sixthlight

I read a lot of books in these two months but writing them up was derailed comprehensively by the whole family being stricken with illness for most of September, just the worst kind of horrible lingering cold where you’re not very sick but you are unquestionably sick and it gets only fractionally better day by day. Do not recommend. Coming back to this now, I was going to do two posts but actually I spent most of these two months reading three series so I might as well discuss it all at once.

Fiction

The Sinister Booksellers of Bath (Garth Nix)

Sequel to The Left-Handed Booksellers of London, continues in the same cheerfully fast-paced urban fantasy/period adventure tone (once again, the early 1980s is now ‘period’, we are all decaying into dust etcetera). I was a bit surprised by something which seemed like an obvious plot hook for a third book being resolved very quickly in the last ten pages but maybe that was the intention all along? Otherwise loads of fun. I particularly like the author using the correct extrapolation of ‘inherited magical power’ (one ancestor a couple of centuries ago -> many distantly related descendants in the modern day) to bring in a large and diverse cast.

The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi (Shannon Chakraborty)

A pastiche of medieval Islamic adventure tales for a modern audience, centred around the Indian Ocean, starring a middle-aged retired pirate who has to get the crew back together for One Last Adventure, including dealing with her sexy but terrible ex-husband, the various entanglements of her crew in their own retirements, and some weird and terrifying magic. The adventure is fun and I think it does a really excellent job of hitting the vibe of the worldview of this time and place, where magic and magical beings are simply part of the world that most people don’t ever have to directly deal with. Would read more about Amina’s adventures anyday.

A Thief In The Night (K J Charles)

A novella about the fate of a very minor background character from The Gentle Art of Fortune Hunting, but more simply a second-chance romance that’s also a story about identity and family and the prosaic task of cleaning up the house after a family member dies. Not on my top 10 of hers but a pleasant read.

The Merchant Princes series (Charles Stross)

A very 90s fantasy-SF series about a Jewish biotech journalist in Boston who stumbles onto a conspiracy that turns personal; she is actually a lost noblewoman from a parallel/alternate universe with medieval technology. Stross is the kind of author who thinks this would be a terrible thing to be and Miriam’s life is not easy hereon in, but if you like tightly-written SF thrillers about economic development, YOU will have fun even when she doesn’t. Also, a lot of nuclear bombs get dropped. Docking points for “we’ll show the bad guys are Very Bad with some casual rape and torture of NPCs” and a fairly wince-worthy decision around the turning point for the alternate universe (no Abrahamic religions does not mean technological innovation is choked off for an extra millennium, come onnnnnnnnnnnnn) but I can’t lie, I downed these like a cold beer on a hot day and I’ll probably re-read them at least once.

The Empire Games series (Charles Stross)

Follow-up series to the Merchant Princes, set twenty years after the originals, when Miriam’s adopted-out daughter is recruited into a secret US government spy programme and the games begin. Equally good in terms of SF thriller cred and with a much happier ending (kind of obligatory when you finish a trilogy in 2021, and I believe the author said as much), and you can see how the world has moved along in many regards between the two series (e.g., there’s no major queer characters in the originals; two queer WOC are the major PoVs for this series). Just as many nuclear bombs as the original but with somewhat fewer casualties.

The God-King Chronicles (Mike Brooks)

Fantasy trilogy in light of Brexit (as so much current British fantasy is); starts with Fantasy Viking refugees showing up at the furthest outpost of a feudal empire run by knights with dinosaurs and gets weirder, though ultimately follows a fairly conventional epic fantasy storyline. Enjoyable characters and a plot that races along. The author is trying to do something interesting with cultural relativity about gender and sexuality but ultimately fails to land it cleanly because he doesn’t understand the ways that misogyny and homophobia/transphobia are intimately linked; however, it’s a worthy effort and does fun things with some standard fantasy archetypes along the way (e.g. the small man/big man thief and swordsman odd couple, but they’ve been married for twenty years). Also, the dinosaurs have feathers, an azhdarchid eats someone, and various natural disasters are depicted with high accuracy, which buys a lot of leeway from me.

A Day of Fallen Night (Samantha Shannon)

Prequel to The Priory of the Orange Tree. Somehow I thought it was a novella???? It is…exactly the opposite of that. Extremely similar to the original in that it’s a big sweeping epic fantasy following several characters across several continents as they all converge on fighting the same Unambiguously Evil opponent, also many lesbians. Could have been a trilogy, is a brick-sized single book instead. I don’t know if I got a lot out of it that I didn’t get out of the first one, but if you liked that you’ll like this.

Legends and Lattes (Travis Baldree)

The author describes this (I paraphrase lightly) as coming from a wish for a Hallmark movie but in D&D land and…that’s exactly what this is, no more and no less. If that is what you are looking for you will have a very pleasant time and if it isn’t you’ll be bored. I did not find it terribly groundbreaking but I do not feel like I wasted my time.

Translation State (Ann Leckie)
A bucketful of romance and bildungsroman tropes (arranged marriage! Running away from home! Finding your True Self!) but also cannibalism (mostly cannibalism) as Leckie digs into the culture and presence in the universe of Presger Translators, outside the context of the Imperial Radch. Very very good because it’s Leckie but also. SO much cannibalism and vivisection and just come prepared, eh.

Scarlet (Genevieve Cogman)
Scarlet Pimpernel fanfic which makes two major changes: 1) the main character is a housemaid drawn into the eponymous nobleman’s undercover heroics and 2) vampires (and other supernatural elements revealed as the story goes on). I thought it did a very good job of balancing interrogating the actual morals of rescuing aristocrats during the French Revolution from the point of view of an ordinary (not desperately poor, but far from financially secure) woman, but not tipping into full ‘actually the heroes of the original are the baddies really’ - not that that can’t be fun too (c.f. K J Charles’ The Henchmen of Zenda) but I found this more interesting. I don’t think you need to know too much about the original to enjoy it; I have never actually read the full text, read the abridged version I did read when I was about six, and still found it very easy to follow.

Non-fiction

Mysteries of the Quantum Universe (Thibault Damour and Mathieu Burniat)
Comic book starring characters who are clearly meant to evoke (but are not) Tintin and Snowy, exploring the concepts of quantum physics. The art is very clever and there’s loads of details I think a second reading would reward, but the format IS mostly ‘white dude explains things to a white dude’ which is a little dull IMO.

The Dark Lady of DNA (Brenda Maddox)
Biography of Rosalind Franklin which focuses heavily on her identity and historical context as an Anglo-Jewish woman from a wealthy family. Does a lot of work to try and determine why she never married or had a serious relationship but is twenty years old so the word ‘asexual’ never comes up - I think in a modern biography it would. I was really pleased to have my understanding of her expanded so far beyond the question of her contribution to discovering the structure of DNA, and I’d recommend it if you’re interested in the history of science and women in science at all.