On Vacation!

 Hey everyone!

We'll be back in a couple of weeks, we're going on vacation and  off the internet for a short while.

Normal service should resume shortly.

The Mercy of Gods - James S.A. Corey

The Mercy of Gods is the start of a new sci-fi series from James S.A. Corey, the pen name of the writing duo responsible for The Expanse. As a big fan of their previous work, I was very excited to pick up this new work and see what they were up to. There was a danger that they wouldn't live up to the hype, and I can say that fear was unfounded. This is thoughtful, compelling, high-concept science-fiction, with characters that make us feel and understand a bit more about what it means to be human - and non-human characters whose perspectives will challenge, appall and excite the reader in equal measure. 

The protagonist is Dafyd Alkhor, whom we first meet at a faculty party. He's a research assistant for a group of scholars that's busy making history. Dafyd is a smart, thoughtful viewpoint, with an instinct for people and interpersonal politics. He's not powerful, but incisive and a little manipulative. Those he's surrounded by are all brilliant in their own ways, and flawed in others - from Tonner, the research lead with a towering intellect and an equally towering sense of self-importance, to Else, who gave up her own position as a research lead to be inside Tonner's group, and is also incidentally his girlfriend, to Jessyn, who matches a searing intelligence with struggles to keep an even keel. While the story takes a while to get going, it uses its time wisely, building out these people, their lives, their hopes and dreams and darker desires, their pride, their flaws, their hubris, their leaps of intellect and occasional misadventures. We come to them with nothing, and Corey uses the start of the story to turn them into living, breathing people. Recognisably from a different cultural context, but still people we could recognise if we saw them in the street - from the venal to the brilliant and back again in the space of a breath. 

And the world they inhabit is there as well, one where humanity has entered an interstellar age - and then forgotten. Where people live on another world with a dual biosphere - and don't know why. With politics and institutions that are rich and filled with veins of lore and the crackle of hidden history told in a newsreel. A world that has texture, and a past. Dafyd and his friends live somewhere we can recognise, even if its about forty-five degrees off what we'd normally see looking out the window.

And then, right about the time you're trying to work out what the point is, it's all washed away. An outside-context-even shatters Dafyd's personal universe, and his world. An alien fleet descends and seizes  everything and everyone it deems useful, and whisks them away to, well, elsewhere. And that's where the groundwork becomes essential, as the book becomes less a space opera, and more of a survival story. A story of trauma and how we respond to it. A story of what it takes to make it through another day, and the compromises and decisions someone will make to ensure not just their own survival but the survival of their friends, or their species. And it doesn't shy away from exploring these questions either, of calling out when those compromises might be self-delusional grasps for a shred of comfort, or when the necessary thing is also a terrible thing. Where horrors force someone to behave like a captor they despise to survive, and what that does to someone, or to a group. It's by tunrs brutal and transcendent. I described it to a friend as "deeply harrowing". It's a story that drinks deeply from the well of human misery, from abrupt, seemingly arbitrary executions, to uncaring captors leaving their prisoners to become useful - or die. From people cowering in their nightgowns, to exploring the moral compromises and definitions of resistance. It's a book that delves into what it means to be human, what it means to survive, what it means to live.

It's a complicated story, which survives, first on the in-depth characterisation, as we see people we've come to know slowly change in the crucible of being alien POW's, and second on a world which is only revealed to us one strand at a time, but promises to be a flavourful gumbo of deeply weird alien cultures, all with their own histories, their own perspectives, their own agenda. Our protagonist and his friends and colleagues are blindsided, confused, and desperate to learn what's going on to ensure their own survival - and so are we, right along with them. And Corey does something wonderful here, giving us the Carryx, an antagonist so strange we're not even entirely sure what it is they want, why they're doing what they're doing, what their goals are and how their society functions. Some of this comes out over the course of the text, and uncovering it alongside Dafyd's group (and occasionally, shortly before) makes for a powerful and at times revelatory narrative experience.

