Mindspace Investigations

Prose-wise, over the weekend I enjoyed the first three Mindspace Investigations novels (Clean, Sharp, and Marked) by Alex Hughes. They’re quick reads, not too far from the urban/paranormal field despite being set several centuries in the future: first person POV, a telepath and recovering drug addict working for the Atlana police, generally with sexy workaholic cop as partner. I do see similarities to the Dresden Files (and to similar genre books), although frankly addiction & thought sensing are not quite as fun as monsters & magic. The post-Tech-Wars future, where the U.S. in particular is only slowly re-releasing advanced technology in the wake of disastrous misuse of networked and biological tech, has a lot of potential although at the moment it's a bit "fun tech like flying cars to establish a futuristic setting and low tech like lack of networked search capabilities for the average detective where it's plot convenient." Where Hughes excels, however, is in creating believably, frustratingly powerful antagonists (of both the cat-stroking and more interesting but infuriating it’s-all-just-part-of-living-within-a-corrupt-system varieties). I think it’s a little overly cute that we don’t learn our POV character’s name is “Adam” until the last page of Book 1, but it’s not really important to the story. While each book focuses on a primay case or two, there is some development overall of both the character relationships and of some over-arching conflicts. In fact, there are some surprising shake-ups in the third book that also lead to some significant character moments. (After reading these three titles, I stumbled across an online interview with the author in which she revealed that she’s sketched out a 9-book arc for the series, a detail I think bodes well for her continued ability to include procedural details without having the series seem to run in place.) In any case, clearly I’ve found the Mindspace Investigations novels to be pageturners so far.

Saga & Other Graphics

A Romeo and Juliet story where warring planets stand in for feuding houses and, instead of killing themselves, our fugitive heroes are just trying to make a life for themselves and their newborn daughter. Saga is straight-up space opera, where the horned moon-dwellers may work magic while their winged opponents invest in the latest laser and missile tech, but this is really a Clarke’s Law situation where the plausibility and pedigree of the deadly force matter less than how it’s used (especially against our protagonists). Instead of getting tied up in technical details, writer Brian K. Vaughan lets the details of his imagined future speak to the present-day. You see, planet Landfall and its moon Wreath have long since exported their war to other planets to minimize the damage to the homeworlds. We see a non-native Landfall medic who signed up in order to get permission to attend university on Landfall. We have a shady intelligence officer, calculations as to who qualifies as a “friendly,” and plenty of collateral damage. Both sides of the conflict occasionally use outside contractors, and our bounty hunter (with a heart of gold?) has to deal with his agent and his insurance company. Volume Three introduces us to a storyline that touches on the powers and freedom of the press.

More even than the present-day parallels, however, it’s the emotional truths that matter to the story. The illustrations by Fiona Staples do a large part of the work, drawing us in and conveying subtle nuances of expression (a grin versus an indulgent smile, sadness versus shame, surprise and fear). It’s exciting to have a couple worth rooting for, full partners: Alana the brash soldier-turned prison guard-turned deserter and Marko the conflicted pacifist and former detainee. Their relationship, like those of all the characters, is complex, with attractions and resentments and fights and sacrifices. Even characters who may seem relatively minor have developed backstories (like our royal prince with PTSD who also happens to be a robot – and the mechanics of these robot royalty I just can’t stop questioning, no matter that the story so far has little time for such nuts and bolts). I absolutely began to care for these people. (Spoilers be damned: I had a scare, but Lying Cat is alive and in the picture as of the end of Chapter 18.) This is a story about love and war and sex and hope, societal guilt and responsibilities, parenting and family, and even (with a nod, I’m convinced, to Samuel R. Delany) the importance of art. I can’t wait to read more of it (but I’ll have to, since Volume Four isn’t out yet … I wonder how the individual issues are being released).

