Ramona and Her Father is the fourth book featuring Ramona Quimby as the protagonist, and (by my count) the tenth book of Cleary's featuring the denizens of the fictional Klickitat Street in Cleary's fictionalized version of Portland, Oregon. As the title suggests, much of the book revolves around Ramona's interactions with her father, who unexpectedly has more time at home with her than usual for most of the story. While the book deals with some very real adult problems in the Quimby household, the story is told from Ramona's perspective and reflects her sensibilities as she tries to deal with the difficulties facing the Quimby's as best a second-grader can. This last point - showing the world through the eyes and mind of a child - is where Cleary shines as an author, and this book demonstrates that quite well.
The first chapter of the book starts off fairly innocuously as Ramona, Beezus, and their mother make plans for the family's dinner and awaiting Mr. Quimby's arrival home, eventually deciding that they should go to Whopperburger for a special payday treat. Unfortunately, Mr. Quimby arrives home bearing gummi candies for Beezus and Ramona, and the bad news that he has been laid off from his job due to a corporate merger. Mr. Quimby's unemployment derails all the plans for the evening and becomes the dominant theme of the rest of the book - Mrs. Quimby goes to work full time, Mr. Quimby spends his days sending out resumes, waiting by the phone for interview offers, show more going to interviews, and collecting his weekly unemployment check. Most importantly, Mr. Quimby becomes Ramona's primary caregiver, taking care of her and Beezus when they get home from school every day.
Since the story is told from Ramona's perspective, much of her father's job search is in the background - an omnipresent task that occupies Mr. Quimby's attention and keeps the telephone off-limits much of the time lest someone call to offer an interview. Ramona occupies herself with trying to figure out how to help her family, first deciding that she could become a child actor and appear in commercials to make money, leading to an unfortunate incident with a crown made of burrs, then latching on to the project of getting her father to stop smoking when Beezus reveals that it is an unhealthy and dangerous habit, and then trying to assist Beezus in her creative writing assignment.
Of all of Cleary's books featuring the Quimby's this one seems to include the most weighty problems, as adult realities intrude on Ramona's childhood existence. The loss of her father's job results in her parents limiting their spending, meaning the occasional treats that Ramona is used to vanish. As her mother now works full-time, she is not able to devote herself to catering to Ramona's desires in the way she normally is - and as a result, Ramona has what seems to her to be a disappointing costume for the Christmas pageant. The most distressing event happens when Ramona comes home from school to find no one home to let her into the house. She imagines that her father has abandoned the family as she sits in the autumn chill on the front steps of the house. This being a Cleary book, her father arrives eventually, explaining that it took longer than usual to collect his unemployment check. Even so, this is clearly a distressing event for the seven year old protagonist. show less
The first chapter of the book starts off fairly innocuously as Ramona, Beezus, and their mother make plans for the family's dinner and awaiting Mr. Quimby's arrival home, eventually deciding that they should go to Whopperburger for a special payday treat. Unfortunately, Mr. Quimby arrives home bearing gummi candies for Beezus and Ramona, and the bad news that he has been laid off from his job due to a corporate merger. Mr. Quimby's unemployment derails all the plans for the evening and becomes the dominant theme of the rest of the book - Mrs. Quimby goes to work full time, Mr. Quimby spends his days sending out resumes, waiting by the phone for interview offers, show more going to interviews, and collecting his weekly unemployment check. Most importantly, Mr. Quimby becomes Ramona's primary caregiver, taking care of her and Beezus when they get home from school every day.
Since the story is told from Ramona's perspective, much of her father's job search is in the background - an omnipresent task that occupies Mr. Quimby's attention and keeps the telephone off-limits much of the time lest someone call to offer an interview. Ramona occupies herself with trying to figure out how to help her family, first deciding that she could become a child actor and appear in commercials to make money, leading to an unfortunate incident with a crown made of burrs, then latching on to the project of getting her father to stop smoking when Beezus reveals that it is an unhealthy and dangerous habit, and then trying to assist Beezus in her creative writing assignment.
Of all of Cleary's books featuring the Quimby's this one seems to include the most weighty problems, as adult realities intrude on Ramona's childhood existence. The loss of her father's job results in her parents limiting their spending, meaning the occasional treats that Ramona is used to vanish. As her mother now works full-time, she is not able to devote herself to catering to Ramona's desires in the way she normally is - and as a result, Ramona has what seems to her to be a disappointing costume for the Christmas pageant. The most distressing event happens when Ramona comes home from school to find no one home to let her into the house. She imagines that her father has abandoned the family as she sits in the autumn chill on the front steps of the house. This being a Cleary book, her father arrives eventually, explaining that it took longer than usual to collect his unemployment check. Even so, this is clearly a distressing event for the seven year old protagonist. show less
Ribsy is the last of the books centered on Henry Huggins that Beverly Cleary wrote, although, as the title suggests, it doesn't really center on Henry, but rather centers on his dog Ribsy. In the story, Ribsy gets lost and has a series of adventures as he tries to find his way home. After the first chapter, Henry mostly appears in short vignettes at the beginning of each chapter as the book details the efforts made by Henry and his parents to find their wayward hound. Meanwhile, Ribsy bounces around the small city, encountering person after person who is taken in by his muttish charm.
One of the most notable facts about the book is that it was written in 1964, and it shows. The world depicted in its pages represents a reality of childhood, pet ownership, and the treatment of animals that simply no longer exists. Ribsy is routinely allowed to run free in the Huggins' neighborhood, so much so that the instigating event in the book is caused by him racing for blocks after the family station wagon dodging traffic in an attempt to join Henry and his parents as they drive to the local shopping mall. Once there, the family leaves Ribsy alone in the car for hours while they go off to shop - Henry having taken off his collar so the dog could scratch at a troublesome flea.
After getting out of the car by accidentally rolling down the window, Ribsy finds himself disoriented and unable to locate the correct car. Eventually, he jumps into a car that he thinks is correct, only to show more discover later that he was sadly mistaken when the automobile's owners return. Thus begins Ribsy's extended travels as the Dingley family decides to simply bring this strange dog home with them as an afternoon diversion for their many children. From there, Ribsy's life becomes a series of vignettes as he travels from one usually well-meaning person to another. He goes from a violet-scented bubble bath administered by the gaggle of Dingley children, to a comfy existence with the elderly Mrs. Frawley, to a hectic week spent living as a mascot for Mrs. Sonchek's second grade class, to an exciting afternoon at a high school football game concluding with a trip to Joe Saylor's house, and finally a sojourn at the apartment building occupied by latchkey kid Larry Biggerstaff.
There is something distinctly idyllic about the world Cleary presents. Ribsy, despite being what amounts to a stray for more than a month, is never bothered by an animal control officer, never runs across someone who turns him in to an animal shelter, never encounters a person who wants to abuse him, or does more than simply say "shoo" to get him to move on. He never goes hungry - the only complaint really registered by Ribsy concerning food is that he is sometimes reduced to eating cat food or other things he finds less than appealing. For the most part, however, Ribsy runs across little old ladies who feed him stew, children who are more than happy to give them half of their bagged school lunches, or people at sporting events who gladly hand over so many pieces of hot dog that Ribsy can turn down ones that have too more mustard than he likes on them.
A mildly interesting wrinkle of this book is that Cleary uses it as a means of introducing the reader to characters that don't fit the typical moderate middle-class residents of Klickitat Street. The Dingleys only appear in the book for a short time, presenting a raucously chaotic family with more children than any of the families featured in Cleary's other books, Mrs. Frawley is an older single woman, clearly widowed, retired, and lonely, while Joe Saylor's family is lower middle-class and obviously much less well-off than the Huggins' (or the Quimby's). Finally, Larry Biggerstaff lives in an apartment with his single working mother, left alone all day so she can wait tables at a nearby café. In short, it seems like one of the motivating impulses for writing the book was Cleary's desire to show an array of people from all walks of life in her fictionalized Portland, giving the reader a window into a wider world of people who might not be quite as blessed as her usual characters.
Ribsy should not be mistaken for anything resembling incisive social commentary. All that Cleary does in the book is point to a couple of impoverished children and say "these people exist in the world", with no real discussion as to why a boy like Joe Saylor would feel the need to beg his way into a high school football game and scrounge the bleachers afterwards looking for lost change, or why Larry Biggerstaff's mother would be in a position where she left him alone all day to sit on the front steps of an apartment building, not even having enough money to buy her son a ball to replace the worn-out one he owns. Even so, in a media environment that was pushing programs like Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet as the standard vision for American families, presenting an array of families diverging from those models seems like a revelation.
In the end, Ribsy is a children's book that delivers a fun story for kids with just a bit of an edge to keep adults entertained. Throughout the pages, Ribsy manages to both be somewhat anthropomorphized and still clearly a dog, with doggish sensibilities: Viewing the world through scent, confused by unfamiliar people and places, and confounded by things like unaccommodating bus drivers and fire escapes. Despite being more than sixty years old, the book kept my eight-year old enraptured, and she eagerly anticipated each additional chapter. Even so, the resolution of the book is not really much of a mystery - my daughter predicted the ending quite early in the book - although the fun is in exactly how the story gets to what is the somewhat obvious conclusion. In short, this book is a fun romp that comes packaged with just a little bit of insight, and is certainly worth reading for almost every child. show less
One of the most notable facts about the book is that it was written in 1964, and it shows. The world depicted in its pages represents a reality of childhood, pet ownership, and the treatment of animals that simply no longer exists. Ribsy is routinely allowed to run free in the Huggins' neighborhood, so much so that the instigating event in the book is caused by him racing for blocks after the family station wagon dodging traffic in an attempt to join Henry and his parents as they drive to the local shopping mall. Once there, the family leaves Ribsy alone in the car for hours while they go off to shop - Henry having taken off his collar so the dog could scratch at a troublesome flea.
After getting out of the car by accidentally rolling down the window, Ribsy finds himself disoriented and unable to locate the correct car. Eventually, he jumps into a car that he thinks is correct, only to show more discover later that he was sadly mistaken when the automobile's owners return. Thus begins Ribsy's extended travels as the Dingley family decides to simply bring this strange dog home with them as an afternoon diversion for their many children. From there, Ribsy's life becomes a series of vignettes as he travels from one usually well-meaning person to another. He goes from a violet-scented bubble bath administered by the gaggle of Dingley children, to a comfy existence with the elderly Mrs. Frawley, to a hectic week spent living as a mascot for Mrs. Sonchek's second grade class, to an exciting afternoon at a high school football game concluding with a trip to Joe Saylor's house, and finally a sojourn at the apartment building occupied by latchkey kid Larry Biggerstaff.
There is something distinctly idyllic about the world Cleary presents. Ribsy, despite being what amounts to a stray for more than a month, is never bothered by an animal control officer, never runs across someone who turns him in to an animal shelter, never encounters a person who wants to abuse him, or does more than simply say "shoo" to get him to move on. He never goes hungry - the only complaint really registered by Ribsy concerning food is that he is sometimes reduced to eating cat food or other things he finds less than appealing. For the most part, however, Ribsy runs across little old ladies who feed him stew, children who are more than happy to give them half of their bagged school lunches, or people at sporting events who gladly hand over so many pieces of hot dog that Ribsy can turn down ones that have too more mustard than he likes on them.
A mildly interesting wrinkle of this book is that Cleary uses it as a means of introducing the reader to characters that don't fit the typical moderate middle-class residents of Klickitat Street. The Dingleys only appear in the book for a short time, presenting a raucously chaotic family with more children than any of the families featured in Cleary's other books, Mrs. Frawley is an older single woman, clearly widowed, retired, and lonely, while Joe Saylor's family is lower middle-class and obviously much less well-off than the Huggins' (or the Quimby's). Finally, Larry Biggerstaff lives in an apartment with his single working mother, left alone all day so she can wait tables at a nearby café. In short, it seems like one of the motivating impulses for writing the book was Cleary's desire to show an array of people from all walks of life in her fictionalized Portland, giving the reader a window into a wider world of people who might not be quite as blessed as her usual characters.
Ribsy should not be mistaken for anything resembling incisive social commentary. All that Cleary does in the book is point to a couple of impoverished children and say "these people exist in the world", with no real discussion as to why a boy like Joe Saylor would feel the need to beg his way into a high school football game and scrounge the bleachers afterwards looking for lost change, or why Larry Biggerstaff's mother would be in a position where she left him alone all day to sit on the front steps of an apartment building, not even having enough money to buy her son a ball to replace the worn-out one he owns. Even so, in a media environment that was pushing programs like Leave It to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet as the standard vision for American families, presenting an array of families diverging from those models seems like a revelation.
In the end, Ribsy is a children's book that delivers a fun story for kids with just a bit of an edge to keep adults entertained. Throughout the pages, Ribsy manages to both be somewhat anthropomorphized and still clearly a dog, with doggish sensibilities: Viewing the world through scent, confused by unfamiliar people and places, and confounded by things like unaccommodating bus drivers and fire escapes. Despite being more than sixty years old, the book kept my eight-year old enraptured, and she eagerly anticipated each additional chapter. Even so, the resolution of the book is not really much of a mystery - my daughter predicted the ending quite early in the book - although the fun is in exactly how the story gets to what is the somewhat obvious conclusion. In short, this book is a fun romp that comes packaged with just a little bit of insight, and is certainly worth reading for almost every child. show less
Persepolis Rising is the seventh book in the ongoing Expanse series that started with Leviathan Wakes. Like the other books before it, the book focuses primarily on the crew of the Rocinante - James Holden, Naomi Nagata, Amos Burton, Alex Kemal, Bobbie Draper, and Clarissa Mao, and the continuing efforts of humanity to deal with the changes wrought by the alien protomolecule. Unlike the previous book, which all took place over the course of a fairly short time period, with only a handful of months at most between each book, Persepolis Rising takes place decades later, and all of the familiar personalities who populate the books thus far are all getting fairly advanced in age. Society has advanced as well, with colonies having been established on hundreds of the worlds now accessible through the alien gate ring and the Transport Union assuming the position of the de facto government of the rapidly expanding human sphere of influence Everything seems to be going swimmingly, when the splinter group of the Martian Navy, now calling themselves the Laconians, that seized control of one of the systems accessible through one of the gates and then sealed themselves off from the rest of humanity reemerges and sets the plot of the book into motion.
As has become de rigeur for this series the book opens with a prologue that both gives a bit of world-building background and sets the stage for the rest of the volume. Focused on Cortázar, a scientist working for the Laconian government, show more the prologue establishes that the mutinous Navy men have been busy in the intervening years, building themselves massive buildings that are far in excess of their relatively small population's needs, with the idea that they will conquer and assimilate the rest of humanity and Laconia will become the new center of human government and commerce. This is run-of-the mill villainy, even with the apparent callback to Hitler's plans to build Germania as the center of his envisioned thousand year Reich, as dreams of empire have beguiled many nations in history. What indicates from the outset that Laconian society is rotten to the core is that they have been experimenting with the protomolecule that they stole in Babylon's Ashes, and to ensure that they have a steady supply of protomolecule to experiment upon, they have instituted a system in which people are sent to the "pens" and infected as punishment for even trivial offenses. Once you start condemning people to agonizing death by alien infection as punishment for things like sleeping on duty, it doesn't matter what other high-minded principles your society might espouse, your way of life is twisted and irredeemably evil. Right from the outset, the authors have given the reader a glimpse of the vile core at the heart of Laconian society.
[More forthcoming] show less
As has become de rigeur for this series the book opens with a prologue that both gives a bit of world-building background and sets the stage for the rest of the volume. Focused on Cortázar, a scientist working for the Laconian government, show more the prologue establishes that the mutinous Navy men have been busy in the intervening years, building themselves massive buildings that are far in excess of their relatively small population's needs, with the idea that they will conquer and assimilate the rest of humanity and Laconia will become the new center of human government and commerce. This is run-of-the mill villainy, even with the apparent callback to Hitler's plans to build Germania as the center of his envisioned thousand year Reich, as dreams of empire have beguiled many nations in history. What indicates from the outset that Laconian society is rotten to the core is that they have been experimenting with the protomolecule that they stole in Babylon's Ashes, and to ensure that they have a steady supply of protomolecule to experiment upon, they have instituted a system in which people are sent to the "pens" and infected as punishment for even trivial offenses. Once you start condemning people to agonizing death by alien infection as punishment for things like sleeping on duty, it doesn't matter what other high-minded principles your society might espouse, your way of life is twisted and irredeemably evil. Right from the outset, the authors have given the reader a glimpse of the vile core at the heart of Laconian society.
[More forthcoming] show less
I love Babylon 5. I consider it to be the best science fiction television series to ever reach the small screen. I also love Sense8, and I have a real appreciation for shows like The Real Ghostbusters and Jeremiah. I even liked what little we got of Crusade. Straczynski's work, to a large extent, speaks for itself through its consistent, high-quality storytelling, but Straczynski's works aren't the focus of this book, and they didn't need to be. For fans hungry for information about the development and creation of those works, there are a plethora of sources, not least of which are numerous publications focused on them produced by Straczynski himself - I have, for example, the five volume set titled Asked & Answered: J. Michael Straczynski Answers 5,296 Fan Questions about Babylon 5 & Beyond as well as the fifteen volumes of script books he had published. His work has been, to put it bluntly, discussed to death. Fans who are looking for discussions about that sort of thing can probably skip this book and go find those other sources. Those who want a story that they haven't seen before, a story about a life that was at turns awful, at times sublime, and always interesting, will do well to read Becoming Superman.
J. Michael Straczynski could have played it safe. He's been the creator, showrunner, or producer for several successful live action television shows, as well as a couple of animated series - all of which performed better when he was associated with them than when he show more was not. He's had successful runs as a novelist, comic book writer, and screenwriter. Before any of that, he was a successful journalist. When he sat down to write his autobiography, he could have focused entirely on his professional life, detailing his time writing for She-Ra, The Real Ghostbusters, regaling readers with his experiences showrunning Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. He could have spent chapter after chapter talking about bringing Babylon 5, Jeremiah, and Sense8 to the screen. No one would have complained at all had he spent the pages of the book discussing how he wrote Spider-Man, Thor, and Superman, or any of the other projects he worked on. Those things are all in this book, although not as much as one might think, because Straczynski had another story to tell, a story that involved absolutely not playing it safe.
In Avengers: Infinity War, Dr. Strange says that he looked at fourteen million possible futures to find the one where the Avengers are able to prevent Thanos from eradicating half the population of the Universe and defeat the mad titan. After reading Becoming Superman, I feel like there are fourteen million alternate universes in which J. Michael Straczynski never broke free of his past and was never able to produce the wonderful body of work that we have been able to enjoy for the last couple of decades. There are universes where Straczynski didn't survive infancy, killed by his depressed and unstable mother. There are universes where he died of sickness and neglect, or where he was abducted and killed on the streets of New Jersey. There are universes in which his abusive father went too far and left the boy version of Straczynski too shattered to continue. Or where the constant stream of violence and neglect was compounded by the institutional indifference of the schools that were supposed to educate him, resulting in Straczynski's life being derailed into crime, addiction, or simple despair.
The book opens with a recounting of the stories that Straczynski was told about his family's past, and over the next several hundred pages, he takes apart and examines this carefully constructed lie. From a certain perspective, it seems almost inevitable that Straczynski would become a storyteller, because pretty much every member of his family put forward a carefully crafted fiction about their past, weaving together a web of falsehoods with just enough threads made of truth to make the whole at least somewhat plausible. At times, it seems as if some of the members of Straczynski's family had come to believe the fictional version of their past that they had conjured up, but time and again, reality peeks around the edges, throwing everyone's life into disarray as they desperately try to cover their tracks yet again - efforts that often seem to drive many of the callous and violent actions described in the book. This is not to say that keeping the made-up story of their past is the sole cause of the harrowing home life Straczynski describes in the book, but it does help to explain elements such as the constant moves from place to place, the hushed conversations between adults, the isolation from outsiders, and even the violent outbursts from his father. When added to the constant need to evade creditors, the copious consumption of alcohol, the brutality, the outright sadism, and the hinted at mental illnesses that seem to have plagued the family, the need to cover up secrets was just folded into the toxic mixture and gave what might have been run-of-the-mill dysfunction and misfortune an added edge of viciousness.
In the biography of someone who has had as successful a career as Straczynski, it may seem odd to dwell so extensively upon his childhood home life, teenage angst, and college experiences but the reality is that his years in journalism seem to have inculcated in Straczynski the ability to cut to the real meat of a story, and the real meat of his life story isn't in writing episodes of The Real Ghostbusters or showrunning Murder She Wrote or any of his other professional credits. The meat of his story is in the almost ludicrously horrific childhood, his somewhat desperate dalliance with a moderately lunatic cult, and the revelations about what his grandmother and father were up to during their sojourn in Europe during World War II. That said, while the meat of the story is the terrifying life he led before he managed to essentially cut off all connections with his entire completely fucked up family, the heart of the story is the connection he made with the people he picked up along the way: With Harlan Ellison, who became an almost unwilling mentor, with Larry DiTillio, with whom he worked on a couple of shows, with Andreas Katsulas, Richard Biggs, Jerry Doyle and the other cast members of Babylon 5, many of whom died far too soon, and on and on. These personal recollections, told in often vivid detail, about both the awful family he was born into, and the creative and loving replacement family that he picked up during his adulthood, elevate this autobiography far above a simple recollection of the hows and whys of television and movie productions.
The title of the book is a metaphor, derived from Straczynski's childhood love for Superman, who, along with a collection of other comic book figures, seem to have filled in as surrogate parents for a boy who was comprehensively failed by everyone around him. The subtitle is My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood, with Stops Along the Way at Murder, Madness, Mayhem, Movie Stars, Cults, Slums, Sociopaths, and War Crimes, and every single one of those elements is part of the story that led Straczynski from living in barely heated tenements and eating food that had all but spoiled to being a successful writer with careers in journalism, screenwriting, novel-writing, and comic book writing As he states late in the book, the life story told in the book is so improbable that if you wrote it as fiction, it would never get published. The end result is story that is as unbelievable as it is true, and well-worth reading.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
J. Michael Straczynski could have played it safe. He's been the creator, showrunner, or producer for several successful live action television shows, as well as a couple of animated series - all of which performed better when he was associated with them than when he show more was not. He's had successful runs as a novelist, comic book writer, and screenwriter. Before any of that, he was a successful journalist. When he sat down to write his autobiography, he could have focused entirely on his professional life, detailing his time writing for She-Ra, The Real Ghostbusters, regaling readers with his experiences showrunning Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future. He could have spent chapter after chapter talking about bringing Babylon 5, Jeremiah, and Sense8 to the screen. No one would have complained at all had he spent the pages of the book discussing how he wrote Spider-Man, Thor, and Superman, or any of the other projects he worked on. Those things are all in this book, although not as much as one might think, because Straczynski had another story to tell, a story that involved absolutely not playing it safe.
In Avengers: Infinity War, Dr. Strange says that he looked at fourteen million possible futures to find the one where the Avengers are able to prevent Thanos from eradicating half the population of the Universe and defeat the mad titan. After reading Becoming Superman, I feel like there are fourteen million alternate universes in which J. Michael Straczynski never broke free of his past and was never able to produce the wonderful body of work that we have been able to enjoy for the last couple of decades. There are universes where Straczynski didn't survive infancy, killed by his depressed and unstable mother. There are universes where he died of sickness and neglect, or where he was abducted and killed on the streets of New Jersey. There are universes in which his abusive father went too far and left the boy version of Straczynski too shattered to continue. Or where the constant stream of violence and neglect was compounded by the institutional indifference of the schools that were supposed to educate him, resulting in Straczynski's life being derailed into crime, addiction, or simple despair.
The book opens with a recounting of the stories that Straczynski was told about his family's past, and over the next several hundred pages, he takes apart and examines this carefully constructed lie. From a certain perspective, it seems almost inevitable that Straczynski would become a storyteller, because pretty much every member of his family put forward a carefully crafted fiction about their past, weaving together a web of falsehoods with just enough threads made of truth to make the whole at least somewhat plausible. At times, it seems as if some of the members of Straczynski's family had come to believe the fictional version of their past that they had conjured up, but time and again, reality peeks around the edges, throwing everyone's life into disarray as they desperately try to cover their tracks yet again - efforts that often seem to drive many of the callous and violent actions described in the book. This is not to say that keeping the made-up story of their past is the sole cause of the harrowing home life Straczynski describes in the book, but it does help to explain elements such as the constant moves from place to place, the hushed conversations between adults, the isolation from outsiders, and even the violent outbursts from his father. When added to the constant need to evade creditors, the copious consumption of alcohol, the brutality, the outright sadism, and the hinted at mental illnesses that seem to have plagued the family, the need to cover up secrets was just folded into the toxic mixture and gave what might have been run-of-the-mill dysfunction and misfortune an added edge of viciousness.
In the biography of someone who has had as successful a career as Straczynski, it may seem odd to dwell so extensively upon his childhood home life, teenage angst, and college experiences but the reality is that his years in journalism seem to have inculcated in Straczynski the ability to cut to the real meat of a story, and the real meat of his life story isn't in writing episodes of The Real Ghostbusters or showrunning Murder She Wrote or any of his other professional credits. The meat of his story is in the almost ludicrously horrific childhood, his somewhat desperate dalliance with a moderately lunatic cult, and the revelations about what his grandmother and father were up to during their sojourn in Europe during World War II. That said, while the meat of the story is the terrifying life he led before he managed to essentially cut off all connections with his entire completely fucked up family, the heart of the story is the connection he made with the people he picked up along the way: With Harlan Ellison, who became an almost unwilling mentor, with Larry DiTillio, with whom he worked on a couple of shows, with Andreas Katsulas, Richard Biggs, Jerry Doyle and the other cast members of Babylon 5, many of whom died far too soon, and on and on. These personal recollections, told in often vivid detail, about both the awful family he was born into, and the creative and loving replacement family that he picked up during his adulthood, elevate this autobiography far above a simple recollection of the hows and whys of television and movie productions.
The title of the book is a metaphor, derived from Straczynski's childhood love for Superman, who, along with a collection of other comic book figures, seem to have filled in as surrogate parents for a boy who was comprehensively failed by everyone around him. The subtitle is My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood, with Stops Along the Way at Murder, Madness, Mayhem, Movie Stars, Cults, Slums, Sociopaths, and War Crimes, and every single one of those elements is part of the story that led Straczynski from living in barely heated tenements and eating food that had all but spoiled to being a successful writer with careers in journalism, screenwriting, novel-writing, and comic book writing As he states late in the book, the life story told in the book is so improbable that if you wrote it as fiction, it would never get published. The end result is story that is as unbelievable as it is true, and well-worth reading.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Outliers is, as the subtitle suggests, a book about success. Specifically, it is about the factors that contribute to the success of particular people, as well as the myths that surround that same success. The primary theme of the book is that the markers that guide the way to success are often opaque to most observers due to our cultural prejudices, but for those who know where to look, they are obvious and apparent.
The dominant cultural prejudice about "success", at least in modern American society, is that the successful are responsible for their own success. That is one just works hard and makes good choices, one will be a success. In short, the only thing that stands between a young boy or girl and becoming the next Jeff Bezos is diligence and cleverness. As Gladwell points out early in the book, this myth is so powerful that Jeb Bush, the son of a former President, the brother of another former President, and the grandson of a Senator and oil magnate, described himself on the campaign trail as being a "self-made man". In Jeb Bush's case, it is obvious that this description is entirely inapt, that the myth he is telling about himself is, quite simply, bullshit, but in many other cases it seems that we are perfectly willing to buy into these myths. In Outliers, Gladwell methodically demonstrates that the myths we tell about success are usually bullshit.
Nothing in this book discounts the importance of work as a factor of success. Two entire chapters are devoted to the show more value of work. Gladwell lays out in substantial detail that hard work is required to master a skill - a sustained and consistent level of practice sometimes summarized as the "10,000 hour" rule. The basic thrust of this claim is that 10,000 hours of practice are required to master a skill. Using music students as an example, he shows that the real difference between those musicians who are destined to become concert soloists and those who are destined to become high school music teachers boils down to little more than how much practice time they have put into their craft. Based on studies related to intelligence tests, Gladwell surmises that once someone meets a modest level of ability in an area, that the true differentiator between people who are just ordinary at something and people who are experts is nothing more than practice. In short, you don't need to be a genius to earn a PhD, just a lot of hard work.
Much of the book is spent illustrating that the difference between people who are successful and those who are not is whether they have the opportunity to obtain those 10,000 hours of practice. The first example given in the book, and the one that seems to resonate the most, relates to Canadian youth hockey and birthdays. Gladwell highlights how a disproportionate number of players in the elite Canadian youth hockey leagues have birthdays in the first three months of the year - and lays out how this is related to the January 1 cut off date for participating in Canadian youth hockey. If you are child who is born in January, February, or March, you are among the oldest kids in your "age group", which is a huge advantage when players are eight or nine years old. This leads to the older children having an advantage in being selected for placement on travel teams, and placement in elite leagues. Once there, they practice more and play more games than the younger kids they left behind. By the time they are fifteen or sixteen, they have had thousands of hours of extra experience in hockey that other kids simply have not. Kids born earlier in the year aren't naturally better at hockey, they just have more access to the 10,000 hours of practice needed to excel at the sport.
Gladwell goes on to suggest that while getting 10,000 hours of practice is critical to success, the timing of your 10,000 hours of practice is just as important.
[More forthcoming] show less
The dominant cultural prejudice about "success", at least in modern American society, is that the successful are responsible for their own success. That is one just works hard and makes good choices, one will be a success. In short, the only thing that stands between a young boy or girl and becoming the next Jeff Bezos is diligence and cleverness. As Gladwell points out early in the book, this myth is so powerful that Jeb Bush, the son of a former President, the brother of another former President, and the grandson of a Senator and oil magnate, described himself on the campaign trail as being a "self-made man". In Jeb Bush's case, it is obvious that this description is entirely inapt, that the myth he is telling about himself is, quite simply, bullshit, but in many other cases it seems that we are perfectly willing to buy into these myths. In Outliers, Gladwell methodically demonstrates that the myths we tell about success are usually bullshit.
Nothing in this book discounts the importance of work as a factor of success. Two entire chapters are devoted to the show more value of work. Gladwell lays out in substantial detail that hard work is required to master a skill - a sustained and consistent level of practice sometimes summarized as the "10,000 hour" rule. The basic thrust of this claim is that 10,000 hours of practice are required to master a skill. Using music students as an example, he shows that the real difference between those musicians who are destined to become concert soloists and those who are destined to become high school music teachers boils down to little more than how much practice time they have put into their craft. Based on studies related to intelligence tests, Gladwell surmises that once someone meets a modest level of ability in an area, that the true differentiator between people who are just ordinary at something and people who are experts is nothing more than practice. In short, you don't need to be a genius to earn a PhD, just a lot of hard work.
Much of the book is spent illustrating that the difference between people who are successful and those who are not is whether they have the opportunity to obtain those 10,000 hours of practice. The first example given in the book, and the one that seems to resonate the most, relates to Canadian youth hockey and birthdays. Gladwell highlights how a disproportionate number of players in the elite Canadian youth hockey leagues have birthdays in the first three months of the year - and lays out how this is related to the January 1 cut off date for participating in Canadian youth hockey. If you are child who is born in January, February, or March, you are among the oldest kids in your "age group", which is a huge advantage when players are eight or nine years old. This leads to the older children having an advantage in being selected for placement on travel teams, and placement in elite leagues. Once there, they practice more and play more games than the younger kids they left behind. By the time they are fifteen or sixteen, they have had thousands of hours of extra experience in hockey that other kids simply have not. Kids born earlier in the year aren't naturally better at hockey, they just have more access to the 10,000 hours of practice needed to excel at the sport.
Gladwell goes on to suggest that while getting 10,000 hours of practice is critical to success, the timing of your 10,000 hours of practice is just as important.
[More forthcoming] show less
Little Hits is the second volume in Matt Fraction's run as the writer for Hawkeye, and as such, it continues pretty much all of the themes introduced in the first volume in the series. The story is still focused on how Clint Barton, a man without any actual super powers, manages to keep up with his compatriots. Or, more accurately, the story details how Barton often falls short of keeping up and the incredible toll even trying to do so takes upon him. This presages a significant tonal shift from the first volume: While My Life as a Weapon featured Hawkeye working at the edge of his capabilities and managing to get through scrapes by the skin of his teeth, in Little Hits, as the title implies, Hawkeye suffers a series of losses in this one ranging from relationship disasters to the murder of those close to him. While the first book showed Barton getting injured on the job, this volume highlights the even more painful losses that his life engenders.
[More forthcoming]
[More forthcoming]
My Life as a Weapon is the first volume in Matt Fraction’s series about Clint Barton, also known as Hawkeye, a non-super powered super-hero who spends most of his time with the Avengers. The stories presented in this series are about what Hawkeye does when he is not working alongside Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America, and it turns out that the answer is mostly “gets in way over his head and gets injured”.
The interesting thing about Barton is that he’s pretty much simply an ordinary person with an extraordinary talent for archery. He isn’t super strong, he isn’t super durable, and he doesn’t have any high-tech equipment to help him out: He is, as is pointed out in the first pages of this volume, just a guy fighting crime with a weapon that dates to the Paleolithic era. The fact that he often stands shoulder-to-shoulder with medically enhanced super soldiers and literal gods while fighting cosmically powerful threats that could destroy all of humanity and doesn’t die in the process is probably the most remarkable aspect of Hawkeye’s existence.
Fraction begins each of the first three parts of this volume with Barton saying to the reader, in what amounts to a voice over narration, “Okay, this looks bad”. Each time Barton follows this up with an admission that the situation doesn’t just look bad, it actually is bad. Each time Barton proceeds to get the crap beat out of him, in some cases almost immediately thereafter, in others he can stave off the show more inevitable for a bit, but he winds up unconscious at least once in every sections of the story, and twice in two of them. In one incident, Barton ends up severely injured and hospitalized for an extended period of time. The running theme that underlies everything else in this volume is that the human body is simply too fragile for the life that Barton is leading. Despite his somewhat half-hearted protestations otherwise, Barton often gets himself into trouble because he thinks more like Captain America than he would care to admit. Though he often tries to adopt the pose of being indifferent, Barton always gives in to the pleas for help aired by those he comes into contact with, or, as in the case of Pizza Dog, acts to help those who happen to be near him when they are in need. His aid is often accompanied by his complaints, and is always well-meaning, but another theme that runs through this volume is that Barton is just not very good at solving problems. Fortunately, for the most part, the villains in the book aren't really all that much better at planning schemes. Much of the volume involves Barton essentially bumbling his way into foiling schemes formulated by criminals who are, at best, marginally competent themselves.
In the first section, Barton first winds up in the hospital as a result of literally falling off of a building, and upon being released he almost immediately walks into a local mob boss and his "tracksuit Mafia" evicting Barton's neighbors from their apartments when they can't pay the rent he recently tripled. Hawkeye's solution to the problem turns out to be to march down to the illegal gambling den that the mafia boss haunts and try to pay the rent for everyone in the building, and when that fails, try to fight his way through all of the boss's henchmen (which goes about as well as one would expect). This story is intercut with scenes of Barton demanding that a veterinarian treat Pizza Dog after the dog had been hurt very badly by being hit by a car, all the while insisting that Pizza Dog is not his dog. There is a rather obvious parallel drawn in the way the story is framed between Pizza Dog, who is thrown out into traffic by the tracksuit Mafia after it comes to Barton's aid, and Barton himself, and Barton's need to have Pizza Dog survive suggests that Barton knows this. In the end, Barton forces the mafia boss to sell him the building for a rather generous price (although one does have to wonder why Barton has $12.7 million in cash on hand), while the mafia boss protests that he did nothing illegal. In fact, the only person who has done something overtly illegal in this part of the story is actually Barton, but the reader is clearly supposed to side with him, as his illegal acts are in support of a noble cause, while the tracksuit Mafia's perfectly legal actions were intended to make people homeless.
The next section features Kate Bishop, who had once held the title of Hawkeye, as Barton tries to figure out what the warning signs in carney code that have been cropping up across town might mean. Barton figures out who the villains are when he and Bishop attend a gala performance of "Cirque du Nuit", and the story starts to resemble a traditional super-hero story except that Barton leads off by getting knocked out, captured, and then jumping out of a window into a swimming pool. It is up to Bishop to save his bacon, and while Clint rallies late to defeat the ringleader of the band of thieves, this is almost an anti climatic moment following Kate's heroics. Further, Barton manages to screw even this victory up, as he makes some rather powerful enemies in the process. This section further cements the pattern that Fraction's stories about Hawkeye will follow for the most part: Barton stumbles into a sticky situation, maneuvers his way through it by the skin of his teeth, and manages to somehow screw up the win.
The third section follows pretty much this established pattern, with Barton finding himself in a high-speed car chase through the streets of New York after he went out to get some tape and picked up a woman for a quick afternoon fling instead. She, of course, turns out to be on the run, and Barton manages to get knocked out, has to call upon Bishop for assistance, and winds up running through pretty much his entire inventory of gimmick arrows fending off their pursuers. True to form, Barton manages to get knocked out and captured again, and true to form, Kate saves the day. This section features two interesting twists - first, Barton never finds out what his paramour did, why she is on the run, or who exactly is pursuing her, and consequently neither does the reader. This further reinforces the almost bumbling nature of Barton's non-Avengers heroics. Second, Barton manages to unknowingly throw a wrench into his relationship with Bishop, and as usual, his screw-up is the result of his good intentions.
The final section of the main story is a two part piece that is probably the most "super-heroish" of anything in the volume. Barton is whisked away from a rooftop party by S.H.I.E.L.D. and sent to Madripoor with the organizations Amex Black and instructions to recover a videotape in which Barton was filmed committing a political assassination. This story is convoluted, full of twists and turns, with a veritable gallery of nefarious villains cropping up, as well as some unexpected allies. As I noted earlier, this story line adheres most closely to the the traditional "super-hero" style, and yet it is also the least satisfying section of the book. The plot is overly convoluted, and even though the situation ends up more or less where the good guys want it to be, the way they got there is so byzantine and depends on a couple of unexpected and entirely unpredictable developments that one is left wondering what the actual plan was. On the one hand, having no discernable plan seems entirely in character for Barton, but on the other, it seems entirely out of character for S.H.I.E.L.D., especially when one considers just how critically important Agent Hill insists that the mission is to everyone involved all the way up to the President of the United States. leaving this oddness aside, the real flaw in this story line is that Fraction simply doesn't play fair with the reader. The "big reveal" that comes at the end of the story makes several key scenes and conversations that happened earlier into nonsense. In short, Fraction was only able to preserve his surprise by not merely hiding information from the reader, but by having characters have discussions with one another that simply make no sense for them to have.
The final pages of this volume are dedicated to an installment of Young Avengers in which Barton, in his Ronin persona, tests Bishop as she is set to take over the mantle of Hawkeye. For her part, Bishop is dealing with some complicated romantic feelings for fellow Young Avengers Patriot and Speed, and is somewhat distracted throughout the story. To be blunt, this portion of the book is simply not as good as the rest, and even the artwork, which is fairly standard for comic books, feels jarring and out of place after an entire book of Aja and Pulido's almost impressionistic artwork in the main portion of the book. Putting an unrelated story at the end of a graphic novel collecting several issues seems to be a pattern for Marvel, and in my experience the added story always seems to fall short of the main work, and this book is no exception to that rule.
Hawkeye, as a non-super-powered super-hero, is somewhat unique among the Avengers, and this volume is somewhat unique among super-hero stories. Fraction, Aja, and Pulido have taken what could have been a bland and uninteresting character and breathed life into him by emphasizing his very mundane nature, and in the process highlighting what an exceptional individual he is as a result. Fraction is one of the few writers working in comics today whose work I will buy simply based upon his involvement in a project, and this volume is an example of the reason why that is so.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The interesting thing about Barton is that he’s pretty much simply an ordinary person with an extraordinary talent for archery. He isn’t super strong, he isn’t super durable, and he doesn’t have any high-tech equipment to help him out: He is, as is pointed out in the first pages of this volume, just a guy fighting crime with a weapon that dates to the Paleolithic era. The fact that he often stands shoulder-to-shoulder with medically enhanced super soldiers and literal gods while fighting cosmically powerful threats that could destroy all of humanity and doesn’t die in the process is probably the most remarkable aspect of Hawkeye’s existence.