In any case. Before I go on too much. Not to overstate it, this isn't The Expanse. This is something new. But it has a lot of the same hallmarks. Complex moral questions. A humanity on the brink of paradigm-shattering change. Characters whom you can live with love with, cry with, hate and love and empathise with, often over the course of a few pages. Sprawling, detailed societies filled with those little details that make them real. A commitment to asking big, hard questions and letting the reader push themselves toward answers, where there are any. And a fierce, for want of another word, faith in humanity, or at least in people. This isn't The Expanse. It's something new. But it's also really bloody good, if you want to explore trauma, survival, deeply alien environments, prison complexes that are also alien civilisations, and, again, those big questions around who wand what we are, what it means to be people, what it means to be a person. It's slow start is more than paid off by the catharsis of its conclusion, and if it took me a while to really let it get going, once it did, I couldn't take my eyes off the page. Top notch stuff, that lives up to the hype.

Back next week!

 We're on vacation this week!

We'll be back next week.

Deep Black - Miles Cameron

I've been waiting on Deep Black for a while. Ever since I finished Artifact Space, honestly, at which point I shook my fist and demanded a sequel, ideally immediately. Well, immediately it wasn't, but the sequel is here, wrapping up the story that the first book began: Marca Nbaro is having her first eventful cruise aboard the Greatship Athens, trading with mysterious aliens for technology and materials we barely pretend to understand. Nbaro grew by leaps and bounds in the first story, rising from her beginnings in an orphanage to something like a talisman, getting to live to her full potential in service to the Service. Of course to do that she had to deal with an espionage ring and the aforesaid mysterious aliens.

This second book opens where the first left off. With the Athens meeting some weird and wonderful starfish-aliens, and trading them all sorts of knickknacks for their own goods. And I'll say this for Deep Black. It's not afraid to start looking at the aliens that underpin the economy of interstellar human civilisation. We've heard a little bit about the Starfish, but this is seeing them up close, as Nbaro and the rest of the crew try to work out how to extract as much alien tech as possible for as little outlay as possible. This is, after all, a merchant voyage. But it's also a voyage that shows us a crew trying to understand the alien. Trying to see where they come from, and what it is that they want all our stuff for, and find a way to communicate. Those efforts are slow, and stumbling, but you can feel the small victories, and the potential for shattering consequences that they evoke. And the Starfish remain impressively opaque, with drives and responses that seem to sit at an odd angle to our own. They're fun to read. This is a universe populated by the strange. Speaking of which, there are rumblings of other aliens making an appearance as well (as seen in the interstitial short story collection Beyond the Fringe), and their agenda and world view is likely to change everything again. 

The book manages to make all of this work by taking the high concept stuff - the galaxy-spanning humanity, the distinctly odd alien cultures, and grounding it in what feels suspiciously like 16th century Venice, but with faster-than-light travel. The Athens is a massive, brutally elegant tool, staffed by tens of thousands of people, all of whom are, after months or years in the middle of nowhere, busy politicking or screwing or feuding just trying to find a decent cup of coffee. They're our grounding influence, in their messy humanity, in their enmities and in their friendships and in their love perhaps most of all. They're good people. And, you know, also, they learn to fight hand-to hand, they fly space-fighters, and they do, sometimes, blow shit up real good. Because this is a world that fights slow, real wars in space, where getting everyone in the same place at the same time is hard, but throwing a bunch of kilometers-long railgun slugs at them once you do is reasonably easy. Deep Black has more of a focus on the xeno-culture than its predecessor, but worry not. It's still full of tense space-navy warfare, and harsh, kinetic and bloodily immediate combat, on the "ground" and in the air - all described with compulsive prose that leaves a taste of iron and gunpowder in your mouth.

