets involved in avoiding assassins as well as accountants and competitors, A non-zero amount of her time is spent investigating what she needs to find, and then trying to escape the attentions of the many interested parties that want to get hold of it themselves. On the plus side, as a mage, she has a more thnan human cap[acity to keep herself alive, and from time to time blow other stuff up.

Minimum Wage Magic is an exciting blend of near-future science fantasy, one which kept me turning the pages with engaging characterisation, a carefully detailed, well-travelled world, and a story that never let up. Give it a try! 

Honor for the Dead - Connor Ludovissy

Honor for the Dead is a thoughtful, character-driven and above all entertaining piece of what we're now calling "flintlock fantasy", Flintlock fantasy, if you're unfamiliar, intersects fantasy worlds with the technical and social aura of the 19th century - blackpowder muskets and smoothbore pistols sitting alongside monsters and dark magic. It's a bit of a niche of its own inside the genre, and another entrant in the field is always welcome. 

It helps that Honor for the Dead is rather good. 

The story focuses on Ao, a villager-turned-infantryman for a nation which seems to be sitting on the edge of the war with its neighbour, the auspiciously named "Kings". Quite who started the war, and what they#re getting out of it, is unclear, at least as the story begins. But Ao is quick to discover that war isn't as much heroic last stands, glory and victory parades as it is blood, and mud, and dead friends. The text is unflinching in showing the costs of conflict, though it also makes time to show us the courage and tenacity of the soldiers as well. 

Ao is a compassionate, empathetric individual, with a fairly well developed sense of right and wrong. He's also a member of an ethnic minority that is at best tolerated, and at worst violently discriminated against. His struggle to shape who he is to fit social expectations while also still being himself is fascinating to read, especially as he's still trying to decide who he is, even while working out what the military expects of him. Ao just wants to do his best, doesn't want to be defined by what his family have done, or what his people have done, wants to step out and be a hero.  It soudns simple, but as we turn the pages, Ao discovers that all of these things are more complex than they appear on the surface. If his family have a history of desertion, was it justified? If his people are discriminated against, is it worth asking why, and how much is he willing to tolerate it? If there's a war, what started it, who benefits, and how does it end? If Ao isn't just a simple farm boy, then who is he? As a protagonist, Ao is a lot of fun to spend time with, and if his moral wrestling sometimes drags a little, he makes up for it with resilience and a genuine desire to do good. Whether that's going to work out, on the other hand, is anyone's guess.

In his defence, Ao is surrounded by people who are somewhere between moral ambivalence and outright psychosis. Fellow new soldiers get the shine knocked off of them very quickly, and his officers are either pragmatic killers, or individuals sufficiently out of their depth that their capacity for doing terrible things is far greater than the constraints set out to stop them. There's some question of who the antagonist is for this story - the enemy army, which wants to kill everyone, or members of Ao's own unit, who do a wonderful line in delicious malevolence with a side of brutality. Interestingly, the latter get their own viewpoint sections, and they're as unpleasantly compelling as you might expect. 

Ao (and his many, many enemies) live in a rich  world, with a history that I can feel just bubbling under the surface. Honestly, the local area is wonderfully described, to the point where I think I might be able to navigate it myself. The forests, mountains and horse-ranches have a deep sense of place, of having roots about them. I would have liked to hear more about the rest of the world, though - there are hints about the Kings, about why the nations work as they do, of a shared history, of mistakes, of places other than small villages on contested borders - but we don't get enough time to make them as real as I'd like. Still, perhaps this is something the next book will rectify. In the meanwhile, I shan't complain too much, because what we have  is a slice of space and time that has a real depth and texture to it.

And the story, well, there's a fair bit of military marching and muskets going off, and battles in close order (and otherwise). There's betrayal and disaster. There's more than one victory, some of which even stick. And there's a boy growing rapidly past his expectations and dreams into a man, one who may be able to change the course of, if not the war, at least his little patch of it, for the better. It's a snappy read, and one that kept my attention from the first page - and as such, I'd say it's worth giving Honor for the Dead a look. 

Back next week!

 We've been on vacation the last few weeks, we'll be back next week!

Star Wars: Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade - Delilah S. Dawson

Okay, first of all, all the colons in there aren't my fault, okay? It's just a mouthful of a title. And despite being something of a mouthful, Inquisitor: Rise of the Red Blade is also a really interesting story. Broadly, when I think of Star Wars, it's in the context of its heroes, those who stand up in the face of evil and fight back - from the chivalric everyman rise of Luke Skywalker, to the cold-war-spy heroics of Cassian Andor and Kleya Marki.But this isn't a story of risign heroics, it's a story of descent into darkness, and finding out what lies at the hart of a character. It's also an emotional, thoughtful journey, one that definitely dishes out hope and hurt in near-equal measure. Darth Vader is easy to see as a monster; Iskat Akaris is a victim.