Fraction begins each of the first three parts of this volume with Barton saying to the reader, in what amounts to a voice over narration, “Okay, this looks bad”. Each time Barton follows this up with an admission that the situation doesn’t just look bad, it actually is bad. Each time Barton proceeds to get the crap beat out of him, in some cases almost immediately thereafter, in others he can stave off the show more inevitable for a bit, but he winds up unconscious at least once in every sections of the story, and twice in two of them. In one incident, Barton ends up severely injured and hospitalized for an extended period of time. The running theme that underlies everything else in this volume is that the human body is simply too fragile for the life that Barton is leading. Despite his somewhat half-hearted protestations otherwise, Barton often gets himself into trouble because he thinks more like Captain America than he would care to admit. Though he often tries to adopt the pose of being indifferent, Barton always gives in to the pleas for help aired by those he comes into contact with, or, as in the case of Pizza Dog, acts to help those who happen to be near him when they are in need. His aid is often accompanied by his complaints, and is always well-meaning, but another theme that runs through this volume is that Barton is just not very good at solving problems. Fortunately, for the most part, the villains in the book aren't really all that much better at planning schemes. Much of the volume involves Barton essentially bumbling his way into foiling schemes formulated by criminals who are, at best, marginally competent themselves.
In the first section, Barton first winds up in the hospital as a result of literally falling off of a building, and upon being released he almost immediately walks into a local mob boss and his "tracksuit Mafia" evicting Barton's neighbors from their apartments when they can't pay the rent he recently tripled. Hawkeye's solution to the problem turns out to be to march down to the illegal gambling den that the mafia boss haunts and try to pay the rent for everyone in the building, and when that fails, try to fight his way through all of the boss's henchmen (which goes about as well as one would expect). This story is intercut with scenes of Barton demanding that a veterinarian treat Pizza Dog after the dog had been hurt very badly by being hit by a car, all the while insisting that Pizza Dog is not his dog. There is a rather obvious parallel drawn in the way the story is framed between Pizza Dog, who is thrown out into traffic by the tracksuit Mafia after it comes to Barton's aid, and Barton himself, and Barton's need to have Pizza Dog survive suggests that Barton knows this. In the end, Barton forces the mafia boss to sell him the building for a rather generous price (although one does have to wonder why Barton has $12.7 million in cash on hand), while the mafia boss protests that he did nothing illegal. In fact, the only person who has done something overtly illegal in this part of the story is actually Barton, but the reader is clearly supposed to side with him, as his illegal acts are in support of a noble cause, while the tracksuit Mafia's perfectly legal actions were intended to make people homeless.
The next section features Kate Bishop, who had once held the title of Hawkeye, as Barton tries to figure out what the warning signs in carney code that have been cropping up across town might mean. Barton figures out who the villains are when he and Bishop attend a gala performance of "Cirque du Nuit", and the story starts to resemble a traditional super-hero story except that Barton leads off by getting knocked out, captured, and then jumping out of a window into a swimming pool. It is up to Bishop to save his bacon, and while Clint rallies late to defeat the ringleader of the band of thieves, this is almost an anti climatic moment following Kate's heroics. Further, Barton manages to screw even this victory up, as he makes some rather powerful enemies in the process. This section further cements the pattern that Fraction's stories about Hawkeye will follow for the most part: Barton stumbles into a sticky situation, maneuvers his way through it by the skin of his teeth, and manages to somehow screw up the win.
The third section follows pretty much this established pattern, with Barton finding himself in a high-speed car chase through the streets of New York after he went out to get some tape and picked up a woman for a quick afternoon fling instead. She, of course, turns out to be on the run, and Barton manages to get knocked out, has to call upon Bishop for assistance, and winds up running through pretty much his entire inventory of gimmick arrows fending off their pursuers. True to form, Barton manages to get knocked out and captured again, and true to form, Kate saves the day. This section features two interesting twists - first, Barton never finds out what his paramour did, why she is on the run, or who exactly is pursuing her, and consequently neither does the reader. This further reinforces the almost bumbling nature of Barton's non-Avengers heroics. Second, Barton manages to unknowingly throw a wrench into his relationship with Bishop, and as usual, his screw-up is the result of his good intentions.
The final section of the main story is a two part piece that is probably the most "super-heroish" of anything in the volume. Barton is whisked away from a rooftop party by S.H.I.E.L.D. and sent to Madripoor with the organizations Amex Black and instructions to recover a videotape in which Barton was filmed committing a political assassination. This story is convoluted, full of twists and turns, with a veritable gallery of nefarious villains cropping up, as well as some unexpected allies. As I noted earlier, this story line adheres most closely to the the traditional "super-hero" style, and yet it is also the least satisfying section of the book. The plot is overly convoluted, and even though the situation ends up more or less where the good guys want it to be, the way they got there is so byzantine and depends on a couple of unexpected and entirely unpredictable developments that one is left wondering what the actual plan was. On the one hand, having no discernable plan seems entirely in character for Barton, but on the other, it seems entirely out of character for S.H.I.E.L.D., especially when one considers just how critically important Agent Hill insists that the mission is to everyone involved all the way up to the President of the United States. leaving this oddness aside, the real flaw in this story line is that Fraction simply doesn't play fair with the reader. The "big reveal" that comes at the end of the story makes several key scenes and conversations that happened earlier into nonsense. In short, Fraction was only able to preserve his surprise by not merely hiding information from the reader, but by having characters have discussions with one another that simply make no sense for them to have.
The final pages of this volume are dedicated to an installment of Young Avengers in which Barton, in his Ronin persona, tests Bishop as she is set to take over the mantle of Hawkeye. For her part, Bishop is dealing with some complicated romantic feelings for fellow Young Avengers Patriot and Speed, and is somewhat distracted throughout the story. To be blunt, this portion of the book is simply not as good as the rest, and even the artwork, which is fairly standard for comic books, feels jarring and out of place after an entire book of Aja and Pulido's almost impressionistic artwork in the main portion of the book. Putting an unrelated story at the end of a graphic novel collecting several issues seems to be a pattern for Marvel, and in my experience the added story always seems to fall short of the main work, and this book is no exception to that rule.
Hawkeye, as a non-super-powered super-hero, is somewhat unique among the Avengers, and this volume is somewhat unique among super-hero stories. Fraction, Aja, and Pulido have taken what could have been a bland and uninteresting character and breathed life into him by emphasizing his very mundane nature, and in the process highlighting what an exceptional individual he is as a result. Fraction is one of the few writers working in comics today whose work I will buy simply based upon his involvement in a project, and this volume is an example of the reason why that is so.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible is Stan Lee's exuberantly hyperbolic graphic novel memoir in which he recounts the events of his life as he remembers them. I note at the outset that this isn't a biography, or even an autobiography, as it does not really seem to strive for complete accuracy. Lee has a known tendency to embellish the past, and an astute reader will note that at least some of the anecdotes related in this book are at odds with the recollections of other participants, and in some cases, at odds with documented history. One who was looking for a sober assessment of the life of Stan Lee and his career in and impact upon the comic book industry should probably look elsewhere. On the other hand, if you want a view into what more or less amounts to unadulterated Stan Lee enthusiasm, then this book will definitely suit your fancy.
Though the book more or less follows Lee's life chronologically from his birth as Stan Lieber to some time just short of 2015, the story is told as a flashback, with Lee bursting through the opening page in boisterous fashion to kick off the story with open arms and the question "How did it happen?" The scene then switches to Lee standing in front of a crowd ready to regale them with stories about his exploits before getting distracted by his own image on the giant jumbo-tron behind him whereupon he mentions that his wife has cut his hair for his entire adult life. This is an almost perfect metaphor for both Lee's storytelling skill and his show more almost oppressively omnipresent narcissism. The fact that he highlights this so early in the book, and with such self-awareness is what keeps Lee's intense self-promotion from being off-putting and makes it instead somewhat endearing.
The "it" in "How did it happen" is basically Lee's life, or more specifically, how did a poor kid from New York become a comic book writer and wind up as one of the most recognizable figures in that industry. The story itself isn't all that exciting - Lee grew up poor in the depression, got a job as a gopher in the comic books division of a small publishing company, was in the right place at the right time to move up and showed a flair for the kind of over-the-top evocative storytelling that the medium favored. Along the way he met a woman, got married, had a child, and kept making comic books for decades. What makes this book work as well as it does is that it takes this fairly bland story and wraps it in Lee's style of storytelling, punching up the mundane and lacing it with humorous anecdotes to make it exciting and interesting.
One of the keys to understanding this book is to note that it contains two mostly distinct but intertwined plot lines. The first, which shows up first, is the story of Lee's life, starting with his childhood making homemade milkshakes and devouring books and running through his service in the U.S. Army, his misadventures that led to his marriage to Joanie, and the other ordinary events that most lives are made of. The second is the story of Lee's professional career, kicking off with his first job working for Atlas through his glory years in the 1960s when he created and launched the lineup of Marvel characters that serve as the publisher's foundation to this day, to his repeated efforts to start and maintain a Marvel fan club, and on to his later projects including his ill-fated venture into internet commerce, and quirky titles like Stripperella. These stories are related insofar that they are all events in Lee's life, but for the most part they are otherwise disconnected with one another, resulting in a somewhat compartmentalized semi-episodic feel that pervades the book.
One of the odd things about the book is that the parts that are already pretty well-known, especially the the sort of person who would be interested in this book to begin with - the parts that recount Lee's work at Marvel, the creation of various titles for the company, the pages where he highlights the iconic figures he worked with such as Ditko and Kirby - are the parts that are interesting, whereas the parts that are not well-known - the details of Lee's early home life, his relationship with his wife, and other personal details - are somewhat less interesting, or at least they are only interesting because they are mundane stories that are told by Lee. This dynamic makes the book a bit weird to read. For example, it is somewhat interesting that Lee created the Fantastic Four as a crime-fighting family with interpersonal dynamics as a core element of the storytelling, and it is kind of cool to have a full page showing the cover of the first issue of the Fantastic Four title, but none of this is really much of a revelation to the intended audience for the book. On the other hand, it probably is news to a lot of people that Lee met his future wife Joanie when she answered the door as he was coming pick up her roommate for a blind date, but that isn't all that newsworthy a tidbit of information.
The whole book is wrapped in a kind of manic energy. In any other book this would hint of a desperate attempt to punch up a boring story, but here it just seems like a reflection of Lee's personality. Amidst all of the superlatives, the book contains numerous nice flourishes that long time fans are sure to appreciate, such as full page illustrations depicting some of the notable figures in comic book history, replicas of the covers of the first issues in which many of the most prominent Marvel characters appeared, and a reproduction of the anti-VD poster lee designed while he was in the Army. Through all of the unfettered exuberance, the most brilliant elements of the book are contained in the subtle touches such as a panel in which Lee explains how to be a better writer by paying attention while watching movies shows a scene from what appears to be Captain America: The Winter Soldier with Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans as Black Widow and Captain America. Or a sequence in which Lee explains to his younger self that the woman he daydreams about will be the woman he eventually marries that is punctuated by the older Lee tossing aside a copy of the issue of Action Comics in which Superman first appeared. Or the sequence in which Lee talks about, and grieves for, his daughter who died in infancy. These small moments elevate the book beyond being simply a steady stream of excited enthusiasm, and make it a memorable memoir.
Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible is ultimately kind of like Lee's favorite catch phrase "Excelsior!" - it is bombastic, enthusiastic, and delivered with an exclamation point, but beyond that it has about as much substance as one of Marvel's famous No-Prizes. Just like a No-Prize is nice to win but doesn't really provide much more than the nice feeling of having won it, this book is nice to read, but doesn't offer a whole lot more than the nice feeling of having read it. Anyone who picks up this volume looking to glean some insights into Lee's life is likely to come away feeling slightly disappointed. On the other hand, anyone who picks up this book hoping to experience just a little bit of what it is like to listen to Lee perform in front of an audience of appreciative ComicCon attendees is likely to get exactly what they were looking for. I'm not sure if this book can be really described as great, but it definitely can be described as ineffably Stan Lee, and that is probably all one can really ask from it.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Though the book more or less follows Lee's life chronologically from his birth as Stan Lieber to some time just short of 2015, the story is told as a flashback, with Lee bursting through the opening page in boisterous fashion to kick off the story with open arms and the question "How did it happen?" The scene then switches to Lee standing in front of a crowd ready to regale them with stories about his exploits before getting distracted by his own image on the giant jumbo-tron behind him whereupon he mentions that his wife has cut his hair for his entire adult life. This is an almost perfect metaphor for both Lee's storytelling skill and his show more almost oppressively omnipresent narcissism. The fact that he highlights this so early in the book, and with such self-awareness is what keeps Lee's intense self-promotion from being off-putting and makes it instead somewhat endearing.
The "it" in "How did it happen" is basically Lee's life, or more specifically, how did a poor kid from New York become a comic book writer and wind up as one of the most recognizable figures in that industry. The story itself isn't all that exciting - Lee grew up poor in the depression, got a job as a gopher in the comic books division of a small publishing company, was in the right place at the right time to move up and showed a flair for the kind of over-the-top evocative storytelling that the medium favored. Along the way he met a woman, got married, had a child, and kept making comic books for decades. What makes this book work as well as it does is that it takes this fairly bland story and wraps it in Lee's style of storytelling, punching up the mundane and lacing it with humorous anecdotes to make it exciting and interesting.
One of the keys to understanding this book is to note that it contains two mostly distinct but intertwined plot lines. The first, which shows up first, is the story of Lee's life, starting with his childhood making homemade milkshakes and devouring books and running through his service in the U.S. Army, his misadventures that led to his marriage to Joanie, and the other ordinary events that most lives are made of. The second is the story of Lee's professional career, kicking off with his first job working for Atlas through his glory years in the 1960s when he created and launched the lineup of Marvel characters that serve as the publisher's foundation to this day, to his repeated efforts to start and maintain a Marvel fan club, and on to his later projects including his ill-fated venture into internet commerce, and quirky titles like Stripperella. These stories are related insofar that they are all events in Lee's life, but for the most part they are otherwise disconnected with one another, resulting in a somewhat compartmentalized semi-episodic feel that pervades the book.
One of the odd things about the book is that the parts that are already pretty well-known, especially the the sort of person who would be interested in this book to begin with - the parts that recount Lee's work at Marvel, the creation of various titles for the company, the pages where he highlights the iconic figures he worked with such as Ditko and Kirby - are the parts that are interesting, whereas the parts that are not well-known - the details of Lee's early home life, his relationship with his wife, and other personal details - are somewhat less interesting, or at least they are only interesting because they are mundane stories that are told by Lee. This dynamic makes the book a bit weird to read. For example, it is somewhat interesting that Lee created the Fantastic Four as a crime-fighting family with interpersonal dynamics as a core element of the storytelling, and it is kind of cool to have a full page showing the cover of the first issue of the Fantastic Four title, but none of this is really much of a revelation to the intended audience for the book. On the other hand, it probably is news to a lot of people that Lee met his future wife Joanie when she answered the door as he was coming pick up her roommate for a blind date, but that isn't all that newsworthy a tidbit of information.
The whole book is wrapped in a kind of manic energy. In any other book this would hint of a desperate attempt to punch up a boring story, but here it just seems like a reflection of Lee's personality. Amidst all of the superlatives, the book contains numerous nice flourishes that long time fans are sure to appreciate, such as full page illustrations depicting some of the notable figures in comic book history, replicas of the covers of the first issues in which many of the most prominent Marvel characters appeared, and a reproduction of the anti-VD poster lee designed while he was in the Army. Through all of the unfettered exuberance, the most brilliant elements of the book are contained in the subtle touches such as a panel in which Lee explains how to be a better writer by paying attention while watching movies shows a scene from what appears to be Captain America: The Winter Soldier with Scarlett Johansson and Chris Evans as Black Widow and Captain America. Or a sequence in which Lee explains to his younger self that the woman he daydreams about will be the woman he eventually marries that is punctuated by the older Lee tossing aside a copy of the issue of Action Comics in which Superman first appeared. Or the sequence in which Lee talks about, and grieves for, his daughter who died in infancy. These small moments elevate the book beyond being simply a steady stream of excited enthusiasm, and make it a memorable memoir.
Amazing, Fantastic, Incredible is ultimately kind of like Lee's favorite catch phrase "Excelsior!" - it is bombastic, enthusiastic, and delivered with an exclamation point, but beyond that it has about as much substance as one of Marvel's famous No-Prizes. Just like a No-Prize is nice to win but doesn't really provide much more than the nice feeling of having won it, this book is nice to read, but doesn't offer a whole lot more than the nice feeling of having read it. Anyone who picks up this volume looking to glean some insights into Lee's life is likely to come away feeling slightly disappointed. On the other hand, anyone who picks up this book hoping to experience just a little bit of what it is like to listen to Lee perform in front of an audience of appreciative ComicCon attendees is likely to get exactly what they were looking for. I'm not sure if this book can be really described as great, but it definitely can be described as ineffably Stan Lee, and that is probably all one can really ask from it.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Disclosure: I received this book as a Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.
The Clingerman Files is a comprehensive collection of all of Mildred Clingerman's short fiction, encompassing her wide range of stories that range from the mundane doings of teenagers and old ladies to the exotic adventures of time travelers and alien space explorers. While Clingerman is mostly remembered as a science fiction author, with her stories frequently appearing in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, this collection contains a broader array of stories, including several that have no speculative fiction element at all that were originally published in outlets such as Good Housekeeping and Colliers. No matter whether the stories are fantastical or not, most of them feature ordinary people, often women, finding themselves at a critical juncture in their lives. To a certain extent, this collection could be regarded as an homage to the extraordinary nature of ordinary people.
Like many of Clingerman's stories, First Lesson is almost not a fantasy story. Or rather, it is a fantasy story that is so subtle that it could be real. A young woman has a dream in which her paratrooper husband dies in a training accident and enlists the assistance of a voodoo practitioner to weave a spell of protection around her spouse. Despite the fact show more that the protagonist believes in the magic in the story, there isn't any overt indication that belief is justified. As a result, this story exists in that hazy border between reality and fantasy. Clingerman's skill at giving the story a sense of place is on full display here, and the story feels comfortable and unsettling at the same time. Stickney and the Critic shares many of the same storytelling aspects with First Lesson, with the only difference being that the subtle fantasy element is an unseen malevolent entity residing in an out of the way well on an isolated farm. Once again, Clingerman makes the reader feel the setting - one can almost feel the hot and dusty winds that sweep across the farmstead. Once again, the story could be fantasy or it could simply be mundane coincidence, and that ambiguity makes it seem almost dreamlike, although it eventually veers into nightmare territory.
Stair Trick seems like it is going to be another story that seems like it is going to cloak its fantasy in ambiguity as a bartender does a recurring trick of going "downstairs" behind the bar to get items in a bar that doesn't have a basement. For most of the story it seems like this is just a clever way to entertain the patrons with some combination of mime and trickery, but then the story takes a turn and everything you thought about what was happening is wrong. This sort of story works in large part because it is contained in a collection that features some of Clingerman's more ambiguous stories, so the small twist that pops up feels much larger than it otherwise would. The Little Witch of Elm Street shares some thematic characteristics as well, as the story seems to be a perfectly ordinary story of a fussy woman, henpecked husband, and a horrifically terrible neighbor child named Nina, but it takes a turn towards the end that seems like it could just be coincidence. Like so much of Clingerman's work, the deliciousness of the story rests in the ambiguity of whether the pivotal event is simply coincidence or evidence of something supernatural, with the Little Witch carrying the added bonus of a quirky and interesting character in the form of Nina's sister Garnet.
Another story that rests comfortably in the twilight between fantasy and reality is A Day for Waving, which could probably best be described as a comforting ghost story. Seven or eight year old Eden lives with her domineering grandmother, vacant mother, and somewhat macabre-minded uncle (who happens to be almost exactly the same age as Eden). After a brief bit of background to give the reader an idea of the nature of the various characters and a glimpse into the fertile imagination of the narrator, the action moves on to an afternoon visit to the family grave plots, where Eden finds herself having a conversation with someone whose arrival is both unexpected and entirely predictable. The interesting part of the story is not in the resolution - essentially amounting to a ghost showing up to give its blessing to an impending event - but in the fact that one can never be sure if the narrative is actually happening or if it is just the vivid imagination of a young girl given free rein. The story is at turns frightening and comfortably cozy but at all turns remains decidedly ambiguous.
The volume contains a few alien first contact stories, starting with Minister Without Portfolio, which features mostly benevolent aliens and a grandmother whose color-blindness turns out to be an advantage rather than a disability. The twist in the story is easy to predict, but the presentation is so pleasant that one doesn’t mind. Birds Can’t Count is an alien encounter story with a slightly less approachable, even downright inscrutable, alien. The protagonist in the story is portrayed as perceptive, persistent, and adventurous, but by the end it is apparent that she might not be particularly bright, or at least not able to make certain connections that are hinted at in the story. The story is creepy, but in a comfortably quaint sort of way.
Clingerman's fiction sometimes veers too deep into the "cozy" direction and becomes a bit twee. One example of this tendency is The Word, a story about some diminutive aliens who have to go foraging for food on a planet filled with huge inhabitants. The brave explorers set out to essentially panhandle food with the use of a secret code word they have discovered is used by the natives. I'm not sure if I would call the resolution of the story a "twist" since it is pretty blatantly telegraphed throughout the text, and it is both cute and silly but probably a little bit too much so. The Wild Wood, which is ostensibly a Christmas story, is a much better creepy tale involving a mother who has established family Christmas traditions that she now regrets - specifically an annual trip to Mr. Cravolini's to purchase a tree. The story starts off feeling like it is a mundane story that involves incredibly creepy sexual harassment, and slowly morphs into something much creepier, until by the end the full body horror is revealed. The Gay Deceiver is another quite disturbing story in the collection, which starts out happy and cheerful, featuring a magically wonderful performer at a parade and his somewhat drab and colorless traveling partner. In the opening pages of the story, everything is beautiful and gleeful, but as the story goes on, the darker underlying secret of the whistling Harlequin at its center becomes more and more apparent until in the final few lines the terrible truth is revealed. In this story, Clingerman demonstrates her disturbing ability to take a well-known folk-tale and import it into the modern mundane world to expose its horrific reality.
A recurring figure in Clingerman's writing is the normally timid woman who finally gets fed up with her life. In some cases, as in The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak, such a character asserts her independence from the humdrum, constrained life she has been living by throwing all caution aside to embark upon a time traveling romance. In others, such as Winning Recipe, the protagonist merely figures out a way to confound and incapacitate a hated piece of machinery. These stories appear deceptively cozy, but are actually so incredibly sharply pointed that the reader should be careful not to cut themselves when reading them. The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak does have a beautiful used bookstore featured within its pages, which is an added bonus.
The protagonist of Letters from Laura is decidedly not a timid woman, but rather a young lady who has signed up to enjoy some time travel to ancient Crete. Told as a series of letters from Laura to her mother, her best friend Prue, and finally to the travel agent Laura had booked her excursion with, the story reveals Laura's expectations for her journey, and the reality that doesn't quite match them. It is silly and fun, but at the same time biting and incisive. While Laura is a no nonsense kind of woman albeit a bit misinformed to begin with, Reggie, the central character of The Last Prophet, can best be described as a well-informed milquetoast who has a message, but isn't able to get anyone interested in hearing it. The story kind of meanders and is about as uninteresting as Reggie himself until it turns out that everything was basically just a set-up for a kind of shaggy god twist at the end.
While many of Clingerman's stories are pointed, very few are quite as sharply honed as Mr. Sakrison's Halt. The protagonist of the story is a young woman who would travel to visit her grandparents in the rural South, and the last leg of her journey would always be on the Katy Local where she would meet up with a little old lady named Miss Mattie who rode the train constantly looking for the halt where her fiancee had gotten off the train many years before. Her quest is hampered by the fact that she doesn't quite remember where her long-lost love had gotten off the train, and it turns out that there is a very specific reason why she hasn't been able to find it despite riding the Katy Local for decades. The message of the story is delivered about as subtly as a club to the back of the head, but it is a message worth delivering.
One of the oft-repeated mantras is that "strong female characters" is a desirable goal for fiction writers hoping to eschew sexist portrayals in their writing. I have seen several authors claim "I can't be sexist because I included a strong female character in my story". I think this is a flawed viewpoint insofar as a "strong" female character is as much a stereotype as any other trope attached to female characters. What makes a story really good are interesting female characters, more to the point, female characters that have the freedom to be flawed human beings, and Red Heart and Blue Roses is an example of a story that has exactly that. The story is related by one woman to another while they share a hospital room: Katie, a bundle of nerves and anxiety, relates her tale of woe to the narrator who exists in a languid almost dream-like state most of the time. As the story unfolds, Katie recounts how she has become plagued by an odd young man that her son had brought as a guest for the holidays, and how the visitor had wormed his way into her family. From there, Katie's story gets progressively more disturbing, but a twist at the end brings it back into that realm of stories that exist in that hazy area between reality and unreality.
Although Clingerman was primarily a speculative fiction author, this collection includes a handful of stories that appear to be devoid of any speculative fiction elements. Little Girl tells the story of a pair of young girls taking the train as they journey from spending the summer in Iowa with their father and his new wife back to where their mother lives in Arizona. The story is told from the perspective of eight-year old Cissie, the older of the two sisters as she tries to navigate a train station late at night with her sister in tow all the while dealing with incredulous and annoying adults. There isn't much to this story, although there is a nice little character note for Cissie in that she reads books that at least one adult thinks are too adult for her. Another story lacking any speculative fiction element is Tutti Frutti Delight, which is basically a tale about a pair of high school girls with plans to take the world by storm and a crush on one of their teachers. The infatuation leads to about the end result that one would expect, although this doesn't really seem to slow down the protagonist's plans for the future other than to modestly redirect them. Another story focused on the love life of a teenager, You Remember Charles? focuses on Anne Holland and her infatuation with Charles, the most popular and desirable boy in her school. The story is a study in toxic masculinity and privilege, as it would be understating things to say that Charles turns out to be a miscreant, but gets away with his actions due to who his father is and, by extension, who he is. Anne, for her part, first enables Charles, and then pulls back, and then wistfully wonders whatever happened to him, winding up with about as happy an ending as she could have given the society she lived in.
The third story lacking in speculative fiction elements is The Stray, featuring a housewife living in rural Arizona as a protagonist, which seems to be at least somewhat autobiographical. She takes in a young woman that she finds wandering a nearby empty lot used as a hangout by a group of hippies. The story kind of meanders, with the main character simultaneously showing great care for her stray and expressing disdain for all of the members of the hippie community she had been living with. The very little bit of plot eventually resolves in a fairly serendipitous manner, but the story seems mostly to be aimed at providing a view into the lives of two women and how they deal with the world. This focus on the lives of ordinary women is something of a recurring theme in this set of non-speculative fiction stories, highlighting these characters and how they relate to the world around them. Not all of the ordinary stories focus on women however. Sorrow for the Need, for example is told from a woman's viewpoint, but that's almost entirely incidental to the story, which is basically about a married couple choosing the mundane lives they have settled into over an old friend with subversive political ideas. The story reads like a reaction to the McCarthy era Red Scare, and how it destroyed relationship. The entire story is laced through with regret, but regret tempered by how a kind of easy comfortable existence can sap away one's youthful idealism.
The Man Who Stole Tomorrow is a small story about a man who learns the value of time, and how to get more of it. There isn't really much more to the story, but it does contain a moderately clever little twist at its heart. This story, like several others penned by Clingerman, sits on the very edge of speculative fiction, as there is no explicit science fictional or fantastical element, but events in the story can be read as if they are, or they could be read as mere coincidences taking place in an entirely mundane world. Another story that rests on this ambiguous line is Grandma's Refuge, which deals with fond childhood memories of grandma and a shared hideaway to seek shelter from the desert heat and the occasional storm. Once again, there is no explicit fantasy element to the story, but a child's memories sometimes attribute powers to the adults in their lives and the story simply doesn't clarify whether these are real or are just the product of youthful imagination. Size 5½ B also follows this pattern, as a woman goes to buy shoes while beset by literary concepts and thinking dark thoughts about her oblivious and seemingly uncaring husband. Once again, it is unclear whether she actually is being assaulted by clichés, tediums, and ad men, while avoiding being classified in the majority or becoming a statistic, or if the story is just an elaborate fantasy playing out in the protagonist's head, but either way it has a dark turn and a rather unsettling conclusion.
Another story with a dark turn is Apologia, although saying it has a dark turn rather underplays just how creepy this brief little tale is. In just under two pages of text, Clingerman manages to set up a slightly unsettling back story and then pushes forward to an entirely unsettling denouement. With a story this short, there isn't much room for much beyond that, but like the very best of these sorts of little stories, it leaves the reader filled with questions. Far less fantastical, but almost as unsettling The Tea Party seemingly depicts nothing more than a pair of young girls having a tea party with their dolls, but everything about the scenario seems to be just slightly off kilter, There is nothing directly horrific about the story, but the author manages to fill the text with a kind of barely suppressed foreboding without even letting the reader know why it is there. While The Man Eater is not unsettling, it does seem to be headed in that direction for much of its length. Featuring a young Native American boy named Guillermo and his love for the pretty (and decidedly not Native American) but careless girl Debbie, the story seems destined for a terrible turn as Debbie takes advantage of her young suitor's affections to goad him into committing petty crimes. Just when the reader expects the story to take a dark turn, it instead turns into a lesson about what love means and how a fair world would treat people with differing status in different ways. The List, on the other hand, is incredibly unsettling, although it cannot fairly be said to be horrific except in the sense of anticipation. In the story, Mr. and Mrs. Adams have a polite conversation after putting their children to bed following what seems to have been a fairly ordinary family dinner. Their day's tasks however, seem to have included taking supplies to their hidden refuge where they intend to weather the possible collapse of society, and their conversation turns to how to make sure their children will reach the hidden cave in the event that neither of their parents are able to accompany them. The casual nature of this conversation about their plans for after the end of civilization is simply terrifying, and gives the story an almost surreal air.
In the realm of the mundane, The Vine is a story about a woman whose mental reservations about her impending pregnancy manifest in a myriad of ways, the most obvious of which is her decision to plant a set of vines along a new fence that her husband built mostly to keep an obnoxious neighbor at bay. The story revolves around the question of whether one should own cats or dogs, how some people simply don't observe boundaries very well, and resentments directed towards one's parents. There's nothing particularly out of the ordinary about the events in the story, but what makes it so extraordinary is how everything is contextualized from the viewpoint of a woman who doesn't seem to be particularly enthralled with the "usual" pursuits of womanhood. Her indifference to having children and her dislike of gardening frame her as being out of the accepted range for married women of her day, and yet she is clearly the most interesting and sympathetic character in the story. Similarly mundane, Tribal Customs is a study in prejudice and expectations. Darcy is a young woman who is about to marry her boyfriend Joe with the story revolving around her first visit to meet his parents. Joe is part Native American, and the trouble begins when his family and family home don't match up to her expectations. All of the conflict in this story is rooted in the somewhat racist assumptions made by Darcy, and the resolution of the story revolves around her more or less accepting that. This story is a remarkably insightful study in how seemingly benign prejudice is still pernicious.
Many of Clingerman's stories focus on enjoying the little pleasures of life. In this vein, A Widow for Mr. Stevens presents the reader with two men, both sharing a hospital room. The protagonist Arthur has spent his life devoted to business and never gave much consideration to enjoying himself. His unseen roommate Jack, hidden behind a curtain that separates the room in two, has something Arthur does not: A window. Through the story Jack regales Arthur with stories of what he can see through the window in the park below. Because this is a Clingerman story, not everything is entirely as it seems, and in the end when Arthur moves from his side of the room to Jack's vacated bed, it turns out that Jack's view wasn't quite what he let on, and Arthur finally understands what he had been missing his entire life. The fact that people seem to fall into a rut of listlessly living their lives trying just to make ends meet is a recurring theme in Clingerman's work, and The Telling Day confronts this issue head on as Carl and Linda talk about how dissatisfied they have become with their lives of shepherding their kids to and from school while doing nothing of consequence but working and simply existing - and wondering if that is all there is to life. It isn't, and the story turns when they start remembering what it is they used to love about their lives and decide to try to rekindle that fire. Once again, it turns out that the resolution of the story is the realization that loving the little things in the world is what gives life meaning.
In Clingerman's fiction, loving little things doesn't just soothe your own soul and give your life meaning, it can also serve as the glue that binds people to the world they live in. In Threading a Closed Loop, Lenore and Doug have recently moved to Arizona for their child Jaime's health, and they simply aren't fitting in. Doug's business is faring poorly, and Lenore doesn't know anyone in town. Lenore finds her way to a local junk sale and flea market and finds a book about making string figures, and also finds Meg Rawlinson, and their shared love of little kindnesses turns Lenore's fortunes around, and Doug's love of string figures gives a shy man a way to socialize in a new community. Clingerman's fiction seems to be at its best when she is describing everyday women at a critical moment in their lives. In A Time to Be Bold, Cynthia Bishop is a woman who has sacrificed her chance at marriage and pretty much her entire social life to dedicate herself to the care f her younger brother. The story revolves around Cynthia's PTA activities and consequent interactions with the high school teachers at her brother's school. Or rather, the story focuses on her interactions with Mr. Davis and Ms. Betts - the object of her affections and her rival for said affections respectively. Eventually Cynthia makes the fateful decision to pursue Mr. Davis to San Francisco in order to head off a ploy by Ms. Betts, and then the story comes to a relatively satisfying close although the tale ends as soon as the critical turning point has resolved, essentially stopping the story more or less in media res, which is unusual but in this case, effective.
One of the few supernaturally themed stories in the later portion of the book, Top Hand has the feel of an Old West tall tale like the stories about Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan. The story features a preternaturally skilled cowboy named "the Kid" and his foil "Red", both of whom are described as having drifted into the area and gotten work at the same ranch as the narrator. The story wends through the narrator marveling at the Kid's skill as a ranch hand until everyone finds themselves at a small town dance where a disagreement over a woman leads Red to a deadly encounter and causes the Kid to drift onward. It is only after the pair have left that the ranch hands figure out who they were, and it is this revelation that gives the entire story a supernatural flair and elevates the entire story above the ordinary. Another story with a supernatural tinge, A Stranger and a Pilgrim recounts an encounter between a patient old woman waiting for a visitor from a far away place and the long-expected traveler. The meeting doesn't go quite the way the protagonist expects, and the story has some fairly heavy religious imagery thrown in, which was somewhat unexpected. I am not certain if Watermelon Weather contains speculative elements or if it is just so infused with the dreamlike nature of its protagonist's daily life that it seems to contain speculative fiction elements. This doesn't detract from the story, which features a woman who has what can only be called extremely lucid and odd dreams involving spaceships, violet grass and pink watermelons. Her family seems to accept these mental excursions with equanimity, and the story toddles along until everything wraps up with a very sweet little love story.
Another strength of Clingerman's fiction is her portrayal of wise but unexpectedly colorful older women, a strength that is clearly in evidence in The Birthday Party. in which Marguerite attends her grandmother's birthday party. At first Marguerite regards the party, forgotten until a reminder from her mother the morning of the event, as little more than an annoyance, barely outranking the dental appointment that she has earlier in the day (and which is rather humorously described in the story), but when her various aunts assemble for the celebration and begin to open up about their younger days, she gets a revelation that she never saw coming. The story glories in the bullheaded determination of youth and the lust for adventure, revealing layers within the collection of older women that one would never have expected given the staid and domestic setting the story is rooted within. On the other hand, not all older women in Clingerman's fiction are wise and colorful. In On the Nicer Side, Liz Temple is the amazingly conventional mother of an unwed pregnant daughter who spends much of the story worrying about what the neighbors might think if they found out about her child's condition and trying to push her daughter into giving up the impending newborn up for adoption. The story starts off with tragedy, which makes Mrs. Temple's actions seem fairly callous, and ends with more tragedy, which allows Mrs. Temple to redeem herself via the somewhat unanticipated kindness she displays. At the other end of the spectrum, The Father of Daughters focuses on Robin, a teenage girl whose only real problem is that she does not yet have the right date for the prom, a situation that exasperates her father. There isn't anything deep or meaningful to the story other than the fact that it focuses on a teenage girl and takes her concerns seriously.
The last story in the book, and serving as something of a fitting coda to the collection as a whole, is A Note from Eleanor, a melancholy tale of the relationship between two women, one young and lacking in any kind of social position, and one older and firmly ensconced in the upper echelons of the town she lives in. Their unlikely friendship is unusual and sweet, and benefits both of them, but like all friendships, life gets in the way and the two drift apart and return to one another a couple of times. That is, they drift apart and return to one another until they don't. It is a somewhat fitting end for the volume, as it contemplates how people might choose to meet their end, and how those who are close to them might miss their last chance to see their loved ones due to the everyday distractions of life. This is, ultimately, the fundamental truth that underlies most of Clingerman's fiction: Life happens when you aren't paying attention to it, and the best you can do is muddle through it.
Although the details of the stories in this collection are eclectic, the constant is the importance of the everyday, and the fact that ordinary people are fitting subjects for a story. More importantly, the dominant theme that runs through the entire volume is that women have stories that are worth telling. As I noted before, in some circles there is a refrain of wanting stories about "strong women", and there are some of those in these pages, but what is more notable is that there are women described in these stories that are allowed to be fully realized characters with flaws, foibles, and petty faults. The characters that appear in these stories could best be described as both everyday and interesting at the same time, as Clingerman manages to capture the exotic concealed within the familiar, and highlight the fact that even the most mundane-seeming individual contains hidden depths.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The Clingerman Files is a comprehensive collection of all of Mildred Clingerman's short fiction, encompassing her wide range of stories that range from the mundane doings of teenagers and old ladies to the exotic adventures of time travelers and alien space explorers. While Clingerman is mostly remembered as a science fiction author, with her stories frequently appearing in the pages of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, this collection contains a broader array of stories, including several that have no speculative fiction element at all that were originally published in outlets such as Good Housekeeping and Colliers. No matter whether the stories are fantastical or not, most of them feature ordinary people, often women, finding themselves at a critical juncture in their lives. To a certain extent, this collection could be regarded as an homage to the extraordinary nature of ordinary people.
Like many of Clingerman's stories, First Lesson is almost not a fantasy story. Or rather, it is a fantasy story that is so subtle that it could be real. A young woman has a dream in which her paratrooper husband dies in a training accident and enlists the assistance of a voodoo practitioner to weave a spell of protection around her spouse. Despite the fact show more that the protagonist believes in the magic in the story, there isn't any overt indication that belief is justified. As a result, this story exists in that hazy border between reality and fantasy. Clingerman's skill at giving the story a sense of place is on full display here, and the story feels comfortable and unsettling at the same time. Stickney and the Critic shares many of the same storytelling aspects with First Lesson, with the only difference being that the subtle fantasy element is an unseen malevolent entity residing in an out of the way well on an isolated farm. Once again, Clingerman makes the reader feel the setting - one can almost feel the hot and dusty winds that sweep across the farmstead. Once again, the story could be fantasy or it could simply be mundane coincidence, and that ambiguity makes it seem almost dreamlike, although it eventually veers into nightmare territory.
Stair Trick seems like it is going to be another story that seems like it is going to cloak its fantasy in ambiguity as a bartender does a recurring trick of going "downstairs" behind the bar to get items in a bar that doesn't have a basement. For most of the story it seems like this is just a clever way to entertain the patrons with some combination of mime and trickery, but then the story takes a turn and everything you thought about what was happening is wrong. This sort of story works in large part because it is contained in a collection that features some of Clingerman's more ambiguous stories, so the small twist that pops up feels much larger than it otherwise would. The Little Witch of Elm Street shares some thematic characteristics as well, as the story seems to be a perfectly ordinary story of a fussy woman, henpecked husband, and a horrifically terrible neighbor child named Nina, but it takes a turn towards the end that seems like it could just be coincidence. Like so much of Clingerman's work, the deliciousness of the story rests in the ambiguity of whether the pivotal event is simply coincidence or evidence of something supernatural, with the Little Witch carrying the added bonus of a quirky and interesting character in the form of Nina's sister Garnet.
Another story that rests comfortably in the twilight between fantasy and reality is A Day for Waving, which could probably best be described as a comforting ghost story. Seven or eight year old Eden lives with her domineering grandmother, vacant mother, and somewhat macabre-minded uncle (who happens to be almost exactly the same age as Eden). After a brief bit of background to give the reader an idea of the nature of the various characters and a glimpse into the fertile imagination of the narrator, the action moves on to an afternoon visit to the family grave plots, where Eden finds herself having a conversation with someone whose arrival is both unexpected and entirely predictable. The interesting part of the story is not in the resolution - essentially amounting to a ghost showing up to give its blessing to an impending event - but in the fact that one can never be sure if the narrative is actually happening or if it is just the vivid imagination of a young girl given free rein. The story is at turns frightening and comfortably cozy but at all turns remains decidedly ambiguous.