Nbaro is as much of a joy to read as ever, incidentally. If you're here for competence-as-a-service, she can hook you up. There's a sense that she's grown more as a person than at the start of the first book. Here she's thrown into the deep end of trying to be a grown-up officer in what's definitely not a space navy (it absolutely is).Buried beneath watch reports and Science! and trying to fly a space-fighter and maybe also learn to be an engineer and and and. But underneath that is a vulnerability and a humanity that show us she's not just a hyper-competent plot-magnet. She's someone trying to understand what's going on, what she wants, and where her friends and her career fit in a world slowly tilting out of the known, and into something different, whether or not it's better. I've always liked her for being intelligent and brave, but seeing her run into the edges of her own personality, and need to think things through, was a delight - working on her own need to be at the front, to be seen and a hero, and yet also somehow not end up dead. And she's surrounded by some delightful supporting characters. Including the mostly-not-that-bad shipmind AI, and also her long term crush who may reciprocate her feelings, and her roommate, who has her own problems. The book wants to spend more time with some than others, but I liked the way it dealt with the issues it did have time to explore - love, loss, and dealing with the sometimes permanent consequences of a life spent at hazard. I would've liked to give them all a little more room to breathe - sometimes there's a cavalcade of names and faces and they don't get as much flavour as I'd prefer, in between the world-building and the world-exploding. But that said, the book's already big enough, and honestly I was always going to want more anyway.

The story? Well. If I can paraphrase Blackadder, it twists and turns like a...twisty turny thing. I will say that you naval warfare fans and you ground-pounders, there's plenty for you. But there's romance in here too, little sparks of joy in the dark. There's tense negotiation and catharsis and blood on the decks. There's epic space battles, and sometimes there's just training and coffee and trying to make it to the next thing before you fall over. There's being the one who shows up, the one who cares. This is high concept space opera, with a gritty feel to it, a feel of flight decks stained with oil and blood, but with some smart ideas hiding behind the explosions. This is, in short, a fine sequel, and a fine conclusion to the series.

P.S. I will say that there was some nice extra context made available in Beyond the Fringe reviewed last time, which I encourage everyone to give a read. It's not necessary but it certainnly adds some interesting facets to an already complex tale.

Beyond the Fringe - Miles Cameron

Beyond the Fringe is a collection of short stories by Miles Cameron, set in the Arcana Imperii universe. The mainline entry in the series, Artifact Space was a rollicking space adventure, with some deep world-building and strong characterisation, married to a plot that ramped up in a hurry and ended with me reading later at night than I should've been.  These stories take place in the same universe, butt with different characters, and in different places.  That said, most of them centre around the world of "New Texas", which seems to be getting rather expansionist, and also seems to feel like it can challenge the existing socio-political and interstellar commercial order. Why it thinks that is another matter entirely, one slowly revealed over the course of these vignettes.

I will say, up front, that I had a great time with each of these stories. There are five in the collection, and if I remember correctly, two were published already. Each has a different focus. From bloody massacre in the face of a New Texas revolution, through espionage, tradecraft and violence in dealing with a defector, and out the other side into the gracefully deadly ballet of space warfare. I won't say there's something for everyone - it's a little less cozy than you might expect - but if there's a military tinge to the SF here, that's fine if you like that sort of thing. And the stories themselves are lean, incisive work, without much in the way of narrative flab.

I think my favourite may be Tradecraft, which follows an agent of the human polity as she potters about her day, gathering information and selling luxury goods to the locals. Until someone puts down a red flag, and she has to drop everything to find and protect a (potential) defector with some very high stakes indeed. It's a story that emphasises the slow adrenaline of espionage - there's a soupcon of Le Carre in here somewhere - but backs up the long shots of preparation and discussion with some explosive moments of action which are kinetic and bloody in equal measure.

That said, there's another which explores the claustrophobic world of another human polity through its navy. Three ships diving through the darkness, on a mission of great importance. Probably. Unless what they're doing isn't what it seems. This one looks more at the enemies of the DHC, the central human power of the mainline story. If the DHC are a futuristic Venice, their opponent feels like something different - possibly there's a flavour of China there. In any case, this is a claustrophobic tale of betrayal, conspiracy and what happens when you let off a handgun in a confined space. 