Iskat is also very sympathetic, certainly in the front section of the book. She's an outsider among the Jedi, avoided by many after a training accident caused harm to another student. Iskat works alongside a Jedi Master who seems to care for her only distantly, as an assistant in search of rare artifacts. There's none of the bond we see between Obi-Wan and Anakin here, only a more absolute distance, wrapped in a philosophy of detachment.And Iskat is trying very hard to be what everyone else wants her to be, and struggling, it seems, against who she wants to be. The story manages to show us the Jedi not as heroes, but as an institution. A bureaucracy, a school that has a model for how those within it should be, or must be, and those who don't fit that model are...disappointments. 

If you've ever been different from your peers, if you've ever felt the edge of disappointment in the voices of teachers, mentors, friends, if you've ever felt like you were alone, this will all sound searingly familiar.

Then, Iskat finds something she's good at. As war engulfs the galaxy, Iskat discovers that she can fight, and can kill, and that she's good at it. Unfortunately, despite being in a fight for survival, the Jedi Order has no time for warriors, for those who enjoy the fight, for those who make choices they might not, under pressure. Iskat finds that instead of plaudits and assignments, she faces ostracism, silence and condescension.  Individuals are so wrapped up in themselves that they don't see her pain, or dismiss it, or don't have the time to deal with it in the way that they think it should be done. So instead she's left to find her own path, riven from the support of the institution while being attacked for the choices she makes without that support.

I have a lot of empathy for Iskat.

Eventually, of course, things fall apart, and Iskat gets to decide if she wants to die a hero, or take a different path. Unsurprisingly, given the cover, you can probably guess how that turns out. But the trick is that each step of the way we're there with Iskat, living her fear of failure, her fear of ostracism, her fear of abandonment, and seeing that fear backed up in the actions of those around her, in a world that seems determined to shove her square peg into a Jedi-shaped hole, whether it fits in there or not, and no matter how uncomfortable she may be about it. And you can see how the environment around her, and the whispers of acceptance are so powerful. How finally getting to live her life as herself and not one crushed by the weight of others expectations has significant appeal. 

This is, of course, a tragedy. The rise of the red blade is the fall of Iskat, the Padawan, the Jedi Knight, even while it may also be the rise of Iskat, the person. Does she do terrible things? Of course. But we know what shaped those choices, we know that if she's not justified, she's certainly valid in her concoction of self-justification. The story doesn't flinch away from what the Inquisitors are, and neither does Iskat - she just finds the price worth it to be free - at least for a while. 

 This isn't a happy story. It's a character study of someone in pain, someone alone, someone making sacrifices every day to appear somewhere near what their society expects. It's a story of someone feeling like they have to hide who they are, of the way institutions, even benign ones, can fail us, and the costs to both them and us when that happens. It's Iskat's story, but it's a story that resonates with anyone who's ever felt like they were on the outside looking in, that they weren't being given a chance to show what they could do, or able to live as who they were. It's a story that hurts, and that's the highest praise I have to offer. It will make you feel. Go, read it, you won't regret it.

Caves of Ice - Sandy Mitchell

Continuing our journey through franchises, this week we're in the universe of Warhammer: 40,000. And what a universe it is. a grimdark-before-we-had-the-word galaxy largely composed of different species of alien and humanity, all focused on trying to kill each other. Back in the eighties and early 90's, the lore largely served as an excuse to sell different model armies and rulesets, so that you could blow up your friends Space Marine (giant genetically and surgically altered human warriors) with your Orks (green, hordes, argumentative, cockney accents). Somewhere in the intervening decades, however, the lore has become rather popular in itself, with near-numberless video game adaptions, book series, and even the occasional TV episode. The sheer volume of stories now available for 40K, as it's known, mean that they can be of..variable..quality, and that there's plenty of sub-genres available, from political thrillers, through war stories, to comedy. Because if there's one thing 40K is known for, it's not taking itself too seriously, especially when it's taking itself too seriously. That whimsy and sense of humour can sometimes be hard to find in a world of stoic warrior-monks, demon-possessed monstrosities, and elegant robotic killers, but it is, I think, what makes that world so successful. After all, you have to laugh, don't you. 

Which brings us, by a rather roundabout route, to Caves of Ice. This is the second novel in a looooong sequence of stories starring Commissar Ciaphas Cain. A Comissar has the job of maintaining the morale of the hordes of humanity impressed or indentured into the Imperial Guard, whose role is usually to serve as a bit of light cannon fodder for the enemy before the more expensive models show up. Commissar's usually maintain morale by shooting anyone who tries to run away. Cain is a bit different in this regard, intuiting that if he keeps morale high by less lethal, more collaborative means, his troops are less likely to leave him to get eaten by the next alien monstrosity that they come across. Cain is also, since we're treated to his internal monologue, a pragmatic, self-serving individual, one who only goes into a fight if he thinks it's necessary for his survival, or that he can win, or ideally both.He's possibly the only sane man in a legion of religious fanatics, hardened killers, fanatics keen to die for their Emperor and other such reprobates. He wants to win, and he also wants to live, and his efforts to do the latter often seem to end up with him performing bouts of accidental heroism, ensuring he'll be the first choice of the top brass next time they need someone to throw at a problem. 