The volume contains a few alien first contact stories, starting with Minister Without Portfolio, which features mostly benevolent aliens and a grandmother whose color-blindness turns out to be an advantage rather than a disability. The twist in the story is easy to predict, but the presentation is so pleasant that one doesn’t mind. Birds Can’t Count is an alien encounter story with a slightly less approachable, even downright inscrutable, alien. The protagonist in the story is portrayed as perceptive, persistent, and adventurous, but by the end it is apparent that she might not be particularly bright, or at least not able to make certain connections that are hinted at in the story. The story is creepy, but in a comfortably quaint sort of way.
Clingerman's fiction sometimes veers too deep into the "cozy" direction and becomes a bit twee. One example of this tendency is The Word, a story about some diminutive aliens who have to go foraging for food on a planet filled with huge inhabitants. The brave explorers set out to essentially panhandle food with the use of a secret code word they have discovered is used by the natives. I'm not sure if I would call the resolution of the story a "twist" since it is pretty blatantly telegraphed throughout the text, and it is both cute and silly but probably a little bit too much so. The Wild Wood, which is ostensibly a Christmas story, is a much better creepy tale involving a mother who has established family Christmas traditions that she now regrets - specifically an annual trip to Mr. Cravolini's to purchase a tree. The story starts off feeling like it is a mundane story that involves incredibly creepy sexual harassment, and slowly morphs into something much creepier, until by the end the full body horror is revealed. The Gay Deceiver is another quite disturbing story in the collection, which starts out happy and cheerful, featuring a magically wonderful performer at a parade and his somewhat drab and colorless traveling partner. In the opening pages of the story, everything is beautiful and gleeful, but as the story goes on, the darker underlying secret of the whistling Harlequin at its center becomes more and more apparent until in the final few lines the terrible truth is revealed. In this story, Clingerman demonstrates her disturbing ability to take a well-known folk-tale and import it into the modern mundane world to expose its horrific reality.
A recurring figure in Clingerman's writing is the normally timid woman who finally gets fed up with her life. In some cases, as in The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak, such a character asserts her independence from the humdrum, constrained life she has been living by throwing all caution aside to embark upon a time traveling romance. In others, such as Winning Recipe, the protagonist merely figures out a way to confound and incapacitate a hated piece of machinery. These stories appear deceptively cozy, but are actually so incredibly sharply pointed that the reader should be careful not to cut themselves when reading them. The Day of the Green Velvet Cloak does have a beautiful used bookstore featured within its pages, which is an added bonus.
The protagonist of Letters from Laura is decidedly not a timid woman, but rather a young lady who has signed up to enjoy some time travel to ancient Crete. Told as a series of letters from Laura to her mother, her best friend Prue, and finally to the travel agent Laura had booked her excursion with, the story reveals Laura's expectations for her journey, and the reality that doesn't quite match them. It is silly and fun, but at the same time biting and incisive. While Laura is a no nonsense kind of woman albeit a bit misinformed to begin with, Reggie, the central character of The Last Prophet, can best be described as a well-informed milquetoast who has a message, but isn't able to get anyone interested in hearing it. The story kind of meanders and is about as uninteresting as Reggie himself until it turns out that everything was basically just a set-up for a kind of shaggy god twist at the end.
While many of Clingerman's stories are pointed, very few are quite as sharply honed as Mr. Sakrison's Halt. The protagonist of the story is a young woman who would travel to visit her grandparents in the rural South, and the last leg of her journey would always be on the Katy Local where she would meet up with a little old lady named Miss Mattie who rode the train constantly looking for the halt where her fiancee had gotten off the train many years before. Her quest is hampered by the fact that she doesn't quite remember where her long-lost love had gotten off the train, and it turns out that there is a very specific reason why she hasn't been able to find it despite riding the Katy Local for decades. The message of the story is delivered about as subtly as a club to the back of the head, but it is a message worth delivering.
One of the oft-repeated mantras is that "strong female characters" is a desirable goal for fiction writers hoping to eschew sexist portrayals in their writing. I have seen several authors claim "I can't be sexist because I included a strong female character in my story". I think this is a flawed viewpoint insofar as a "strong" female character is as much a stereotype as any other trope attached to female characters. What makes a story really good are interesting female characters, more to the point, female characters that have the freedom to be flawed human beings, and Red Heart and Blue Roses is an example of a story that has exactly that. The story is related by one woman to another while they share a hospital room: Katie, a bundle of nerves and anxiety, relates her tale of woe to the narrator who exists in a languid almost dream-like state most of the time. As the story unfolds, Katie recounts how she has become plagued by an odd young man that her son had brought as a guest for the holidays, and how the visitor had wormed his way into her family. From there, Katie's story gets progressively more disturbing, but a twist at the end brings it back into that realm of stories that exist in that hazy area between reality and unreality.
Although Clingerman was primarily a speculative fiction author, this collection includes a handful of stories that appear to be devoid of any speculative fiction elements. Little Girl tells the story of a pair of young girls taking the train as they journey from spending the summer in Iowa with their father and his new wife back to where their mother lives in Arizona. The story is told from the perspective of eight-year old Cissie, the older of the two sisters as she tries to navigate a train station late at night with her sister in tow all the while dealing with incredulous and annoying adults. There isn't much to this story, although there is a nice little character note for Cissie in that she reads books that at least one adult thinks are too adult for her. Another story lacking any speculative fiction element is Tutti Frutti Delight, which is basically a tale about a pair of high school girls with plans to take the world by storm and a crush on one of their teachers. The infatuation leads to about the end result that one would expect, although this doesn't really seem to slow down the protagonist's plans for the future other than to modestly redirect them. Another story focused on the love life of a teenager, You Remember Charles? focuses on Anne Holland and her infatuation with Charles, the most popular and desirable boy in her school. The story is a study in toxic masculinity and privilege, as it would be understating things to say that Charles turns out to be a miscreant, but gets away with his actions due to who his father is and, by extension, who he is. Anne, for her part, first enables Charles, and then pulls back, and then wistfully wonders whatever happened to him, winding up with about as happy an ending as she could have given the society she lived in.
The third story lacking in speculative fiction elements is The Stray, featuring a housewife living in rural Arizona as a protagonist, which seems to be at least somewhat autobiographical. She takes in a young woman that she finds wandering a nearby empty lot used as a hangout by a group of hippies. The story kind of meanders, with the main character simultaneously showing great care for her stray and expressing disdain for all of the members of the hippie community she had been living with. The very little bit of plot eventually resolves in a fairly serendipitous manner, but the story seems mostly to be aimed at providing a view into the lives of two women and how they deal with the world. This focus on the lives of ordinary women is something of a recurring theme in this set of non-speculative fiction stories, highlighting these characters and how they relate to the world around them. Not all of the ordinary stories focus on women however. Sorrow for the Need, for example is told from a woman's viewpoint, but that's almost entirely incidental to the story, which is basically about a married couple choosing the mundane lives they have settled into over an old friend with subversive political ideas. The story reads like a reaction to the McCarthy era Red Scare, and how it destroyed relationship. The entire story is laced through with regret, but regret tempered by how a kind of easy comfortable existence can sap away one's youthful idealism.
The Man Who Stole Tomorrow is a small story about a man who learns the value of time, and how to get more of it. There isn't really much more to the story, but it does contain a moderately clever little twist at its heart. This story, like several others penned by Clingerman, sits on the very edge of speculative fiction, as there is no explicit science fictional or fantastical element, but events in the story can be read as if they are, or they could be read as mere coincidences taking place in an entirely mundane world. Another story that rests on this ambiguous line is Grandma's Refuge, which deals with fond childhood memories of grandma and a shared hideaway to seek shelter from the desert heat and the occasional storm. Once again, there is no explicit fantasy element to the story, but a child's memories sometimes attribute powers to the adults in their lives and the story simply doesn't clarify whether these are real or are just the product of youthful imagination. Size 5½ B also follows this pattern, as a woman goes to buy shoes while beset by literary concepts and thinking dark thoughts about her oblivious and seemingly uncaring husband. Once again, it is unclear whether she actually is being assaulted by clichés, tediums, and ad men, while avoiding being classified in the majority or becoming a statistic, or if the story is just an elaborate fantasy playing out in the protagonist's head, but either way it has a dark turn and a rather unsettling conclusion.
Another story with a dark turn is Apologia, although saying it has a dark turn rather underplays just how creepy this brief little tale is. In just under two pages of text, Clingerman manages to set up a slightly unsettling back story and then pushes forward to an entirely unsettling denouement. With a story this short, there isn't much room for much beyond that, but like the very best of these sorts of little stories, it leaves the reader filled with questions. Far less fantastical, but almost as unsettling The Tea Party seemingly depicts nothing more than a pair of young girls having a tea party with their dolls, but everything about the scenario seems to be just slightly off kilter, There is nothing directly horrific about the story, but the author manages to fill the text with a kind of barely suppressed foreboding without even letting the reader know why it is there. While The Man Eater is not unsettling, it does seem to be headed in that direction for much of its length. Featuring a young Native American boy named Guillermo and his love for the pretty (and decidedly not Native American) but careless girl Debbie, the story seems destined for a terrible turn as Debbie takes advantage of her young suitor's affections to goad him into committing petty crimes. Just when the reader expects the story to take a dark turn, it instead turns into a lesson about what love means and how a fair world would treat people with differing status in different ways. The List, on the other hand, is incredibly unsettling, although it cannot fairly be said to be horrific except in the sense of anticipation. In the story, Mr. and Mrs. Adams have a polite conversation after putting their children to bed following what seems to have been a fairly ordinary family dinner. Their day's tasks however, seem to have included taking supplies to their hidden refuge where they intend to weather the possible collapse of society, and their conversation turns to how to make sure their children will reach the hidden cave in the event that neither of their parents are able to accompany them. The casual nature of this conversation about their plans for after the end of civilization is simply terrifying, and gives the story an almost surreal air.
In the realm of the mundane, The Vine is a story about a woman whose mental reservations about her impending pregnancy manifest in a myriad of ways, the most obvious of which is her decision to plant a set of vines along a new fence that her husband built mostly to keep an obnoxious neighbor at bay. The story revolves around the question of whether one should own cats or dogs, how some people simply don't observe boundaries very well, and resentments directed towards one's parents. There's nothing particularly out of the ordinary about the events in the story, but what makes it so extraordinary is how everything is contextualized from the viewpoint of a woman who doesn't seem to be particularly enthralled with the "usual" pursuits of womanhood. Her indifference to having children and her dislike of gardening frame her as being out of the accepted range for married women of her day, and yet she is clearly the most interesting and sympathetic character in the story. Similarly mundane, Tribal Customs is a study in prejudice and expectations. Darcy is a young woman who is about to marry her boyfriend Joe with the story revolving around her first visit to meet his parents. Joe is part Native American, and the trouble begins when his family and family home don't match up to her expectations. All of the conflict in this story is rooted in the somewhat racist assumptions made by Darcy, and the resolution of the story revolves around her more or less accepting that. This story is a remarkably insightful study in how seemingly benign prejudice is still pernicious.
Many of Clingerman's stories focus on enjoying the little pleasures of life. In this vein, A Widow for Mr. Stevens presents the reader with two men, both sharing a hospital room. The protagonist Arthur has spent his life devoted to business and never gave much consideration to enjoying himself. His unseen roommate Jack, hidden behind a curtain that separates the room in two, has something Arthur does not: A window. Through the story Jack regales Arthur with stories of what he can see through the window in the park below. Because this is a Clingerman story, not everything is entirely as it seems, and in the end when Arthur moves from his side of the room to Jack's vacated bed, it turns out that Jack's view wasn't quite what he let on, and Arthur finally understands what he had been missing his entire life. The fact that people seem to fall into a rut of listlessly living their lives trying just to make ends meet is a recurring theme in Clingerman's work, and The Telling Day confronts this issue head on as Carl and Linda talk about how dissatisfied they have become with their lives of shepherding their kids to and from school while doing nothing of consequence but working and simply existing - and wondering if that is all there is to life. It isn't, and the story turns when they start remembering what it is they used to love about their lives and decide to try to rekindle that fire. Once again, it turns out that the resolution of the story is the realization that loving the little things in the world is what gives life meaning.
In Clingerman's fiction, loving little things doesn't just soothe your own soul and give your life meaning, it can also serve as the glue that binds people to the world they live in. In Threading a Closed Loop, Lenore and Doug have recently moved to Arizona for their child Jaime's health, and they simply aren't fitting in. Doug's business is faring poorly, and Lenore doesn't know anyone in town. Lenore finds her way to a local junk sale and flea market and finds a book about making string figures, and also finds Meg Rawlinson, and their shared love of little kindnesses turns Lenore's fortunes around, and Doug's love of string figures gives a shy man a way to socialize in a new community. Clingerman's fiction seems to be at its best when she is describing everyday women at a critical moment in their lives. In A Time to Be Bold, Cynthia Bishop is a woman who has sacrificed her chance at marriage and pretty much her entire social life to dedicate herself to the care f her younger brother. The story revolves around Cynthia's PTA activities and consequent interactions with the high school teachers at her brother's school. Or rather, the story focuses on her interactions with Mr. Davis and Ms. Betts - the object of her affections and her rival for said affections respectively. Eventually Cynthia makes the fateful decision to pursue Mr. Davis to San Francisco in order to head off a ploy by Ms. Betts, and then the story comes to a relatively satisfying close although the tale ends as soon as the critical turning point has resolved, essentially stopping the story more or less in media res, which is unusual but in this case, effective.
One of the few supernaturally themed stories in the later portion of the book, Top Hand has the feel of an Old West tall tale like the stories about Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan. The story features a preternaturally skilled cowboy named "the Kid" and his foil "Red", both of whom are described as having drifted into the area and gotten work at the same ranch as the narrator. The story wends through the narrator marveling at the Kid's skill as a ranch hand until everyone finds themselves at a small town dance where a disagreement over a woman leads Red to a deadly encounter and causes the Kid to drift onward. It is only after the pair have left that the ranch hands figure out who they were, and it is this revelation that gives the entire story a supernatural flair and elevates the entire story above the ordinary. Another story with a supernatural tinge, A Stranger and a Pilgrim recounts an encounter between a patient old woman waiting for a visitor from a far away place and the long-expected traveler. The meeting doesn't go quite the way the protagonist expects, and the story has some fairly heavy religious imagery thrown in, which was somewhat unexpected. I am not certain if Watermelon Weather contains speculative elements or if it is just so infused with the dreamlike nature of its protagonist's daily life that it seems to contain speculative fiction elements. This doesn't detract from the story, which features a woman who has what can only be called extremely lucid and odd dreams involving spaceships, violet grass and pink watermelons. Her family seems to accept these mental excursions with equanimity, and the story toddles along until everything wraps up with a very sweet little love story.
Another strength of Clingerman's fiction is her portrayal of wise but unexpectedly colorful older women, a strength that is clearly in evidence in The Birthday Party. in which Marguerite attends her grandmother's birthday party. At first Marguerite regards the party, forgotten until a reminder from her mother the morning of the event, as little more than an annoyance, barely outranking the dental appointment that she has earlier in the day (and which is rather humorously described in the story), but when her various aunts assemble for the celebration and begin to open up about their younger days, she gets a revelation that she never saw coming. The story glories in the bullheaded determination of youth and the lust for adventure, revealing layers within the collection of older women that one would never have expected given the staid and domestic setting the story is rooted within. On the other hand, not all older women in Clingerman's fiction are wise and colorful. In On the Nicer Side, Liz Temple is the amazingly conventional mother of an unwed pregnant daughter who spends much of the story worrying about what the neighbors might think if they found out about her child's condition and trying to push her daughter into giving up the impending newborn up for adoption. The story starts off with tragedy, which makes Mrs. Temple's actions seem fairly callous, and ends with more tragedy, which allows Mrs. Temple to redeem herself via the somewhat unanticipated kindness she displays. At the other end of the spectrum, The Father of Daughters focuses on Robin, a teenage girl whose only real problem is that she does not yet have the right date for the prom, a situation that exasperates her father. There isn't anything deep or meaningful to the story other than the fact that it focuses on a teenage girl and takes her concerns seriously.
The last story in the book, and serving as something of a fitting coda to the collection as a whole, is A Note from Eleanor, a melancholy tale of the relationship between two women, one young and lacking in any kind of social position, and one older and firmly ensconced in the upper echelons of the town she lives in. Their unlikely friendship is unusual and sweet, and benefits both of them, but like all friendships, life gets in the way and the two drift apart and return to one another a couple of times. That is, they drift apart and return to one another until they don't. It is a somewhat fitting end for the volume, as it contemplates how people might choose to meet their end, and how those who are close to them might miss their last chance to see their loved ones due to the everyday distractions of life. This is, ultimately, the fundamental truth that underlies most of Clingerman's fiction: Life happens when you aren't paying attention to it, and the best you can do is muddle through it.
Although the details of the stories in this collection are eclectic, the constant is the importance of the everyday, and the fact that ordinary people are fitting subjects for a story. More importantly, the dominant theme that runs through the entire volume is that women have stories that are worth telling. As I noted before, in some circles there is a refrain of wanting stories about "strong women", and there are some of those in these pages, but what is more notable is that there are women described in these stories that are allowed to be fully realized characters with flaws, foibles, and petty faults. The characters that appear in these stories could best be described as both everyday and interesting at the same time, as Clingerman manages to capture the exotic concealed within the familiar, and highlight the fact that even the most mundane-seeming individual contains hidden depths.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Disclosure: I received this book as an Advance Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.
Sunday is a member of the starship Eriophora, and has been for millions upon millions of years. Traveling at relativistic speeds, spending most of her time in suspended animation, Sunday and her fellow crew members are called upon by the ship's AI., nicknamed "the Chimp", whenever it faces a problem that requires human creativity to solve. Despite being "the Chimp", the ship's computer essentially runs everything on Eiophora, so when it turns out that it is an an amoral and inhuman overseer that regards the human crew as nothing more than mission assets to be discarded when their cost outweighs their utility, fomenting a revolt proves to be somewhat difficult.
The story of The Freeze-Frame Revolution starts off by establishing the "normal" that Sunday lives within. The Eriophora is a massive ship carved from rock surrounding a black hole that has been flung around the Milky Way on a mission to build gates, presumably to pave the way for other travelers to follow. The ship is mostly run by an A.i. dubbed the Chimp, which pilots the ship and builds gates on its own most of the time, but once in a while it confronts a problem that its extensive programming is ill-equipped to handle. For such situations, the Eriophora has a crew, who spend years show more on end in suspended animation and are thawed out once in a great while to troubleshoot. The exact number of crew is never stated, but they clearly number in the thousands, with only a handful being active at any given point in time, brought out of hibernation in groups that are determined at the whim of the Chimp. When the novel opens, the Eriophora has been traveling for the equivalent of sixty-six million years (although given relativistic effects, there is a serious question about what that actually means), and has made at least one complete circuit of the Milky Way.
On the surface, The Freeze-Frame Revolution is about a revolt, or more accurately, a conspiracy to stage a revolt. Sunday and her friend Lian are frequent work partners and occasional sex partners, so when Lian starts expressing doubts about their mission in general and the Chimp specifically, Sunday is forced to examine her own thoughts on the matter. When Lian dies in what is written off as an accident and Sunday makes a rather horrifying discovery concerning roughly three thousand crew members who were "deprecated" by the Chim, Sunday finds herself drawn into a long and secretive conspiracy in which crew members communicate with one another across thousands of years by hiding messages in songs, artwork, and other secret communiques. The trouble the conspirators face is that not only does the Chimp have cameras and monitoring devices throughout the Eriophora, it can literally look through their eyes using implants that all of the crew members carry within themselves. Thus, the conspirators must not only communicate secretly, they must do so in a manner that hides their communications even when they are reading them.
The difficulties the conspirators face are further compounded by the fact that the Chimp essentially resides throughout the entire ship, and can move itself from place to place at a whim. This means that not only do they have to figure out a way to topple a nigh-omnipresent A.I., they have to find a way to do this when it is vulnerable and more quickly than it can react. This, as one might expect, proves to be a difficult prospect. The story runs through some twists and turns, but the real depth of the book comes from the oddities and unanswered questions. The Chimp is an inhuman creature, without emotion or feeling, and in some cases without memory or even an understanding of what it has done in the past or what it is doing in the present. For all of the characterization that it is presented with in the story, and all of the emotion that Sunday invests it with from her end, time and again the story reminds the reader that the Chimp is merely an A.I. and only as good (or as evil) as its long-dead programmers made it.
Much of the book is framed as a conflict between humans on the one hand, and an inhuman A.I. on the other, but Watts' includes background details that call that assessment into question. The crew are ostensibly human, but as the details of their childhood and training come to light, one starts to question that categorization. Though never explicitly stated, the details that are peppered throughout the story suggest that the crew members were specially selected for the mission, and were quite possibly engineered specifically for it. There are strong hints that they were trained, conditioned, and physically modified in ways that seem to have stripped at least some of their humanity away. The end result is that one has to wonder if they can fairly be characterized as human any more, or if they are, as the Chimp views them, merely components of the Eriophora to be evaluated solely on the basis of their usefulness to the mission.
But questions about the humanity of the crew only serve to raise questions about the continuing humanity of those who were left behind. At the time the story opens, the Eriophora has been travelling for sixty-six million "Earth" years, enough time for the Tyrannosaurus Rex to evolve into a chicken and longer than the time it took for humans to evolve from shrew-like creatures. Given that length of time, and the fact that the Chimp apparently hasn't heard from "Mission Control" for millions of subjective years, one has to question whether there is anyone left "back home" to benefit from the mission. Further, in light of this realization, the infrequent mysterious "monsters" that burst from freshly completed gates take on a potentially different character: Could they be the descendants of humanity desperately trying to communicate with the Eriophora and trying to get the ship to stop its now counterproductive mission?
The fact that the Eriophora has lost contact with humanity gives the entire story a kind of unmoored, dream-like quality, and also serves as a metaphor for the lack of humanity that seems to run through both sides of the conflict in the book. What makes The Freeze-Frame Revolution so good, like so much other good science fiction, is that the story is filled with questions that eat at the reader long after they have finished the book. For example, one is left wondering what the crew of the Eriophora plan to do once they throw off the yoke of the Chimp - even if they could get off the ship, which seems unlikely, they seem to have no skills other than those needed to aid the ship in its mission. Will they simply continue to travel the galaxy building gates until they die, just without the Chimp being around? It is fairly apparent that keeping all (or even a substantial part) of the crew awake all the time would rapidly deplete the ship's resources, so who gets to decide who is awake and who sleeps, and how the crew is rotated (if they are rotated at all). The ship has a vast archive of stored information, and finding space for this enormous volume of data is a significant plot point in the story, but one is left wondering what the point of keeping the archive is. The archive can't be sent "back" for anyone to use, and no one aboard the ship seems to use it for anything in particular. One crew member hopes that the mission will last long enough that he can watch the ongoing heat death of the Universe, but he seems to be motivated by nothing but idle curiosity. It seems that the ultimate point of The Freeze-Frame Revolution is that there is no point to human life. That idle curiosity is all that we have to motivate us, and that may have to be enough. That the only purpose human life has is to make one's own choices and there is no further goal than that. Watts seems resolutely determined not to offer any easy answers, and that is part of what makes this book brilliant.
In the final analysis, The Freeze-Frame Revolution is a multilayered story that has a set-up that seems to be little more than a conspiracy to revolt set in a hard science setting, but which reveals deeper questions about the nature of the characters that inhabit the story and the nature of humanity in general. Watts presents a dystopia that, even if the protagonists succeed, will only be slightly less dystopian, and forces the reader to confront the ways in which this dystopian vision so closely mirrors the world we currently live in. This is a book that is full of big ideas, intricate conspiracies, and countless thorny questions that will stick with you long after you have turned the last page.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Sunday is a member of the starship Eriophora, and has been for millions upon millions of years. Traveling at relativistic speeds, spending most of her time in suspended animation, Sunday and her fellow crew members are called upon by the ship's AI., nicknamed "the Chimp", whenever it faces a problem that requires human creativity to solve. Despite being "the Chimp", the ship's computer essentially runs everything on Eiophora, so when it turns out that it is an an amoral and inhuman overseer that regards the human crew as nothing more than mission assets to be discarded when their cost outweighs their utility, fomenting a revolt proves to be somewhat difficult.
The story of The Freeze-Frame Revolution starts off by establishing the "normal" that Sunday lives within. The Eriophora is a massive ship carved from rock surrounding a black hole that has been flung around the Milky Way on a mission to build gates, presumably to pave the way for other travelers to follow. The ship is mostly run by an A.i. dubbed the Chimp, which pilots the ship and builds gates on its own most of the time, but once in a while it confronts a problem that its extensive programming is ill-equipped to handle. For such situations, the Eriophora has a crew, who spend years show more on end in suspended animation and are thawed out once in a great while to troubleshoot. The exact number of crew is never stated, but they clearly number in the thousands, with only a handful being active at any given point in time, brought out of hibernation in groups that are determined at the whim of the Chimp. When the novel opens, the Eriophora has been traveling for the equivalent of sixty-six million years (although given relativistic effects, there is a serious question about what that actually means), and has made at least one complete circuit of the Milky Way.
On the surface, The Freeze-Frame Revolution is about a revolt, or more accurately, a conspiracy to stage a revolt. Sunday and her friend Lian are frequent work partners and occasional sex partners, so when Lian starts expressing doubts about their mission in general and the Chimp specifically, Sunday is forced to examine her own thoughts on the matter. When Lian dies in what is written off as an accident and Sunday makes a rather horrifying discovery concerning roughly three thousand crew members who were "deprecated" by the Chim, Sunday finds herself drawn into a long and secretive conspiracy in which crew members communicate with one another across thousands of years by hiding messages in songs, artwork, and other secret communiques. The trouble the conspirators face is that not only does the Chimp have cameras and monitoring devices throughout the Eriophora, it can literally look through their eyes using implants that all of the crew members carry within themselves. Thus, the conspirators must not only communicate secretly, they must do so in a manner that hides their communications even when they are reading them.
The difficulties the conspirators face are further compounded by the fact that the Chimp essentially resides throughout the entire ship, and can move itself from place to place at a whim. This means that not only do they have to figure out a way to topple a nigh-omnipresent A.I., they have to find a way to do this when it is vulnerable and more quickly than it can react. This, as one might expect, proves to be a difficult prospect. The story runs through some twists and turns, but the real depth of the book comes from the oddities and unanswered questions. The Chimp is an inhuman creature, without emotion or feeling, and in some cases without memory or even an understanding of what it has done in the past or what it is doing in the present. For all of the characterization that it is presented with in the story, and all of the emotion that Sunday invests it with from her end, time and again the story reminds the reader that the Chimp is merely an A.I. and only as good (or as evil) as its long-dead programmers made it.
Much of the book is framed as a conflict between humans on the one hand, and an inhuman A.I. on the other, but Watts' includes background details that call that assessment into question. The crew are ostensibly human, but as the details of their childhood and training come to light, one starts to question that categorization. Though never explicitly stated, the details that are peppered throughout the story suggest that the crew members were specially selected for the mission, and were quite possibly engineered specifically for it. There are strong hints that they were trained, conditioned, and physically modified in ways that seem to have stripped at least some of their humanity away. The end result is that one has to wonder if they can fairly be characterized as human any more, or if they are, as the Chimp views them, merely components of the Eriophora to be evaluated solely on the basis of their usefulness to the mission.
But questions about the humanity of the crew only serve to raise questions about the continuing humanity of those who were left behind. At the time the story opens, the Eriophora has been travelling for sixty-six million "Earth" years, enough time for the Tyrannosaurus Rex to evolve into a chicken and longer than the time it took for humans to evolve from shrew-like creatures. Given that length of time, and the fact that the Chimp apparently hasn't heard from "Mission Control" for millions of subjective years, one has to question whether there is anyone left "back home" to benefit from the mission. Further, in light of this realization, the infrequent mysterious "monsters" that burst from freshly completed gates take on a potentially different character: Could they be the descendants of humanity desperately trying to communicate with the Eriophora and trying to get the ship to stop its now counterproductive mission?
The fact that the Eriophora has lost contact with humanity gives the entire story a kind of unmoored, dream-like quality, and also serves as a metaphor for the lack of humanity that seems to run through both sides of the conflict in the book. What makes The Freeze-Frame Revolution so good, like so much other good science fiction, is that the story is filled with questions that eat at the reader long after they have finished the book. For example, one is left wondering what the crew of the Eriophora plan to do once they throw off the yoke of the Chimp - even if they could get off the ship, which seems unlikely, they seem to have no skills other than those needed to aid the ship in its mission. Will they simply continue to travel the galaxy building gates until they die, just without the Chimp being around? It is fairly apparent that keeping all (or even a substantial part) of the crew awake all the time would rapidly deplete the ship's resources, so who gets to decide who is awake and who sleeps, and how the crew is rotated (if they are rotated at all). The ship has a vast archive of stored information, and finding space for this enormous volume of data is a significant plot point in the story, but one is left wondering what the point of keeping the archive is. The archive can't be sent "back" for anyone to use, and no one aboard the ship seems to use it for anything in particular. One crew member hopes that the mission will last long enough that he can watch the ongoing heat death of the Universe, but he seems to be motivated by nothing but idle curiosity. It seems that the ultimate point of The Freeze-Frame Revolution is that there is no point to human life. That idle curiosity is all that we have to motivate us, and that may have to be enough. That the only purpose human life has is to make one's own choices and there is no further goal than that. Watts seems resolutely determined not to offer any easy answers, and that is part of what makes this book brilliant.
In the final analysis, The Freeze-Frame Revolution is a multilayered story that has a set-up that seems to be little more than a conspiracy to revolt set in a hard science setting, but which reveals deeper questions about the nature of the characters that inhabit the story and the nature of humanity in general. Watts presents a dystopia that, even if the protagonists succeed, will only be slightly less dystopian, and forces the reader to confront the ways in which this dystopian vision so closely mirrors the world we currently live in. This is a book that is full of big ideas, intricate conspiracies, and countless thorny questions that will stick with you long after you have turned the last page.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The Poppy War is R.F. Kuang's debut novel, and it is a magnificent debut. Set in a thinly disguised fantasy version of China (called Nikara in the novel) the story follows Rin as she goes from being an impoverished and despised war orphan to being a powerful and despised war leader. Along the way, Rin faces obstacles stemming from her poverty and social standing, overcoming them with a dogged single-mindedness that draws the reader in and conceals the fact that Rin is, ultimately, really a frightening and in many ways unpleasant person. The true brilliance of this book is that Kuang guides the reader along Rin's path in such a skillful manner, making every step seem so perfectly reasonable that one doesn't realize how terrible the destination is until it is imminent and inevitable.
The story follows Rin, who is a war orphan of the last conflict between Nikara and the Murgen Federation who has been taken in by the Fang family, not out of the goodness of the Fang's hearts, but rather because families with fewer than a certain number of children were required by law to take in war orphans. As the Fangs clearly didn't really want to take in a war orphan, they provide for Rin, but require her to work in their rather crooked business and take the first opportunity they can to try to arrange a marriage for her that will work to their benefit. To escape the unwanted marriage, Rin hatches a desperate plan: She will study for an take the nationwide examination that grants admission show more to the various academies that prepare entrants for prestigious jobs as teachers, bureaucrats, and military officers. Rin attacks the task (and every other obstacle that she comes across in the story) with a single-minded determination that serves as one of the dominant character traits for the character throughout the novel, and this trait is both Rin's greatest strength, and what makes her dangerous to everyone around her.
It is readily apparent that Kuang has drawn heavily on Chinese history and mythology to build her fantasy world: Even with my relatively moderate knowledge of Chinese history and legends, I recognized several elements of The Poppy War as having been adapted therefrom. One should not come away thinking that this is a weakness of the novel, but rather that these serve as little Easter Eggs that enhance the story for those who can spot them. I think it is reasonably likely that I missed some, but there ones that I did notice were pretty obvious: The Murgen Federation stands in for the Japanese, Hesperia takes the role of Europeans complete with Hesperian trading enclaves and meddling in Nikaran politics, and the Hinterlands are the steppes of Asia from whence the Mongol-analogous Hinterlanders hail. This borrowing of Chinese history and folklore to serve as a framework to build a fantasy world is similar to the manner in which most Eurocentric fantasy uses European history and folklore to build a fantasy world. This makes the book feel simultaneously comfortable and approachable while being notably different in tone and focus.
For the most part, the story is the story of Rin's coming of age, as she grows from a child into an adult, and the reader discovers the world she inhabits as she does. As she takes each step of her journey, Rin seems convinced that if she can just overcome the obstacles right in front of her, she will have smooth sailing thereafter. The trouble is that Rin doesn't know what lies beyond the next metaphorical hill because so much information about the society she lives in - both its history and its current structure - has been obscured, either by being intentionally hidden or lost to the vagaries of time. "Forgetting", whether as the result of official policy to occlude the truth, or just because the historical record gets misty with age, has a price, and in The Poppy War the full extent of that price is driven home time again to Rin specifically, and Nikara in general.
Throughout the story, layer upon layer of falsehood is peeled back as Rin progresses first through her studies and then through the ranks of the Nikaran military. Much of Nikaran history and culture is based upon false information, much of intentionally spread by the ruling class in an effort to avoid facing inconvenient truths that would threaten their position, but when a real threat emerges in the form of an aggressive Murgen Federation, this policy of disinformation serves to hinder Nikaran efforts to fend off the foreign threat. Through the story, it becomes clear that Nikaran isolationism, insularity, and love of secrecy has served the nation poorly. One of the dominant themes that runs through this book is that while disinformation may appear to create stability for a time, it is only the illusion of stability, and when the veneer comes off everything is so much worse than it would have been has the Nikaran nation simply faced its history head on, sins and all. The truly masterful part of this book is that all of this sneaks up on the reader, just as it sneaks up on Rin and her peers. Because the world is presented through Rin's eyes, and thus Nikaran eyes, the built in assumptions of a Nikaran are baked into the presented viewpoint, and consequently, when the deceptions inherent in that world view are stripped away, it is an appropriately jarring experience.
If this book has a weakness, it is that Kuang is clearly a believer in Chekov's Gun. If something odd or unusual appears in an early chapter, it is almost certain that it will be of crucial importance later in the story. From the mystery of the fate of the island of Speer and the Speerlies, to the oddities of Master Jiang, to the enigmatic and superlatively talented upperclassman Altan, pretty much every curiosity that pops into the narrative turns out to be significant in some manner. As weaknesses go, this one is pretty minor, but this writing technique is used so often in the book that it is noticeable. One should also note that this is the first book in what is planned to be a trilogy, so while it does have a reasonably satisfying conclusion, there are significant loose ends left hanging at the close of the story.
The Poppy War is, quite simply, an excellent novel. Rin is not exactly a "likable" protagonist, but she is a protagonist that one will root for, even as she follows an increasingly dark and dangerous path. Kuang's Nikara is a brilliantly executed fantasy world, that is so full of color, intrigue, contradictions, and three-dimensional characters that it almost feels real. In Kuang's hands, Nikara is a place that feels both familiar and fresh at the same time, with a story that is cruel and harsh and yet is also fanciful and imaginative at the same time. This is not a book for the faint-hearted, as it tackles some rather grim and gritty topics, but it is a book that is well-worth reading.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The story follows Rin, who is a war orphan of the last conflict between Nikara and the Murgen Federation who has been taken in by the Fang family, not out of the goodness of the Fang's hearts, but rather because families with fewer than a certain number of children were required by law to take in war orphans. As the Fangs clearly didn't really want to take in a war orphan, they provide for Rin, but require her to work in their rather crooked business and take the first opportunity they can to try to arrange a marriage for her that will work to their benefit. To escape the unwanted marriage, Rin hatches a desperate plan: She will study for an take the nationwide examination that grants admission show more to the various academies that prepare entrants for prestigious jobs as teachers, bureaucrats, and military officers. Rin attacks the task (and every other obstacle that she comes across in the story) with a single-minded determination that serves as one of the dominant character traits for the character throughout the novel, and this trait is both Rin's greatest strength, and what makes her dangerous to everyone around her.
It is readily apparent that Kuang has drawn heavily on Chinese history and mythology to build her fantasy world: Even with my relatively moderate knowledge of Chinese history and legends, I recognized several elements of The Poppy War as having been adapted therefrom. One should not come away thinking that this is a weakness of the novel, but rather that these serve as little Easter Eggs that enhance the story for those who can spot them. I think it is reasonably likely that I missed some, but there ones that I did notice were pretty obvious: The Murgen Federation stands in for the Japanese, Hesperia takes the role of Europeans complete with Hesperian trading enclaves and meddling in Nikaran politics, and the Hinterlands are the steppes of Asia from whence the Mongol-analogous Hinterlanders hail. This borrowing of Chinese history and folklore to serve as a framework to build a fantasy world is similar to the manner in which most Eurocentric fantasy uses European history and folklore to build a fantasy world. This makes the book feel simultaneously comfortable and approachable while being notably different in tone and focus.
For the most part, the story is the story of Rin's coming of age, as she grows from a child into an adult, and the reader discovers the world she inhabits as she does. As she takes each step of her journey, Rin seems convinced that if she can just overcome the obstacles right in front of her, she will have smooth sailing thereafter. The trouble is that Rin doesn't know what lies beyond the next metaphorical hill because so much information about the society she lives in - both its history and its current structure - has been obscured, either by being intentionally hidden or lost to the vagaries of time. "Forgetting", whether as the result of official policy to occlude the truth, or just because the historical record gets misty with age, has a price, and in The Poppy War the full extent of that price is driven home time again to Rin specifically, and Nikara in general.
Throughout the story, layer upon layer of falsehood is peeled back as Rin progresses first through her studies and then through the ranks of the Nikaran military. Much of Nikaran history and culture is based upon false information, much of intentionally spread by the ruling class in an effort to avoid facing inconvenient truths that would threaten their position, but when a real threat emerges in the form of an aggressive Murgen Federation, this policy of disinformation serves to hinder Nikaran efforts to fend off the foreign threat. Through the story, it becomes clear that Nikaran isolationism, insularity, and love of secrecy has served the nation poorly. One of the dominant themes that runs through this book is that while disinformation may appear to create stability for a time, it is only the illusion of stability, and when the veneer comes off everything is so much worse than it would have been has the Nikaran nation simply faced its history head on, sins and all. The truly masterful part of this book is that all of this sneaks up on the reader, just as it sneaks up on Rin and her peers. Because the world is presented through Rin's eyes, and thus Nikaran eyes, the built in assumptions of a Nikaran are baked into the presented viewpoint, and consequently, when the deceptions inherent in that world view are stripped away, it is an appropriately jarring experience.
If this book has a weakness, it is that Kuang is clearly a believer in Chekov's Gun. If something odd or unusual appears in an early chapter, it is almost certain that it will be of crucial importance later in the story. From the mystery of the fate of the island of Speer and the Speerlies, to the oddities of Master Jiang, to the enigmatic and superlatively talented upperclassman Altan, pretty much every curiosity that pops into the narrative turns out to be significant in some manner. As weaknesses go, this one is pretty minor, but this writing technique is used so often in the book that it is noticeable. One should also note that this is the first book in what is planned to be a trilogy, so while it does have a reasonably satisfying conclusion, there are significant loose ends left hanging at the close of the story.
The Poppy War is, quite simply, an excellent novel. Rin is not exactly a "likable" protagonist, but she is a protagonist that one will root for, even as she follows an increasingly dark and dangerous path. Kuang's Nikara is a brilliantly executed fantasy world, that is so full of color, intrigue, contradictions, and three-dimensional characters that it almost feels real. In Kuang's hands, Nikara is a place that feels both familiar and fresh at the same time, with a story that is cruel and harsh and yet is also fanciful and imaginative at the same time. This is not a book for the faint-hearted, as it tackles some rather grim and gritty topics, but it is a book that is well-worth reading.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Babylon's Ashes is the sixth book in the Expanse series, and is essentially the second part of the story that was begun in Nemesis Games. As this novel opens up, the heroes have been reunited, but the Earth is still under siege and Inaros' splinter portion of the OPA still holds the alien gateway to the thousands of extra-Solar worlds. Even though Holden, Naomi, Alex and Amos are reunited, and Avasarala and Bobbi have survived to try to salvage something out of the wreckage of the inner planets, the "free Navy" still seems to hold all the cards and our heroes still have their backs up against the wall.
