Exploring the Fantastical Wild West

I quite enjoyed Native Star, a Christmas gift off my Amazon wishlist from Noah, plus it got my 2014 SFF Explorer Challenge off to an early start, since I hadn’t read anything by M.K. Hobson. It’s a mostly-light historical fantasy with a heavy (predictable but enjoyable) dose of Pride and Prejudice. Emily Edwards, witch from the small Sierra Neveda town Lost Pine, must journey to San Francisco (and then farther) with East Coast-educated warlock Dreadnought Stanton. There are some of the expected tropes of the historical fantasy and Western genres: the savages are noble, the Russians are mysterious, the raccoons are mutants, and the miners are undead. Well, maybe not all of those tropes are so expected. One of the most satisfying aspects of the storytelling is that the characters stay true to their own personalities and agendas throughout; I never felt a character was simply caving to the dictates of the plot, and while the ending was a bit rushed, Hobson set up many intriguing possibilities and a few surprises. Emily remained a true and worthy protagonist to the end.

There are many enjoyable intricacies to this world, from mail-order patent charms to the hybrid Cockatrice flying machine. There are tensions between science and magic, various schools of magic (the sangrimancers traffic in blood magics while for the credomancers, belief is everything), and the ill-regarded witches. While filling in some details, the follow-up, The Hidden Goddess, was not quite as polished. Emily seemed to drift from place to place and encounter to encounter, seldom taking the lead and even more rarely interacting with Dreadnought. The pressure of living up to the uppercrust Stantons is a central dilemma, but neither Emily nor Dreadnought’s family seem to change much or have any noteworthy reactions to each other; they simply cohabitate when the

circumstances dictate. While there’s a clear and very bad Big Bad, it doesn’t seem to much affect the goings-on in New York until the hurried ending, which seemed as if it would have taken place in much the same way at the novel’s beginning (without any of the intervening events) as it does at the end. The cleverest element of the book is the character and story of Miss Jesczenka, who explores the themes of gender relationships and the morals of public relations much more thoroughly in this volume than does Emily.

It seems that Hobson’s third book, set in 1911 and dealing with the offspring of characters from The Native Star, is less well reviewed than the two I’ve read. Still, there’s enough detail and possibility in the world Hobson creates and the way it intersects with “real” history that I’m interested in reading more. I’ll probably wait until Book 4 comes out, however, as it looks like Hobson has a tendency to write in pairs (mabye it’s in her contract).

***

Bloodshot and Hellbent by Cherie Priest are also partially set in the West; vampire and thief Raylene Pendle is based in Seattle when she’s contracted by a fellow member of the undead to steal the records of the secret government experiments of which he was a victim. The books are pretty generic first-person urban fantasy with more than a dash of paranormal romance. I found Raylene’s overly chummy narration tended to get annoying (Have I mentioned I over-pack my purse when I prepare to break into a government facility? You remember what happened with my last adventure, right?) and I could wish for a bit more obvious skill in my protagonist (übercompetence may be a cliché, but so is cluelessness).

Though both books spend significant time on the West Coast, they also range afield, with much of Bloodshot’s action taking place in Atlanta and D.C. and a central Hellbent encounter involving the infiltration of a Houston NASA compound. In fact, one of the highlights of the series hails from Atlanta, Adrian deJesus, an ex-Navy SEAL drag queen whose vampire sister was a victim of both the government experiments and Atlanta’s own ruthless vampire nest.

These were like-‘em-not-love-‘em fare for me, but they did keep the pages turning. While I won’t necessarilly be looking for the chronicles of Raylene’s future adventures, I am still interested in Priest’s series of steampunkish alternate-history Westerns, for which she’s best known.

***

Oh, and sometime I should do a post about two writers who didn’t quite make the Explorer cut – Charles Stross (whom I can’t count as new-to-me because I read Revenge of the Nerds, which he co-authored with Cory Doctorow, last year) and Ruth Ozeki (whose For The Time Being I just can’t consider either sci-fi or fantasy). But I’ll save that for another night.