OK, you may be asking, perceptive loyal reader: aren’t graphic novels a little out of my wheelhouse? Why am I writing about comics? Well, in large part because one of my Goodreads groups in hosting a science fiction and fantasy graphic novel challenge. I haven’t read a lot of comics or graphic novels (Maus, Perspepolis, and that’s it?), especially in the sci-fi and fantasy genres, and there are some classics I’ve been meaning to get around to for a while (Watchmen). Of course, when I got onto Amazon to look at titles, I found myself buying up mostly interesting-looking contemporary titles. (Yes, the library has graphic novels, although not a huge selection and generally a little battered. Also, I’ve worked at a public library, and I know which kinds of books have to be retrieved from the men’s restrooms at the end of a night.) Oh, I’m sure I’ll get to Alan Moore eventually. I may even try some manga. And although I told myself I’d just get some a couple of Volume Ones and borrow newer issues if I enjoyed the beginning, when the first issue of Saga arrived in the mail, I knew I’d want copies of the rest of the series. We’ll see if that trend continues for a couple of other series I want to try(Sandman, actually a classic; The Sixth Gun). Sheesh. I thought trade paperbacks were expensive; guess you gotta pay the illustrator. And colorists. But I think I’ll intersperse with some actual prose next.

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Meanwhile, notes on a couple of graphic novels I got to before Saga:

Because I’m a fan of the Dresden Files books, I’d been interested in the graphic novels. Since the first, shorter volume (Welcome to the Jungle) is an original story by Jim Butcher, I thought it worth an investment. Overall verdict: pretty good. I like the art by Ardian Syf: it’s detailed and interesting and fits in well with how I’d imagined Dresden and the Chicago settings. (I did wonder what was up w/that scar over Harry’s eye and why it seemed to keep changing sides of his face before deciding those lines were really just there to give “craggy” facial definition and assist in conveying expressions.) In Butcher’s introduction, he writes, “I can honestly say that the representation of the characters found here is very, very close to the images of them that exist in my head. Harry is bang-on, in particular… .” There’s pretty much only one viable suspect to the mystery plot, but the visual reveal of the villain’s true form is satisfyingly creepy. (Also, just from the small tastes here, I can tell the vampires bits in this series are going to look really awesome.) There are some nice visual jokes (Harry’s run-through of the “usual suspects”), but in many of the action sequences, I felt like the text/narration from Harry got in the way of following the visuals. It’s a real challenge to balance a visual medium with a character whose distinctiveness is his wise-cracking inner voice, and while the volume is very readable, I don’t think it always finds the perfect balance with this. Fun, but it doesn’t necessarily have me rushing out to buy the rest of the graphic novels.

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My other recent graphic novel read is decidedly not fantasy or sci-fi. I’d been reading a lot of film reviews (while half-heartedly trying to avoid anything too spoilery) and think pieces on Blue is the Warmest Color since it won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, and I’d been curious. But some of the potential problematic issues that had been mentioned (a prurient focus on sex, poor working conditions for the starring actresses, the originator of the story’s expressed dissatisfaction with the adaptation, power imbalance between the fictional lovers) tended to make me less curious. So, since the royalties would go to author Julie Maroh, and since I usually try to read the book before seeing the movie anyway, it made sense to check Blue is the Warmest Color the graphic novel.

The book tells a moving love story. There’s not a great deal of dialogue, though some narration is provided in the form of lines from an old diary read by one of the lovers. The watercolor-like art, in shades of neutrals with dashes of blue, draws in the reader and conveys both emotion and, where appropriate, eroticism. The frames sometimes “zoom in” to give emphasis or explain nuance. The story begins when Clementine, a French high school student, finds herself uninterested in the senior boy who wants to date her, fascinated instead by a blue-haired woman she glimpses in passing in the square. The woman turns out to be Emma, an art college student, who is intrigued by Clem but unsure about complicating her own life and relationships.