The entire Expanse series of novels has a few themes running through it, and Babylon's Ashes is no exception. The only odd thing about this novel is that one of the themes is not "Holden makes any situation he comes into contact with worse", but the other - "Humans continue to try to kill one another in the face of inscrutable alien technology" - is definitely to be found here. The grievances that caused Inaros' and his followers to launch their attack on Earth are rooted in the very existence of the alien gateway to the stars that has formed the core storyline that runs through the entire series. Fearful at being left behind now that they are no longer needed, Inaros' radical group of Belters leveraged the existing grievances the denizens of the outer planets had before the protomolecule opened up a thousand new worlds to colonize, and once they had obtained a sufficient show more power base, they lashed out and murdered hundreds of millions of people on Earth, essentially wrecking the planet (and in the process, almost unthinkingly dooming the people they claimed to be representing). The interesting twist on the running theme is that even though the inscrutable alien technology is the primary driver of the conflict in this novel, it doesn't really appear in it much. The novel is essentially about the consequences of introducing humanity to alien forces, but none of those consequences actually flow from the actions of the alien presence.
This novel continues the practice of rotating between viewpoint characters in each chapter, but unlike previous volumes, the range of viewpoint characters is not limited to a handful of critical individuals. Instead, there are at least seventeen viewpoint characters in this novel, including both Chrisjen Avasarala, Fred Johnson, and Marcos Inaros. The most frequent viewpoint characters are Holden, who is as close as this series has to a central protagonist, and Pa, one of Marcos' fleet captains, but we also have chapters told from the perspective of other familiar character such as Amos, Alex, Naomi, Prax, Bobbie, and even Filip. This works to show just how expansive the conflict is as it reaches across the entire Solar System and affects nearly every human within it, and also emphasizes that every previous element of the series has been leading to the events in this volume, Equally important to the breadth of characters featured is exactly who is featured - the viewpoints expressed come from all sides of the conflict, and in many cases, multiple social levels within each side, resulting in a multifaceted perspective on the interplanetary war. Using the rotating viewpoint has always been an element of this series, but in Babylon's Ashes, the rotating viewpoint is not merely an interesting literary device, it is an integral part of telling the story.
Much of the action in this book is centered on the ongoing war started in Nemesis Games. The book opens with the Earth still subjected to the asteroid bombardment that has killed billions, the Martian government in disarray, and the OPA so divided against itself that it is often difficult to determine who is friend and who is foe. While one might go into the novel feeling like the heroes should rise up in righteous rage and retaliate for the atrocities committed by Inaros' Free Navy, the authors don't let them have that easy of a solution, and that is what makes this story so very compelling. The plot turns as much on delicate political negotiations as it does on military strategy and derring do, which is perfectly in keeping with this series. The only drawback to this is that if one goes into this story expecting to see the villains punished and the virtuous vindicated, then you are likely to be disappointed. Attaining victory, or even something that resembles a settlement, requires compromise and sacrifice from everyone involved, and those who are unwilling to do either almost inevitably end up on the short end of the stick. Corey has created a harsh, unforgiving universe, and this is a harsh, unforgiving story.
Even though the Expanse series is destined to become a nine book series, this volume feels like the end of a major arc. Certainly it is the second half of the story started in Nemesis Games, but it is more than that. This book serves as an effective conclusion for most of the plot threads that have run through the series since Leviathan Wakes. Conflicts are resolved, allies and enemies die or are otherwise removed from the board, there are losses, victories, and compromises, and long-held secrets are forced into the open. This is not to say that there are no remaining mysteries to be solved: The inscrutable alien technology is still inscrutable, at least two inimical forces still lurk out in the void, and while the raging fires have been put out, one can still see the smoldering embers that litter the landscape of the Solar System. Ultimately, this book manages the difficult trick of being both an ending of a number of long-running story arcs, and a promise of a fresh set of new ones at the same time.
By the time a series reaches its sixth volume, it is relatively common for the series to begin to drift, with books filled with padding simply providing pages of nothing to increase the word count. With Babylon's Ashes, the Expanse has managed to avoid this fate. Instead, Corey grabbed all of the characters and plot threads that have been built up over the five previous books and wrapped them into a story filled with action and intrigue. After Babylon's Ashes everything about the Expanse is clearly going to be dramatically changed, but the series is in no danger of slowing down at all.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The entire Expanse series of novels has a few themes running through it, and Babylon's Ashes is no exception. The only odd thing about this novel is that one of the themes is not "Holden makes any situation he comes into contact with worse", but the other - "Humans continue to try to kill one another in the face of inscrutable alien technology" - is definitely to be found here. The grievances that caused Inaros' and his followers to launch their attack on Earth are rooted in the very existence of the alien gateway to the stars that has formed the core storyline that runs through the entire series. Fearful at being left behind now that they are no longer needed, Inaros' radical group of Belters leveraged the existing grievances the denizens of the outer planets had before the protomolecule opened up a thousand new worlds to colonize, and once they had obtained a sufficient show more power base, they lashed out and murdered hundreds of millions of people on Earth, essentially wrecking the planet (and in the process, almost unthinkingly dooming the people they claimed to be representing). The interesting twist on the running theme is that even though the inscrutable alien technology is the primary driver of the conflict in this novel, it doesn't really appear in it much. The novel is essentially about the consequences of introducing humanity to alien forces, but none of those consequences actually flow from the actions of the alien presence.
This novel continues the practice of rotating between viewpoint characters in each chapter, but unlike previous volumes, the range of viewpoint characters is not limited to a handful of critical individuals. Instead, there are at least seventeen viewpoint characters in this novel, including both Chrisjen Avasarala, Fred Johnson, and Marcos Inaros. The most frequent viewpoint characters are Holden, who is as close as this series has to a central protagonist, and Pa, one of Marcos' fleet captains, but we also have chapters told from the perspective of other familiar character such as Amos, Alex, Naomi, Prax, Bobbie, and even Filip. This works to show just how expansive the conflict is as it reaches across the entire Solar System and affects nearly every human within it, and also emphasizes that every previous element of the series has been leading to the events in this volume, Equally important to the breadth of characters featured is exactly who is featured - the viewpoints expressed come from all sides of the conflict, and in many cases, multiple social levels within each side, resulting in a multifaceted perspective on the interplanetary war. Using the rotating viewpoint has always been an element of this series, but in Babylon's Ashes, the rotating viewpoint is not merely an interesting literary device, it is an integral part of telling the story.
Much of the action in this book is centered on the ongoing war started in Nemesis Games. The book opens with the Earth still subjected to the asteroid bombardment that has killed billions, the Martian government in disarray, and the OPA so divided against itself that it is often difficult to determine who is friend and who is foe. While one might go into the novel feeling like the heroes should rise up in righteous rage and retaliate for the atrocities committed by Inaros' Free Navy, the authors don't let them have that easy of a solution, and that is what makes this story so very compelling. The plot turns as much on delicate political negotiations as it does on military strategy and derring do, which is perfectly in keeping with this series. The only drawback to this is that if one goes into this story expecting to see the villains punished and the virtuous vindicated, then you are likely to be disappointed. Attaining victory, or even something that resembles a settlement, requires compromise and sacrifice from everyone involved, and those who are unwilling to do either almost inevitably end up on the short end of the stick. Corey has created a harsh, unforgiving universe, and this is a harsh, unforgiving story.
Even though the Expanse series is destined to become a nine book series, this volume feels like the end of a major arc. Certainly it is the second half of the story started in Nemesis Games, but it is more than that. This book serves as an effective conclusion for most of the plot threads that have run through the series since Leviathan Wakes. Conflicts are resolved, allies and enemies die or are otherwise removed from the board, there are losses, victories, and compromises, and long-held secrets are forced into the open. This is not to say that there are no remaining mysteries to be solved: The inscrutable alien technology is still inscrutable, at least two inimical forces still lurk out in the void, and while the raging fires have been put out, one can still see the smoldering embers that litter the landscape of the Solar System. Ultimately, this book manages the difficult trick of being both an ending of a number of long-running story arcs, and a promise of a fresh set of new ones at the same time.
By the time a series reaches its sixth volume, it is relatively common for the series to begin to drift, with books filled with padding simply providing pages of nothing to increase the word count. With Babylon's Ashes, the Expanse has managed to avoid this fate. Instead, Corey grabbed all of the characters and plot threads that have been built up over the five previous books and wrapped them into a story filled with action and intrigue. After Babylon's Ashes everything about the Expanse is clearly going to be dramatically changed, but the series is in no danger of slowing down at all.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Disclosure: I received this book as a Review Copy. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.
Red Planet Blues is a noir-ish science fiction novel clearly inspired by the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Set on Mars and featuring Alex Lomax, the red planet's only private investigator, the novel presents a set of interconnected mysteries involving murder, money, and insanity with a healthy dose of alien artifacts and imaginative technology to complicate matters. The novel winds through a series of smaller mysteries, that are threaded together by the facts that almost everyone on Mars lives in one relatively small settlement and Lomax is really the only option people have to turn to when they need a crime solved.
Alex Lomax lives in New Klondike, a domed city on the surface of Mars (which is also the only city on Mars), exiled from Earth for somewhat mysterious reasons that are only revealed near the very end of the book. Without much in the way of technical skills, Lomax plies his trade as a private investigator, filling in for the mostly disinterested local police force. The fictional future world Sawyer created for him lives in is dominated by the technology of identity transfer, a development managed by the "NewYou" corporation, and which allows people to move their consciousness into a new and usually much improved body that show more is often stronger, more durable, and can be made more attractive, even to the point of changing one's appearance to match that of a well-known celebrity. "Transfers" as individuals who have undergone the process are called, also don't need to eat, sleep, or breathe, can comfortably work unprotected on the surface of Mars, and are exempt from certain life-support related taxes, which quite understandably makes transferring quite popular among the denizens of New Klondike. Despite some legal controls, in short order it becomes relatively obvious that this technology, if abused by someone with nefarious intent, can be used to hide one's identity, and make it very difficult to identify who is actually in a particular body.
It should be noted that the first ten chapters of this novel are a moderately rewritten version of the previously published novella Identity Theft, and they work pretty much as a stand-alone story. This is not to say that the first section is disconnected from the rest of the novel, but if one were to read through to the end of chapter ten and stop, one would have read a reasonably satisfying complete story. The novella (and thus, the novel) opens up like most hard-boiled detective stories do: When a beautiful woman named Cassandra shows up in Lomax's office asking him to find her missing husband. Both Cassandra and her missing husband Joshua are not only transfers, they own the local NewYou franchise. Cassandra's missing husband is located in relatively short order, but that only causes the mystery to deepen and the tale of greed, kidnapping, and murder ensues that takes a couple of interesting twists and turns and hinges on the use (or rather misuse) of identity transfer technology and the attendant difficulties that logically ensue concerning how do you prove who someone actually is, or how one proves which one the "real" version of someone is. By the end of the opening novella, the villains have been foiled, the innocent have been vindicated, and at least some modicum of justice has been served.
Even though the remaining plot of the novel is something of a "fix-up", Sawyer is a skillful storyteller, which means that he is able to pick up the slender threads left by these opening chapters and build the rest of the novel upon them to create a coherent whole. The mystery that runs through every section of the book concerns the Alpha Deposit, a legendary find that kicked off the Great Martian Fossil Rush as hungry fortune seekers flocked to the planet hoping to find alien fossils they could ship to collectors back on Earth for huge profits. The location of the Alpha Deposit, and the fate of Weingarten and O'Reilly - the two explorers who found it - is unknown, and, given the fact that anyone who could answer these unknowns would find themselves immensely wealthy, there is keen interest in being the person who can answer them. There is a further mystery involving a notorious passenger ship and the horrors that took place upon it that wraps into the narrative, adding still more intrigue to the story. Everything is told in Sawyer's extremely readable style, and the text of the entire book just flows smoothly. I have always found Sawyer's prose to be extremely enjoyable and capable of being consumed at a rapid clip, and this book is no exception.
There are only a couple of minor flaws to Red Planet Blues. The first concerns the identity transfer technology, which is described as being a well-established technology that has been in use for decades and so well-entrenched in society that only adherents to fringe religious groups object to its use. Despite this, the inhabitants in the story seem to be frequently surprised or unprepared for the realities of dealing with "transfers". For example, Lomax carries a handgun, which is pretty much useless against transfers due to their incredibly durable artificial bodies, but he seems to act like the weapon should serve as protection in such cases, even while simultaneously pointing out that it won't be. Many of the twists in the story turn on people being caught off-guard by what should be pretty routine ways of exploiting transfer technology, and so on. One is also left wondering why everyone who can doesn't simply transfer - as presented in the book, transferring makes one younger, stronger, and essentially immortal. Given the fact that everyone who isn't regarded as a crackpot holds the opinion that identity transfer is a safe and proven process, there doesn't really seem to be a reason for anyone to not do it.
The second flaw concerns the women in the book. Pretty much everyone who shows up in the story gets involved in the deadly hunt for the Alpha Deposit from geologists to down-on-their-luck thugs, to housewives to writers in residence to police officers, each of whom plays a part. While the men are described as coming in all shapes and sizes, almost all of the women are described as various stripes of beautiful with the one notable exception being a woman who is described as looking like an ape - if a woman isn't sexy, apparently the only other option is for her to look simian. Lomax spends his internal monologue leering at and salivating over these women no matter what circumstances he encounters them under, which serves to make him seem kind of sleazy and unlikable.. Further, this collection of women seem to find Alex improbably attractive, even the ones who would seem to have no real reason to. To a certain extent, this is probably an effort to mimic the noir detective stories that inspired Red Planet Blues, after all, beautiful women who fall for hard-boiled detectives are kind of a staple of such novels. The problem is, the trope sticks out like a sore thumb when imported into this novel, and doesn't really do much other than give the story some uncomfortably creepy segments.
Despite these small missteps, Red Planet Blues is a good science fiction detective story. Lomax is a flawed but ultimately engaging and enjoyable character who inhabits a world that is both interesting and plausible. The mysteries that he is confronted with are just cryptic enough to keep the reader guessing but still sufficiently well-laid out that it feels like the author is playing fair. In the end, anyone looking for something akin to The Maltese Falcon on Mars is likely to come away from this book feeling like they got what they came for. If a noir-era mystery in a science fiction setting sounds like something you would enjoy, this is pretty much exactly what you need to scratch that itch.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Red Planet Blues is a noir-ish science fiction novel clearly inspired by the works of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Set on Mars and featuring Alex Lomax, the red planet's only private investigator, the novel presents a set of interconnected mysteries involving murder, money, and insanity with a healthy dose of alien artifacts and imaginative technology to complicate matters. The novel winds through a series of smaller mysteries, that are threaded together by the facts that almost everyone on Mars lives in one relatively small settlement and Lomax is really the only option people have to turn to when they need a crime solved.
Alex Lomax lives in New Klondike, a domed city on the surface of Mars (which is also the only city on Mars), exiled from Earth for somewhat mysterious reasons that are only revealed near the very end of the book. Without much in the way of technical skills, Lomax plies his trade as a private investigator, filling in for the mostly disinterested local police force. The fictional future world Sawyer created for him lives in is dominated by the technology of identity transfer, a development managed by the "NewYou" corporation, and which allows people to move their consciousness into a new and usually much improved body that show more is often stronger, more durable, and can be made more attractive, even to the point of changing one's appearance to match that of a well-known celebrity. "Transfers" as individuals who have undergone the process are called, also don't need to eat, sleep, or breathe, can comfortably work unprotected on the surface of Mars, and are exempt from certain life-support related taxes, which quite understandably makes transferring quite popular among the denizens of New Klondike. Despite some legal controls, in short order it becomes relatively obvious that this technology, if abused by someone with nefarious intent, can be used to hide one's identity, and make it very difficult to identify who is actually in a particular body.
It should be noted that the first ten chapters of this novel are a moderately rewritten version of the previously published novella Identity Theft, and they work pretty much as a stand-alone story. This is not to say that the first section is disconnected from the rest of the novel, but if one were to read through to the end of chapter ten and stop, one would have read a reasonably satisfying complete story. The novella (and thus, the novel) opens up like most hard-boiled detective stories do: When a beautiful woman named Cassandra shows up in Lomax's office asking him to find her missing husband. Both Cassandra and her missing husband Joshua are not only transfers, they own the local NewYou franchise. Cassandra's missing husband is located in relatively short order, but that only causes the mystery to deepen and the tale of greed, kidnapping, and murder ensues that takes a couple of interesting twists and turns and hinges on the use (or rather misuse) of identity transfer technology and the attendant difficulties that logically ensue concerning how do you prove who someone actually is, or how one proves which one the "real" version of someone is. By the end of the opening novella, the villains have been foiled, the innocent have been vindicated, and at least some modicum of justice has been served.
Even though the remaining plot of the novel is something of a "fix-up", Sawyer is a skillful storyteller, which means that he is able to pick up the slender threads left by these opening chapters and build the rest of the novel upon them to create a coherent whole. The mystery that runs through every section of the book concerns the Alpha Deposit, a legendary find that kicked off the Great Martian Fossil Rush as hungry fortune seekers flocked to the planet hoping to find alien fossils they could ship to collectors back on Earth for huge profits. The location of the Alpha Deposit, and the fate of Weingarten and O'Reilly - the two explorers who found it - is unknown, and, given the fact that anyone who could answer these unknowns would find themselves immensely wealthy, there is keen interest in being the person who can answer them. There is a further mystery involving a notorious passenger ship and the horrors that took place upon it that wraps into the narrative, adding still more intrigue to the story. Everything is told in Sawyer's extremely readable style, and the text of the entire book just flows smoothly. I have always found Sawyer's prose to be extremely enjoyable and capable of being consumed at a rapid clip, and this book is no exception.
There are only a couple of minor flaws to Red Planet Blues. The first concerns the identity transfer technology, which is described as being a well-established technology that has been in use for decades and so well-entrenched in society that only adherents to fringe religious groups object to its use. Despite this, the inhabitants in the story seem to be frequently surprised or unprepared for the realities of dealing with "transfers". For example, Lomax carries a handgun, which is pretty much useless against transfers due to their incredibly durable artificial bodies, but he seems to act like the weapon should serve as protection in such cases, even while simultaneously pointing out that it won't be. Many of the twists in the story turn on people being caught off-guard by what should be pretty routine ways of exploiting transfer technology, and so on. One is also left wondering why everyone who can doesn't simply transfer - as presented in the book, transferring makes one younger, stronger, and essentially immortal. Given the fact that everyone who isn't regarded as a crackpot holds the opinion that identity transfer is a safe and proven process, there doesn't really seem to be a reason for anyone to not do it.
The second flaw concerns the women in the book. Pretty much everyone who shows up in the story gets involved in the deadly hunt for the Alpha Deposit from geologists to down-on-their-luck thugs, to housewives to writers in residence to police officers, each of whom plays a part. While the men are described as coming in all shapes and sizes, almost all of the women are described as various stripes of beautiful with the one notable exception being a woman who is described as looking like an ape - if a woman isn't sexy, apparently the only other option is for her to look simian. Lomax spends his internal monologue leering at and salivating over these women no matter what circumstances he encounters them under, which serves to make him seem kind of sleazy and unlikable.. Further, this collection of women seem to find Alex improbably attractive, even the ones who would seem to have no real reason to. To a certain extent, this is probably an effort to mimic the noir detective stories that inspired Red Planet Blues, after all, beautiful women who fall for hard-boiled detectives are kind of a staple of such novels. The problem is, the trope sticks out like a sore thumb when imported into this novel, and doesn't really do much other than give the story some uncomfortably creepy segments.
Despite these small missteps, Red Planet Blues is a good science fiction detective story. Lomax is a flawed but ultimately engaging and enjoyable character who inhabits a world that is both interesting and plausible. The mysteries that he is confronted with are just cryptic enough to keep the reader guessing but still sufficiently well-laid out that it feels like the author is playing fair. In the end, anyone looking for something akin to The Maltese Falcon on Mars is likely to come away from this book feeling like they got what they came for. If a noir-era mystery in a science fiction setting sounds like something you would enjoy, this is pretty much exactly what you need to scratch that itch.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
"Fridging" a character specifically refers to an incident in the Green Lantern comic book in which the hero Kyle Rayner's girlfriend Alexandra DeWitt was killed by the villain Major Force and stuffed into a refrigerator for Rayner to find later. This kind of plot device then sends the hero into a righteous wrath whereupon he then goes upon a rage-driven quest for revenge to avenge his lost love. The use of the term in a more general sense, to mean a character (who is almost always a woman) who is killed off in order to provide motivation and character development for the hero (who is almost always a man), was originally coined by Gail Simone, and has since become a widely used term to refer to this sort of lazy and misogynistic trope.
The framing of "fridging" is to subordinate the fridged character to the protagonist's story - the now-dead character only exists in the story to help tell the story of the "more important" central character. Because this trope is almost always presented as a female character being sacrificed to give depth and meaning to the story of a male character, this has the effect of erasing the women's stories. In many of these cases, the female character to be killed off is presented in as shallow a way as possible - since she exists only to further someone else's story, to the extent her story is told, it is usually only told to the extent that her story intersects with the protagonist's. The end result is that there is a rogue's gallery consisting show more of dozens (or, more likely hundreds) of female characters whose stories were never told, because they were killed off so that Bob Squarejaw could experience a little angst and dedicate himself to vengeance. Marvel's Punisher is a character entirely built upon this premise, and his wife and children pretty much only exist within flashbacks in his story. I suspect that the fact that the villain's killed Wick's dog in John Wick was intended as a kind of joke - replacing the usual girlfriend, wife, sister, or daughter of the hero with a dog, and part of the commentary provided was that the dog got as much character development as the usual victim would have.
Cat Valente's Refrigerator Monologues takes this trope and flips it on its head. The characters given voices in this book are all women who are residents of Deadtown - the place where the discarded comic book characters go when they die. Some characters die and then come back to life, but others, the ones who were "fridged", are all eternally confined to the never-ending autumn of Deadtown. They call themselves the Hell Hath Club, aren't happy about their deaths, and they are going to tell anyone who shows up at the Lethe Café on open mic night. They are Paige Embry, Julia Ash, Pauline Ketch, Blue Bayou, Daisy Green, and Samantha Dane, they all have their own stories to tell, and in this book Cat Valente tells them all.
To provide a setting for her heroines to exist in, Valente has crafted a complete world around them, populated with super-heroes, super-villains, love interests, mentors, children, and everyone else. Although the world is very clearly inspired by the fictional worlds of some of the major comic book publishers, and several of the characters and storylines are reminiscent of characters and storylines that have appeared in those worlds, Valente's world is a distinct entity unto its own. To a certain extent, such similarities are unavoidable, and some are possibly even unintentional, but it is clear that many of the elements that run parallel to well-known comic book stories were included quite deliberately. These parallels are, after all, part of the point of the book: To highlight how these stories in previously published stories sideline and marginalize women's stories, one has to emulate them to some extent, and Valente manages to come close enough for the references to be recognizable, but not so close that the stories she is telling are diminished.
Each of the six stories told in this book end tragically, which is an inevitable outcome given that this is a book about women who died to further the story of another person. Even within this limitation, Valente refuses to allow the stories of these character to be erased - even if the story they were supposed to have originally appeared in cast them as a secondary character, in this book they take center stage and give full voice to their own lives and experiences. The characters in this book might be a girlfriend who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or a superheroine whose powers were "too dangerous" for her teammates to allow her to live, or a disaffected punk teen who finds love and has an ill-fated child, but that is not all they are, and in each of their stories that is made painfully clear. This is a book full of rage, rage at being dead, but also rage at having their story erased. But there is so much more than rage in these stories, because as Valente presents them, these are fully realized characters with complete lives: The anger that runs through each woman's story is engendered by the joy she had in her life - the hopes, the dreams, and the ambitions she had for herself that were all snatched away by the necessities of formulaic storytelling.
There are some books that need to be written to make a point. The Refrigerator Monologues is one of those books. But like the women depicted in its pages, it isn't only that kind of book. While some books intended to make a point can become didactic polemics, in Valente's hands, the premise results in a collection of fully realized women living in what feels like a completely distinct and yet entirely familiar fictional comic book world. This is, quite simply, a brilliant book. These are stories that needed to be told, and it turns out that Valente was the perfect person to tell them.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The framing of "fridging" is to subordinate the fridged character to the protagonist's story - the now-dead character only exists in the story to help tell the story of the "more important" central character. Because this trope is almost always presented as a female character being sacrificed to give depth and meaning to the story of a male character, this has the effect of erasing the women's stories. In many of these cases, the female character to be killed off is presented in as shallow a way as possible - since she exists only to further someone else's story, to the extent her story is told, it is usually only told to the extent that her story intersects with the protagonist's. The end result is that there is a rogue's gallery consisting show more of dozens (or, more likely hundreds) of female characters whose stories were never told, because they were killed off so that Bob Squarejaw could experience a little angst and dedicate himself to vengeance. Marvel's Punisher is a character entirely built upon this premise, and his wife and children pretty much only exist within flashbacks in his story. I suspect that the fact that the villain's killed Wick's dog in John Wick was intended as a kind of joke - replacing the usual girlfriend, wife, sister, or daughter of the hero with a dog, and part of the commentary provided was that the dog got as much character development as the usual victim would have.
Cat Valente's Refrigerator Monologues takes this trope and flips it on its head. The characters given voices in this book are all women who are residents of Deadtown - the place where the discarded comic book characters go when they die. Some characters die and then come back to life, but others, the ones who were "fridged", are all eternally confined to the never-ending autumn of Deadtown. They call themselves the Hell Hath Club, aren't happy about their deaths, and they are going to tell anyone who shows up at the Lethe Café on open mic night. They are Paige Embry, Julia Ash, Pauline Ketch, Blue Bayou, Daisy Green, and Samantha Dane, they all have their own stories to tell, and in this book Cat Valente tells them all.
To provide a setting for her heroines to exist in, Valente has crafted a complete world around them, populated with super-heroes, super-villains, love interests, mentors, children, and everyone else. Although the world is very clearly inspired by the fictional worlds of some of the major comic book publishers, and several of the characters and storylines are reminiscent of characters and storylines that have appeared in those worlds, Valente's world is a distinct entity unto its own. To a certain extent, such similarities are unavoidable, and some are possibly even unintentional, but it is clear that many of the elements that run parallel to well-known comic book stories were included quite deliberately. These parallels are, after all, part of the point of the book: To highlight how these stories in previously published stories sideline and marginalize women's stories, one has to emulate them to some extent, and Valente manages to come close enough for the references to be recognizable, but not so close that the stories she is telling are diminished.
Each of the six stories told in this book end tragically, which is an inevitable outcome given that this is a book about women who died to further the story of another person. Even within this limitation, Valente refuses to allow the stories of these character to be erased - even if the story they were supposed to have originally appeared in cast them as a secondary character, in this book they take center stage and give full voice to their own lives and experiences. The characters in this book might be a girlfriend who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, or a superheroine whose powers were "too dangerous" for her teammates to allow her to live, or a disaffected punk teen who finds love and has an ill-fated child, but that is not all they are, and in each of their stories that is made painfully clear. This is a book full of rage, rage at being dead, but also rage at having their story erased. But there is so much more than rage in these stories, because as Valente presents them, these are fully realized characters with complete lives: The anger that runs through each woman's story is engendered by the joy she had in her life - the hopes, the dreams, and the ambitions she had for herself that were all snatched away by the necessities of formulaic storytelling.
There are some books that need to be written to make a point. The Refrigerator Monologues is one of those books. But like the women depicted in its pages, it isn't only that kind of book. While some books intended to make a point can become didactic polemics, in Valente's hands, the premise results in a collection of fully realized women living in what feels like a completely distinct and yet entirely familiar fictional comic book world. This is, quite simply, a brilliant book. These are stories that needed to be told, and it turns out that Valente was the perfect person to tell them.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
War and Craft is the third, and definitely final, book in Tom Doyle's American Craftsmen series, a fantasy that posits the existence of magical craftspeople in the modern world who are mostly tied to their home countries and native magical traditions. The series started in the novel American Craftsmen with a conflict that was almost entirely internal to the U.S. crafting community, continued in The Left-Hand Way in which the conflict spread outward, most notably to Russia, the Ukraine, and Japan, and reaches it denouement in this novel, where the threat has become both global and, for the protagonists, intensely personal.
After a brief prologue where Ossian Mac Cool, the last of the Fianna guardians of the three gifts of the order is introduced via a rather bloody confrontation with some members of Left Hand adherents, Most practitioners or the arcane arts engage in rather mundane craft, but those who dabble in the darker arts are said to be "Left Hand" practitioners, and make up the villainous contingent in the novel. Part of the tension in the story comes from the fact that one of the heroes - Dale Morton - is the last scion of a craft bloodline that is notorious for indulging in Left-Hand craft, and one of his ancestors was the primary villain in the first two books. The ambiguous nature of the heroes is ramped up still further due to the fact that Michael Endicott, a member of a house traditionally opposed to the Mortons and their Left-Handed ways, was only kept alive show more in The Left-Hand Way due to the use of Left-Hand magic, and is now sustained by Left-Hand infused nanobots in his body. Throughout the novel, both are tempted by the Left-Hand craft time and again, and they are rather understandably regarded with suspicion by every craft practitioner who comes into contact with them.
After the prologue, the story shifts to the four central characters - Dale Morton, Michael Endicott, Scherie Rezvani-Morton, and Grace Marlowe where they are hiding out in Japan following their refusal to obey orders in the previous book. Granted, the actions they took in the last book did save the world, but as they took their actions in defiance of their superiors, they start this book "on the lam". Plus, given that Endicott appears to have taken a step forward to becoming a trans-national craft power (a situation that has caused large scale wars in the past), even those outside of the United States government view the quartet with caution. Other nations, including Japan, clearly see a possible opportunity to garner an edge for themselves by offering asylum to the group, but are wary of the potential harm that may ensue.
The quartet are not just in Japan sitting around, they are there so that Endicott and Marlowe can get married. This is an event of some import in the magical world created by Doyle, as the union of two craft families is a big deal and looms even larger in that it is the union of two craft families from different countries, and one of the betrothed may be an impending trans-national threat to boot. There is an array of rituals and taboos surrounding a craft marriage, the most salient one being that there is a true surrounding the wedding until after the marriage is consummated, meaning that the quartet of heroes are safe for the first part of this segment of the story, allowing numerous representatives from around the world to be introduced, including the Jessica Mwangi of Kenya, Omatr Khan of Pakistan, Zhuge Liang from China, and the emissary from the Vatican, a priest named Cornaro. Even by introducing some of these characters only in passing, Doyle is expanding and deepening the mythic reality of his fictional world, making it feel more like a fully realized place with each addition.
The wedding goes smoothly, and then all hell breaks loose as expected afterwards as various enemies try to eliminate Marlowe and Endicott as soon as their happy event has concluded. This leads to a running fight through the streets of Yokohama where the four heroes pick up an unexpected new ally and suffer an entirely unexpected loss that is caused by an entirely unexpected enemy. Their hosts soon let them know that they have worn out their welcome in Japan and they hop into a plane and head off without much of a plan, dazed from the curveball they had just been thrown. They end up more or less tumbling into India, where they are confronted by an Indian craft community that is both powerful and deeply suspicious of them, but needs their services for a mission of critical import, which is where the real meat of the plot turns up - in the world sanctuary, a monastery located in disputed territory near the three-way border between India, Pakistan, and China.
As a condition for offering the quartet (actually quintet, or possibly sextet, depending on how you count "people") refuge, the Indian government gets them to agree to investigate the world sanctuary and report on the source of the strange events that had recently begun happening. Because Scherie is pregnant, the other three more or less conspire to get her to agree to go to Italy and meet with Cornaro on the pretext that she needs to learn more about banishing spirits before they head to the sanctuary. Of course, as soon as she is safely packed away, Dale, Michael, and Grace immediately head off to the mountains to try to infiltrate the sanctuary. With the team split, the story hops back and forth between Scherie and the strike team as each finds themselves confronted with mortal danger. For the strike team trio, the danger is readily apparent, and they knew ahead of time that they were walking into a situation that was going to be potentially life-threatening (and even soul-threatening) and every step they take just ramps up the tension in the story. For her part, Scherie expected to be going to meet with a potential ally and learn some valuable information, but she is fairly quickly disabused of this notion and finds herself locked in an unexpected struggle for her life and the life of her unborn child.
It is during this portion of the book that the novel shifts in tone. While the early parts of the book had been filled with action and adventure, it was an almost rollicking kind of action, reminiscent of what something like James Bond would have been like if magic had been in play. Once Scherie heads to Italy and the remaining trio make their way to the world sanctuary, the tone quickly becomes much darker, dipping into the horror genre at times. Although each of the heroes is confronted with malevolent enemies intent upon their destruction, the real horror they face comes from within themselves, as time and again they face situations in which their own fears and weaknesses are used against them. Doyle pushes the reader relentlessly forward: Each time one turns to the next page, one finds themselves hoping against all reason that Endicott, Marlowe, Morton, or Rezvani can somehow find a way to deal with the terrors that they face without damning themselves, and each time one turns to the next page, the author refuses to let his characters off the hook. Three of the four central characters reach the point of no return, and each of those three continues forward, pressing on despite the personal cost. Victory can be had, but the price that will be exacted in exchange is tremendous. The brilliance of this book is that every step the characters take seems perfectly reasonable and at the same time completely horrible and the whole time the reader is hoping that conclusion that feels inevitable can somehow be averted all the while knowing that it cannot.
Early in War and Craft, one of the characters tells the reader how the story is going to end. Telling the reader where the story is going is a difficult to use technique, but when it works it can be very effective - John Michael Straczynski used this approach to great effect a couple of times in Babylon 5 - and Doyle deploys it almost perfectly here. By letting the reader know what is going to happen, the author gives the outcome an almost existential inevitability that serves to give the entire book a sense of impending doom. Paradoxically, this general air of overwhelming dread serves to provide a glimmer of hope, as one finds themselves wishing for the heroes to avert this foretold conclusion, desperately looking for ways that they could evade this seemingly foregone conclusion. Even so, when the story winds its way to the dire end that one has been anxiously hoping could be avoided, it feels strangely satisfying, as if the grim ending was the only way the story could have ended. That is, perhaps, the greatest tribute to the quality of the book: It ends not perhaps in the way that one wanted, but in the way that it had to end, and as a result, one walks away from the book feeling content, albeit a kind of drained and devastated contentment.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
After a brief prologue where Ossian Mac Cool, the last of the Fianna guardians of the three gifts of the order is introduced via a rather bloody confrontation with some members of Left Hand adherents, Most practitioners or the arcane arts engage in rather mundane craft, but those who dabble in the darker arts are said to be "Left Hand" practitioners, and make up the villainous contingent in the novel. Part of the tension in the story comes from the fact that one of the heroes - Dale Morton - is the last scion of a craft bloodline that is notorious for indulging in Left-Hand craft, and one of his ancestors was the primary villain in the first two books. The ambiguous nature of the heroes is ramped up still further due to the fact that Michael Endicott, a member of a house traditionally opposed to the Mortons and their Left-Handed ways, was only kept alive show more in The Left-Hand Way due to the use of Left-Hand magic, and is now sustained by Left-Hand infused nanobots in his body. Throughout the novel, both are tempted by the Left-Hand craft time and again, and they are rather understandably regarded with suspicion by every craft practitioner who comes into contact with them.
After the prologue, the story shifts to the four central characters - Dale Morton, Michael Endicott, Scherie Rezvani-Morton, and Grace Marlowe where they are hiding out in Japan following their refusal to obey orders in the previous book. Granted, the actions they took in the last book did save the world, but as they took their actions in defiance of their superiors, they start this book "on the lam". Plus, given that Endicott appears to have taken a step forward to becoming a trans-national craft power (a situation that has caused large scale wars in the past), even those outside of the United States government view the quartet with caution. Other nations, including Japan, clearly see a possible opportunity to garner an edge for themselves by offering asylum to the group, but are wary of the potential harm that may ensue.
The quartet are not just in Japan sitting around, they are there so that Endicott and Marlowe can get married. This is an event of some import in the magical world created by Doyle, as the union of two craft families is a big deal and looms even larger in that it is the union of two craft families from different countries, and one of the betrothed may be an impending trans-national threat to boot. There is an array of rituals and taboos surrounding a craft marriage, the most salient one being that there is a true surrounding the wedding until after the marriage is consummated, meaning that the quartet of heroes are safe for the first part of this segment of the story, allowing numerous representatives from around the world to be introduced, including the Jessica Mwangi of Kenya, Omatr Khan of Pakistan, Zhuge Liang from China, and the emissary from the Vatican, a priest named Cornaro. Even by introducing some of these characters only in passing, Doyle is expanding and deepening the mythic reality of his fictional world, making it feel more like a fully realized place with each addition.
The wedding goes smoothly, and then all hell breaks loose as expected afterwards as various enemies try to eliminate Marlowe and Endicott as soon as their happy event has concluded. This leads to a running fight through the streets of Yokohama where the four heroes pick up an unexpected new ally and suffer an entirely unexpected loss that is caused by an entirely unexpected enemy. Their hosts soon let them know that they have worn out their welcome in Japan and they hop into a plane and head off without much of a plan, dazed from the curveball they had just been thrown. They end up more or less tumbling into India, where they are confronted by an Indian craft community that is both powerful and deeply suspicious of them, but needs their services for a mission of critical import, which is where the real meat of the plot turns up - in the world sanctuary, a monastery located in disputed territory near the three-way border between India, Pakistan, and China.
As a condition for offering the quartet (actually quintet, or possibly sextet, depending on how you count "people") refuge, the Indian government gets them to agree to investigate the world sanctuary and report on the source of the strange events that had recently begun happening. Because Scherie is pregnant, the other three more or less conspire to get her to agree to go to Italy and meet with Cornaro on the pretext that she needs to learn more about banishing spirits before they head to the sanctuary. Of course, as soon as she is safely packed away, Dale, Michael, and Grace immediately head off to the mountains to try to infiltrate the sanctuary. With the team split, the story hops back and forth between Scherie and the strike team as each finds themselves confronted with mortal danger. For the strike team trio, the danger is readily apparent, and they knew ahead of time that they were walking into a situation that was going to be potentially life-threatening (and even soul-threatening) and every step they take just ramps up the tension in the story. For her part, Scherie expected to be going to meet with a potential ally and learn some valuable information, but she is fairly quickly disabused of this notion and finds herself locked in an unexpected struggle for her life and the life of her unborn child.
It is during this portion of the book that the novel shifts in tone. While the early parts of the book had been filled with action and adventure, it was an almost rollicking kind of action, reminiscent of what something like James Bond would have been like if magic had been in play. Once Scherie heads to Italy and the remaining trio make their way to the world sanctuary, the tone quickly becomes much darker, dipping into the horror genre at times. Although each of the heroes is confronted with malevolent enemies intent upon their destruction, the real horror they face comes from within themselves, as time and again they face situations in which their own fears and weaknesses are used against them. Doyle pushes the reader relentlessly forward: Each time one turns to the next page, one finds themselves hoping against all reason that Endicott, Marlowe, Morton, or Rezvani can somehow find a way to deal with the terrors that they face without damning themselves, and each time one turns to the next page, the author refuses to let his characters off the hook. Three of the four central characters reach the point of no return, and each of those three continues forward, pressing on despite the personal cost. Victory can be had, but the price that will be exacted in exchange is tremendous. The brilliance of this book is that every step the characters take seems perfectly reasonable and at the same time completely horrible and the whole time the reader is hoping that conclusion that feels inevitable can somehow be averted all the while knowing that it cannot.
