Tag: Read All The Fiction

“Hawkmistress!” Marion Zimmer Bradley

See note about the author here.

Hawkmistress! is tagged in my head as “the cross-dressing one”, and that’s a fairly accurate tag. It’s set a little after Stormqueen! in the chronology of Darkover, and tells the story of Romilly a daughter of the MacAran family. Their family laran (psychic power) is to do with animal control/empathy and she’s got a large helping of it. The trouble is, not only is her father suspicious of laran users but also tending hawks and horses is man’s work and thoroughly unsuitable for a young lady. This is a fairly archetypal coming of age story – Romilly runs away from an arranged marriage and after overcoming several obstacles and growing up she finds her place in the world. It’s also a somewhat Shakespearean story – to try and stay safe in a dangerous world she disguises herself as a man. With varying amounts of success, and of farce.

Unlike Stormqueen! this book is actually about its titular character. We see the story through Romilly’s eyes, and she has considerably more agency than Dorilys could even dream of. Romilly not only escapes from an unwanted arranged marriage she also rescues herself when she’s trapped by a rapey farmer (yes, it’s still a rapey book). She’s valued by herself and by the other characters for her skills rather than her bloodline – although obviously she first proves herself to them when they think she’s a boy but she retains respect after the reveal. She even rescues the, er, “love interest”.

Sadly the romance element to the plot is made of WTF?! In summary: Romilly falls in love with an older man (Orain), but it turns out that he was only interested in sex when he thought she was a prepubescent boy. After more plot happens she rescues him from torture and they reconcile, he still wouldn’t want sex so he suggests she marry his (estranged) son coz the lad is her age and likes girls. (The son is the product of his own arranged marriage and I think they’re estranged coz Orain never quite forgave the boy for being the living reminder that he’d had to have sex with a woman to get an heir.) And there’s a strongly implied happily ever after (delayed but not derailed by Romilly’s wishes to do other things first before marrying). I always did think it was a subplot of farce and WTF?! – I mean, “oh I don’t fancy you so marry my son instead” is more than a bit bizarre. I had, however, previously missed the implications of Orain thinking Romilly was a “beardless boy” – by assuming that Orain thought Romilly was a young adult man rather than a boy. But given what I now know about Bradley’s second husband’s convictions for molesting pre- and peri-pubescent boys, it reads completely differently. Orain is definitely positioned as a good guy, someone we should empathise with and identify with … just a good guy that has sex with adolescent (at best) boys.

So a bit of a mixed bag of a book. I liked the centring of the female protagonist – in particular in comparison to Stormqueen!. But the “romance” and all its implications are more than a bit horrifying.

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“Stormqueen!” Marion Zimmer Bradley

See the note about the author here.

This is the second book in internal chronological order of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series that I own, and I don’t think I’m missing any intervening ones. The story is a set a long time after the events of Darkover Landfall (post) and Darkovan society has had ample time to forget their off-world origins. The culture that’s grown up is pseudo-feudal in nature and heavily dependent on psychic powers to replace the technology that was impossible on this metal poor world. The aristocratic caste are the Comyn who are those with laran, their name for psychic powers. The Comyn have been breeding themselves for every more potent powers, and not just breeding but manipulating their genetics (using laran). The results have not been good in the long term and that’s one of the primary themes of the book and the one the story is shaped by.

Dorilys is the Stormqueen! of the title. Her family’s laran is to do with weather control and with sensing the electrical field of the planet, and Dorilys is born with a particularly potent form of it. She’s the only and much coddled heir to Dom Mikhail Aldaran, in a world where a woman doesn’t really inherit but her husband does. For most of the story she’s on the cusp of puberty, which is the most dangerous time for a member of the Comyn – that’s when their powers come into full force and this causes an illness called threshold sickness which can kill, and in fact did kill Aldaran’s older children. Whilst she’s the title character and the key element around which the story revolves, I don’t think she counts as the protagonist – that’s two men: her half-brother Donal, and Allart Hastur.

Donal isn’t Aldaran’s son, he shares a mother with Dorilys, but Aldaran loves him like a son. And one of the tensions in the story is that Aldaran would like Donal to inherit but it’s not possible. Donal doesn’t have very strong laran – he’s only touched by this over-engineering of the Comyn by what it’s done to his sister. Allart Hastur on the other hand is another victim of the project. He has a form of foresight, but he sees all possible paths into the future. So without great effort and self control all he sees is how everything could go wrong with a single misstep. A simple journey from one town to the next is a torture of nightmarish visions about falling off his horse, breaking bones, getting snowed in or out of somewhere etc etc etc. He’s retreated to a monastery of the Christoforos (descended from the Catholic faith of some of the original colonists) where the ritual of life has a steadying influence on his thoughts. But circumstances and family duty call him out of there, and he ends up involved in the tragedy at Castle Aldaran.