It’s true that there’s not much new or unexpected (arguably, apart from the gender of the lovers) to this romance; the value is in the sensitive and believable exploration of a particular relationship. (Happily, although at least one of the main characters becomes a teacher, this is not a student-teacher relationship, which is what several of the film reviews I’d read implied. Celebrating that kind of power imbalance in a relationship seemed to bother me more than the reviewers, who seemed to more caught up on the age difference itself. In the graphic novel, the four-year age difference between the lovers is never dismissed as unproblematic and is explored, I think, in a thoughtful and appropriate way.) I’m not sure whether I think the very sad frame story is necessary, though I’m more or less willing to accept that the author felt it was. I would have appreciated more information about the couple’s mature, adult relationship, but I think that would have been a different book. The heart of this one is in adolescent love, strong and unsure at the same time. It’s a beautiful piece, well worth reading whether or not I decide to rent the movie.

Angry Robot Does Shakespeare

The Alchemist of Souls by Anne Lyle is an alternate-history fantasy set during the reign of Elizabeth I. The big twist in this timeline is that when European explorers reached the New World, they encountered the thriving and powerful skrayling communities.* Skraylings, based on Viking legend of encounters with, are not human, although they interact and have longstanding trade relationships with the humans of the New World (our Native Americans). The tattooed, fanged, vestigial-tale-possessing skraylings are secretive but demonstrably possess at least some magical abilities that make them much-sought allies by the nations of Europe. When the skraylings send an ambassador to London, they recruit our reluctant protaganist, Maliverny Catlyn, as his bodyguard, despite Mal’s openly expressed wariness of the skraylings.

 

As the novel begins, Mal’s a down-at-the-heels gentleman, essentially reduced to mercenary status, staying in Southwark with Ned, a scribe whose mother rents rooms. There’s plenty of action; in the first chapter, Mal is confronted by armed guards who take him to the Tower of London. Soon, Mal is involved in court intrigues, caught up in the plans of Elizabeth’s spymastser Walsingham, and still bewildered by skrayling ambassador Kiiren.

Meanwhile, Ned is spending time with his theatre friends, including Gabriel Parrish, an actor who has successfully made the uncommon transition from playing women’s roles to playing adult men. There’s a lot of enjoyment in exploring the world of Shakespeare and Marlowe, and we’re soon introduced to Coby Hendricks, who has been masquerading as a boy for years, ever since the shipwreck deaths of her immigrant parents. She and Parrish work for Master Naismith of the Duke’s Men, a theatre company that has been receiving funds from both the Duke of Suffolk and a skrayling trader.

So, whence the angry robots of my post’s title? I mention the publisher Angry Robot not to overshadow author Anne Lyle in any way: it’s clear that the The Alchemist of Souls and the rest of the Night’s Masques trilogy are the products of her rich imagination and fascinated study of history. Rather, I mention the publisher because this series seems emblematic of many of the qualities and values I’ve noticed in Angry Robot books: 1) Bold, fresh voices. Even if the freshness if often just from a slightly more realistically diverse cast of characters built from longstanding types, the inclusion of an oft-neglected perspective, or the reflection of the last few decades’ technological advances in an envisioned future, it’s a freshness that’s much welcome in contemporary “speculative fiction.”** 2) Fiction that rewards the reader’s expectations, delivering high stakes action and characters worth caring about (usually with a fairly swift narrative pace and showing some indications that the author is familiar with, even if diverge from, genre tropes). 3) An attempt to deliver multi-volume story arcs to the reader in a reasonable real-life timeframe. That means series that come out over the course of a year or two instead of a decade or more. 

Believe it or not, there are some downsides to new authors trying to speedily concoct fan candy, and Night’s Masques is not immune to them. Angry Robot books sometimes seem a little rough and unpolished, with plot or pacing issues that seem to indicate final products that could have used another draft or two. The second book, The Merchant of Dreams, is solid enough, taking its cast to the Venice of courtesans and commedia del’arte as Mal attempts to discover whether the skraylings plan to find a new European trade partner. The familiar partnerships from Alchemist are mostly broken up, but there are some rewards to seeing different sets of characters take independent journeys. While there’s not enough of Mal and Coby (who are increasingly drawn together over the course of the first novel) working together, we get to see Coby interact with Mal’s twin. And there are pirates and Sir Walter Raleigh.  