Early in War and Craft, one of the characters tells the reader how the story is going to end. Telling the reader where the story is going is a difficult to use technique, but when it works it can be very effective - John Michael Straczynski used this approach to great effect a couple of times in Babylon 5 - and Doyle deploys it almost perfectly here. By letting the reader know what is going to happen, the author gives the outcome an almost existential inevitability that serves to give the entire book a sense of impending doom. Paradoxically, this general air of overwhelming dread serves to provide a glimmer of hope, as one finds themselves wishing for the heroes to avert this foretold conclusion, desperately looking for ways that they could evade this seemingly foregone conclusion. Even so, when the story winds its way to the dire end that one has been anxiously hoping could be avoided, it feels strangely satisfying, as if the grim ending was the only way the story could have ended. That is, perhaps, the greatest tribute to the quality of the book: It ends not perhaps in the way that one wanted, but in the way that it had to end, and as a result, one walks away from the book feeling content, albeit a kind of drained and devastated contentment.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
In 1986, to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the use of the name Marvel Comics, Marvel decided to launch a new line of comics, set in a completely separate fictional continuity that they called, naturally enough, the "New Universe". The idea was that the new fictional universe would be just like our Earth, right up to a specific event called the "White Event" that supposedly took place in 1986 and sparked the development of super-heroes and super-villains. Star Brand was one of the initial eight titles in the new continuity, and was initially written by Jim Shooter, who was the editor-in-chief at Marvel at the time it was launched. This series was intended to be the flagship title for the New Universe, and is something of a hybrid of Green Lantern, Lensman, and Superman in tone. This volume covers roughly half of the entire run of the series, from October 1986 through November 1987, with a couple of crossover issues included in which the Star Brand character featured.
The basic premise of Star Brand is pretty straightforward. Kenneth Connell is in the countryside outside of Pittsburgh riding his motorcycle and practicing stunts when he comes across an alien creature who gifts him with the "Star Brand", a tattoo-like mark that, when used properly, acts as a powerful weapon. The Brand, when activated, makes Kenneth nigh-invulnerable, super-strong, and gives him the ability to fly, even in outer space. The Brand also grants an array of other powers, mostly involving throwing show more energy blasts and blowing things up. Since Kenneth doesn't know the full range of powers of the Brand, the reader really doesn't either, and every now and then the writers pop out a new power when they need for Kenneth to have it. Even with the impressive array of powers of the Brand at his disposal, Kenneth is conflicted and unsure of what to do, and this is one of the central themes that runs through the entire volume. Armed with world altering (or even potentially world-ending) power, Kenneth is at a loss as to best use it, or even if he should use it at all.
Being wishy-washy seems to be one of Kenneth's central character traits. When the series opens, he is dating the beautiful blonde Barb, but also fooling around with the Debbie "the Duck" on the side. Despite his professions of love for Barb, Kenneth is afraid to commit to a stable relationship with her, and also unwilling to set "the Duck" aside, even though through much of the volume he treats Debbie awfully, exploiting her devotion to him to get his laundry done while also shoving her out the back door so Barb won't find her. Kenneth is wishy-washy about his career as well, working as an auto mechanic at an auto dealer without much thought of trying to advance his career or do anything else to improve his situation. Kenneth is, quite simply, a terrible choice to have the power of the Star Brand because he is terrible at actually making choices. It isn't that Kenneth makes bad choices, it is that he simply doesn't make choices, but rather spends his time drifting along and refusing to actually choose. The fact that there is really no reason for Kenneth's angst just makes the book a bit more tedious: Over the course of the volume, he has three attractive women pining for him. He's tall, handsome, and has a job that provides sufficient income for him to pay all of his bills and have motorcycle that he basically uses as a toy, and the only reason that he doesn't have a better job is that he basically doesn't seem to want one. Plus, he gets the power of the Star Brand handed to him at the outset of the novel. He's a mopey character who is mopey for no identifiable reason.
There is something somewhat interesting in the idea that an ordinary person could be blessed with great power and then find themselves at a loss as to what to do, but the ongoing paralysis Kenneth experiences just becomes tiresome after a while. There are nice touches where the story tries to illustrate the difficulties one might have as a super-hero - Kenneth frequently has to navigate using rivers and large landmarks while flying around, and even then he sometimes gets lost. He is confronted with problems that even his powers cannot solve, such as a child with a fatal ailment caused by the chemical plant in the town where he lives. He worries that if he reveals himself, he may be targeted by the government and forced to either serve as its agent or become a pariah who is hunted. The trouble is, these background details really amount to what should be little more than the scenery of a super-hero story, rather than the main plot, and they simply aren't enough to carry the series on their own. Much of this volume feels like the side story in a super-hero comic that fills in the pages in between the real story.
This feeling that one is reading the filler in between the real story, to a certain extent, encapsulates the New Universe as a whole. The idea behind the line of comics was that the fictional world would look "just like the world outside your window" and the stories would strive for more realism, but the net result was that the stories were kind of pedestrian and plodding. Kenneth wallows in self-doubt for far too long - essentially this entire volume - only rousing himself to action once in a while, and then only in fitful spurts. The very last story in this book is essentially an extended flashback that ends with Kenneth distraught over actually doing something to prevent the likely onset of World War III. Some of the best storylines in this volume take place when the Star Brand title crossed over with, notably Spitfire and the Troubleshooters and then later Nightmask, but these stories are mostly interesting because Kenneth basically plays second fiddle to the other heroes in them. The Spitfire crossovers are especially interesting because they show the titular characters actually taking action to try to make the world around them better and dealing with the fallout that ensues, a marked contrast to Kenneth's frequent melancholy malaise.
To a certain extent, the promise and problems that Star Brand has is reflective of the promise and problems of the New Universe series as a whole. One of the taglines used for the line was that it was just like "the world outside your window", which was kind of an interesting idea, but all too often the writers seemed to forget to add "but with super-heroes and super-villains", and that is in evidence all too frequently in this collection. Sure, Kenneth has the powers of the Star Brand, but he doesn't really use them for much, and with a tiny number of exceptions, never faces an opponent that even comes close to matching him. The only real recurring villain is the "old man" who is also the alien who originally gifted the Star Brand to Kenneth, but there seems to be no rhyme or reason to his actions: First he gives the brand to Kenneth, then tries a couple times to take it back, getting increasingly vicious in the process, but as a character he remains almost entirely opaque to the reader. The end result is that it is difficult for the reader to really care about much of what is going on in the story. The book is "the world outside your window", and not much more, and that's just not all that interesting. There was a lot to like about the premise of the series, but the execution simply left a lot to be desired.
Overall, Star Brand is an intriguing idea that had fatally flawed execution. This volume compiles a year's worth of issues of the title, and by the end it feels like essentially nothing of real consequence has taken place. The most notable difference between the beginning and the end of the book is that Kenneth has stopped dating Barb, gotten a short-term girlfriend in Switzerland killed, and is kind of in a committed relationship with the Duck. Pretty much everything else is essentially the same in the final issue of the book as it was in the opening issue of the book. In the end, Star Brand feels like a missed opportunity, just like the rest of the New Universe, with a possibly brilliant but definitely interesting premise presented in the most pedestrian manner possible.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The basic premise of Star Brand is pretty straightforward. Kenneth Connell is in the countryside outside of Pittsburgh riding his motorcycle and practicing stunts when he comes across an alien creature who gifts him with the "Star Brand", a tattoo-like mark that, when used properly, acts as a powerful weapon. The Brand, when activated, makes Kenneth nigh-invulnerable, super-strong, and gives him the ability to fly, even in outer space. The Brand also grants an array of other powers, mostly involving throwing show more energy blasts and blowing things up. Since Kenneth doesn't know the full range of powers of the Brand, the reader really doesn't either, and every now and then the writers pop out a new power when they need for Kenneth to have it. Even with the impressive array of powers of the Brand at his disposal, Kenneth is conflicted and unsure of what to do, and this is one of the central themes that runs through the entire volume. Armed with world altering (or even potentially world-ending) power, Kenneth is at a loss as to best use it, or even if he should use it at all.
Being wishy-washy seems to be one of Kenneth's central character traits. When the series opens, he is dating the beautiful blonde Barb, but also fooling around with the Debbie "the Duck" on the side. Despite his professions of love for Barb, Kenneth is afraid to commit to a stable relationship with her, and also unwilling to set "the Duck" aside, even though through much of the volume he treats Debbie awfully, exploiting her devotion to him to get his laundry done while also shoving her out the back door so Barb won't find her. Kenneth is wishy-washy about his career as well, working as an auto mechanic at an auto dealer without much thought of trying to advance his career or do anything else to improve his situation. Kenneth is, quite simply, a terrible choice to have the power of the Star Brand because he is terrible at actually making choices. It isn't that Kenneth makes bad choices, it is that he simply doesn't make choices, but rather spends his time drifting along and refusing to actually choose. The fact that there is really no reason for Kenneth's angst just makes the book a bit more tedious: Over the course of the volume, he has three attractive women pining for him. He's tall, handsome, and has a job that provides sufficient income for him to pay all of his bills and have motorcycle that he basically uses as a toy, and the only reason that he doesn't have a better job is that he basically doesn't seem to want one. Plus, he gets the power of the Star Brand handed to him at the outset of the novel. He's a mopey character who is mopey for no identifiable reason.
There is something somewhat interesting in the idea that an ordinary person could be blessed with great power and then find themselves at a loss as to what to do, but the ongoing paralysis Kenneth experiences just becomes tiresome after a while. There are nice touches where the story tries to illustrate the difficulties one might have as a super-hero - Kenneth frequently has to navigate using rivers and large landmarks while flying around, and even then he sometimes gets lost. He is confronted with problems that even his powers cannot solve, such as a child with a fatal ailment caused by the chemical plant in the town where he lives. He worries that if he reveals himself, he may be targeted by the government and forced to either serve as its agent or become a pariah who is hunted. The trouble is, these background details really amount to what should be little more than the scenery of a super-hero story, rather than the main plot, and they simply aren't enough to carry the series on their own. Much of this volume feels like the side story in a super-hero comic that fills in the pages in between the real story.
This feeling that one is reading the filler in between the real story, to a certain extent, encapsulates the New Universe as a whole. The idea behind the line of comics was that the fictional world would look "just like the world outside your window" and the stories would strive for more realism, but the net result was that the stories were kind of pedestrian and plodding. Kenneth wallows in self-doubt for far too long - essentially this entire volume - only rousing himself to action once in a while, and then only in fitful spurts. The very last story in this book is essentially an extended flashback that ends with Kenneth distraught over actually doing something to prevent the likely onset of World War III. Some of the best storylines in this volume take place when the Star Brand title crossed over with, notably Spitfire and the Troubleshooters and then later Nightmask, but these stories are mostly interesting because Kenneth basically plays second fiddle to the other heroes in them. The Spitfire crossovers are especially interesting because they show the titular characters actually taking action to try to make the world around them better and dealing with the fallout that ensues, a marked contrast to Kenneth's frequent melancholy malaise.
To a certain extent, the promise and problems that Star Brand has is reflective of the promise and problems of the New Universe series as a whole. One of the taglines used for the line was that it was just like "the world outside your window", which was kind of an interesting idea, but all too often the writers seemed to forget to add "but with super-heroes and super-villains", and that is in evidence all too frequently in this collection. Sure, Kenneth has the powers of the Star Brand, but he doesn't really use them for much, and with a tiny number of exceptions, never faces an opponent that even comes close to matching him. The only real recurring villain is the "old man" who is also the alien who originally gifted the Star Brand to Kenneth, but there seems to be no rhyme or reason to his actions: First he gives the brand to Kenneth, then tries a couple times to take it back, getting increasingly vicious in the process, but as a character he remains almost entirely opaque to the reader. The end result is that it is difficult for the reader to really care about much of what is going on in the story. The book is "the world outside your window", and not much more, and that's just not all that interesting. There was a lot to like about the premise of the series, but the execution simply left a lot to be desired.
Overall, Star Brand is an intriguing idea that had fatally flawed execution. This volume compiles a year's worth of issues of the title, and by the end it feels like essentially nothing of real consequence has taken place. The most notable difference between the beginning and the end of the book is that Kenneth has stopped dating Barb, gotten a short-term girlfriend in Switzerland killed, and is kind of in a committed relationship with the Duck. Pretty much everything else is essentially the same in the final issue of the book as it was in the opening issue of the book. In the end, Star Brand feels like a missed opportunity, just like the rest of the New Universe, with a possibly brilliant but definitely interesting premise presented in the most pedestrian manner possible.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The premise of The Wicked + The Divine is that once every ninety years, seven gods emerge, inspire millions and earn rock star-like adulation for two years, and then die. This cycle permits gods to be both immortal and finite - making their very existence into a mystery that underlies the entire book. This also makes most of the gods teenagers, which is interesting, since most actual teenagers seem to think they are immortal, even if they are not. Even the question of whether or not the figures at the center of this story are in fact "gods", or are merely charlatans impersonating divinities is left as something of an enigma for the reader to ponder. The fact that one of the alleged gods - Ananke - appears to not die, but live on in perpetuation in between the cycles, just serves to further deepen the mystery surrounding these figures.
The central character of the story in this volume is not one of the gods, but rather a London teenager named Laura who has been swept up in the mania surrounding the gods. After a brief introduction set ninety years before the main events of the book, the plot gets going with Laura sneaking out of her house, skipping her college classes, and attending a concert given by Amaterasu. The concert itself is presented much as a rock concert would be presented, with the added boost of throwing in some sexual ecstasy being engendered in the crowd by Amaterasu as well. The near orgasmic experience of confronting the object of her adoration causes show more Laura to pass out, and she later wakes up in a room with Lucifer, another one of the gods who takes a liking to the girl and escorts her to where Amaterasu is being interviewed by a skeptical woman named Cassandra with the goddess Sakhmet in the background behaving cat-like on the couch.
It is at this interview that the plot of the book kicks off, when a pair of would-be assassins seemingly try to kill the assembled goddesses from a nearby roof by taking shots into the room, which in turn prompts Lucifer to apparently cause the assailants' heads to explode by snapping her fingers. In the aftermath, Lucifer is arrested and charged with murder. At Lucifer's arraignment, she quite reasonably asks how she could possibly be charged for murder just for snapping her fingers i the next building over - as she points out, there is no way that she logically could have done the two men harm that way. This highlights one of the tensions that exists in the book: How does the world deal with beings who allegedly have inexplicable supernatural powers? One has to wonder exactly how the legal system actually would adjudicate such a case, because none of the normal standards for proving causation could possibly apply. In any event, the judge essentially refuses to believe anything Lucifer says, and when Lucifer gets angry, Lucifer snaps her fingers and the judge's head also explodes.
Lucifer is, of course, immediately swept away and changed with the judge's death as well, despite her protestations that she didn't actually do anything and that she is innocent of the judge's death. This leads to the meat of the book, as Laura befriends Lucifer while visiting her in prison, and then teams up with Cassandra to try to investigate who might have wanted to set Lucifer up to take a fall. This leads Laura to hunt down the Morrigan in the London Underground, where she also comes across the murderous Baphomet, and sees what appears to be yet another series of miracles. Soon enough, Laura and Cassandra receive a rather insistent invitation from Baal himself to come and visit the entire pantheon, where Ananke informs Laura that they are not going to do anything to aid Lucifer and then dismisses the mortal. This, naturally enough, doesn't sit well with Lucifer, who breaks out of her prison, sparking a bloody fight between Lucifer and several of the other gods (with the Morrigan making a late appearance to assist Lucifer) that is only ended when Ananke appears to kill Lucifer off with a snap of her fingers.
The story ends on something of a cliffhanger, as Laura belatedly discovers that she seems to have acquired a power similar to Lucifers, or at least has been gifted with a cigarette that holds a remnant of the goddesses power. But the volume is also filled with unanswered and frequently troubling questions. As Laura points out, one of the pantheon is a murderer and none of the other members seem the least bit interested in finding out who that might be. This, however, is only the most obvious and probably trivial mystery presented by the book. The most tantalizing questions stem from the prologue which is set in 1923, during the previous cycle of the gods, although the reader might not truly understand the significance of the scene when they read it. In this sequence, the gods are assembled around a table, preparing to commit suicide so that they can make their next appearance in ninety years. The curious thing about this scene is that more than half of the places around the table are empty, presumably because the absent deities didn't survive the two years of life that they are allotted each cycle. Even curiouser, Ananke doesn't participate in the mass suicide, and apparently will live through the intervening ninety years until the others return.
The questions that revolve around Ananke alone would be enough to fuel the rest of the series: Why doesn't Ananke participate in the death and rebirth cycle that the other gods endure? Why do all of the other gods seem to defer to Ananke? Why does the ninety year cycle even exist to begin with? Does Ananke enforce it? And so on. But there are a myriad of other questions that come to mind as well: Is the array of gods that is reborn the same in each cycle, or do the gods vary as is implied at one point by Baal? Do the gods personalities override the previous personalities of the beings they are reborn as, or do the gods remember their non-divine lives as Minerva seems to suggest when she bitterly complains about the unfairness of dying before she turns fourteen? Do the gods remember their lives as previous incarnations? The web of questions is tantalizing, pulling the reader in and enticing them further into the story.
The Faust Act is an excellent opening gambit to what promises to be a strong series of stories. This volume contains a story that both feels satisfying in itself, and promises far more to come at the same time. The book also manages the neat trick of making the gods simultaneously mysterious and enigmatic, and yet still so closely analogous to the rock star style media figures that feature so heavily in modern culture now that they seem comfortably familiar. In short, this book is a mass of delightful contradictions encompassing a myriad of intriguing mysteries that presages what appears to be a thoroughly engaging ongoing story.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The central character of the story in this volume is not one of the gods, but rather a London teenager named Laura who has been swept up in the mania surrounding the gods. After a brief introduction set ninety years before the main events of the book, the plot gets going with Laura sneaking out of her house, skipping her college classes, and attending a concert given by Amaterasu. The concert itself is presented much as a rock concert would be presented, with the added boost of throwing in some sexual ecstasy being engendered in the crowd by Amaterasu as well. The near orgasmic experience of confronting the object of her adoration causes show more Laura to pass out, and she later wakes up in a room with Lucifer, another one of the gods who takes a liking to the girl and escorts her to where Amaterasu is being interviewed by a skeptical woman named Cassandra with the goddess Sakhmet in the background behaving cat-like on the couch.
It is at this interview that the plot of the book kicks off, when a pair of would-be assassins seemingly try to kill the assembled goddesses from a nearby roof by taking shots into the room, which in turn prompts Lucifer to apparently cause the assailants' heads to explode by snapping her fingers. In the aftermath, Lucifer is arrested and charged with murder. At Lucifer's arraignment, she quite reasonably asks how she could possibly be charged for murder just for snapping her fingers i the next building over - as she points out, there is no way that she logically could have done the two men harm that way. This highlights one of the tensions that exists in the book: How does the world deal with beings who allegedly have inexplicable supernatural powers? One has to wonder exactly how the legal system actually would adjudicate such a case, because none of the normal standards for proving causation could possibly apply. In any event, the judge essentially refuses to believe anything Lucifer says, and when Lucifer gets angry, Lucifer snaps her fingers and the judge's head also explodes.
Lucifer is, of course, immediately swept away and changed with the judge's death as well, despite her protestations that she didn't actually do anything and that she is innocent of the judge's death. This leads to the meat of the book, as Laura befriends Lucifer while visiting her in prison, and then teams up with Cassandra to try to investigate who might have wanted to set Lucifer up to take a fall. This leads Laura to hunt down the Morrigan in the London Underground, where she also comes across the murderous Baphomet, and sees what appears to be yet another series of miracles. Soon enough, Laura and Cassandra receive a rather insistent invitation from Baal himself to come and visit the entire pantheon, where Ananke informs Laura that they are not going to do anything to aid Lucifer and then dismisses the mortal. This, naturally enough, doesn't sit well with Lucifer, who breaks out of her prison, sparking a bloody fight between Lucifer and several of the other gods (with the Morrigan making a late appearance to assist Lucifer) that is only ended when Ananke appears to kill Lucifer off with a snap of her fingers.
The story ends on something of a cliffhanger, as Laura belatedly discovers that she seems to have acquired a power similar to Lucifers, or at least has been gifted with a cigarette that holds a remnant of the goddesses power. But the volume is also filled with unanswered and frequently troubling questions. As Laura points out, one of the pantheon is a murderer and none of the other members seem the least bit interested in finding out who that might be. This, however, is only the most obvious and probably trivial mystery presented by the book. The most tantalizing questions stem from the prologue which is set in 1923, during the previous cycle of the gods, although the reader might not truly understand the significance of the scene when they read it. In this sequence, the gods are assembled around a table, preparing to commit suicide so that they can make their next appearance in ninety years. The curious thing about this scene is that more than half of the places around the table are empty, presumably because the absent deities didn't survive the two years of life that they are allotted each cycle. Even curiouser, Ananke doesn't participate in the mass suicide, and apparently will live through the intervening ninety years until the others return.
The questions that revolve around Ananke alone would be enough to fuel the rest of the series: Why doesn't Ananke participate in the death and rebirth cycle that the other gods endure? Why do all of the other gods seem to defer to Ananke? Why does the ninety year cycle even exist to begin with? Does Ananke enforce it? And so on. But there are a myriad of other questions that come to mind as well: Is the array of gods that is reborn the same in each cycle, or do the gods vary as is implied at one point by Baal? Do the gods personalities override the previous personalities of the beings they are reborn as, or do the gods remember their non-divine lives as Minerva seems to suggest when she bitterly complains about the unfairness of dying before she turns fourteen? Do the gods remember their lives as previous incarnations? The web of questions is tantalizing, pulling the reader in and enticing them further into the story.
The Faust Act is an excellent opening gambit to what promises to be a strong series of stories. This volume contains a story that both feels satisfying in itself, and promises far more to come at the same time. The book also manages the neat trick of making the gods simultaneously mysterious and enigmatic, and yet still so closely analogous to the rock star style media figures that feature so heavily in modern culture now that they seem comfortably familiar. In short, this book is a mass of delightful contradictions encompassing a myriad of intriguing mysteries that presages what appears to be a thoroughly engaging ongoing story.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Stay Fly is the second volume in Kelly Sue DeConnick's run of Captain Marvel, and it is a gloriously silly book made up of three nearly ridiculous stories that are, at best, only loosely connected to one another. Many graphic novels are deep and meaningful, with political and social commentary conveyed through their characters and stories. This is not one of those graphic novels. This is a graphic novel that revels in the goofiness of the Marvel interstellar universe, with teleporting rock stars, arranged royal marriages, Santa Claus, and cats who aren't cats that can access extradimensional space.
The book picks up shortly after the conclusion of Higher, Further, Faster, More, with Captain Marvel, also known as Carol Danvers, having a disturbing dream about Rhodey's death, blaming herself for his loss. The atmosphere lightens up shortly thereafter when Tic trying to convince Carol to allow her to continue to travel with the hero, making her case by providing breakfast and suggesting she could serve as Captain Marvel's second in command - a role that Carol reminds Tic that Spider-Woman already fills.
This somewhat playful banter is interrupted when the two manage to track down Carol's missing starship and find that it is under the care of none other than Rocket Raccoon. Given that Rocket had previously attempted to kill Carol's cat Chewie claiming it was actually a member of an incredibly rare and dangerous species called the "flerken", Carol is somewhat nonplussed by this show more revelation. She is even less pleased when she discovers that Rocket has reprogrammed the AI in her ship to speak in meows in an attempt to communicate with Chewie and apparently sent a message out to the universe that he had a flerken for sale. This, quite predictably, results in somewhat hostile fortune-seekers showing up to try and claim the rare creature, leading to some rather hilarious action sequences as Carol and Rocket try to hold off the mysterious attackers while dealing with an incomprehensible AI and sniping at one another as Tic tries to deal with a somewhat recalcitrant Chewie who lays a couple hundred eggs during the fight. And that's more or less the punchline to this portion of the book: Rocket was actually correct and Chewie is in fact a flerken. Nothing that seems to be of lasting consequence really happens in this segment, especially once Carol decides that she will simply ignore the fact that Chewie is actually a flerken. This kind of ultimate triviality seems to be a running theme in this volume, as three out of the four stories essentially amount to little of import.
The second story in the volume starts with Carol and Tic's shared love of teleporting interstellar rock star Lila Cheney, a love that winds up causing Lila to teleport onto Carol's ship. After Carol and Tic fangirl a bit over Lila, the mutant rock star tells them about how she got accidentally betrothed to a prince on an the alien world of Aladna when she was younger and jaunting about the galaxy before she mastered her powers. In short order, Cheney recruits Carol and Tic to help her extricate herself from this betrothal - and by "recruits" I mean she simply teleports them to the faraway planet and asks that they help her now that they are there. This is the point where Cheney reveals that everyone speaks in rhyme on Aladna and that Prince Yan, the man Cheney is betrothed to, cannot ascend to a position of leadership without being married. There is some humor made of the fact that Carol is terrible at rhyming and everyone assuming that she is Cheney's mother (which doesn't stop Yan from making romantic overtures in her direction), but things become temporarily serious when Marlo of Sleen shows up to try to claim Yan's hand by force. Carol handles the problem with her usual rough diplomacy but things seem to be headed towards an unwanted union between Carol and Yan before Tic steps in and offers herself as a bride, reasoning that due to the short lifespan of her species, this will be her best chance for a fairy tale wedding. As with the first story, there isn't anything of much lasting consequence here - even Tic's marriage is little more than a marriage of convenience with no real long-term impact on the heroes.
The third part of the book takes the form of a series of letters from Carol's family back on Earth as they recount their adventures dealing with the machinations of the nefarious Grace Valentine. The first letter is from Kit, also known as "Lieutenant Trouble", and recounts how Valentine fooled the prison authorities into thinking she had reformed while she set her plan to take control of the city's rats into motion. The second letter is from the rat-phobic Spider-Woman, detailing her efforts to fight off and (with Barbara Kawasaki's help) neutralize the threat of the swarming rats. The third letter is from Rhodey, as he details trying to get Valentine to disclose where she planted her bombs and take her into custody, an effort that also involves Kawasaki's help and includes a brief detour into outer space to dispose of an explosive device. The final letter is from Barbara Kawasaki telling Carol that Tracy Burke is not doing well health-wise, a revelation that drives Carol to return to Earth for a brief visit. Other than the note concerning Tracy, everything else about this section of the story is essentially ephemera - there is a problem, Spider-Woman and War Machine deal with it, and the world is reset back to the status quo ante.
The last section of the book details Carol's visit to Earth to see the comatose and dying Tracy Burke, a visit that is interrupted by Grace Valentine and June Covington. After they slap some power-dampening cuffs on Carol and knock her out, they then proceed to trying to steal Captain Marvel's powers with a plot that seems to involve a handcuffed grungy mall Santa Claus. After some heroics on Carol's part, the whole fracas is interrupted by the actual Santa Claus who puts an end to the villains' plots and saves the day. Carol then asks Santa for a favor and puts on a rather explosive light show for Tracy as a farewell gift and the volume ends.
Stay Fly is not much more than four kind of silly stories strung together, but they are all pretty fun to read silly stories. There's not really anything profound about these stories other than possibly showing what the day-to-day headaches that an interstellar super-hero might have to deal with in between the big missions. That isn't to say that Carol's heroics are trivial here, even though they are combating relatively small-scale problems, they are definitely important to the people involved. There isn't anything Earth-shaking contained in this volume of Captain Marvel, but it is an enjoyable read.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The book picks up shortly after the conclusion of Higher, Further, Faster, More, with Captain Marvel, also known as Carol Danvers, having a disturbing dream about Rhodey's death, blaming herself for his loss. The atmosphere lightens up shortly thereafter when Tic trying to convince Carol to allow her to continue to travel with the hero, making her case by providing breakfast and suggesting she could serve as Captain Marvel's second in command - a role that Carol reminds Tic that Spider-Woman already fills.
This somewhat playful banter is interrupted when the two manage to track down Carol's missing starship and find that it is under the care of none other than Rocket Raccoon. Given that Rocket had previously attempted to kill Carol's cat Chewie claiming it was actually a member of an incredibly rare and dangerous species called the "flerken", Carol is somewhat nonplussed by this show more revelation. She is even less pleased when she discovers that Rocket has reprogrammed the AI in her ship to speak in meows in an attempt to communicate with Chewie and apparently sent a message out to the universe that he had a flerken for sale. This, quite predictably, results in somewhat hostile fortune-seekers showing up to try and claim the rare creature, leading to some rather hilarious action sequences as Carol and Rocket try to hold off the mysterious attackers while dealing with an incomprehensible AI and sniping at one another as Tic tries to deal with a somewhat recalcitrant Chewie who lays a couple hundred eggs during the fight. And that's more or less the punchline to this portion of the book: Rocket was actually correct and Chewie is in fact a flerken. Nothing that seems to be of lasting consequence really happens in this segment, especially once Carol decides that she will simply ignore the fact that Chewie is actually a flerken. This kind of ultimate triviality seems to be a running theme in this volume, as three out of the four stories essentially amount to little of import.
The second story in the volume starts with Carol and Tic's shared love of teleporting interstellar rock star Lila Cheney, a love that winds up causing Lila to teleport onto Carol's ship. After Carol and Tic fangirl a bit over Lila, the mutant rock star tells them about how she got accidentally betrothed to a prince on an the alien world of Aladna when she was younger and jaunting about the galaxy before she mastered her powers. In short order, Cheney recruits Carol and Tic to help her extricate herself from this betrothal - and by "recruits" I mean she simply teleports them to the faraway planet and asks that they help her now that they are there. This is the point where Cheney reveals that everyone speaks in rhyme on Aladna and that Prince Yan, the man Cheney is betrothed to, cannot ascend to a position of leadership without being married. There is some humor made of the fact that Carol is terrible at rhyming and everyone assuming that she is Cheney's mother (which doesn't stop Yan from making romantic overtures in her direction), but things become temporarily serious when Marlo of Sleen shows up to try to claim Yan's hand by force. Carol handles the problem with her usual rough diplomacy but things seem to be headed towards an unwanted union between Carol and Yan before Tic steps in and offers herself as a bride, reasoning that due to the short lifespan of her species, this will be her best chance for a fairy tale wedding. As with the first story, there isn't anything of much lasting consequence here - even Tic's marriage is little more than a marriage of convenience with no real long-term impact on the heroes.
The third part of the book takes the form of a series of letters from Carol's family back on Earth as they recount their adventures dealing with the machinations of the nefarious Grace Valentine. The first letter is from Kit, also known as "Lieutenant Trouble", and recounts how Valentine fooled the prison authorities into thinking she had reformed while she set her plan to take control of the city's rats into motion. The second letter is from the rat-phobic Spider-Woman, detailing her efforts to fight off and (with Barbara Kawasaki's help) neutralize the threat of the swarming rats. The third letter is from Rhodey, as he details trying to get Valentine to disclose where she planted her bombs and take her into custody, an effort that also involves Kawasaki's help and includes a brief detour into outer space to dispose of an explosive device. The final letter is from Barbara Kawasaki telling Carol that Tracy Burke is not doing well health-wise, a revelation that drives Carol to return to Earth for a brief visit. Other than the note concerning Tracy, everything else about this section of the story is essentially ephemera - there is a problem, Spider-Woman and War Machine deal with it, and the world is reset back to the status quo ante.
The last section of the book details Carol's visit to Earth to see the comatose and dying Tracy Burke, a visit that is interrupted by Grace Valentine and June Covington. After they slap some power-dampening cuffs on Carol and knock her out, they then proceed to trying to steal Captain Marvel's powers with a plot that seems to involve a handcuffed grungy mall Santa Claus. After some heroics on Carol's part, the whole fracas is interrupted by the actual Santa Claus who puts an end to the villains' plots and saves the day. Carol then asks Santa for a favor and puts on a rather explosive light show for Tracy as a farewell gift and the volume ends.
Stay Fly is not much more than four kind of silly stories strung together, but they are all pretty fun to read silly stories. There's not really anything profound about these stories other than possibly showing what the day-to-day headaches that an interstellar super-hero might have to deal with in between the big missions. That isn't to say that Carol's heroics are trivial here, even though they are combating relatively small-scale problems, they are definitely important to the people involved. There isn't anything Earth-shaking contained in this volume of Captain Marvel, but it is an enjoyable read.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
President Bitch is a brutal, intense, and amazing installment in a series that was already brutal, intense, and amazing. Set in the same patriarchal dystopian nightmare world as the first volume, where women who have been deemed "Non-Compliant" by virtue of being not submissive enough, or insufficiently attentive to their husband's needs, or being interested in women, or just being unattractive or obese, are shipped off to a prison planet dubbed "Bitch Planet" where they are supposed to be reeducated into good little women. In reality, the women in the "Bitch Planet" prison system are treated brutally, and in the first volume, some were assembled into a sports team intended to compete against male teams as an political exhibition, but instead everything went wrong for them and one member of the team ended up dead.
With the stage thus set, President Bitch sets about expanding the world and increasing the depth of the story. This volume opens up with what amounts to a flashback involving Meiko Maki, the woman killed at the end of the first volume, and how she ended up an N.C. condemned to Bitch Planet. This sequence is harrowing - showing the length that parents will go to try to give their daughters a better life than the one allowed by the Patriarchs, and also showing the inherent corruption in the system that permits a man with a creepy fetish for young Asian girls to try to pressure those parents into handing one of their daughters over to him. The ultimate act that puts show more Meiko into prison is brutal and vicious, and entirely appropriate given the provocations that led to it. But what is striking about this portion of the book is the array of little background details about the world that crop up, from a mother being refused access to her daughter in a hospital, to the implications made about what is considered appropriate (and inappropriate) education for girls. Every aspect of the book serves to give the reader a view into the lives of the people who live in the dystopian society of the book, and the picture is stark and bleak.
Much of the book flows from Meiko's murder in book one. Meiko's father, not knowing Meiko is dead, agrees to travel to Bitch Planet to build a sports arena in the hopes that he can see her. His attempts to locate his daughter result in complete chaos for the administration, and allow much of what happens in the second half of the book to take place. Whitney, the former operative of the Specials Division finds herself removed from the staff and sent into the prison as an inmate - discovering that as a member of the oppressed class, her higher status was conditional and at the sufferance of the oppressors. Penny blames herself for Meiko's death. All of these threads become important plot elements as the story moves forward, serving as catalysts for other events that push the world to a larger scale and push the story further along. Although the story has not yet fully paid off on this score, Meiko's death seems to be the event that sets all other events into motion that ultimately results in fundamental change - in a sense, she seems destined to become the martyr that sparks the revolution.
Alongside those stories driven by Meiko's death is Kam's quest to locate her sister Morowa, also consigned to imprisonment on Bitch Planet, although her crime was gender falsification - in short, Morowa is a transwoman kept in the compound reserved for other transwomen. The story provides a sequence showing Morowa's incarceration, and the brutal, open transmisogyny that accompanies it, as well as the ways in which the inmates hold each other up in the face of the indignities heaped upon them. This sequence does make one wonder what the compound with the transmen would look like, as I cannot imagine that the Patriarchs would not imprison them as well. One suspects that there might be a revelation concerning such a collection of inmates at some point in a future volume. In any event, Kam's single-minded dedication to locating her sister is brings together all of the threads resulting from Meiko's death, and serves as the unifying force that drives the plot forward. But this story line also serves to highlight the pervasive nature of the prejudices that underpin dystopian society within which Bitch Planet exists. Whitney, knowing Morowa's status, repeatedly misgenders her when speaking with Kam, in part to needle Kam, but also it seems clear, because she simply cannot conceive of a transwoman being a woman. When the populations of the two compounds find themselves in contact with one another, the women don't see their fellow inmates as women, but rather men trying to take something away from them. Even the oppressed buy into the way the world is framed by the oppressors.
As compelling as the main story is, where this book really hits home are the small touches that fill the interstitial spaces between the featured characters. Elements like a coffee mug with a sexist joke on it, or a group of men in a meeting complaining that there are no women to get them coffee and laughing about the idea that women might learn construction-related skills, or the casual assertion that serve to highlight that the world depicted in Bitch Planet is not that far removed from or own. Little interludes like the corporate response to a trio of young men trespassing to take a short cut across private property feel almost as if they could be real. The real terror in Bitch Planet comes from the realization that there are people for whom the society it depicts is their fondest desire. Not people living far away, or in some other place, but people living in one's own communities, some of whom have their hands on the levers of power. Bitch Planet is powerful, in part, because it is a dystopian future that sits just on the edge of reality.
As if to hammer this point home, Eleanor Doane - the President Bitch of the title - enters the story to show that the world the characters inhabit was once not so very unlike ours. While her direct impact on the story, and the impact the followers she inspires, is readily apparent, her presence also serves to show that the state of the world as it is depicted in the "present" of the books is relatively new, having been imposed not just within living memory, but within the span of a single politician's career. The true horror of the world of Bitch Planet becomes clear when one realizes that most of the women struggling to live under the constraints imposed upon them by the regime grew up in a world in which their actions, their dreams, and their horizons were not so limited. Doane is not merely an agent opposed to those in power, she is a symbol that demonstrates that the government is not merely unjust, but is also illegitimate.
Bitch Planet: President Bitch is a harrowing volume in a harrowing series. Even when it takes a mildly hopeful turn, the series drenches it with brutality and violence. This is not the story of docile women living submissively under a misogynistic regime, but rather a story about rage and anger that is bottled up and vented in an almost indiscriminate manner. The pages of this volume are full of fury, but it is a justified fury that feels both unsettling and entirely satisfying at the same time. From the main plot, to the subtext, to the little background details, and even to the fictitious ads that pop up from time to time, every piece of this book serves as a powerful thread that are all woven together masterfully by DeConnick to yield a story that feels like a punch to the throat in the best possible way.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
With the stage thus set, President Bitch sets about expanding the world and increasing the depth of the story. This volume opens up with what amounts to a flashback involving Meiko Maki, the woman killed at the end of the first volume, and how she ended up an N.C. condemned to Bitch Planet. This sequence is harrowing - showing the length that parents will go to try to give their daughters a better life than the one allowed by the Patriarchs, and also showing the inherent corruption in the system that permits a man with a creepy fetish for young Asian girls to try to pressure those parents into handing one of their daughters over to him. The ultimate act that puts show more Meiko into prison is brutal and vicious, and entirely appropriate given the provocations that led to it. But what is striking about this portion of the book is the array of little background details about the world that crop up, from a mother being refused access to her daughter in a hospital, to the implications made about what is considered appropriate (and inappropriate) education for girls. Every aspect of the book serves to give the reader a view into the lives of the people who live in the dystopian society of the book, and the picture is stark and bleak.
Much of the book flows from Meiko's murder in book one. Meiko's father, not knowing Meiko is dead, agrees to travel to Bitch Planet to build a sports arena in the hopes that he can see her. His attempts to locate his daughter result in complete chaos for the administration, and allow much of what happens in the second half of the book to take place. Whitney, the former operative of the Specials Division finds herself removed from the staff and sent into the prison as an inmate - discovering that as a member of the oppressed class, her higher status was conditional and at the sufferance of the oppressors. Penny blames herself for Meiko's death. All of these threads become important plot elements as the story moves forward, serving as catalysts for other events that push the world to a larger scale and push the story further along. Although the story has not yet fully paid off on this score, Meiko's death seems to be the event that sets all other events into motion that ultimately results in fundamental change - in a sense, she seems destined to become the martyr that sparks the revolution.
Alongside those stories driven by Meiko's death is Kam's quest to locate her sister Morowa, also consigned to imprisonment on Bitch Planet, although her crime was gender falsification - in short, Morowa is a transwoman kept in the compound reserved for other transwomen. The story provides a sequence showing Morowa's incarceration, and the brutal, open transmisogyny that accompanies it, as well as the ways in which the inmates hold each other up in the face of the indignities heaped upon them. This sequence does make one wonder what the compound with the transmen would look like, as I cannot imagine that the Patriarchs would not imprison them as well. One suspects that there might be a revelation concerning such a collection of inmates at some point in a future volume. In any event, Kam's single-minded dedication to locating her sister is brings together all of the threads resulting from Meiko's death, and serves as the unifying force that drives the plot forward. But this story line also serves to highlight the pervasive nature of the prejudices that underpin dystopian society within which Bitch Planet exists. Whitney, knowing Morowa's status, repeatedly misgenders her when speaking with Kam, in part to needle Kam, but also it seems clear, because she simply cannot conceive of a transwoman being a woman. When the populations of the two compounds find themselves in contact with one another, the women don't see their fellow inmates as women, but rather men trying to take something away from them. Even the oppressed buy into the way the world is framed by the oppressors.