I don't want to spoil any of the stories here; I think they're great at adding flavour and context to a universe that we're used to only seeing from one angle. That they're all also snappy sci-fi adventures is a bonus. That they sneak in some big ideas when nobody's looking, that's something else again. If you're a fan, this is a collection you'll want to pick up sooner rather than later.

The Daughters' War - Christopher Buehlman

Alright, up front, this is one of my favourite books of the year. Its a thoughtful paean on the horrors of war. It's a story of what family is and what it means. It's a means of exploring and understanding grief, and conflict, and trust, and faith. It's a story about kicking goblin arse, and a story of war with an unapologetic, harrowing darkness to it, a razor edge that makes sure you know you're bleeding. It's a tough read, no doubt, but also one that made me think and feel, and explore a little more what it means to be, well, human. It's a book that can be brilliantly funny, understatedly smart, and emotionally devastating in a handful of pages.

Anyway. That's probably telling you that I quite liked it. And I did! It's worth noting that it's a prequel to Buehlman's The Blacktongue Thief, but I'd say it could happily be read as a standalone. And it's very tonally distinct from that story, with an interlocutor whose perspective is very different to that of the previous novel, and in a different time and place entirely. Decades before, during the last Goblin war, which ripped apart a continent.

Our protagonist is Galva, a young woman who has defied her family to go to war. It helps that her family are one of the pre-eminent noble families of her kingdom, and it helps that two previous wars with Goblins have savagely lowered the number of men available to, well, fight wars - so now the military is heavily populated by women. Incidentally, the story does delve into the socio-political issues this causes, with a minority of rich men struggling to come to grips with the idea that their command structure is now populated mostly by women, many of whom both aren't taking any of their crap, and also are looking to step up and replace the existing hierarchy pretty soon now.

But anyway, Galva. Those of you who read The Blacktongue Thief may recognise her from there, but here she's twenty years younger, and it shows. This Galva is blunt, but thoughtful. She struggles to reach out and make human connections, but also seems very incentivised to make them - trying to be a little less self contained, looking for, if not romance, at least peace and comfort during a conflict that means life is likely to be cut short at any moment. Galva is also well trained and dangerous, though not yet a hardened killer - she has an innocent side to her, slowly calloused by the sheer brutality of what she's exposed to. But she's also sweet, compassionate, and probably not going to put a sword in you unless you deserve it. Her struggle to really understand people is something that gives her startling vulnerability, even when she's slogging through mud, falling headlong into the horrors of war, and marching with magical war-ravens (read and, well, find out). I mean...I don't want to go on about this exactly, but as a protagonist, she's pitch-perfect, drawing us in, letting us empathise and sympathise, and showing us not only the best and worst of her world but what it means and how it feels. She does also kick serious butt, but her emotions are there, her humanity is there to make us feel the raw nature of the events she's embroiled in. In summary, Galva is wonderfully realised here, and if you've seen her before, then this adds a rich texture to her previous appearance - and if not, well, she's still great.

This is a war story, and I will say that the Goblins, as primary antagonists, are brutal. This is not a happy-go-lucky book. It's laced with blood and tragedy, and you know what by the end I absolutely loathed these creatures as much as Galva does. Buehlman manages to make them repulsive while also giving the, a life and culture of their own, it's just one that sits at a solid ninety-degrees to our own (actually, since they can't abide straight lines, probably at eighty-five degrees). They're viciously intelligent, brutal, and horrifying in equal measure. And every battle (and there are a few) is viscerally felt, bloody, uncompromising in the grit and sweat and horror. But this is also a world that plays with triumph and with subtler emotions - the grief, for example, that an equestrian nation feels when its horses are cut down by an engineered plague, laced with a need for vengeance, and sorrow. 

Anyway. Maybe I haven't sold you with all that. So I'll say this. The Daughter's War is a war story, a story of family, born and made, a story of horrors and a story of love that could light the stars. It's a story that you'll want to tear through, a story that you won't want to end, an story that will make you feel. Go and get a copy as soon as you can, you won't regret it.

Back next week!

 Everyone here is ill right now so we'll try againnnext week!