The Prince of Lies happily brings the whole company back to England, but in attempting to bring all storylines, including the conflict with the skraylings, to a head, the book perhaps bites off a bit more than it can chew. There are some questionable time jumps, but more problematic is how we’re often not shown other characters’ reactions when one of our heros makes an important decision or betrays another. In fact, decisions start to seem to be made based on plot convenience instead of logic or recognizable character responses. For instance, we see Mal hastily , while later he practically insists she join, and the difference in attitudes isn’t fully explained. There are journey that prove unnecessary but other points seem wrapped up too neatly (for instance, the end seems practically ideal but leaves some big questions unanswered, possibly changing the series-established rules on magic/transmigration of souls). Even some character moments don’t seem fully resolved; there’s a chilling demonstration of Mal’s brother’s amorality at the beginning of the book, but even the ending seems to deliberately sidestep addressing this fully. Some of the choppiness of the plot is surely to protect some of the surprises of the book’s last quarter (and there are some interesting antagonists and some revelations about the “guisers” who have long impersonated English nobility), but though the finale tries hard to connect all the dots, I felt a few to be missing.

In this way, Prince of Lies is very different from the seemingly more carefully constructed first novel, in which much of the pleasure is seeing the points of view of different characters, most of whom have been drawn into the world of espionage, as they deliberate what to do and what to reveal. In terms of plotting and suspense, we know early on in Alchemist that three theatre companies are participating in a contest to be judged by the skrayling ambassador, so as events escalate, we fully expect a climax to arrive with the Duke’s Men’s turn to perform, and Lyle doesn’t disappoint. We just can’t anticipate all the details, and so we read on.

Prince of Lies occasionally drops a clue to the future, but the overall impression is of randomness rather than carefully crafted suspense. This may be truer to life, but that’s really not why I read historical fantasies involving magical races. So, Prince of Lies is not necessarily a book I’d recommend, though it’s probably required reading for a reader who wants to see how Mal’s story ends (or continues). The Alchemist of Souls, however, was highly entertaining and the series as a whole probably more pleasurable than not.

*Also, for some unclear reason, in this timeline Elizabeth I married Robert Dudley and had kids. She’s already a widow by the time Alchemis of Souls begins and I’m not sure of the significance of her marriage to this world (it does make the succession politics, especially of the later books, quite different from those of our history but not necessarily more interesting or tension-filled). I suspect wish fulfillment from an the author who has just always rooted for Elizabeth I to have (somewhat) better luck in love.

**No, no, no, I’m not going to talk about genre definitions.

N. K. Jemisin's Dreamblood

I’d been meaning for a while to read N.K. Jemisin, whose works overall have been receiving good reviews and who, as a rare female African-American who publishes fantasy, has been vocal in advocating for greater diversity in speculitive fiction.* I’d bought her first-published trilogy, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, in an Amazon 4-for-3 offer, but it just sat in the spare room unread. Part of me wondered if I was interested in Jemisin more because of her identity than because of her storytelling: would I have bought her books if she wasn’t black? Would I have already read them? At the least, I wouldn’t be asking myself these questions. Ultimately, I think it’s mainly that I just wasn’t in the mood for the kind of epic The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms looks like it’s going to be, because when I stumbled across Jemisin’s blog, in which she told the story of the passionate writing of her first two books, which she was unable to sell until publishing the successful (but slightly less unusual) trilogy. Not only was I taken by the publishing story, but the myth-soaked Dreamblood duology sounded deeply interesting.