As compelling as the main story is, where this book really hits home are the small touches that fill the interstitial spaces between the featured characters. Elements like a coffee mug with a sexist joke on it, or a group of men in a meeting complaining that there are no women to get them coffee and laughing about the idea that women might learn construction-related skills, or the casual assertion that serve to highlight that the world depicted in Bitch Planet is not that far removed from or own. Little interludes like the corporate response to a trio of young men trespassing to take a short cut across private property feel almost as if they could be real. The real terror in Bitch Planet comes from the realization that there are people for whom the society it depicts is their fondest desire. Not people living far away, or in some other place, but people living in one's own communities, some of whom have their hands on the levers of power. Bitch Planet is powerful, in part, because it is a dystopian future that sits just on the edge of reality.
As if to hammer this point home, Eleanor Doane - the President Bitch of the title - enters the story to show that the world the characters inhabit was once not so very unlike ours. While her direct impact on the story, and the impact the followers she inspires, is readily apparent, her presence also serves to show that the state of the world as it is depicted in the "present" of the books is relatively new, having been imposed not just within living memory, but within the span of a single politician's career. The true horror of the world of Bitch Planet becomes clear when one realizes that most of the women struggling to live under the constraints imposed upon them by the regime grew up in a world in which their actions, their dreams, and their horizons were not so limited. Doane is not merely an agent opposed to those in power, she is a symbol that demonstrates that the government is not merely unjust, but is also illegitimate.
Bitch Planet: President Bitch is a harrowing volume in a harrowing series. Even when it takes a mildly hopeful turn, the series drenches it with brutality and violence. This is not the story of docile women living submissively under a misogynistic regime, but rather a story about rage and anger that is bottled up and vented in an almost indiscriminate manner. The pages of this volume are full of fury, but it is a justified fury that feels both unsettling and entirely satisfying at the same time. From the main plot, to the subtext, to the little background details, and even to the fictitious ads that pop up from time to time, every piece of this book serves as a powerful thread that are all woven together masterfully by DeConnick to yield a story that feels like a punch to the throat in the best possible way.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Three the Hard Way is the third volume in the Sex Criminals series, and while one would think that a story about people who stop time when they orgasm would already be far enough out on the edge that they couldn't make it much odder, Fraction and Zdarsky manage to do exactly that. In this volume the universe that Suzie and Jon inhabit expands even further, as characters with even stranger relationships with what Suzie the "Quiet" are introduced, but the book also takes a metatextual turn, as the author and artist play with the art form they are using to tell the story, even explicitly introducing themselves into the narrative at one point. To a certain extent, this volume is "more of the same" - at one point even repeating a visual motif used in all thew way back in volume one - but it also takes the story in strange, unexpected, and entirely entertaining directions.
After a brief interlude to introduce an entirely new (and fairly creepy) character, the story mostly picks up where volume two left off, with Suzie and Jon now allied with sex researcher and former porn actress Jazmine Kincaid hunting through the stolen records of the Sex Police to try to find other people who share their strange ability. While this plot development leads in some interesting directions insomuch as it introduces some quirky new characters to the secret Sex Criminals universe, it doesn't really seem to be going anywhere in particular. The Sex Police are still hunting for Jon and Suzie (and by show more extension Kincaid), but the reason for their relentless pursuit is as yet completely unexplained. Jon and Suzie are trying to fend off their pursuers, but given that Suzie decides they should stop robbing banks, there doesn't seem to be any real reason for their conflict with the Sex Police any more, and their embryonic goal of assembling like-minded individuals to fight against the Sex Police seems somewhat counterproductive at this point. The plot, such as it is, in this volume, is pretty much the weakest part of this book, as the characters seem to be pushing forward with agendas without much reason for them to do so.
Where the book shines, though, is in the development of the characters and the weird world they inhabit. In their hunt for allies, Jon and Suzie locate others who can access the "Quiet", and who display even stranger powers than those that have thus far shown up in the series. Douglas D. Douglas turns into a sex ghost in a manner similar to that of Kincaid, but with the added twist that his personal fetishes turn him into an anime Lolita sex ghost who speaks in what appear to be unintelligible phrases and hides a dangerous secret. Alix is asexual, has a weird thing about Carl Sagan, and enters the "Quiet" by jumping off buildings. Their personal stories are interesting, giving a glimpse into the somewhat out of the mainstream lives that led them to where they are when they show up in the story, but neither of them really add much to the book otherwise, as they more of less just show up for a bit and then the larger story moves on without them. I suppose they might show up again in a later volume, but at this point, they are just some interesting background material to expand the fictional universe the protagonists live in.
Another character who gets some serious character development is Myrtle, the leader of the Sex Police, who has entered into a sexual relationship with Jon's psychiatrist in order to try to find information about Jon. The number of boundaries that Myrtle crosses in this hunt for Jon and Suzie is evidence of her Ahab-like obsession with catching them, but due to the fact that her motivation for this obsessive quest is thus far unexplained, she seems bizarrely creepy rather than ominous. The fact that her two minions are almost buffoonishly stupid is somewhat disappointing, as it makes Myrtle really the only member of the Sex Police who is even remotely interesting. The fact that they are spend most of their time openly ogling her while she whips them into actually working is a kind of unexpected wrinkle that makes their whole relationship seem even more warped than one might have originally thought, but this doesn't really amount to much more than a quirk. Everything about the plot-line involving Myrtle and her minions serves to illustrate that the book is largely composed of quirky little moments highlighted for the reader, and while this works really well some times, by the end of this volume I was really hoping for something a little more significant.
One of the running themes established in the previous volume is that despite the fact that the various individuals in the story share a common ability, they are often not particularly compatible with one another otherwise. The foundation of Suzie and Jon's relationship is their shared ability to enter the "Quiet" post-orgasm, but time and again, the cracks engendered by their almost comical incompatibility show up. They both work with Kincaid, but the academic holds both Jon and Suzie in barely concealed contempt, at one point exploding into anger when she discovers what the pair use their abilities to do. The interaction between Kincaid and Jon also serves to put an additional strain upon Jon and Suzie's relationship, as Kincaid essentially ignores Suzie and talks only to Jon, while Jon behaves like an adoring fan of the former porn performer. On the other side of the metaphorical street, Myrtle clearly loathes the pair of henchmen who serve as the muscle in her Sex Police activities, and they regard her with poorly hidden lust. Even Douglas and Alix have a relationship of sorts, and it is just as dysfunctional as all the others portrayed in the book. Time and again Sex Criminals highlights just how emotionally broken the characters that inhabit its world are, and how this has twisted and warped their ability to interact with other people to such an extent that even when they find someone who shares their ability, they often struggle to make their relationships function.
What really sets this story apart from the norm is its copious amounts of metatextual material. Sex Criminals has dabbled in metatextual elements from the first volume in which the lyrics to Fat Bottomed Girls were replaced by post-it notes over the speech bubbles explaining what would have been in them but for copyright issues, or scenes in which one character or another breaks the fourth wall to explain something directly to the reader. But while earlier volumes have included metatextual material, Three the Hard Way positively revels in it. Some scenes are entirely omitted in favor of black panels with text explaining what would have been happening. Some of these skips are of trivial scenes, such as a character shopping at an Asian market, while others involve substantive sequences involving characters resolving their differences. Most of the tricks used in previous volumes show up again, including the post-it notes, although this time with a note explaining that they know they are reusing the device. At one point, the book includes an extended sequence in which Fraction and Zdarsky themselves appear in the book to discuss the author's struggles in coming up with a way to advance a particular scene. Some of these metatextual elements work better than others, but what makes them all so interesting is that they amount to telling the story in a manner that would be impossible with any other medium and that is what sets this book apart from many other graphic stories. For any other flaws it might have, Sex Criminals is a story that simply could not exist as anything other than a graphic novel.
Three volumes in, Sex Criminals is a sprawling, ramshackle story told in a quirky and offbeat manner. Full of odd characters - many of whom one would never want to actually meet or interact with - and with a plot that seems to wander almost aimlessly at times, this is a book that simply should not work. However, despite these flaws, or perhaps because of them, this book is eminently readable, and at times compelling. Coming into this volume,
Sex Criminals was an odd series about odd people told in odd ways, and by the end it had become an odder series about odder people told in even odder ways. This volume is, in the end, a glorious, albeit slightly unfocused and more exuberant continuation of the story and anyone who enjoyed the first two is likely to find this enchanting in its weirdness.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
After a brief interlude to introduce an entirely new (and fairly creepy) character, the story mostly picks up where volume two left off, with Suzie and Jon now allied with sex researcher and former porn actress Jazmine Kincaid hunting through the stolen records of the Sex Police to try to find other people who share their strange ability. While this plot development leads in some interesting directions insomuch as it introduces some quirky new characters to the secret Sex Criminals universe, it doesn't really seem to be going anywhere in particular. The Sex Police are still hunting for Jon and Suzie (and by show more extension Kincaid), but the reason for their relentless pursuit is as yet completely unexplained. Jon and Suzie are trying to fend off their pursuers, but given that Suzie decides they should stop robbing banks, there doesn't seem to be any real reason for their conflict with the Sex Police any more, and their embryonic goal of assembling like-minded individuals to fight against the Sex Police seems somewhat counterproductive at this point. The plot, such as it is, in this volume, is pretty much the weakest part of this book, as the characters seem to be pushing forward with agendas without much reason for them to do so.
Where the book shines, though, is in the development of the characters and the weird world they inhabit. In their hunt for allies, Jon and Suzie locate others who can access the "Quiet", and who display even stranger powers than those that have thus far shown up in the series. Douglas D. Douglas turns into a sex ghost in a manner similar to that of Kincaid, but with the added twist that his personal fetishes turn him into an anime Lolita sex ghost who speaks in what appear to be unintelligible phrases and hides a dangerous secret. Alix is asexual, has a weird thing about Carl Sagan, and enters the "Quiet" by jumping off buildings. Their personal stories are interesting, giving a glimpse into the somewhat out of the mainstream lives that led them to where they are when they show up in the story, but neither of them really add much to the book otherwise, as they more of less just show up for a bit and then the larger story moves on without them. I suppose they might show up again in a later volume, but at this point, they are just some interesting background material to expand the fictional universe the protagonists live in.
Another character who gets some serious character development is Myrtle, the leader of the Sex Police, who has entered into a sexual relationship with Jon's psychiatrist in order to try to find information about Jon. The number of boundaries that Myrtle crosses in this hunt for Jon and Suzie is evidence of her Ahab-like obsession with catching them, but due to the fact that her motivation for this obsessive quest is thus far unexplained, she seems bizarrely creepy rather than ominous. The fact that her two minions are almost buffoonishly stupid is somewhat disappointing, as it makes Myrtle really the only member of the Sex Police who is even remotely interesting. The fact that they are spend most of their time openly ogling her while she whips them into actually working is a kind of unexpected wrinkle that makes their whole relationship seem even more warped than one might have originally thought, but this doesn't really amount to much more than a quirk. Everything about the plot-line involving Myrtle and her minions serves to illustrate that the book is largely composed of quirky little moments highlighted for the reader, and while this works really well some times, by the end of this volume I was really hoping for something a little more significant.
One of the running themes established in the previous volume is that despite the fact that the various individuals in the story share a common ability, they are often not particularly compatible with one another otherwise. The foundation of Suzie and Jon's relationship is their shared ability to enter the "Quiet" post-orgasm, but time and again, the cracks engendered by their almost comical incompatibility show up. They both work with Kincaid, but the academic holds both Jon and Suzie in barely concealed contempt, at one point exploding into anger when she discovers what the pair use their abilities to do. The interaction between Kincaid and Jon also serves to put an additional strain upon Jon and Suzie's relationship, as Kincaid essentially ignores Suzie and talks only to Jon, while Jon behaves like an adoring fan of the former porn performer. On the other side of the metaphorical street, Myrtle clearly loathes the pair of henchmen who serve as the muscle in her Sex Police activities, and they regard her with poorly hidden lust. Even Douglas and Alix have a relationship of sorts, and it is just as dysfunctional as all the others portrayed in the book. Time and again Sex Criminals highlights just how emotionally broken the characters that inhabit its world are, and how this has twisted and warped their ability to interact with other people to such an extent that even when they find someone who shares their ability, they often struggle to make their relationships function.
What really sets this story apart from the norm is its copious amounts of metatextual material. Sex Criminals has dabbled in metatextual elements from the first volume in which the lyrics to Fat Bottomed Girls were replaced by post-it notes over the speech bubbles explaining what would have been in them but for copyright issues, or scenes in which one character or another breaks the fourth wall to explain something directly to the reader. But while earlier volumes have included metatextual material, Three the Hard Way positively revels in it. Some scenes are entirely omitted in favor of black panels with text explaining what would have been happening. Some of these skips are of trivial scenes, such as a character shopping at an Asian market, while others involve substantive sequences involving characters resolving their differences. Most of the tricks used in previous volumes show up again, including the post-it notes, although this time with a note explaining that they know they are reusing the device. At one point, the book includes an extended sequence in which Fraction and Zdarsky themselves appear in the book to discuss the author's struggles in coming up with a way to advance a particular scene. Some of these metatextual elements work better than others, but what makes them all so interesting is that they amount to telling the story in a manner that would be impossible with any other medium and that is what sets this book apart from many other graphic stories. For any other flaws it might have, Sex Criminals is a story that simply could not exist as anything other than a graphic novel.
Three volumes in, Sex Criminals is a sprawling, ramshackle story told in a quirky and offbeat manner. Full of odd characters - many of whom one would never want to actually meet or interact with - and with a plot that seems to wander almost aimlessly at times, this is a book that simply should not work. However, despite these flaws, or perhaps because of them, this book is eminently readable, and at times compelling. Coming into this volume,
Sex Criminals was an odd series about odd people told in odd ways, and by the end it had become an odder series about odder people told in even odder ways. This volume is, in the end, a glorious, albeit slightly unfocused and more exuberant continuation of the story and anyone who enjoyed the first two is likely to find this enchanting in its weirdness.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Seven volumes into its story, and Saga just seems to be getting better. Perhaps it is because the characters are so well-established by now that their hopes and dreams carry more weight and their tragedies and losses seem more poignant. Perhaps it is because the story has backed both the heroes and the villains into a corner from which there seems to be no escape and yet they carry on, No matter the reason for the continued improvement of the series, this volume packs an emotional punch that is almost heartless in how devastating it is, and yet feels completely necessary to the story. In short, Saga is a brutal series, and this volume is the most brutal of all of the installments in it.
This volume picks up shortly after Volume Six left off, with some unhappy people sharing the tree-ship that serves as Alana, Marko, and Hazel's home. The former Prince Robot (now merely Sir Robot) wallows in self-pity and, to a certain extent, self-hatred following his exile from his people and later separation from his son. This self-loathing has turned to sexual frustration, with an unhealthy focus on Alana. On the other side of the ship, Petrichor spends her time grumbling about the work she is doing for her "new wardens" to make clothes for Hazel and her impending younger sibling. When Izabel suggests Petrichor could make maternity clothes for Alana, Petrichor nearly erupts in anger, angrily condemning both Alana and Sir Robot. The former prisoner of war might swallow her anger show more sufficiently to allow her to share a ship with those from the "other side", but she isn't going to be happy about it. Even when they are all on the run from the two most powerful empires in the galaxy, the animosity engendered by the interstellar war that surrounds them is still all but all-consuming.
After the stage is set with these preliminaries, the story gets into full swing when it is discovered that one of the fuel lines in the ship had a leak and they are running on fumes necessitating an emergency landing on the contested comet of Phang, which coincidentally happens to be the refugee child Sophia's original home world (Sophia, one might recall, is the child sex slave that the Will saved and who has since taken up following Marko's former fiancee Gwendolyn around). The primary resource that Prang has is fuel, which is exactly what Alana and Marko need, and also what keeps Wreath and Landfall fighting over the place, as much to deny the place to the other as to claim it for themselves. Phang was already riven with internal sectarian conflict, but when the two great powers jumped in, the conflict became world shattering, transforming the entire populace into either combatants or refugees. One of the subtexts of the entire Saga series is that Landfall and Wreath have long since forgotten their original bones of contention and at the point the story takes place, are merely fighting for the sake of fighting. The story on Prang is quite possibly the starkest and rawest example of this fact.
Intending to stop for just a few hours to plant their tree for a bit and refuel, Alana and Marko instead meet up with a band of adorable looking little religious zealots who also happen to be pitiful refugees. When Hazel is taken by one named Kurti, they agree to help feed the wayward family despite Petrichor's objections, and then let them take up residence in the tree ship. Although not directly stated, it is heavily implied that taking in this added group has strained their resources, and as a result the refueling takes six months, and even then is not complete. This is described by Hazel as one of the happiest times she ever had with her family, but her earlier statement that few adventures ended worse than this one hangs like a looming threat over the domestic tranquility. Events overtake the more or less happy commune, and before too long the war begins to knock on their doorstep.
The action cuts away a few times to focus on the Will, Sophie, Gwendolyn, and Lying Cat, catching the reader up with what is going on in their stories. Sophie, having grown up, seeks to apprentice with a freelancer like the Will and possibly gain vengeance against Marko on Gwendolyn's behalf. Gwendolyn, for her part, has gotten married, entered the Wreath bureaucracy and set about trying to climb the hierarchy while engaging in some illicit collaboration with her nation's enemy. The Will, on the other hand, is still wallowing in drug addled self-pity, and loses his membership in the freelancers union. While Gwendolyn's story in this volume turns out to matter to the events taking place on Phang, and Sophia still seems both adorable and terrifying, the Will's story and everything else about him has just become tired and dull. At this point, I simply don't care what happens to the Will (or, as he is now called since he lost his membership in the freelancer's union, Billy). He has become such a sad sack character that he makes every scene he is in seem completely pointless.
Before too long, the tragedies on Phang start hitting fast and furious as a freelancer named the March comes to try to collect the bounty on Marko and causes an unexpected and somewhat shocking casualty in the process. Sir Robot's sexual obsessions come to a head at exactly the wrong moment when he decides to experiment with a secret stash of drugs he had hidden away, while Petrichor figures out what the forces of Landfall and Wreath are up to and pushes for everyone to get off Phang before it is too late - mostly to save her own skin, because Petrichor is nothing if not self-interested, but saving everyone else is a side-effect that she is willing to live with. In a twist Jabarah and the rest of the family that Alana and Marko had taken in elect not to leave the doomed comet, asserting that their faith in the Lord will protect them from any harm. Waiting and trying to convince the misguided zealots to leave results in a rushed take off just in time to avoid disaster, and causes another tragedy that is small, personal, and devastating. One of the brilliant pieces of writing in the book is to take a moment in which the entire population of a world is being snuffed out, and reduce the deaths to two small and helpless people and blank black empty pages. The ending of this volume is among the most heart-breaking resolutions one could imagine. Even the fact that one tragedy is piled on top of another, which would normally seem almost cloyingly desperate, only enhances the darkness and despair conveyed by this turn of events.
On the one hand, Volume Seven of Saga is a very small-scale story, telling a tale of personal conflicts, and human scale tragedies. Our heroes suffer not one, but two terrible losses, and revelations come out that will strain the already tense living arrangements of the tree ship. On the other hand, Volume Seven is a story that is told on a sweeping scale and involves the politics of two interstellar nations and the fate of an entire world. Telling the story on both the personal and the epic level has been an element of Saga almost from the beginning of the series, but the two have not crashed into one another in such a savage way before. At the same time, one of the underlying questions running through the series has been "is there any way to end the calamitous war between Landfall and Wreath", and this volume offers the small glimmer of hope that there might be, although the spark will probably be the reaction to the events of this book rather than the odd collaboration that is seen taking place in it. In the end, this is one of the most heart-rending volumes of a series that was already heart-rending, but at the same time, the harsh and callous nature of the story feels both necessary and almost satisfying.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
This volume picks up shortly after Volume Six left off, with some unhappy people sharing the tree-ship that serves as Alana, Marko, and Hazel's home. The former Prince Robot (now merely Sir Robot) wallows in self-pity and, to a certain extent, self-hatred following his exile from his people and later separation from his son. This self-loathing has turned to sexual frustration, with an unhealthy focus on Alana. On the other side of the ship, Petrichor spends her time grumbling about the work she is doing for her "new wardens" to make clothes for Hazel and her impending younger sibling. When Izabel suggests Petrichor could make maternity clothes for Alana, Petrichor nearly erupts in anger, angrily condemning both Alana and Sir Robot. The former prisoner of war might swallow her anger show more sufficiently to allow her to share a ship with those from the "other side", but she isn't going to be happy about it. Even when they are all on the run from the two most powerful empires in the galaxy, the animosity engendered by the interstellar war that surrounds them is still all but all-consuming.
After the stage is set with these preliminaries, the story gets into full swing when it is discovered that one of the fuel lines in the ship had a leak and they are running on fumes necessitating an emergency landing on the contested comet of Phang, which coincidentally happens to be the refugee child Sophia's original home world (Sophia, one might recall, is the child sex slave that the Will saved and who has since taken up following Marko's former fiancee Gwendolyn around). The primary resource that Prang has is fuel, which is exactly what Alana and Marko need, and also what keeps Wreath and Landfall fighting over the place, as much to deny the place to the other as to claim it for themselves. Phang was already riven with internal sectarian conflict, but when the two great powers jumped in, the conflict became world shattering, transforming the entire populace into either combatants or refugees. One of the subtexts of the entire Saga series is that Landfall and Wreath have long since forgotten their original bones of contention and at the point the story takes place, are merely fighting for the sake of fighting. The story on Prang is quite possibly the starkest and rawest example of this fact.
Intending to stop for just a few hours to plant their tree for a bit and refuel, Alana and Marko instead meet up with a band of adorable looking little religious zealots who also happen to be pitiful refugees. When Hazel is taken by one named Kurti, they agree to help feed the wayward family despite Petrichor's objections, and then let them take up residence in the tree ship. Although not directly stated, it is heavily implied that taking in this added group has strained their resources, and as a result the refueling takes six months, and even then is not complete. This is described by Hazel as one of the happiest times she ever had with her family, but her earlier statement that few adventures ended worse than this one hangs like a looming threat over the domestic tranquility. Events overtake the more or less happy commune, and before too long the war begins to knock on their doorstep.
The action cuts away a few times to focus on the Will, Sophie, Gwendolyn, and Lying Cat, catching the reader up with what is going on in their stories. Sophie, having grown up, seeks to apprentice with a freelancer like the Will and possibly gain vengeance against Marko on Gwendolyn's behalf. Gwendolyn, for her part, has gotten married, entered the Wreath bureaucracy and set about trying to climb the hierarchy while engaging in some illicit collaboration with her nation's enemy. The Will, on the other hand, is still wallowing in drug addled self-pity, and loses his membership in the freelancers union. While Gwendolyn's story in this volume turns out to matter to the events taking place on Phang, and Sophia still seems both adorable and terrifying, the Will's story and everything else about him has just become tired and dull. At this point, I simply don't care what happens to the Will (or, as he is now called since he lost his membership in the freelancer's union, Billy). He has become such a sad sack character that he makes every scene he is in seem completely pointless.
Before too long, the tragedies on Phang start hitting fast and furious as a freelancer named the March comes to try to collect the bounty on Marko and causes an unexpected and somewhat shocking casualty in the process. Sir Robot's sexual obsessions come to a head at exactly the wrong moment when he decides to experiment with a secret stash of drugs he had hidden away, while Petrichor figures out what the forces of Landfall and Wreath are up to and pushes for everyone to get off Phang before it is too late - mostly to save her own skin, because Petrichor is nothing if not self-interested, but saving everyone else is a side-effect that she is willing to live with. In a twist Jabarah and the rest of the family that Alana and Marko had taken in elect not to leave the doomed comet, asserting that their faith in the Lord will protect them from any harm. Waiting and trying to convince the misguided zealots to leave results in a rushed take off just in time to avoid disaster, and causes another tragedy that is small, personal, and devastating. One of the brilliant pieces of writing in the book is to take a moment in which the entire population of a world is being snuffed out, and reduce the deaths to two small and helpless people and blank black empty pages. The ending of this volume is among the most heart-breaking resolutions one could imagine. Even the fact that one tragedy is piled on top of another, which would normally seem almost cloyingly desperate, only enhances the darkness and despair conveyed by this turn of events.
On the one hand, Volume Seven of Saga is a very small-scale story, telling a tale of personal conflicts, and human scale tragedies. Our heroes suffer not one, but two terrible losses, and revelations come out that will strain the already tense living arrangements of the tree ship. On the other hand, Volume Seven is a story that is told on a sweeping scale and involves the politics of two interstellar nations and the fate of an entire world. Telling the story on both the personal and the epic level has been an element of Saga almost from the beginning of the series, but the two have not crashed into one another in such a savage way before. At the same time, one of the underlying questions running through the series has been "is there any way to end the calamitous war between Landfall and Wreath", and this volume offers the small glimmer of hope that there might be, although the spark will probably be the reaction to the events of this book rather than the odd collaboration that is seen taking place in it. In the end, this is one of the most heart-rending volumes of a series that was already heart-rending, but at the same time, the harsh and callous nature of the story feels both necessary and almost satisfying.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Paper Girls 2 starts literally seconds after Paper Girls 1 ended carrying our adolescent heroines deeper into a confusing time travel story that has them meet alternate versions of themselves, learn things about their own future, try to puzzle out how time travel works on the fly, and figure out which side in what appears to be an intergenerational war they should align with. In this volume, Erin, MacKenzie, and Tiffany spend most of their time trying to figure out what happened to fellow paper girl KJ, and along the way find themselves forced to decide between two different versions of Erin from the future while running from giant-sized microbial monsters and the religious zealots from a future timeline who seem dead set on capturing the three girls for some unknown purpose. The story is inventive, beautifully drawn and colored, and full of characters that seem both approachable and heroic, and yet the whole remains just as baffling at the end of this volume as it did at the end of the first. Paper Girls is a story full of motion and action that, thus far, seems to be intentionally mystifying.
When writers try to tell stories involving central characters facing unknown foes who have unknown goals, they face the difficult task of keeping the reader engaged while also keeping the forces arrayed against the heroes mysterious and enigmatic. In Paper Girls, the four titular heroines are confronted with not one, but two time traveling factions, both of which thus far seem show more either unwilling or unable to explain who they are and what they are up to, and the end result is that there is really no way for the reader to get a handle on what either side wants, or even have any real idea of what is at stake in the conflict. This sort of hiding the ball storytelling can work, but at this point Vaughan is two volumes into the story and the reader pretty much has as little information about the two warring factions now as they had when they were first introduced in part one. To a certain extent, the reader can be pulled into the story due to the fact that the four youthful paper girls at the heart of the story are trying to survive amidst the chaos that swirls about them and navigate their way home, but that can only carry the narrative for so long. Without some information about who the large scale antagonists are and what they want, the story risks devolving into just a series of chase scenes punctuated by unexpected and unexplained things happening in the interstitial spaces between them.
Despite the annoyingly vague nature of the threats looming around them, the three paper girls at the core of this story are interesting enough as characters and are place in interesting enough situations to carry the book. There are two different alternate versions of Erin Teng in this volume - one from 2016 where Erin, MacKenzie, and Tiffany time-traveled to, and another from some presumably fat-future time sent back ostensibly to try to help the trio get to where they need to go. The 2016 Erin Teng is a grown woman, but one who is underemployed, single, and generally unhappy with her life. The interaction between the preteen Teng and the adult Teng fuels much of the story, as the adult Teng simultaneously wallows in regret and tries to put on a brave face for her younger iteration - with a lot of the tension arising as the older Teng tries to actually be an adult authority figure to the three younger girls. The far-future Teng is enigmatic through her entire appearance in the book even though she expresses herself in pretty much the most straightforward and direct manner one could every time she interacts with anyone else. As she is apparently from one of the two warring factions, she is fairly circumspect at actually passing on useful information, although it is revealed that she is a clone and that time travel somehow can be miscalibrated in such a way as to cause microscopic creatures to grow to Godzilla-like size. Much of the tension in the story revolves around a cryptic message that is presumably from the missing K.J., as the three papergirls trapped in 2016 must figure out who to trust and what course of action to take.
One of the more interesting subplots in the book involves MacKenzie, who separates from Erin Teng and older Erin Teng with Tiffany and sets out to find her own older self. When she arrives at her familiar childhood home, she is informed by the current residents that the previous occupants's daughter died from leukemia as a teenager. This, somewhat naturally, sets MacKenzie back a bit, as she assumes that this means she only has a few years to live. She cites back to the time-travelling teenagers of the first volume who said that no matter what twists and turns time-travel takes you on, when you reach your end, that's your end. The interesting thing about this subplot is that there are several assumptions in MacKenzie's line of thought that are not necessarily true: The time-travelers may not have been giving accurate information, either intentionally or inadvertently, there may have been another set of occupants in the house between 1988 and 2016, so the "daughter" referenced may not be MacKenzie, and so on. In the face of these various ambiguities, MacKenzie's certainty seems out of place, and for better or for worse the story telegraphs that MacKenzie's conclusions are almost certainly going to be shown to be incorrect.
As with the first volume, Paper Girls, Volume 2 is a visually stunning book. The artwork is quite good, but what really sets it apart from the pack is the coloring by Matt Wilson. While the color scheme is a bit more diverse than the CYMK palette used in the first volume, perhaps to reflect the fact that most of the action takes place in 2016 rather than 1988, the range of colors used is still fairly restricted, and this paradoxically makes the entire volume feel vibrant and lush.
At this point, Paper Girls is a flawed but still intriguing and ultimately promising series. The characters at the center of the story are all engaging, and their direct adventures are all exciting and interesting, but the seemingly intentional lack of explanation of the larger context in which their story is taking place is starting to become a drag on the ability of the story to hold a reader's interest. I remain hopeful that future volumes will rectify this situation, but unless Vaughan becomes a little less stingy with the background details and starts to fill in the larger canvas, this series runs the risk of devolving into nothing more than a series of disjointed-feeling chase scenes. The good parts of Paper Girls are very good, often borderline brilliant, and make the book worth reading, with the only caveat being that there seem to still be some missing colors in the painting.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
When writers try to tell stories involving central characters facing unknown foes who have unknown goals, they face the difficult task of keeping the reader engaged while also keeping the forces arrayed against the heroes mysterious and enigmatic. In Paper Girls, the four titular heroines are confronted with not one, but two time traveling factions, both of which thus far seem show more either unwilling or unable to explain who they are and what they are up to, and the end result is that there is really no way for the reader to get a handle on what either side wants, or even have any real idea of what is at stake in the conflict. This sort of hiding the ball storytelling can work, but at this point Vaughan is two volumes into the story and the reader pretty much has as little information about the two warring factions now as they had when they were first introduced in part one. To a certain extent, the reader can be pulled into the story due to the fact that the four youthful paper girls at the heart of the story are trying to survive amidst the chaos that swirls about them and navigate their way home, but that can only carry the narrative for so long. Without some information about who the large scale antagonists are and what they want, the story risks devolving into just a series of chase scenes punctuated by unexpected and unexplained things happening in the interstitial spaces between them.
Despite the annoyingly vague nature of the threats looming around them, the three paper girls at the core of this story are interesting enough as characters and are place in interesting enough situations to carry the book. There are two different alternate versions of Erin Teng in this volume - one from 2016 where Erin, MacKenzie, and Tiffany time-traveled to, and another from some presumably fat-future time sent back ostensibly to try to help the trio get to where they need to go. The 2016 Erin Teng is a grown woman, but one who is underemployed, single, and generally unhappy with her life. The interaction between the preteen Teng and the adult Teng fuels much of the story, as the adult Teng simultaneously wallows in regret and tries to put on a brave face for her younger iteration - with a lot of the tension arising as the older Teng tries to actually be an adult authority figure to the three younger girls. The far-future Teng is enigmatic through her entire appearance in the book even though she expresses herself in pretty much the most straightforward and direct manner one could every time she interacts with anyone else. As she is apparently from one of the two warring factions, she is fairly circumspect at actually passing on useful information, although it is revealed that she is a clone and that time travel somehow can be miscalibrated in such a way as to cause microscopic creatures to grow to Godzilla-like size. Much of the tension in the story revolves around a cryptic message that is presumably from the missing K.J., as the three papergirls trapped in 2016 must figure out who to trust and what course of action to take.
One of the more interesting subplots in the book involves MacKenzie, who separates from Erin Teng and older Erin Teng with Tiffany and sets out to find her own older self. When she arrives at her familiar childhood home, she is informed by the current residents that the previous occupants's daughter died from leukemia as a teenager. This, somewhat naturally, sets MacKenzie back a bit, as she assumes that this means she only has a few years to live. She cites back to the time-travelling teenagers of the first volume who said that no matter what twists and turns time-travel takes you on, when you reach your end, that's your end. The interesting thing about this subplot is that there are several assumptions in MacKenzie's line of thought that are not necessarily true: The time-travelers may not have been giving accurate information, either intentionally or inadvertently, there may have been another set of occupants in the house between 1988 and 2016, so the "daughter" referenced may not be MacKenzie, and so on. In the face of these various ambiguities, MacKenzie's certainty seems out of place, and for better or for worse the story telegraphs that MacKenzie's conclusions are almost certainly going to be shown to be incorrect.
As with the first volume, Paper Girls, Volume 2 is a visually stunning book. The artwork is quite good, but what really sets it apart from the pack is the coloring by Matt Wilson. While the color scheme is a bit more diverse than the CYMK palette used in the first volume, perhaps to reflect the fact that most of the action takes place in 2016 rather than 1988, the range of colors used is still fairly restricted, and this paradoxically makes the entire volume feel vibrant and lush.
At this point, Paper Girls is a flawed but still intriguing and ultimately promising series. The characters at the center of the story are all engaging, and their direct adventures are all exciting and interesting, but the seemingly intentional lack of explanation of the larger context in which their story is taking place is starting to become a drag on the ability of the story to hold a reader's interest. I remain hopeful that future volumes will rectify this situation, but unless Vaughan becomes a little less stingy with the background details and starts to fill in the larger canvas, this series runs the risk of devolving into nothing more than a series of disjointed-feeling chase scenes. The good parts of Paper Girls are very good, often borderline brilliant, and make the book worth reading, with the only caveat being that there seem to still be some missing colors in the painting.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Book Two of A Nation Under Our Feet picks up more or less where Book One left off, and shows much the same promise of brilliance and suffers from much the same flaws as the first volume. It is clear that Coates wants to write a story about the morality of power - who gets to wield it and how it may be used in a just manner - but he keeps stumbling over the inherent contradictions of a world in which hereditary rulers with powers that make them literally superhuman are the heroes and they are opposed by (among others) people advocating for representative government. It seems that in this installment of the story Coates has recognized this paradox, and has tried to work around it, but it still seems like the world the story is set in is simply getting in the way of the story Coates wants to tell. This isn't to say that this is a bad book, but it is rather an attempt to do something that may be bigger than the genre it takes place in can allow, and as a result, it struggles against these constraints. Ultimately, Coates resolves this issue by mostly abandoning the nuance of the first volume in favor of paring the story down to T'Challa against a collection of over-the-top villains who can be punched into submission.
The political situation at the opening of this book is essentially the same as it was at the end of the last. The shaman Tatu, assisted by the mind-controlling witch Zenzi is fomenting a rebellion he calls "the People" among the Wakandan people with the aim of show more wresting control of the country away from T'Challa. The disaffected dora milaje Aneka and Ayo are off in a corner of the country seemingly intent on setting up a woman-controlled enclave. Changamire is still preaching the benefits of representative government and denouncing what he sees as T'Challa's dictatorial control over Wakanda. Against this, T'Challa is trying to regain control of the nation he rules, navigating a political situation in which the ability to punch one's enemies into submission is not always all that useful. T'Challa also continues to deal with the fact that his sister Shuri is locked in a prolonged coma from which he is unable to wake her. With all the pieces in place from the first volume, Coates proceeds to move them about the board, showing the various back and forth machinations as "the People" try to make inroads against T'Challa's power and T'Challa, in response, tries to locate his enemies and bring them to heel, using the teleportation capabilities of his ally Manifold to hop around the country to do so.
The net result of all this motion is mostly anticlimactic and almost disappointingly predictable. Tatu tries to recruit Changamire to his cause, but Changamire refuses, pointing out that Tatu's vision is little more than replacing T'Challa's monarchical rule with his own. This serves to more or less take Changamire out of the "rebellion" part of the story, and sidelines him for the rest of the book. When T'Challa sends soldiers to try to subdue the wayward dora milaje, Tatu shows up with Zenzi to mind control the Wakandan troops, but his attempts to take over Aneka and Ayo's forces is rebuffed and he settles for something of a tacit alliance. In these sequences, Coates seems to be taking T'Challa's various morally "grey" opponents off of the board one by one, clearing the board for a showdown between a heroic Black Panther and a villainous evil shaman. As if to drive the point home just a little harder, the story reveals that Tatu's efforts are funded by the duplicitous Zeke Stane, and has the rebellion engage in some underhanded deceptive video editing to make T'Challa look bad.
The conflict in this volume comes to a head when T'Challa flips the script on his opponents, engaging in a little subterfuge of his own so he can record them making a damning confession and then calling in Luke Cage, Misty Knight, and Storm -collectively called "the Crew" - to help him brawl with Stane and his team of super-villains. Despite the complex machinations that created a multi-faction civil war, this book reduces the conflict to little more than Black Panther having a throw-down with an unscrupulous foreign interloper who is motivated almost entirely by the prospect of monetary gain. All of the philosophical questions concerning the nature of government raised by Changamire or concerning the role of women raised by Aneka and Ayo are set aside so the story can be simplified to a good and evil punching match with a few guest stars involved in the fracas. After the build-up in the first volume, this sequence almost feels like little more than filler, and to a certain extent undercuts the rest of the story even more. The story was already kind of floundering due to the fact that the rebellion was being sparked by Zenzi's mind-control powers, calling into question whether "the People" actually had any kind of legitimate grievance, and now the fact that it is funded by Stane for purely mercenary reasons opens up even more questions about the legitimacy of the rebel faction. Instead of posing hard questions about the nature of power and who has the right to wield it, the story descends into a simplistic tale of white hats against black hats.
The volume is intercut with sequences in which Shuri explores what amounts to a dream-like version of Wakanada, guided by an ancestral spirit as she navigates the history and folklore of her nation. Each vignette illustrates some lesson about Wakandan culture and the proper use of authority. In a way, it seems like Coates is trying to rehabilitate the notion of rule by a hereditary monarch through the application of mystical wisdom from beyond the grave. This section feels like an attempt to back away from the hard questions posed earlier in the story about the nature of Black Panther's role as the unelected ruler of a nation and make it palatable for T'Challa to emerge victorious in the end. Oddly, despite being isolated from the rest of the narrative (or perhaps because of it), Shuri's story ends up being the most interesting part of this book, filling in Wakandan history and fleshing out her character more fully than just about any other in the volume. This story ends just as T'Challa and Manifold appear to have found their way into the dream world where Shuri is, presumably setting up Shuri passing on these lessons in rulership to her brother.
As with the first volume, this book has a "throwback" story, this time the opening of the 1973 Don McGregor story Panther's Rage, featuring Killmonger and Venomm as antagonists. In the first section, Black Panthers tracks down Killmonger and unsuccessfully faces off against him, with Killmonger assuming the hero is dead following their encounter. In the second, section, the reader is introduced to Killmonger's ally Venomm, who then learns to his dismay that Black Panther is not actually dead, leading to a confrontation between the two. The super-hero stuff in this part of the book is pretty standard stuff: Villains do bad stuff, Black Panther tracks them down, they fight. What is interesting about this selection is the background - T'Challa has apparently been away from Wakanda for a while, and his subjects repeatedly chastise him for ignoring his responsibility to protect the people of Wakanda. The question that looms large in McGregor's piece is simply this: Can someone serve as a super-hero and be a responsible leader for a nation? This sentiment is echoed in the Coates' authored portion of the book, where one of T'Challa's advisors says that T'Challa doesn't want to rule, but rather wants to be a hero. The tension engendered by T'Challa being both the Black Panther and the King of Wakanda readily apparent in McGregor's story, which, in a way, serves as a precursor to Coates' story. The McGregor work contained in this volume is not the complete run of Panther's Rage, but it is so good that it makes me want to dig out a copy and read it in full.
Book Two of A Nation under Our Feet is, as Book One was, a tantalizing but flawed book. The difference is that it is flawed in completely different ways, While Book One tried to fit a complex political story of competing philosophies of government into a super-hero story, Book Two more or less abandons most of the nuance that had been present in the story to focus on some punching. While the first installment in this series seemed overly ambitious, this volume reveals the cracks in the patina, and simply feels vaguely unsatisfying. That may be due to the fact that this is neither the beginning nor the end of the overall story, and thus kind of has to avoid any real substantive resolution, but even so, the direction the story appears to be going as revealed in this volume feels somewhat disappointing. One can't really conclusively call this a bad story, at least not yet, but one can't really call it a good story yet either. I suppose the most accurate description would be "ambitious and potentially great, but kind of adrift and unfocused at this point".