One thing I like about this book is the way it’s structured. Even the first time of reading it (I’m pretty sure) I knew it was a tragedy going in. And as you read it feels inexorable, inevitable, like a giant rock rolling down a path towards you. The juggernaut can’t be stopped. And yet, just before the end there’s a moment of peace where you suddenly believe disaster might be averted, and everything hangs in the balance for an instant before it all comes crashing down.

In contrast to Darkover Landfall I can see how Bradley is using this book to explore feminist themes and ideas. It was written in the 1970s – published in 1978 so presumably written a year or two before that. Notably this is just after Roe v. Wade (the landmark case in the US that legalised abortion), and I think there’s a lot in this book that’s exploring women’s control over their reproductive health/ability. For instance: Dorilys and Donal’s mother dies when Dorilys is born, and it later transpires that if there’d been someone better trained in laran present to ask advice from during the pregnancy she’d’ve known that carrying a girl child who had that laran ability to term would inevitably result in the mother’s death. And the skilled laran worker would also be able to abort the fetus while it was still very very early in the pregnancy. Thus saving the mother’s life. And given the tragedy that later befalls Dorilys as a direct result of her laran, then perhaps that abortion could be seen as merely hastening the inevitable for poor Dorilys. This isn’t the only example – another character does abort a fetus that had early detectable poor combinations of genes, and there’s also discussion of using laran to prevent conception altogether when an adult’s genetics mean that no child of theirs will be born unscathed.

As well as thinking about women’s control of their reproductive systems, there’s a lot of discussion of love matches vs dynastic marriages vs sexual freedom that plays out in the story. Particularly from the women’s perspective, but also the men’s. And another theme is that patriarchy hurts everyone. Allart in particular is as much a victim of this system as any of the women – he gets more agency in how he deals with it, but he’s as forced into his marriage as his wife is for instance. But in more subtle ways the other men are also victims – Damon-Raphael (Allart’s brother and one of the antagonists) wouldn’t come to his own tragic end if he hadn’t been brought up to believe that being power-mad and paranoid was the way to play the game. (Allart is explicitly regarded as weird by his peers for not seizing any opportunity to snatch power that crosses his path.) And Aldaran’s part in what plays out in Castle Aldaran stems from his desperation for a male heir. Mentions should also go to the messages that “eugenics is bad” and “power corrupts”, which are shown throughout the story.

So there’s actually quite a lot of meat there in this story, underneath the skin (or kinda poking through the skin, to stretch the metaphor somewhat). And much of it is still relevant today. I can’t really recommend it as a book though, because my god it’s rapey. Off screen in general, but there’s at least one attempted rape of Dorilys, there’s references to brides being drugged for their wedding nights (with aphrodisiacs), there’s genetically engineered non-human “brainless” sterile concubines (who aren’t quite brainless, so caught between being people and being animal and neither status makes the situation any better). And so on. You could perhaps argue that Bradley couldn’t make the points she was wanting to make without writing her society that way … but it’s pretty relentless and makes for a reduction in enjoyment of the story for me. And it’s only made more uncomfortable by the fact that Dorilys, who is the target of a lot of the generally rapey attitude, is a pre- or peri-pubescent girl for most of the story.

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“Darkover Landfall” Marion Zimmer Bradley

I’ll begin this blog post with a note on the author of the book: Marion Zimmer Bradley. I’ve been dragging my heels on moving along with my re-read of all the fiction on the shelves, and it’s because Bradley was next up and a little while ago I learnt a couple of unpleasant things about her. Firstly, her second husband (Walter Breen) was convicted twice and eventually imprisoned for child sex abuse, and Bradley was aware of and aided his actions. Secondly, once discussion of Breen became current again in 2014 the daughter of Bradley and Breen came forward to say that Bradley was herself an abuser.

Immediately on reading about this I could think of at least one character and situation in her Darkover series that I would re-evaluate with this new information. And more generally – one of the things I’d liked about the Darkover books was that I thought she’d been portraying a world where just like the real one you can’t always spot the monsters at first glance. Effectively, I used to think she was saying “just because someone does good things too, doesn’t stop them being a monster”; and now I think she just had a different working definition of “monster”. So not only has someone who was one of my favourite authors fallen off her pedestal and been revealed as a thoroughly unpleasant person; but also even before starting my re-read I’m pretty sure that the artist can’t be separated from her art in this case. I decided to re-read them anyway, because they were favourites and I’d rather see what I actually think rather than make assumptions based on memories from a decade or so ago when I last read them. But having started this re-read: they’re definitely coming off the shelves once I’ve re-read them (into a box rather than disposed of, for nostalgia for the perspective I can’t read them with any more).