In a world that seems to be completely off the scale ridiculous with its conflicts, with po-faced space-elves declaiming their tragic destiny and murderous space swarms obliterating entire planets, looking over the shoulder of someone who would be quite happy to be left alone so they could go for a quick pint down the pub is, frankly, refreshing. And Caves of Ice does lean into that, letting us see Cain fail upward into more and more dangerous situations. I mean, I say fail, he succeeds in surviving, but never at actually getting out of the way. He does, however, get to fight all kinds of aliens, while trying to keep all of his limbs attached. And he does this with a self-awareness to his internal monologue which is searing and clever. Cain, as a character, is one we can empathise with and sympathise with, because who among us wouldn't want to run all the way away from some sort of teleporting murderous robot or giant with an axe which is also a chainsaw? And yet, he still manages to stand up when it matters, and be a hero. And he's human enough to build friendships with those he works with, and to tweak the noses of authority when that authority doesn't have their (or his) best interests at heart. Cain is funny, thoughtful, sometimes kind, and occasionally ruthless, and in a universe determined to take itself seriously, he's the one on the outside pointing out how ridiculous it all is, before barging in the doors and getting a round in. 

 This is a fun book, entertaining, silly, sometimes a little emotional, and enough of an adventure to keep you turning the pages to see what happens next. As for Cain...well, I'm sure we'll see more of him, and I'll certainly be reading more of his stories in the near future. 

Back next week!

 Everyone is sick again - back next week!

Star Trek: Red Shirts - Cantwell/Levens

I'm not too much of a comics person, but I do have a love of Star Trek. I'm also a sucker for anything that looks at the established forms of a genre or universe and flips them around a bit. And oh, does Star Trek: Red Shirts do that. It focuses on a team of Starfleet Security officers (the eponymous Red Shirts, because their shirts, ha, are red), who are sent on a covert mission to a planet in the middle of nowhere. As one might expect, things do not go well. 

This is a slightly different brand of Trek, though. Set around the Original Series time periods, sharing space with Kirk, Spock, Uhura and the rest of the gang. But where their heroics were appropriate for prime time TV, where the heroes fought injustice and suffered only as much as audience share would allow, the cast of Red Shirts live differently. They're here to fight, and to win. No less heroes than the command staff that we've seen on TV, but down in the mud. Conscious that their lives may be seen as more disposable. Very conscious that their lives are on the line on every away mission. Keen to survive. But for all that, still human. Still willing to be brave, to stand up and be counted, to live and fight and die for their friends, their comrades, or the ideals of the Federation. Not that they want to, of course. But they know the score. This is a more lethal, bloodier version of the world we tohught we knew. 

Levens does a great job in the illustration department. The colours are rich and vibrant, and you can immediately identify each of the hapless Red Shirts as they come across the page. There's eleven of them(!) and if their numbers do reduce rather rapidly, still you know who's who and what their deal is without having to squint. The environments are rendered in lush, loving detail, from the glossy white of Federation starships to the purple dark of an alien jungle, where one small step can leave things splashed carmine with the insides of the unlucky. You can feel the world breathing in and out around you, and if it has more splashes of weapons fire and blood than usual, that just makes it more vital. There's an intentional claustrophobia in the environments, everyone in slightly too close proximity, everyone one short step from disaster. 

The cast...well, you're spread across a lot of different faces, very quickly. But they all have moments to shine, things which make them feel real, make them feel like people, and make you feel for them, as their mission moves from "adventure" to "out of control trashfire". There are definitely a few that seem more like a quick collection of traits than a full characterisation, but the comic is clearly giving it all it has to build them a backstory, to make you see each of these poor folks as people.  Because, make no mistake, and as the monstrous creature that used to be a person on the cover makes clear, this is Star-Trek-As-Horror, and survival is by no means guaranteed. 

There's a story here, about a monitoring station that's keeping an eye on stellar winds.  And about spies, trying to figure out what's being received - or transmitted - from that station. About old officers left out in the middle of nowhere with an eye to conspiracy, and the occasional actual conspiracy. This is a harsher, colder Trek, where nobody has their phasers set to stun, where life is cheap, and where nobody's hands are clean. But it's still Trek, for all that - a story of humanity out among the stars, being our best and worst selves. It's fun, playing on expectation, subverting it, enabling it, and unflinchingly looking at what life is like for these poor expendable folks at the sharp end of Starfleet's exploration of new worlds. It wants to shwow you what kind of people they are, what dreams they have, what drives them, and what they're willing to do to survive - and it doesn't look away form the answers, foul and fair. 

Is Star Trek: Red Shirts a typical Star Trek story? No. But it's an entertaining one, an important one, and one that might leave you asking questions, might leave you examining how you feel, in the wreckage of what expendables will do in the face of the inevitable. It's a good read, and if you're looking for something a little different, then it's well worth a look.