This review has also been poted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The political situation at the opening of this book is essentially the same as it was at the end of the last. The shaman Tatu, assisted by the mind-controlling witch Zenzi is fomenting a rebellion he calls "the People" among the Wakandan people with the aim of show more wresting control of the country away from T'Challa. The disaffected dora milaje Aneka and Ayo are off in a corner of the country seemingly intent on setting up a woman-controlled enclave. Changamire is still preaching the benefits of representative government and denouncing what he sees as T'Challa's dictatorial control over Wakanda. Against this, T'Challa is trying to regain control of the nation he rules, navigating a political situation in which the ability to punch one's enemies into submission is not always all that useful. T'Challa also continues to deal with the fact that his sister Shuri is locked in a prolonged coma from which he is unable to wake her. With all the pieces in place from the first volume, Coates proceeds to move them about the board, showing the various back and forth machinations as "the People" try to make inroads against T'Challa's power and T'Challa, in response, tries to locate his enemies and bring them to heel, using the teleportation capabilities of his ally Manifold to hop around the country to do so.
The net result of all this motion is mostly anticlimactic and almost disappointingly predictable. Tatu tries to recruit Changamire to his cause, but Changamire refuses, pointing out that Tatu's vision is little more than replacing T'Challa's monarchical rule with his own. This serves to more or less take Changamire out of the "rebellion" part of the story, and sidelines him for the rest of the book. When T'Challa sends soldiers to try to subdue the wayward dora milaje, Tatu shows up with Zenzi to mind control the Wakandan troops, but his attempts to take over Aneka and Ayo's forces is rebuffed and he settles for something of a tacit alliance. In these sequences, Coates seems to be taking T'Challa's various morally "grey" opponents off of the board one by one, clearing the board for a showdown between a heroic Black Panther and a villainous evil shaman. As if to drive the point home just a little harder, the story reveals that Tatu's efforts are funded by the duplicitous Zeke Stane, and has the rebellion engage in some underhanded deceptive video editing to make T'Challa look bad.
The conflict in this volume comes to a head when T'Challa flips the script on his opponents, engaging in a little subterfuge of his own so he can record them making a damning confession and then calling in Luke Cage, Misty Knight, and Storm -collectively called "the Crew" - to help him brawl with Stane and his team of super-villains. Despite the complex machinations that created a multi-faction civil war, this book reduces the conflict to little more than Black Panther having a throw-down with an unscrupulous foreign interloper who is motivated almost entirely by the prospect of monetary gain. All of the philosophical questions concerning the nature of government raised by Changamire or concerning the role of women raised by Aneka and Ayo are set aside so the story can be simplified to a good and evil punching match with a few guest stars involved in the fracas. After the build-up in the first volume, this sequence almost feels like little more than filler, and to a certain extent undercuts the rest of the story even more. The story was already kind of floundering due to the fact that the rebellion was being sparked by Zenzi's mind-control powers, calling into question whether "the People" actually had any kind of legitimate grievance, and now the fact that it is funded by Stane for purely mercenary reasons opens up even more questions about the legitimacy of the rebel faction. Instead of posing hard questions about the nature of power and who has the right to wield it, the story descends into a simplistic tale of white hats against black hats.
The volume is intercut with sequences in which Shuri explores what amounts to a dream-like version of Wakanada, guided by an ancestral spirit as she navigates the history and folklore of her nation. Each vignette illustrates some lesson about Wakandan culture and the proper use of authority. In a way, it seems like Coates is trying to rehabilitate the notion of rule by a hereditary monarch through the application of mystical wisdom from beyond the grave. This section feels like an attempt to back away from the hard questions posed earlier in the story about the nature of Black Panther's role as the unelected ruler of a nation and make it palatable for T'Challa to emerge victorious in the end. Oddly, despite being isolated from the rest of the narrative (or perhaps because of it), Shuri's story ends up being the most interesting part of this book, filling in Wakandan history and fleshing out her character more fully than just about any other in the volume. This story ends just as T'Challa and Manifold appear to have found their way into the dream world where Shuri is, presumably setting up Shuri passing on these lessons in rulership to her brother.
As with the first volume, this book has a "throwback" story, this time the opening of the 1973 Don McGregor story Panther's Rage, featuring Killmonger and Venomm as antagonists. In the first section, Black Panthers tracks down Killmonger and unsuccessfully faces off against him, with Killmonger assuming the hero is dead following their encounter. In the second, section, the reader is introduced to Killmonger's ally Venomm, who then learns to his dismay that Black Panther is not actually dead, leading to a confrontation between the two. The super-hero stuff in this part of the book is pretty standard stuff: Villains do bad stuff, Black Panther tracks them down, they fight. What is interesting about this selection is the background - T'Challa has apparently been away from Wakanda for a while, and his subjects repeatedly chastise him for ignoring his responsibility to protect the people of Wakanda. The question that looms large in McGregor's piece is simply this: Can someone serve as a super-hero and be a responsible leader for a nation? This sentiment is echoed in the Coates' authored portion of the book, where one of T'Challa's advisors says that T'Challa doesn't want to rule, but rather wants to be a hero. The tension engendered by T'Challa being both the Black Panther and the King of Wakanda readily apparent in McGregor's story, which, in a way, serves as a precursor to Coates' story. The McGregor work contained in this volume is not the complete run of Panther's Rage, but it is so good that it makes me want to dig out a copy and read it in full.
Book Two of A Nation under Our Feet is, as Book One was, a tantalizing but flawed book. The difference is that it is flawed in completely different ways, While Book One tried to fit a complex political story of competing philosophies of government into a super-hero story, Book Two more or less abandons most of the nuance that had been present in the story to focus on some punching. While the first installment in this series seemed overly ambitious, this volume reveals the cracks in the patina, and simply feels vaguely unsatisfying. That may be due to the fact that this is neither the beginning nor the end of the overall story, and thus kind of has to avoid any real substantive resolution, but even so, the direction the story appears to be going as revealed in this volume feels somewhat disappointing. One can't really conclusively call this a bad story, at least not yet, but one can't really call it a good story yet either. I suppose the most accurate description would be "ambitious and potentially great, but kind of adrift and unfocused at this point".
This review has also been poted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Henry Huggins was Beverly Cleary's first book, written after she spent years as a librarian struggling to find books to recommend to young boys. The book recounts the adventures of Henry Huggins, an eight year old boy living in an unnamed town in the Pacific Northwest as he, among other things, finds a dog, has an unexpected fish explosion, catches worms to pay off a debt, and tries to clean up his messy pet for a dog show. This book doesn't chronicle big events that change the world or recount pivotal moments in people's lives. It is simply stories about an ordinary boy with an ordinary dog living on an ordinary suburban street doing ordinary things. It is also wonderful.
The format of the book is fairly straightforward. There are six chapters. In each chapter, Henry finds himself confronted with a problem that might plausibly face an eight-year-old boy living on Klickitat Street and he solves it in a reasonably plausible yet humorous manner using little boy logic. Sometimes he gets a little help from his friends, and other times he gets a little help from his parents. Each chapter is more or less self-contained - this book isn't really a novel, but is rather a series of sequential short stories that use many of the same characters and the same setting but are only loosely connected otherwise.
The six chapters are Henry and Ribs, where Henry finds a stray dog and has to figure out how to get him home from his trip downtown on the municipal bus. The complication is that the show more municipal bus doesn't allow dogs and Henry has to get home before dinner. In chapter two, Gallons of Guppies, Henry buys a pair of guppies that soon turn into a half dozen guppies, and eventually hundreds, ultimately occupying pretty much all of the jars Henry's mother intended to use for canning fruits and vegetables. Pretty soon produce comes into season and Henry has to figure out what to do with hundreds of guppies now that his mother needs her jars back. In chapter three, Henry and the Night Crawlers, Henry loses his neighbor's football and has to figure out how to get the money to get him a new one, and sets about industriously capturing worms for another neighbor who wants to go on a fishing trip.
One interesting element to the book is that Ribsy becomes more important to the stories the further one gets into it. He's the focus of the first chapter, but in the second and third chapters he's not really all that important to the story. In the fourth chapter, The Green Christmas, Ribsy is responsible for the accident that gets Henry out of an unwanted role in Henry's school's annual Christmas pageant. The fifth and sixth chapters - The Pale Pink Dog and Finders Keepers - are pretty much all about Ribsy. In The Pale Pink Dog, Henry enters Ribsy in a dog show and after Ribsy gets dirty in the middle of the show, Henry resorts to some rather humorous means of trying to cover up the mud. In Finders Keepers an older boy shows up, having seen Ribsy in a picture from the dog show of the previous chapter, and says that Ribsy is actually named Dizzy and that before Henry found him in the drugstore in the first chapter, he had belonged to the boy and he had come to get him back. Essentially, as the book progresses, Ribsy becomes a more integral part of each chapter, which serves as a subtle means of showing how the dog becomes progressively more ingrained in Henry's life.
The other notable element of this book is that it now serves as a somewhat unintentional snapshot of the world of 1950 America, which made it more interesting for me, but may serve to make it somewhat less than engaging for younger readers. The most obvious marker is the technology in the book - early in the book Henry must make a telephone call to his mother using a pay phone and he has to stand on a box so he can speak into the wall-mounted transmitter, a situation that would probably be almost entirely alien to any child born in the last decade. The other plot element that makes the stories show their age is the comparatively extreme freedom that Henry is given by his parents. In the opening chapter, the eight-year-old Henry has taken the municipal bus downtown after school so he could swim at the YMCA and has stopped off to buy himself an ice cream cone before he takes the bus back home. Henry makes this expedition on his own, and the reader is informed that this is a weekly practice for him. While tweens using a bus to get around is probably still commonplace, children as young as Henry is supposed to be almost certainly do not any more. Throughout the book, Henry's parents practice what can more or less be described as benign neglect when it comes to supervising Henry, allowing him the freedom to get himself into trouble on a regular basis, and then expecting him to solve whatever problem he has created for himself pretty much on his own. It is almost impossible to imagine that any suburban middle-class American child of today being given as much free reign, as much responsibility, and as much leeway to work his way out of difficulties as Henry is given in this book.
Despite its somewhat dated nature, or possibly because of this, Henry Huggins remains a delightful book. Originally intended as a book about an ordinary boy doing ordinary boy things and written for ordinary boys to read, age has made it into a snapshot of the Americana of a bygone era as idealized by time and distance. Regardless of its unintentional time capsule status, this book remains a perfect way to introduce children to Beverly Cleary's world of books, and is an almost must read for a complete childhood.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The format of the book is fairly straightforward. There are six chapters. In each chapter, Henry finds himself confronted with a problem that might plausibly face an eight-year-old boy living on Klickitat Street and he solves it in a reasonably plausible yet humorous manner using little boy logic. Sometimes he gets a little help from his friends, and other times he gets a little help from his parents. Each chapter is more or less self-contained - this book isn't really a novel, but is rather a series of sequential short stories that use many of the same characters and the same setting but are only loosely connected otherwise.
The six chapters are Henry and Ribs, where Henry finds a stray dog and has to figure out how to get him home from his trip downtown on the municipal bus. The complication is that the show more municipal bus doesn't allow dogs and Henry has to get home before dinner. In chapter two, Gallons of Guppies, Henry buys a pair of guppies that soon turn into a half dozen guppies, and eventually hundreds, ultimately occupying pretty much all of the jars Henry's mother intended to use for canning fruits and vegetables. Pretty soon produce comes into season and Henry has to figure out what to do with hundreds of guppies now that his mother needs her jars back. In chapter three, Henry and the Night Crawlers, Henry loses his neighbor's football and has to figure out how to get the money to get him a new one, and sets about industriously capturing worms for another neighbor who wants to go on a fishing trip.
One interesting element to the book is that Ribsy becomes more important to the stories the further one gets into it. He's the focus of the first chapter, but in the second and third chapters he's not really all that important to the story. In the fourth chapter, The Green Christmas, Ribsy is responsible for the accident that gets Henry out of an unwanted role in Henry's school's annual Christmas pageant. The fifth and sixth chapters - The Pale Pink Dog and Finders Keepers - are pretty much all about Ribsy. In The Pale Pink Dog, Henry enters Ribsy in a dog show and after Ribsy gets dirty in the middle of the show, Henry resorts to some rather humorous means of trying to cover up the mud. In Finders Keepers an older boy shows up, having seen Ribsy in a picture from the dog show of the previous chapter, and says that Ribsy is actually named Dizzy and that before Henry found him in the drugstore in the first chapter, he had belonged to the boy and he had come to get him back. Essentially, as the book progresses, Ribsy becomes a more integral part of each chapter, which serves as a subtle means of showing how the dog becomes progressively more ingrained in Henry's life.
The other notable element of this book is that it now serves as a somewhat unintentional snapshot of the world of 1950 America, which made it more interesting for me, but may serve to make it somewhat less than engaging for younger readers. The most obvious marker is the technology in the book - early in the book Henry must make a telephone call to his mother using a pay phone and he has to stand on a box so he can speak into the wall-mounted transmitter, a situation that would probably be almost entirely alien to any child born in the last decade. The other plot element that makes the stories show their age is the comparatively extreme freedom that Henry is given by his parents. In the opening chapter, the eight-year-old Henry has taken the municipal bus downtown after school so he could swim at the YMCA and has stopped off to buy himself an ice cream cone before he takes the bus back home. Henry makes this expedition on his own, and the reader is informed that this is a weekly practice for him. While tweens using a bus to get around is probably still commonplace, children as young as Henry is supposed to be almost certainly do not any more. Throughout the book, Henry's parents practice what can more or less be described as benign neglect when it comes to supervising Henry, allowing him the freedom to get himself into trouble on a regular basis, and then expecting him to solve whatever problem he has created for himself pretty much on his own. It is almost impossible to imagine that any suburban middle-class American child of today being given as much free reign, as much responsibility, and as much leeway to work his way out of difficulties as Henry is given in this book.
Despite its somewhat dated nature, or possibly because of this, Henry Huggins remains a delightful book. Originally intended as a book about an ordinary boy doing ordinary boy things and written for ordinary boys to read, age has made it into a snapshot of the Americana of a bygone era as idealized by time and distance. Regardless of its unintentional time capsule status, this book remains a perfect way to introduce children to Beverly Cleary's world of books, and is an almost must read for a complete childhood.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The View from the Cheap Seats is an eclectic mix of selected nonfiction drawn from a wide swathe of Neil Gaiman's career. The works include the transcripts of speeches, introductions to books, memorials to departed writers, liner notes from albums, interviews, and pretty much every other form of writing that one can think of. The topics covered range from libraries to bookstores, from authors to books to music, and from comic books to refugee camps. While this volume is not a complete collection of Gaiman's nonfiction (assembling which would likely be a nigh impossible task), it does contain a broad spectrum of his work, both in terms of style and substance.
Normally, I would describe a volume like this as a collection of essays, but in the case of The View from the Cheap Seats, that would be a misnomer, as these are, for the most part, not essays, but other pieces of writing. The various pieces in this volume are grouped into ten broad categories, each with a relatively loose theme. Because these pieces appeared in a variety of outlets often separated from one another in both time and venue, many of them return to the same themes (and in some cases, the same anecdotes) so reading them one after another can be a little repetitive at times, as Gaiman returns to the same rhetorical well in one article after another. This is somewhat exacerbated by the groupings, as, for example, Gaiman's thoughts on what he believes generally have similar tempos and hit the same notes over show more an over again, which means that putting them all together in the same section has the effect of highlighting their similarities.
That said, this is Neil Gaiman's work, and as a result, it is almost all top notch, even when he does repeat himself a bit. The sections are: "Things I Believe", which are mostly speeches and articles in which Gaiman expounds upon some element of art, myth, or writing. "Some People I Have Known", which are either introductions to books or memorials to authors who have passed on. "Introductions And Musings: Science Fiction", which are introductions to books and one Nebula Awards speech. "Films and Movies and Me" which is basically Gaiman expounding upon film, mostly filmed work he has been involved in. "On Comics and Some of the People Who Make Them", which consists of articles about various comic book properties and creators as well as some insightful speeches about the genre. "Introductions and Contradictions" which is a grab-bag of introductions Gaiman wrote for books that don't really fit in any of the other categories. "Music and the People Who Make It" consisting of album liner notes, a couple of stories about Amanda Palmer, and his interview with Lou Reed. "On Stardust and Fairy Tales" a section that, given the title, has far less about Gaiman's Stardust than one would think, but a lot of commentary about fairy tale stories. "Make Good Art", which is the only section that is comprised of a single essay, whose title is the same as the section. "The View from the Cheap Seats: Real Things" the last and probably most person section has essays that are clearly important to Gaiman but cannot really be categorized with the rest of the material in the book, and includes both his harrowing article about visiting a Syrian refugee camp and his intensely personal essay about the loss of his friend and collaborator Terry Pratchett. Every section contains brutal, brilliant, and insightful pieces in which Gaiman explores such a wide variety of topics that one has to wonder how he keeps up with all of them.
The most notable thing about The View from the Cheap Seats is that, with two notable (and entirely understandable) exceptions, Gaiman is relentlessly positive. I suppose it is kind of sad that a collection of writing that is almost entirely about how much the writer loves the things he is writing about is unusual in that regard, but it does make reading this book an enjoyable experience. It doesn't matter what Gaiman is writing about, he seems to always try to find what he loves in the subject. If he is writing about libraries and bookstores, he writes about the things that he loves about libraries and bookstores - even when writing about the creepy adult book store that somewhat inexplicably had a stack of old science fiction paperbacks on a back shelf. When he writes about books, he focuses on the part of the book that he found transcendent and sublime. When he writes about authors, he writes about the things they created that moved him.
Gaiman even generally keeps the tone positive when writing memorial pieces about authors, which he seems to often be having to do. It is probably a function of Gaiman coming to prominence at a relatively young age, but he seems to now be in the position of being the one who is called upon, by virtue of his relationship with the deceased, to write a tribute to an author or artist who has passed away. He is, to a certain extent, now in the role of being the man who remembers the great authors, artists, and singers of the past for those of us who were not fortunate enough to know them. For the most part, these memorials are sad and wistful, but focus primarily on what great art the departed made while they were alive, and how they touched the lives of others in beneficial ways. The one time Gaiman lets his anger at the loss of someone shine through is late in the volume, in A Slip of the Keyboard: Terry Pratchett, his essay about the passing of his friend and collaborator, but in the end he turns to focusing on the good things about Terry and leaves behind the fury at having him taken away too early.
The one essay which sees Gaiman angry is his piece about Syrian refugee camps titled So Many Ways to Die in Syria Now: May 2014. This is markedly different from the other works in the book, because its subject matter is the human tragedy playing out in dusty UN refugee camps in the Jordanian desert rather than books, music, authors, or artists. Without denigrating the rest of the work in this volume, this essay is definitely the most powerful and moving in the book, in large part due to the seriousness of the subject matter, but also because the plight of the Syrian refugees seems to bring out the very best in Gaiman as he works very hard to make sure their voices come through in his writing. Gaiman has done some news articles in the past, although most of his work seems to have been fluffy celebrity pieces - he did, after all, get his start writing a book about Duran Duran, but this article shows that if he hadn't moved into comics and fiction writing, he'd have been an excellent news correspondent.
In the end, The View from the Cheap Seats is five hundred pages of Gaiman writing about the world around him, and mostly writing about the things he loves. To a certain extent this book can be seen as Gaiman's attempt to pass on the things he loves to the reader, hoping that by extolling their virtues, his enthusiasm will rub off on his audience. By and large, at least for me, this worked, and I came away from the book with a list of new writers to read, music to seek out and listen to, and movies to watch. This is an excellent survey of Gaiman's work, that is likely to appeal both to those who have never read any of his nonfiction work and those who are hardcore fans of his, and is definitely worth reading.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Normally, I would describe a volume like this as a collection of essays, but in the case of The View from the Cheap Seats, that would be a misnomer, as these are, for the most part, not essays, but other pieces of writing. The various pieces in this volume are grouped into ten broad categories, each with a relatively loose theme. Because these pieces appeared in a variety of outlets often separated from one another in both time and venue, many of them return to the same themes (and in some cases, the same anecdotes) so reading them one after another can be a little repetitive at times, as Gaiman returns to the same rhetorical well in one article after another. This is somewhat exacerbated by the groupings, as, for example, Gaiman's thoughts on what he believes generally have similar tempos and hit the same notes over show more an over again, which means that putting them all together in the same section has the effect of highlighting their similarities.
That said, this is Neil Gaiman's work, and as a result, it is almost all top notch, even when he does repeat himself a bit. The sections are: "Things I Believe", which are mostly speeches and articles in which Gaiman expounds upon some element of art, myth, or writing. "Some People I Have Known", which are either introductions to books or memorials to authors who have passed on. "Introductions And Musings: Science Fiction", which are introductions to books and one Nebula Awards speech. "Films and Movies and Me" which is basically Gaiman expounding upon film, mostly filmed work he has been involved in. "On Comics and Some of the People Who Make Them", which consists of articles about various comic book properties and creators as well as some insightful speeches about the genre. "Introductions and Contradictions" which is a grab-bag of introductions Gaiman wrote for books that don't really fit in any of the other categories. "Music and the People Who Make It" consisting of album liner notes, a couple of stories about Amanda Palmer, and his interview with Lou Reed. "On Stardust and Fairy Tales" a section that, given the title, has far less about Gaiman's Stardust than one would think, but a lot of commentary about fairy tale stories. "Make Good Art", which is the only section that is comprised of a single essay, whose title is the same as the section. "The View from the Cheap Seats: Real Things" the last and probably most person section has essays that are clearly important to Gaiman but cannot really be categorized with the rest of the material in the book, and includes both his harrowing article about visiting a Syrian refugee camp and his intensely personal essay about the loss of his friend and collaborator Terry Pratchett. Every section contains brutal, brilliant, and insightful pieces in which Gaiman explores such a wide variety of topics that one has to wonder how he keeps up with all of them.
The most notable thing about The View from the Cheap Seats is that, with two notable (and entirely understandable) exceptions, Gaiman is relentlessly positive. I suppose it is kind of sad that a collection of writing that is almost entirely about how much the writer loves the things he is writing about is unusual in that regard, but it does make reading this book an enjoyable experience. It doesn't matter what Gaiman is writing about, he seems to always try to find what he loves in the subject. If he is writing about libraries and bookstores, he writes about the things that he loves about libraries and bookstores - even when writing about the creepy adult book store that somewhat inexplicably had a stack of old science fiction paperbacks on a back shelf. When he writes about books, he focuses on the part of the book that he found transcendent and sublime. When he writes about authors, he writes about the things they created that moved him.
Gaiman even generally keeps the tone positive when writing memorial pieces about authors, which he seems to often be having to do. It is probably a function of Gaiman coming to prominence at a relatively young age, but he seems to now be in the position of being the one who is called upon, by virtue of his relationship with the deceased, to write a tribute to an author or artist who has passed away. He is, to a certain extent, now in the role of being the man who remembers the great authors, artists, and singers of the past for those of us who were not fortunate enough to know them. For the most part, these memorials are sad and wistful, but focus primarily on what great art the departed made while they were alive, and how they touched the lives of others in beneficial ways. The one time Gaiman lets his anger at the loss of someone shine through is late in the volume, in A Slip of the Keyboard: Terry Pratchett, his essay about the passing of his friend and collaborator, but in the end he turns to focusing on the good things about Terry and leaves behind the fury at having him taken away too early.
The one essay which sees Gaiman angry is his piece about Syrian refugee camps titled So Many Ways to Die in Syria Now: May 2014. This is markedly different from the other works in the book, because its subject matter is the human tragedy playing out in dusty UN refugee camps in the Jordanian desert rather than books, music, authors, or artists. Without denigrating the rest of the work in this volume, this essay is definitely the most powerful and moving in the book, in large part due to the seriousness of the subject matter, but also because the plight of the Syrian refugees seems to bring out the very best in Gaiman as he works very hard to make sure their voices come through in his writing. Gaiman has done some news articles in the past, although most of his work seems to have been fluffy celebrity pieces - he did, after all, get his start writing a book about Duran Duran, but this article shows that if he hadn't moved into comics and fiction writing, he'd have been an excellent news correspondent.
In the end, The View from the Cheap Seats is five hundred pages of Gaiman writing about the world around him, and mostly writing about the things he loves. To a certain extent this book can be seen as Gaiman's attempt to pass on the things he loves to the reader, hoping that by extolling their virtues, his enthusiasm will rub off on his audience. By and large, at least for me, this worked, and I came away from the book with a list of new writers to read, music to seek out and listen to, and movies to watch. This is an excellent survey of Gaiman's work, that is likely to appeal both to those who have never read any of his nonfiction work and those who are hardcore fans of his, and is definitely worth reading.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Disclosure: I received this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program. Some people think this may bias a reviewer so I am making sure to put this information up front. I don't think it biases my reviews, but I'll let others be the judge of that.
99 Stormtroopers Join the Empire is an absolutely adorable little Star Wars-themed picture book. The book opens by introducing the ninety-nine stormtroopers who have joined the Imperial forces, and the succeeding pages show how, in groups from one to thirty-six, they meet their demise. The various deaths are played for humor, with the troopers dying from a variety of causes that will be fairly recognizable to anyone who has seen the Star Wars movies. The entire book is illustrated in a cute, kind of whimsical style, with cartoonish and somewhat surprisingly (given the violence inherent in many of the deaths) bloodless artwork.
The entire book has kind of the same tone as Ed Gorey's Gashleycrumb Tinies, mirroring it somewhat with the creative ways the stormtroopers die. It is also somewhat reminiscent of the old children's song Ten Little Indians, especially since the book keeps a running account of how many stormtroopers are left as each page goes by. One the other hand, such comparisons aren't entirely accurate. Unlike Gorey's Gashleycrumb work, there is no rhyme to the text, and unlike both of the aforementioned works, there is no apparent pattern to the forms the stormtroopers' deaths take or how many stormtroopers show more die per page. I suppose the fact that the deaths are so completely random is part of the joke - disposable stormtroopers dying in completely unpredictable ways highlights the casual, almost offhand manner in which the characters in the movies treat these fatalities.
One question that comes to mind when reading this book is exactly who is its intended audience. At first, one might think that this is a cute Star Wars book aimed at young children, but I suspect it really wouldn't work for them. The "jokes" are really only funny if you know what the author is alluding to: "One stormtrooper fails to shoot first" isn't really funny unless one has seen the cantina scene from the original Star Wars (and followed the ensuing controversy as the scene was cut and recut in various editions of the movie). "Two stormtroopers think the security droid is on their side" is really only funny if you have seen Rogue One. And so on and so forth. The problem is, kids who are still in the "picture book" stage generally won't have latched on to the Star Wars movies yet - they are just too young to appreciate them, at least in my experience. Some of these sorts of works, such as Darth Vader and Son, work as humor even if one doesn't really get the references. They are enhanced when one knows what the author is alluding to, but that is unnecessary for the enjoyment of the book. Without the references, 99 Stormtroopers Join the Empire is just a bunch of guys dying creatively, and that's probably not all that interesting. I can only surmise that the true intended target for this book are people who grew up on the film series who want something cute they can put in their infant's nursery because it looks cool to have it there, or possibly leave on the coffee table as a conversation piece.
Overall, 99 Stormtroopers Join the Empire is a cute little book that delivers exactly what one would expect. Ninety-nine stormtroopers enlist, and then amusingly die as a result of a combination of the Empire's callous indifference and their own ineptitude. The book is not really much more than silly fun, but it is fairly clever silly fun, chock full of Star Wars references that are used to humorous effect. This book is unlikely to change anyone's life, and probably won't occupy anyone for more than ten or fifteen minutes, but it will be a joyful and goofy ride while it lasts.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
99 Stormtroopers Join the Empire is an absolutely adorable little Star Wars-themed picture book. The book opens by introducing the ninety-nine stormtroopers who have joined the Imperial forces, and the succeeding pages show how, in groups from one to thirty-six, they meet their demise. The various deaths are played for humor, with the troopers dying from a variety of causes that will be fairly recognizable to anyone who has seen the Star Wars movies. The entire book is illustrated in a cute, kind of whimsical style, with cartoonish and somewhat surprisingly (given the violence inherent in many of the deaths) bloodless artwork.
The entire book has kind of the same tone as Ed Gorey's Gashleycrumb Tinies, mirroring it somewhat with the creative ways the stormtroopers die. It is also somewhat reminiscent of the old children's song Ten Little Indians, especially since the book keeps a running account of how many stormtroopers are left as each page goes by. One the other hand, such comparisons aren't entirely accurate. Unlike Gorey's Gashleycrumb work, there is no rhyme to the text, and unlike both of the aforementioned works, there is no apparent pattern to the forms the stormtroopers' deaths take or how many stormtroopers show more die per page. I suppose the fact that the deaths are so completely random is part of the joke - disposable stormtroopers dying in completely unpredictable ways highlights the casual, almost offhand manner in which the characters in the movies treat these fatalities.
One question that comes to mind when reading this book is exactly who is its intended audience. At first, one might think that this is a cute Star Wars book aimed at young children, but I suspect it really wouldn't work for them. The "jokes" are really only funny if you know what the author is alluding to: "One stormtrooper fails to shoot first" isn't really funny unless one has seen the cantina scene from the original Star Wars (and followed the ensuing controversy as the scene was cut and recut in various editions of the movie). "Two stormtroopers think the security droid is on their side" is really only funny if you have seen Rogue One. And so on and so forth. The problem is, kids who are still in the "picture book" stage generally won't have latched on to the Star Wars movies yet - they are just too young to appreciate them, at least in my experience. Some of these sorts of works, such as Darth Vader and Son, work as humor even if one doesn't really get the references. They are enhanced when one knows what the author is alluding to, but that is unnecessary for the enjoyment of the book. Without the references, 99 Stormtroopers Join the Empire is just a bunch of guys dying creatively, and that's probably not all that interesting. I can only surmise that the true intended target for this book are people who grew up on the film series who want something cute they can put in their infant's nursery because it looks cool to have it there, or possibly leave on the coffee table as a conversation piece.
Overall, 99 Stormtroopers Join the Empire is a cute little book that delivers exactly what one would expect. Ninety-nine stormtroopers enlist, and then amusingly die as a result of a combination of the Empire's callous indifference and their own ineptitude. The book is not really much more than silly fun, but it is fairly clever silly fun, chock full of Star Wars references that are used to humorous effect. This book is unlikely to change anyone's life, and probably won't occupy anyone for more than ten or fifteen minutes, but it will be a joyful and goofy ride while it lasts.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
Nemesis Games is the fifth book in the Expanse series, and despite being part of a series that has seen the discovery of alien life, the opening of the gateway to the stars, and human colonization of alien worlds, this is the book in which the biggest change takes place. It turns out that not everyone is happy with the changes that are happening in the universe of the Expanse, and rather than simply accept them, they have decided to take drastic action to keep the status quo, even though that status quo is one they have railed against for their entire lives. This book also structurally moves in a new direction, splitting up the crew of the Rocinante for much of its length, and using the four crewmembers as the primary viewpoint characters.
Following on after the events of Cibola Burn, Nemesis Games starts with an interlude in which a team of Belters, led by a young man named Fillip, attack a Martian military outpost on Callisto, killing most of the garrison, destroying much of the facility, and making off with a substantial volume of classified military equipment. This section is quick, brutal, and devastating, which sets the tone for much of the book. Meanwhile, the crew of the Rocinante has made the long, slow journey back from Illus/New Terra to Tycho so that they can repair their mangled ship. The only trouble is that the repairs needed are quite extensive and will take quite a long time to complete, and the various crew members all start to get itchy feet, and one by show more one they leave to take care of personal business and get some character development.
Alex heads off to Mars to try to find some sort of closure with his ex-wife who stayed with him through his roving Navy years, but wasn't able to remain married to him when they had to actually live together. Amos returns to Earth after learning of the death of Lydia, a woman who was an important mother-figure to him during his youth. Finally, Naomi heads to Ceres, drawn by a message that she refuses to reveal the contents of to Holden, on a mission she refuses to talk about, but which is firmly connected to her mysterious past. For the most part, the reasons they head their separate ways turn out to not really matter: Alex's reunion with his ex-wife goes about as well as one might expect a meeting between estranged ex-spouses would go, while Amos' mother figure is still dead and the old neighborhood he used to live in has changed a lot and mostly forgotten him, although he is still able to make arrangements to provide for Lydia's widow. Both Alex and Amos more or less drift into new difficulties, as Alex teams up with Bobbie to investigate irregularities in the Martian Naval supply chain, and Amos finagles a visit with Clarissa Mao, who, following the events in Abaddon's Gate, is firmly ensconced in the most secure prison Earth has. Each of the men more or less back into the main plot of the book, or rather, the main plot of the book almost literally crashes into their lives.
Naomi, on the other hand, gets entangled in the main plot of the book almost immediately. It turns out that Naomi's enigmatic past includes a son, who turns out to be none other than Filip from the first chapter of the book, and Filip's father is Marcos Inaros, the leader of a splinter group of the OPA that is on the furthest and most extreme anti-Earth end of the group's spectrum. It turns out that Inaros and his followers have been planning something big, and when they put their plan into effect, it changes the direction of the entire Solar System. It turns out that some Belters aren't happy about the fact that humanity now has access to at least a few thousand new planets to settle upon, and feel like they are about to be left behind - cast aside without a thought by the rest of the human race as it stampedes through the alien gate to live upon the freshly available alien worlds. To voice their displeasure, Inaros and his gang more or less set out to destroy human civilization, although they aren't willing to admit to themselves that that is what they are doing. Instead, they assert that they are protecting the Belt from the unscrupulous and uncaring denizens of the inner planets, and setting their own people free to pursue their own destiny.
The real problem with Inaros' plan is that Inaros is simply not nearly as brilliant as he thinks he is. Inaros is one of the most compelling and hateable villains to appear in genre fiction in recent years, and part of what makes him so compelling are his rather obvious flaws. Inaros is not stupid, but once the reader encounters him via Naomi, it quickly becomes clear his personal charisma has allowed him to bluster through his schemes going awry for much of his life, and as a result, he has come to believe his own propaganda about his abilities. The fascinating thing about Inaros is not that his plan is fatally flawed and probably inherently self-defeating, but rather that he is able to sell his plan to people who really should know better. Through almost sheer force of personality, Inaros is is able to convince his collection of followers not only to engage in mass murder on an epic scale, but also to fairly obviously follow a course of action that is almost guaranteed to get them and all of those they claim to be defending also killed, although slowly and painfully. The Expanse series has had technocratic sociopathic villains, revenge-driven obsessed villains, amoral murderous villains, and incompetent villains, but Inaros is the first charismatic villain in the series, and his combination of evil cunning, duplicity, and at times almost buffoonish stupidity makes him one of the most interesting villains the series has produced.
All of the four storylines converge, which is pretty much to be expected, but the real meat of the story belongs to Naomi, which is interesting because Naomi spends most of the volume unable to actually do much of anything, as Inaros holds her prisoner and alternately tries to woo her and threaten her. This helps to flesh Inaros out as a character, and makes boths his strengths and glaring flaws stand out quite vividly, but it does more or less sideline Naomi for a substantial portion of the book. This is the second book in a row in which Naomi has been captured so that she could serve as a conduit for the reader to understand the position of the "other side" in the central conflict of the story, and while this has been a fairly effective technique for the authors, it is a trend I hope doesn't continue. Aside from the fact that putting Naomi in danger to humanize the villains and motivate the crew of the Rocinante is kind of tedious and predictable, it also kind of limits Naomi as a character in some ways.
The central theme of Nemesis Games is change. Each volume of the Expanse has seen major shifts in the structure of the world, but this volume is the first in which the political, economic, and military landscape has been completely reshaped. The novel also continues the recurring themes of the series of "when faced with inscrutable alien technology, humans try to kill one another" and "Holden more or less make every situation he comes across worse". In addition to the large scale shifts in the political and military balance of power, there are smaller changes in the fictional world as well, as two new (and somewhat unexpected) potential crewmembers for the Rocinante find their way into the narrative. The only real weakness of the book is that the story it tells is markedly incomplete, essentially halting in the middle of the action to put off on finishing the primary plot until Babylon's Ashes. This is also a change for the series, which until now has been mostly self-contained stories that leave a few threads dangling, but basically wrap up their plots within one volume. Nemesis Games, on the other hand, is clearly only the first part in a two-part story.
The Expanse series is currently projected to total nine books, which makes Nemesis Games the exact middle of the story. As such, it seems fitting that this book would be the pivot point where the story rotates to an entirely new paradigm, and that appears to be what the authors have done. The changes wrought on the universe of the series in this installment are dramatic and far-reaching, and at the same time feel completely organic, and in hindsight, almost expected. This is a big, bold story that also manages to make room for some interesting character development and interaction. In short, Nemesis Games is both an unexpected twist to the ongoing story of the Expanse and at the same time, exactly what the series needed.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Following on after the events of Cibola Burn, Nemesis Games starts with an interlude in which a team of Belters, led by a young man named Fillip, attack a Martian military outpost on Callisto, killing most of the garrison, destroying much of the facility, and making off with a substantial volume of classified military equipment. This section is quick, brutal, and devastating, which sets the tone for much of the book. Meanwhile, the crew of the Rocinante has made the long, slow journey back from Illus/New Terra to Tycho so that they can repair their mangled ship. The only trouble is that the repairs needed are quite extensive and will take quite a long time to complete, and the various crew members all start to get itchy feet, and one by show more one they leave to take care of personal business and get some character development.
Alex heads off to Mars to try to find some sort of closure with his ex-wife who stayed with him through his roving Navy years, but wasn't able to remain married to him when they had to actually live together. Amos returns to Earth after learning of the death of Lydia, a woman who was an important mother-figure to him during his youth. Finally, Naomi heads to Ceres, drawn by a message that she refuses to reveal the contents of to Holden, on a mission she refuses to talk about, but which is firmly connected to her mysterious past. For the most part, the reasons they head their separate ways turn out to not really matter: Alex's reunion with his ex-wife goes about as well as one might expect a meeting between estranged ex-spouses would go, while Amos' mother figure is still dead and the old neighborhood he used to live in has changed a lot and mostly forgotten him, although he is still able to make arrangements to provide for Lydia's widow. Both Alex and Amos more or less drift into new difficulties, as Alex teams up with Bobbie to investigate irregularities in the Martian Naval supply chain, and Amos finagles a visit with Clarissa Mao, who, following the events in Abaddon's Gate, is firmly ensconced in the most secure prison Earth has. Each of the men more or less back into the main plot of the book, or rather, the main plot of the book almost literally crashes into their lives.
Naomi, on the other hand, gets entangled in the main plot of the book almost immediately. It turns out that Naomi's enigmatic past includes a son, who turns out to be none other than Filip from the first chapter of the book, and Filip's father is Marcos Inaros, the leader of a splinter group of the OPA that is on the furthest and most extreme anti-Earth end of the group's spectrum. It turns out that Inaros and his followers have been planning something big, and when they put their plan into effect, it changes the direction of the entire Solar System. It turns out that some Belters aren't happy about the fact that humanity now has access to at least a few thousand new planets to settle upon, and feel like they are about to be left behind - cast aside without a thought by the rest of the human race as it stampedes through the alien gate to live upon the freshly available alien worlds. To voice their displeasure, Inaros and his gang more or less set out to destroy human civilization, although they aren't willing to admit to themselves that that is what they are doing. Instead, they assert that they are protecting the Belt from the unscrupulous and uncaring denizens of the inner planets, and setting their own people free to pursue their own destiny.
The real problem with Inaros' plan is that Inaros is simply not nearly as brilliant as he thinks he is. Inaros is one of the most compelling and hateable villains to appear in genre fiction in recent years, and part of what makes him so compelling are his rather obvious flaws. Inaros is not stupid, but once the reader encounters him via Naomi, it quickly becomes clear his personal charisma has allowed him to bluster through his schemes going awry for much of his life, and as a result, he has come to believe his own propaganda about his abilities. The fascinating thing about Inaros is not that his plan is fatally flawed and probably inherently self-defeating, but rather that he is able to sell his plan to people who really should know better. Through almost sheer force of personality, Inaros is is able to convince his collection of followers not only to engage in mass murder on an epic scale, but also to fairly obviously follow a course of action that is almost guaranteed to get them and all of those they claim to be defending also killed, although slowly and painfully. The Expanse series has had technocratic sociopathic villains, revenge-driven obsessed villains, amoral murderous villains, and incompetent villains, but Inaros is the first charismatic villain in the series, and his combination of evil cunning, duplicity, and at times almost buffoonish stupidity makes him one of the most interesting villains the series has produced.