The rich world-building is a central strength of the Dreamblood books. It draws from history, mostly ancient, of Egypt and Nubia. Jemisin’s fantasy world is complete with mythology, history, and notably details of class status and econmics: these are portrayed not as static but subject to change (in fact, such change is a strong theme of The Shadowed Sun). (It also has its own cosmology, which I probably wouldn’t even have noted except for reading the author’s Q&A in the back.) The heart of the Dreamblood books is the City of Gujareh, a somewhat younger and more cosmopolitan city, with a trading port, than the old motherland, Kisua, to the south. (In terms of earth, Gujareh seems to be positioned in northern, which I believe because of the flow of the Nile was known as Lower, Egypt.) The residents of Gujareh worship Hananja and build their lives around dream magic, long forbidden .

Gujareh has four branches of public servants/priests, which together form the Hetawa: Sentinels (guards), Teachers, Sharers (healers), and the few but powerful Gatherers, who can visit and take over dreams. Gatherers collect dream energy for the Hetawa, dispense euthanasia, and sometimes carry out executions, in the latter cases leading dreamers into pleasant dreamlands before killing them. But, as The Killing Moon opens, strange deaths in the city suggest the Hetawa has become corrupt and a devestating killer from legend – a Reaper – may be on the loose. It falls to Ehiru, a Gatherer with ties to the royal family who has come to doubt his abilities and calling, to investigate, along with his student Nijiri. Nijiri is the point-of-view character we are closest to and most root for, a Gatherer-in-training whose low-caste origins (though such things aren’t supposed to matter to the Hetawa) make him more of an outsider, and who’s long held a crush (or perhaps a deep, abiding love?) for Gatherer Ehiru. Also looking into the killings is Sunandi, a Kisuati diplomat and player in a deadly game of espionage whose loyalty is uncertain.

Even though there’s a lot of exposition about the world to get out of the way in order to appreciate the novels, Jemisin’s skill at weaving in details and the high stakes, emotionally intense story generally keep the reader from feeling overloaded. There are, however, some awkward issues of plot and also times where Jemisin needlessly holds back explanations for the reader – where the detail being held, when revealed, is not really surprising or game-changing or where the fact that all the characters clearly knows what’s going on but the reader is in the dark makes more for frustration than suspense. (I felt this was true of some of the descriptions of the Gatherers’ rituals.) In these ways, it seems the duology’s “real” status as first novels shows a bit. Big events happen in each of the two books, and while they can be read independently, a few minor characters or subplots in The Shadowed Sun might not make much sense to those who skipped The Killing Moon. Although Jemisin has made no commitments, there’s certainly room for a great many more stories to be told in this world.

In The Shadowed Sun, we follow the story of Hanani, first woman accepted to the Hetawa as a Sharer-in-training. After a tragedy that may not have been her fault, she finds herself sent from the city to dwell with the strange, seemingly savage Banbarra, a desert tribe. There she meets Wanahomen, a scion of Gujareh’s royal family. But even as Hanani confronts and comes to accept many of the desert customs, the Banbarra are preparing to wage war against Gujareh. Meanwhile, a deadly plague spreads through the dreams of Gujareen city-dwellers. While Hanani may not quite edge out Nijiri as my favorite character, her struggles to make her way in the world as a woman (and the struggles of the world as it reacts to her) make for a compelling tale. The last few chapters, though short, offer a handful of false endings before giving the reader a final view of Hanani. (Though it’s not necessarily the ending I might have hoped, it’s more satisfying than the one I feared I was getting!)

*There’s been quite a bit of discussion of this over the ether lately, and this blog post is just a review, not a think piece. I do want to say that I think the relative lack of diversity in sci fi and fantasy is a deficiency well worth discussing, one I think the field is making some (limited) progress in addressing. Although it’s only one facet of this issue, I’ve long had an issue with the portrayal of races (orcs or dwarves or elves or Ferengi or Venusians or weasels or mice or rats) who are all good or all bad or all act in one particular, stereotypical way.