All of the four storylines converge, which is pretty much to be expected, but the real meat of the story belongs to Naomi, which is interesting because Naomi spends most of the volume unable to actually do much of anything, as Inaros holds her prisoner and alternately tries to woo her and threaten her. This helps to flesh Inaros out as a character, and makes boths his strengths and glaring flaws stand out quite vividly, but it does more or less sideline Naomi for a substantial portion of the book. This is the second book in a row in which Naomi has been captured so that she could serve as a conduit for the reader to understand the position of the "other side" in the central conflict of the story, and while this has been a fairly effective technique for the authors, it is a trend I hope doesn't continue. Aside from the fact that putting Naomi in danger to humanize the villains and motivate the crew of the Rocinante is kind of tedious and predictable, it also kind of limits Naomi as a character in some ways.
The central theme of Nemesis Games is change. Each volume of the Expanse has seen major shifts in the structure of the world, but this volume is the first in which the political, economic, and military landscape has been completely reshaped. The novel also continues the recurring themes of the series of "when faced with inscrutable alien technology, humans try to kill one another" and "Holden more or less make every situation he comes across worse". In addition to the large scale shifts in the political and military balance of power, there are smaller changes in the fictional world as well, as two new (and somewhat unexpected) potential crewmembers for the Rocinante find their way into the narrative. The only real weakness of the book is that the story it tells is markedly incomplete, essentially halting in the middle of the action to put off on finishing the primary plot until Babylon's Ashes. This is also a change for the series, which until now has been mostly self-contained stories that leave a few threads dangling, but basically wrap up their plots within one volume. Nemesis Games, on the other hand, is clearly only the first part in a two-part story.
The Expanse series is currently projected to total nine books, which makes Nemesis Games the exact middle of the story. As such, it seems fitting that this book would be the pivot point where the story rotates to an entirely new paradigm, and that appears to be what the authors have done. The changes wrought on the universe of the series in this installment are dramatic and far-reaching, and at the same time feel completely organic, and in hindsight, almost expected. This is a big, bold story that also manages to make room for some interesting character development and interaction. In short, Nemesis Games is both an unexpected twist to the ongoing story of the Expanse and at the same time, exactly what the series needed.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The Breath of War by Aliette de Bodard
When It Ends, He Catches Her by Eugie Foster
Toad Words by T. Kingfisher
Makeisha in Time by Rachel K. Jones
Covenant by Elizabeth Bear (signed)
The Truth About Owls by Amal El-Mohtar
A Kiss with Teeth by Max Gladstone (signed)
The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family by Usman T. Malik
This Chance Planet by Elizabeth Bear (signed)
Goodnight Stars by Annie Bellet
We Are the Cloud by Sam J. Miller
The Magician and Laplace's Demon by Tom Crosshill
Spring Festival: Happiness, Anger, Love, Sorrow, Joy by Xia Jia (translated by Ken Liu)
The Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Machado
The Bonedrake's Penance by Yoon Ha Lee
The Devil in America by Kai Ashante Wilson
The Litany of Earth by Ruthana Emrys
A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i by Alaya Dawn Johnson
A Year and a Day in Old Theradane by Scott Lynch
The Regular by Ken Liu
Grande Jeté (The Great Leap) by Rachel Swirsky
[More forthcoming]
When It Ends, He Catches Her by Eugie Foster
Toad Words by T. Kingfisher
Makeisha in Time by Rachel K. Jones
Covenant by Elizabeth Bear (signed)
The Truth About Owls by Amal El-Mohtar
A Kiss with Teeth by Max Gladstone (signed)
The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family by Usman T. Malik
This Chance Planet by Elizabeth Bear (signed)
Goodnight Stars by Annie Bellet
We Are the Cloud by Sam J. Miller
The Magician and Laplace's Demon by Tom Crosshill
Spring Festival: Happiness, Anger, Love, Sorrow, Joy by Xia Jia (translated by Ken Liu)
The Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Machado
The Bonedrake's Penance by Yoon Ha Lee
The Devil in America by Kai Ashante Wilson
The Litany of Earth by Ruthana Emrys
A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i by Alaya Dawn Johnson
A Year and a Day in Old Theradane by Scott Lynch
The Regular by Ken Liu
Grande Jeté (The Great Leap) by Rachel Swirsky
[More forthcoming]
Marvel doesn't really seem to have a particularly strong track record when it comes to "events" in which super-heroes turn against other super-heroes. The original Civil War event was a giant mess and pretty much a terrible story. The current Secret Empire event with Captain America leading a version of Hydra to impose a fascist order upon the United States has gone over about as well as a lead balloon. At its most overarching level, Civil War II was almost as poorly thought out and poorly executed as either of those two events, with an unconvincing attempt to make two morally unequal sides to a debate morally equal just to have the joy of seeing various costumed heroes punch one another. Despite the lack of structural integrity for the overall event, some of the individual story lines in the Civil War II series were actually quite good. Ms. Marvel, in the capable hands of G. Willow Wilson, is one of the good stories.
The volume opens on what is simultaneously a completely mundane and extremely exotic note: A science competition between teams from New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut with a year's supply of duct tape at stake, and representatives from a myriad of technically oriented institutions of higher-learning in attendance. Naturally, Kamala is on New Jersey's team, which is headed up by her best friend Bruno, but in a twist it turns out that the New York team's secret weapon is none other than Miles Morales. There is some humor resulting from the fact that Kamala show more knows Morales' secret identity but he does not know hers, but for the most part the competition goes on about as one would expect a science competition between high schoolers who can produce improbable superscience projects with equipment they have on hand in their classroom laboratories would go. The New Jersey team produces the "Skyshark", the New York team responds with the "Re-Aktron", and then Bruno ups the ante with the "FusionMaster 2000", and then everything goes wrong, ending the event, causing Ms. Marvel, Spider-Man, and Nova to all show up for the rescue operation, and the precognitive Inhuman Ulysses to intone some ominous lines in what amounts to a voice-over.
The book then shifts in both time and place to India during the period following the 1947 partition that formed the countries of present-day India and Pakistan, with Kamala's grandparents among those Muslims living in what has become Hindu-dominated India among those affected. Much of the story in this volume revolves around Kamala making hard decisions, and these background sequences about her personal and family history, like others that are scattered throughout the book, give context to her decisions - essentially showing how Kamala came to be a Pakastani immigrant living in Jersey City, and and in the process showing how she came by the values that inform her choices. There is a certain basic expectation that super-heroes will fight on the side of "right", but often the question of what "right" means to a particular character is left unexplored, or is poorly defined. Wilson lays out what it means for Kamala (and in a sense, for the other Khans), highlighting their familiarity with being the oppressed and the outsider. In a telling scene, Kamala's father offers to pay the school fees of a boy he doesn't know upon learning that the boy has been displaced from his home and his grandparents are struggling to take care of him. He knows how it feels to be the person on the outside, and so he does what he can to alleviate the pain that causes when others find themselves in that position. This identification with those on the bottom of the social order is clearly at the core of Kamala's idea of what "right" means, and this notion has serious consequences in the story when it comes into conflict with Kamala's other notions about who to idolize and look up to.
In short order, Captain Marvel calls Ms. Marvel up to her space station to get the main plot of the book started, and it revolves around the Inhuman Ulysses. It turns out that Ulysses can predict the future, and Captain Marvel wants to use this ability to apprehend criminals before they commit a crime. If you think this sounds a bit like the set-up for the movie Minority Report, the book agrees with you, and even lampshades it with what amounts to as direct a reference as one could make without actually saying the name of the movie. If it seems like one would expect that this plan would go wrong based on that precedent, one would be correct, but Kamala is so star-struck by a request from her idol that she agrees to head up the pilot program for this idea. Not only that, Danvers gets together a group of assistants to help Kamala, which means, as Kamala says, that she now has sidekicks. This is pretty much the set-up that Kamala dreamed of: Trusted by her idol, given a special assignment, and with her own team to lead to boot. And, if there is anything that is consistent in the Ms/ Marvel series, it is that when Kamala gets everything she ever dreamed about, the reality is much less satisfying than her dreams. In fact, the reality almost always turns out to go horribly wrong.
To make a brief digression, given the history between Kamala and Danvers, this decision by Danvers to ask Kamala to lead this pilot program seems just a bit odd. On the one hand, the two start the story with something of a mentor-apprentice bond, with Kamala idolizing Danvers and seeking to emulate her, while Danvers has mostly been there to provide guidance and advice when Ms. marvel needed it. On the other hand, Kamala is a teenager, and has been portrayed as being pretty much as irresponsible and incapable as most teenagers actually are. After all, the last time Danvers interacted with Kamala was when Kamala called in Captain Marvel to prevent Jersey City from being overwhelmed by an army of clones created when Kamala and Bruno messed around with some Asgardian technology Loki left behind when the world was ending. Further, Kamala had created the clones because she was overwhelmed and unable to keep pace with her responsibilities. Given this background, it seems strange that Captain Marvel would decide that this awkward and well-meaning, but naive and entirely too busy teenager would be a good choice for this additional delicate responsibility. The fact that Danvers would hand off the job of running this program to someone like Ms. Marvel without detailed guidance and close supervision really makes one call into question Captain Marvel's leadership skills and judgment. One almost suspects that this story line was forced into the Ms. Marvel series by someone managing the overall Civil War II event, because everything about it feels forced. The character development is, as always, excellent, but every time the actual Civil War II event intrudes, the story kind of falls down a little bit.
At first, at least, the "predictive justice" system seems to work reasonably well: The crew is told that Hijinks, the leader of a band of Canadian anarchist ninjas, is due to steal an experimental tank and drive it around Jersey City until its automatic self-destruct sequence goes off, causing an explosion in the heart of the city and killing innocent bystanders. With the heads up from Ulysses, Khan and her sidekicks are able to apprehend Hijinks before the tank self-destructs. And this is where the book kind of falls down a bit, because everyone involved - both Hijinks and Kamala and her crew - all immediately start talking about the incident as if nothing illegal had been done. Hijinks maintains that he shouldn't be held because he hasn't actually committed a crime, and Kamala and her crew talk about the fact that they are holding him extralegally because he can't be charged with a crime. The only problem is that Hijinks quite clearly did commit a crime. He stole a secret experimental piece of military machinery and then drove around an urban area in that vehicle. There are probably a couple dozen criminal violations contained in that action, and the most obvious one is theft, which is a crime. Not understanding what is and is not legal seems to be a common thread running through both iterations of the Civil War events, as witnessed in the original Civil War event when Agent Hill attempted to arrest Captain America for refusing to help enforce a law that had not even been enacted by Congress yet. I don't expect that comic book writers will know every nuance of the law - I would not expect, for example, a writer to know that willful violations of the Anti-Deficiency Act are potentially prosecutable as criminal offenses, but I at least expect a writer to know that theft is a crime. The fact that none of the characters seem to know that Hijinks has actually committed a crime kind of undercuts the story at this point, which is in large part about the limits of an idea like "predictive justice". Essentially, the prime question posed by this story is whether it is just to detain someone because you have an at least somewhat reliable means of predicting that they will commit a crime, and having the first example be a character who has already committed a crime simply waters down the resulting conundrum. At least it does for the reader, because the characters seem not to realize that theft is a crime, making the reader think that they are all too stupid to be entrusted with any kind of law enforcement, let alone something as potentially fraught with moral hazards as predictive justice.
The story does get around to making its point, with Ms. Marvel and her crew apprehending people who have not yet committed a crime, but who Ulysses has predicted will commit a crime in the very near future. Everything seems to be going swimmingly, when Kamala is confronted with apprehending someone she knows, and her sidekicks prove to be more than a little bit overzealous in carrying out their part in the process. Things spiral out of control and people close to Kamala are first alienated from her by the "predictive justice" program with an especially brutal line where one of her classmates pronounces that none of them are friends, but are rather background characters. Eventually the fallout from the pilot program claims Kamala's closest friend, and she finally gives voice to her growing misgivings, arranging a demonstration for Captain Marvel of the limits of "predictive justice". This first leads to a confrontation with the most ardent of her own sidekicks, nicknamed "Basic Becky" in the story, and then with Carol Danvers herself. The problem with "predictive justice" is that it takes someone who has not committed a crime and treats them as if they have, and since Danvers outright states that they are operating extralegally, doing that is a crime in and of itself. As Kamala states, they may have stopped those crimes from happening, but they have just created a new collection of victims in the process. Kamala identifies with the people who are being oppressed, while Danvers can only see that the statistics show that crime in Jersey City is down. The notion that in the process people's civil liberties were stripped away and their rights were infringed seems to be an unimportant detail to her. No matter the ideological reason for the split, the key element here is that this represents an important break for Kamala, a part of her coming of age story, and it is pretty much done with beautiful poignancy.
Unfortunately, once again the absolute mess than Marvel writers make of legal issues crops up again when Captain Marvel shuts Ms. Marvel's project down and orders that "Basic Becky" be court martialed. There are a couple of problems with this sequence, most notably that since "Basic Becky" is not in the military, she can't be court-martialed, and second, when the civilian cops show up to arrest her, they take her in for kidnapping. But if "Basic Becky" is guilty of kidnapping, then so are Kamala, all the other members of her gang of sidekicks, and even Carol Danvers. In point of fact, they would not only be guilty of kidnapping, they would be guilty of a criminal conspiracy to commit kidnapping. One might argue that Captain Marvel is operating under some colorable authority (despite the fact that she had earlier said they were operating extralegally), but if so, then "Basic Becky" cannot be charged with kidnapping as she was acting under the rubric of Danver's authority. One thing that neither Kamala or Stark see fit to point out is that Danvers also created a new collection of criminals, namely Danvers, Kamala, and all of their eager helpers, and this omission seems rather glaring. These issues don't make the split between Ms. Marvel and Captain Marvel any less dramatic, or the rift between Kamala and Bruno any less tragic, but the clumsy way they are handled does detract from an otherwise magnificent story.
The story has something of an epilogue, with Kamala taking a journey to visit her relatives in Pakistan as a means of getting away from her troubles in Jersey City and dealing with her mixed feelings about being on the opposite side of a dispute from Captain Marvel. The story has used the passing down of a set of wedding bangles as a connecting device, and now Kamala returns to the place where this sort of jewelry has meaning. Having shed the artificiality of the Civil War II event and returned to focusing on Kamala's struggles with being a teenager who must balance being a super-hero with all of the other usual responsibilities that come with growing up, the book almost immediately returns to the usual level excellence for this series. The first resalization Kamala has is that even though she has never felt that she fits in fully as an American, she also doesn't fit into Pakistan any more. She has been irretrievably changed by her experiences, just like the wedding bangles have been altered during their travels. Despite her plan to shed the Ms. Marvel persona for the duration of her visit to Pakistan, local gangs running water extortion rackets spur her to action, but since she doesn't know the local situation, she kind of messes up. She is more or less called off by local super-hero Laal Kanjeer ("the Red Dagger"), who essentially tells her to stay out of things unless she knows what she is doing. To a certain extent, this assuages Kamala's guilty conscience and leads to her second realization by highlighting that even though Captain Marvel is Captain Marvel, she directed the "predictive justice" project literally from a space station and really didn't understand the conditions on the ground in Jersey City like Kamala did. In short, Kamala is actually growing up and beginning to see that she has to chart her own course and pilot her own path.
Ms. Marvel: Civil War II demonstrates that even when handed the thankless task of writing a story in a poorly-conceived and badly executed continuity-wide "event", a skilled writer can salvage a pretty good book out of the larger mess. G. Willow Wilson is a skilled writer, and although this volume kind of falls apart whenever the overarching Civil War II story takes center stage, the elements related to Kamala's character and that of those around her are masterfully presented. The Ms. Marvel series has always been at its best when it focuses on Kamala's relationship with her family, her faith, her heritage, her friends, and her super-hero identity, and this volume is no exception. Despite the fact that the Civil War II elements of the plot are mostly not all that good, the portion of the story that is about Kamala grappling with all of the relationships in her life and trying to decide who it is she actually wants to be is so magnificently done that the overall end result is a superior book.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The volume opens on what is simultaneously a completely mundane and extremely exotic note: A science competition between teams from New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut with a year's supply of duct tape at stake, and representatives from a myriad of technically oriented institutions of higher-learning in attendance. Naturally, Kamala is on New Jersey's team, which is headed up by her best friend Bruno, but in a twist it turns out that the New York team's secret weapon is none other than Miles Morales. There is some humor resulting from the fact that Kamala show more knows Morales' secret identity but he does not know hers, but for the most part the competition goes on about as one would expect a science competition between high schoolers who can produce improbable superscience projects with equipment they have on hand in their classroom laboratories would go. The New Jersey team produces the "Skyshark", the New York team responds with the "Re-Aktron", and then Bruno ups the ante with the "FusionMaster 2000", and then everything goes wrong, ending the event, causing Ms. Marvel, Spider-Man, and Nova to all show up for the rescue operation, and the precognitive Inhuman Ulysses to intone some ominous lines in what amounts to a voice-over.
The book then shifts in both time and place to India during the period following the 1947 partition that formed the countries of present-day India and Pakistan, with Kamala's grandparents among those Muslims living in what has become Hindu-dominated India among those affected. Much of the story in this volume revolves around Kamala making hard decisions, and these background sequences about her personal and family history, like others that are scattered throughout the book, give context to her decisions - essentially showing how Kamala came to be a Pakastani immigrant living in Jersey City, and and in the process showing how she came by the values that inform her choices. There is a certain basic expectation that super-heroes will fight on the side of "right", but often the question of what "right" means to a particular character is left unexplored, or is poorly defined. Wilson lays out what it means for Kamala (and in a sense, for the other Khans), highlighting their familiarity with being the oppressed and the outsider. In a telling scene, Kamala's father offers to pay the school fees of a boy he doesn't know upon learning that the boy has been displaced from his home and his grandparents are struggling to take care of him. He knows how it feels to be the person on the outside, and so he does what he can to alleviate the pain that causes when others find themselves in that position. This identification with those on the bottom of the social order is clearly at the core of Kamala's idea of what "right" means, and this notion has serious consequences in the story when it comes into conflict with Kamala's other notions about who to idolize and look up to.
In short order, Captain Marvel calls Ms. Marvel up to her space station to get the main plot of the book started, and it revolves around the Inhuman Ulysses. It turns out that Ulysses can predict the future, and Captain Marvel wants to use this ability to apprehend criminals before they commit a crime. If you think this sounds a bit like the set-up for the movie Minority Report, the book agrees with you, and even lampshades it with what amounts to as direct a reference as one could make without actually saying the name of the movie. If it seems like one would expect that this plan would go wrong based on that precedent, one would be correct, but Kamala is so star-struck by a request from her idol that she agrees to head up the pilot program for this idea. Not only that, Danvers gets together a group of assistants to help Kamala, which means, as Kamala says, that she now has sidekicks. This is pretty much the set-up that Kamala dreamed of: Trusted by her idol, given a special assignment, and with her own team to lead to boot. And, if there is anything that is consistent in the Ms/ Marvel series, it is that when Kamala gets everything she ever dreamed about, the reality is much less satisfying than her dreams. In fact, the reality almost always turns out to go horribly wrong.
To make a brief digression, given the history between Kamala and Danvers, this decision by Danvers to ask Kamala to lead this pilot program seems just a bit odd. On the one hand, the two start the story with something of a mentor-apprentice bond, with Kamala idolizing Danvers and seeking to emulate her, while Danvers has mostly been there to provide guidance and advice when Ms. marvel needed it. On the other hand, Kamala is a teenager, and has been portrayed as being pretty much as irresponsible and incapable as most teenagers actually are. After all, the last time Danvers interacted with Kamala was when Kamala called in Captain Marvel to prevent Jersey City from being overwhelmed by an army of clones created when Kamala and Bruno messed around with some Asgardian technology Loki left behind when the world was ending. Further, Kamala had created the clones because she was overwhelmed and unable to keep pace with her responsibilities. Given this background, it seems strange that Captain Marvel would decide that this awkward and well-meaning, but naive and entirely too busy teenager would be a good choice for this additional delicate responsibility. The fact that Danvers would hand off the job of running this program to someone like Ms. Marvel without detailed guidance and close supervision really makes one call into question Captain Marvel's leadership skills and judgment. One almost suspects that this story line was forced into the Ms. Marvel series by someone managing the overall Civil War II event, because everything about it feels forced. The character development is, as always, excellent, but every time the actual Civil War II event intrudes, the story kind of falls down a little bit.
At first, at least, the "predictive justice" system seems to work reasonably well: The crew is told that Hijinks, the leader of a band of Canadian anarchist ninjas, is due to steal an experimental tank and drive it around Jersey City until its automatic self-destruct sequence goes off, causing an explosion in the heart of the city and killing innocent bystanders. With the heads up from Ulysses, Khan and her sidekicks are able to apprehend Hijinks before the tank self-destructs. And this is where the book kind of falls down a bit, because everyone involved - both Hijinks and Kamala and her crew - all immediately start talking about the incident as if nothing illegal had been done. Hijinks maintains that he shouldn't be held because he hasn't actually committed a crime, and Kamala and her crew talk about the fact that they are holding him extralegally because he can't be charged with a crime. The only problem is that Hijinks quite clearly did commit a crime. He stole a secret experimental piece of military machinery and then drove around an urban area in that vehicle. There are probably a couple dozen criminal violations contained in that action, and the most obvious one is theft, which is a crime. Not understanding what is and is not legal seems to be a common thread running through both iterations of the Civil War events, as witnessed in the original Civil War event when Agent Hill attempted to arrest Captain America for refusing to help enforce a law that had not even been enacted by Congress yet. I don't expect that comic book writers will know every nuance of the law - I would not expect, for example, a writer to know that willful violations of the Anti-Deficiency Act are potentially prosecutable as criminal offenses, but I at least expect a writer to know that theft is a crime. The fact that none of the characters seem to know that Hijinks has actually committed a crime kind of undercuts the story at this point, which is in large part about the limits of an idea like "predictive justice". Essentially, the prime question posed by this story is whether it is just to detain someone because you have an at least somewhat reliable means of predicting that they will commit a crime, and having the first example be a character who has already committed a crime simply waters down the resulting conundrum. At least it does for the reader, because the characters seem not to realize that theft is a crime, making the reader think that they are all too stupid to be entrusted with any kind of law enforcement, let alone something as potentially fraught with moral hazards as predictive justice.
The story does get around to making its point, with Ms. Marvel and her crew apprehending people who have not yet committed a crime, but who Ulysses has predicted will commit a crime in the very near future. Everything seems to be going swimmingly, when Kamala is confronted with apprehending someone she knows, and her sidekicks prove to be more than a little bit overzealous in carrying out their part in the process. Things spiral out of control and people close to Kamala are first alienated from her by the "predictive justice" program with an especially brutal line where one of her classmates pronounces that none of them are friends, but are rather background characters. Eventually the fallout from the pilot program claims Kamala's closest friend, and she finally gives voice to her growing misgivings, arranging a demonstration for Captain Marvel of the limits of "predictive justice". This first leads to a confrontation with the most ardent of her own sidekicks, nicknamed "Basic Becky" in the story, and then with Carol Danvers herself. The problem with "predictive justice" is that it takes someone who has not committed a crime and treats them as if they have, and since Danvers outright states that they are operating extralegally, doing that is a crime in and of itself. As Kamala states, they may have stopped those crimes from happening, but they have just created a new collection of victims in the process. Kamala identifies with the people who are being oppressed, while Danvers can only see that the statistics show that crime in Jersey City is down. The notion that in the process people's civil liberties were stripped away and their rights were infringed seems to be an unimportant detail to her. No matter the ideological reason for the split, the key element here is that this represents an important break for Kamala, a part of her coming of age story, and it is pretty much done with beautiful poignancy.
Unfortunately, once again the absolute mess than Marvel writers make of legal issues crops up again when Captain Marvel shuts Ms. Marvel's project down and orders that "Basic Becky" be court martialed. There are a couple of problems with this sequence, most notably that since "Basic Becky" is not in the military, she can't be court-martialed, and second, when the civilian cops show up to arrest her, they take her in for kidnapping. But if "Basic Becky" is guilty of kidnapping, then so are Kamala, all the other members of her gang of sidekicks, and even Carol Danvers. In point of fact, they would not only be guilty of kidnapping, they would be guilty of a criminal conspiracy to commit kidnapping. One might argue that Captain Marvel is operating under some colorable authority (despite the fact that she had earlier said they were operating extralegally), but if so, then "Basic Becky" cannot be charged with kidnapping as she was acting under the rubric of Danver's authority. One thing that neither Kamala or Stark see fit to point out is that Danvers also created a new collection of criminals, namely Danvers, Kamala, and all of their eager helpers, and this omission seems rather glaring. These issues don't make the split between Ms. Marvel and Captain Marvel any less dramatic, or the rift between Kamala and Bruno any less tragic, but the clumsy way they are handled does detract from an otherwise magnificent story.
The story has something of an epilogue, with Kamala taking a journey to visit her relatives in Pakistan as a means of getting away from her troubles in Jersey City and dealing with her mixed feelings about being on the opposite side of a dispute from Captain Marvel. The story has used the passing down of a set of wedding bangles as a connecting device, and now Kamala returns to the place where this sort of jewelry has meaning. Having shed the artificiality of the Civil War II event and returned to focusing on Kamala's struggles with being a teenager who must balance being a super-hero with all of the other usual responsibilities that come with growing up, the book almost immediately returns to the usual level excellence for this series. The first resalization Kamala has is that even though she has never felt that she fits in fully as an American, she also doesn't fit into Pakistan any more. She has been irretrievably changed by her experiences, just like the wedding bangles have been altered during their travels. Despite her plan to shed the Ms. Marvel persona for the duration of her visit to Pakistan, local gangs running water extortion rackets spur her to action, but since she doesn't know the local situation, she kind of messes up. She is more or less called off by local super-hero Laal Kanjeer ("the Red Dagger"), who essentially tells her to stay out of things unless she knows what she is doing. To a certain extent, this assuages Kamala's guilty conscience and leads to her second realization by highlighting that even though Captain Marvel is Captain Marvel, she directed the "predictive justice" project literally from a space station and really didn't understand the conditions on the ground in Jersey City like Kamala did. In short, Kamala is actually growing up and beginning to see that she has to chart her own course and pilot her own path.
Ms. Marvel: Civil War II demonstrates that even when handed the thankless task of writing a story in a poorly-conceived and badly executed continuity-wide "event", a skilled writer can salvage a pretty good book out of the larger mess. G. Willow Wilson is a skilled writer, and although this volume kind of falls apart whenever the overarching Civil War II story takes center stage, the elements related to Kamala's character and that of those around her are masterfully presented. The Ms. Marvel series has always been at its best when it focuses on Kamala's relationship with her family, her faith, her heritage, her friends, and her super-hero identity, and this volume is no exception. Despite the fact that the Civil War II elements of the plot are mostly not all that good, the portion of the story that is about Kamala grappling with all of the relationships in her life and trying to decide who it is she actually wants to be is so magnificently done that the overall end result is a superior book.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
Ninefox Gambit is a work of military science fiction in which the science fiction is almost incomprehensible, and the military actions are only slightly less so. That said, it is a beautiful book that is not really hampered by the weirdly exotic world that it drops the reader into, and this weirdness is handled so well that by the end, it almost feels natural. Despite the alien strangeness of the setting, the story told in the book is fundamentally almost ordinary, and that manages to root the book in such a way that even with exotic calendar based math warping reality, there is enough that is familiar to hold onto that the story doesn't dissolve into impenetrability. One of the fine lines that science fiction authors have to walk is the balance between presenting a world in which technology and culture are different enough from ours that it feels at least somewhat alien, but not so different that the fictional reality has ranged so far from the familiar that it is effectively unintelligible for the reader. In Ninefox Gambit, Yoon Ha Lee flirts with this line, standing right at the border where the setting would become entirely baffling, and occasionally stepping across for just a little bit, but for the most part remaining just shy of mystifying.
The central conceit of the novel is a brand of mathematics exists called "calendrical math", and by using it one can determine which collection of variables need to be controlled in order to change the way physics works, allowing show more for a variety of "exotic" technologies that are dependent upon this shared belief system. The government under which the various characters in the book live is the "Hexarchate" and it enforces a rigid calendrical orthodoxy of festivals, remembrances, and torture sessions to power the technologies that underpin the authority of the ruling Hexarchs. Deviations from the calendrical observances are treated as heresies and ruthlessly stamped out. Technology that does not depend upon calendrical math is called "invariant" technology, and is represented as generally being less effective than the calendrically powered "exotic" technologies - and with one notable exception none of the "invariant" technologies are ever really described. The "exotic" technologies are only described in slightly more detail than that: We get names like "Amputation Gun", and "Threshold Winnower", and "Carrion Gun", and a couple of dozen descriptions of various battle formations, but with the exception of the obvious effects some of them have, the technology is never really given any substantial definition.
Some have said that Ninefox Gambit is about calendrical math, but that does not seem to be entirely accurate. There are lots of references to calendrical math in the book, with discussions of people doing computations and the effects of maintaining or not maintaining the calendar, but there is no actual math in the book. To a certain extent this is to be expected - after all, if Lee knew how to do calculations that would reshape the laws of physics, he would be publishing ground-breaking academic papers, not writing fiction. On the other hand, when science fiction authors introduce heretofore unknown technologies into their stories, they usually try to give the reader some general idea of the parameters under which those technologies operate. Calendrical math, however, seems to have no limitation at all, which I suppose might be the point, because once you posit a particular technology that can alter the very fundamental elements of reality, all bets would seem to be off. This gives the book a pervasive sense of unreality, as the central conflict involves putting down a heretical faction that has cropped up and instituted their own calendar with an associated competing set of technologies. Since what is possible with calendrical math is never really explained, the reader really has no grounding in what is possible in this conflict, and as a result, must be content with simply gliding along as the various interested parties explain what is happening as it happens and satisfied with never really understanding exactly why.
One thing that is certain is that the political structure that makes up the Hexarchate are both instrumental to and supported by the maintenance of the orthodox calendrical arrangements. The nation is divided into six factions, each with a defined role within society. The Kel are the soldiers, and are imbued with "formation instinct", which causes them to reflexively follow orders. The Shuos are spies, assassins, and information brokers. The Nirai are mathematicians and creators of the exotic technologies that flow from the calendrical math used by the Hexarchate. The Rahal are the magistrates and judges, charged with enforcing civil order. And so on. Each faction has its place in society, and each member of a faction has a defined role to play. The incomprehensibility of the technology is almost entirely irrelevant to the book. While it is weird to read a book that is basically military science fiction in which none of the actions taken by the various forces involved make any sense because the technology they are using relied upon odd patterns of behavior and geometrical configurations that are never given any more detail than a fanciful name, the simple fact is that all of this exotic technology is just a way to explain the existence of a society that is so rigid that the deadliest heresy is allowing people to have choices.
The core story involves Captain Kel Cheris, a member of the Kel faction of the Hexarchate, whose use of unorthodox formations in response to having heretical weapons deployed against her unit has called attention to herself, leading to the Shuos Hexarch selecting her for a team to evaluate the best way to suppress a heresy that is causing calendrical rot at the heart of one of the most important regions of the Hexarchate in the key position of the Fortress of Scattered Needles. Cheris' proposal is to revive the dead and insane Shuos General Jedao and have him plan the attack that will allow the Hexarchate to retake the fortress intact and reimpose the proper calendrical order. This is a daring and dangerous idea: Daring because when he was alive, Jedao never lost a battle, and dangerous because in his final engagement he killed off the enemy and then turned on his own troops, slaughtering them to a man. The part of the plan that Cheris was not really prepared for is that to revive Jedao, he has to be attached to someone living, and that someone turns out to be her, creating what amounts to private a dialogue between the long-dead General and the living Captain (who is pretty quickly breveted to General for the operation). One might think that such an intimate relationship would engender candor, but like pretty much everyone else in the Hexarchate, Jedao plays his cards extremely close to the chest, even with someone who is literally the only person who can hear him. One problem with books in which intrigue is a major part of the plot is that the author runs the risk of withholding too much information from the reader because the characters would withhold information from one another, resulting in a story in which, from the perspective of the reader, things seem to happen almost at random. Ninefox Gambit doesn't quite sink to that level, but it comes close, and when this is combined with the almost inscrutable nature of calendrical math, the events in the book frequently seem almost haphazard.
For all of the exotic trappings, the story itself is fairly ordinary, although it does have some interesting twists: Rebels rise up against what appears to be a fairly oppressively harsh regime, forces are sent to bring the heretics to heel, various players have their own personal agendas they are trying to advance, and there are a couple of betrayals and reversals to spice things up. The heresy at the center of the story is the revival of the Liozh, a seventh faction that used to exist when the Hexarchate was the Heptarchate before they experimented with democracy and the calendar was revised to remove them. It seems notable that both the Liozh heresy and the creation of Kel formation instinct didn't take place until after Jedao had died the first time, but like all things in this book with its ever shifting reality, this is only an impression and there isn't really anything concrete to base that upon. The one somewhat unique question that seems to loom large in the background, but which is only hinted at, is whether it is possible to have anything resembling what we would recognize as a free society in a world in which calendrical mathematics exists. One can only hope this will be addressed in a future installment of the series.
Ninefox Gambit is a fascinating, confusing, and ultimately frustrating book. In it, Lee posits a strange alien society based upon a technology that is fairly off-the-wall and uses this setting to tell a story that feels oddly comfortable. While Lee never quite reaches the point where the story dissolves into complete chaos, the combination of bizarre technology, an alien society that underpins that technology, and pervasive conspiratorial machinations definitely serves to bring it to the brink of anarchy. There is a lot to love in this book, but there is also a lot that seems to simply whirl about without much rhyme or reason. This seems like a book that people either find interesting, or find absolutely intolerable. The real difficulty is figuring out which kind of person one is, and there's really no way to do that short of trying to read the book. That said, I am the sort of person who found it interesting, and as a result, I think it is definitely worth picking up.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less
The central conceit of the novel is a brand of mathematics exists called "calendrical math", and by using it one can determine which collection of variables need to be controlled in order to change the way physics works, allowing show more for a variety of "exotic" technologies that are dependent upon this shared belief system. The government under which the various characters in the book live is the "Hexarchate" and it enforces a rigid calendrical orthodoxy of festivals, remembrances, and torture sessions to power the technologies that underpin the authority of the ruling Hexarchs. Deviations from the calendrical observances are treated as heresies and ruthlessly stamped out. Technology that does not depend upon calendrical math is called "invariant" technology, and is represented as generally being less effective than the calendrically powered "exotic" technologies - and with one notable exception none of the "invariant" technologies are ever really described. The "exotic" technologies are only described in slightly more detail than that: We get names like "Amputation Gun", and "Threshold Winnower", and "Carrion Gun", and a couple of dozen descriptions of various battle formations, but with the exception of the obvious effects some of them have, the technology is never really given any substantial definition.
Some have said that Ninefox Gambit is about calendrical math, but that does not seem to be entirely accurate. There are lots of references to calendrical math in the book, with discussions of people doing computations and the effects of maintaining or not maintaining the calendar, but there is no actual math in the book. To a certain extent this is to be expected - after all, if Lee knew how to do calculations that would reshape the laws of physics, he would be publishing ground-breaking academic papers, not writing fiction. On the other hand, when science fiction authors introduce heretofore unknown technologies into their stories, they usually try to give the reader some general idea of the parameters under which those technologies operate. Calendrical math, however, seems to have no limitation at all, which I suppose might be the point, because once you posit a particular technology that can alter the very fundamental elements of reality, all bets would seem to be off. This gives the book a pervasive sense of unreality, as the central conflict involves putting down a heretical faction that has cropped up and instituted their own calendar with an associated competing set of technologies. Since what is possible with calendrical math is never really explained, the reader really has no grounding in what is possible in this conflict, and as a result, must be content with simply gliding along as the various interested parties explain what is happening as it happens and satisfied with never really understanding exactly why.
One thing that is certain is that the political structure that makes up the Hexarchate are both instrumental to and supported by the maintenance of the orthodox calendrical arrangements. The nation is divided into six factions, each with a defined role within society. The Kel are the soldiers, and are imbued with "formation instinct", which causes them to reflexively follow orders. The Shuos are spies, assassins, and information brokers. The Nirai are mathematicians and creators of the exotic technologies that flow from the calendrical math used by the Hexarchate. The Rahal are the magistrates and judges, charged with enforcing civil order. And so on. Each faction has its place in society, and each member of a faction has a defined role to play. The incomprehensibility of the technology is almost entirely irrelevant to the book. While it is weird to read a book that is basically military science fiction in which none of the actions taken by the various forces involved make any sense because the technology they are using relied upon odd patterns of behavior and geometrical configurations that are never given any more detail than a fanciful name, the simple fact is that all of this exotic technology is just a way to explain the existence of a society that is so rigid that the deadliest heresy is allowing people to have choices.
The core story involves Captain Kel Cheris, a member of the Kel faction of the Hexarchate, whose use of unorthodox formations in response to having heretical weapons deployed against her unit has called attention to herself, leading to the Shuos Hexarch selecting her for a team to evaluate the best way to suppress a heresy that is causing calendrical rot at the heart of one of the most important regions of the Hexarchate in the key position of the Fortress of Scattered Needles. Cheris' proposal is to revive the dead and insane Shuos General Jedao and have him plan the attack that will allow the Hexarchate to retake the fortress intact and reimpose the proper calendrical order. This is a daring and dangerous idea: Daring because when he was alive, Jedao never lost a battle, and dangerous because in his final engagement he killed off the enemy and then turned on his own troops, slaughtering them to a man. The part of the plan that Cheris was not really prepared for is that to revive Jedao, he has to be attached to someone living, and that someone turns out to be her, creating what amounts to private a dialogue between the long-dead General and the living Captain (who is pretty quickly breveted to General for the operation). One might think that such an intimate relationship would engender candor, but like pretty much everyone else in the Hexarchate, Jedao plays his cards extremely close to the chest, even with someone who is literally the only person who can hear him. One problem with books in which intrigue is a major part of the plot is that the author runs the risk of withholding too much information from the reader because the characters would withhold information from one another, resulting in a story in which, from the perspective of the reader, things seem to happen almost at random. Ninefox Gambit doesn't quite sink to that level, but it comes close, and when this is combined with the almost inscrutable nature of calendrical math, the events in the book frequently seem almost haphazard.
For all of the exotic trappings, the story itself is fairly ordinary, although it does have some interesting twists: Rebels rise up against what appears to be a fairly oppressively harsh regime, forces are sent to bring the heretics to heel, various players have their own personal agendas they are trying to advance, and there are a couple of betrayals and reversals to spice things up. The heresy at the center of the story is the revival of the Liozh, a seventh faction that used to exist when the Hexarchate was the Heptarchate before they experimented with democracy and the calendar was revised to remove them. It seems notable that both the Liozh heresy and the creation of Kel formation instinct didn't take place until after Jedao had died the first time, but like all things in this book with its ever shifting reality, this is only an impression and there isn't really anything concrete to base that upon. The one somewhat unique question that seems to loom large in the background, but which is only hinted at, is whether it is possible to have anything resembling what we would recognize as a free society in a world in which calendrical mathematics exists. One can only hope this will be addressed in a future installment of the series.
Ninefox Gambit is a fascinating, confusing, and ultimately frustrating book. In it, Lee posits a strange alien society based upon a technology that is fairly off-the-wall and uses this setting to tell a story that feels oddly comfortable. While Lee never quite reaches the point where the story dissolves into complete chaos, the combination of bizarre technology, an alien society that underpins that technology, and pervasive conspiratorial machinations definitely serves to bring it to the brink of anarchy. There is a lot to love in this book, but there is also a lot that seems to simply whirl about without much rhyme or reason. This seems like a book that people either find interesting, or find absolutely intolerable. The real difficulty is figuring out which kind of person one is, and there's really no way to do that short of trying to read the book. That said, I am the sort of person who found it interesting, and as a result, I think it is definitely worth picking up.
This review has also been posted to my blog Dreaming About Other Worlds. show less