So, onward to the book. Darkover Landfall is the first in the internal chronology of the Darkover series, but was the 7th of them to be published (in 1972). I generally prefer to re-read series in chronological order, even if I buy the books in publication order – not that I did that in this case, I didn’t start buying them till the 90s and picked them up as I saw them in shops. The basic premise of the Darkover series is that a colony ship sent out from Earth goes off course and crashlands on the planet Darkover. They have no contact with Earth for over(? around? the chronology is unclear) a thousand years during which they develop their own civilisation, which is heavily influenced by the Gaelic roots of the original colonists & crew. And on this planet psychic powers such as telepathy work – this is part innate human talent (it’s a very 60s sort of series in origin), part due to interbreeding with a native species (see previous parenthetical remark), part due to the plants and geology of the planet (ditto). So you have this pseudo-feudal society with psychic technology who forget they came from anywhere but Darkover, and eventually the Terran multi-planet Empire rediscover them. The novels set after that deal in large part with culture shock and culture clash – mind-powers vs. science, the different sorts of sexism in the two societies, etc.

It’s a series that hits a lot of my buttons – things I’m a sucker for in science fiction include: generation ships or lost colonies, psychic powers as a replacement for tech, culture shock and looking at our own culture through the eyes of the alien. Bradley also manages a sense of time and history – something I wrote about when I talked about Walter M. Miller Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. The way later characters talk about past events is never quite the same as the way the book about those events told the story – things pass from current affairs, to history, to fable and you can see it happening in the books.

I think if I’d started with Darkover Landfall, I wouldn’t’ve continued reading the series – to me any appeal it had relies on enjoying reading about the way things “really happened” as opposed to how they’re later remembered. The story itself I’ve always found rather unsettling and odd. Once their ship crash lands on the wrong planet the crew & colonists have to come to terms with the fact that they’re now stranded on this rather inhospitable world: it has a climate that is only just habitable all year round, and it is very metal poor meaning their advanced tech won’t be viable for long. There’s the obvious conflict between “must make the best of what we have” and “must devote all resources to getting the hell outta here”, and nobody is particularly happy with the situation. And then the kireseth flowers bloom – their pollen is a potent hallucinogen that also lowers your inhibitions and enchances any latent psychic talent. Some members of the crew just have lots of happy sex, one meets a chieri (a native and reclusive intelligent species of the planet) and then has happy sex, others have sex they’re not happy with (to varying degrees of unhappy ranging from “oh dear” to “oh my dear god no what have I done!!?!”). It’s a very 60s/70s sort of story …

The way I remembered this book was “it’s the ‘alien sex pollen makes them do it’ one”, which is a pretty accurate summary to be honest. But on the plus side, it was nowhere near as rape-y as I’d feared, in that all the sex we’re told about is things that the participants wanted to do even if in some cases they were suppressing that desire until the kireseth bloomed. On the other hand … just because you want to, doesn’t mean you should. And in the light of the child sex abuse allegations and convictions for Bradley and her husband it’s to say the least an unsettling theme for the book.

To my eyes reading it now it was atrociously sexist. Not just a little bit here and there, but woven right through the entire fabric of the novel. Which surprised me, because Bradley is often held up as a feminist SFF author and this book comes across as far from feminist. It’s possible that as I wasn’t even born when the book was written I’m missing the nuance that would tell me she was critiquing the sexism and not buying into it … but if there’s nuance and critique there, it’s pretty well buried. It’s not just stuff like Rafe MacAran thinking of women as inherently incapable of any manual labour or physical exertion, where Bradley might be making the point that he’s wrong. It’s also stuff like the way Judy (who has sex with the chieri) isn’t believed by anyone – yes, this might be because it happens under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug; but in context it also comes across as dismissing her as a silly woman who’s obviously making shit up. And it’s stuff like the paean to the joys of motherhood as the one true path to fulfilment for all women and doubly necessary here because it’s also the strict duty of every woman of childbearing age to pop out the sprogs now and forever more so that the colony survives. Any woman who isn’t joyous at the thought of pregnancy and babies is psychologically damaged and brainwashed. And this is one of the ways in which the society of Earth is sick. Apparently. Again, this is in the mouths and minds of the characters of the novel, and perhaps Bradley was intending one to see it as ludicrous. I just don’t think that comes across tho – if this was a trope she was intending to undermine, I don’t think she succeeded.

It made me think, as I was reading it, of “We Who Are About to…” by Joanna Russ which was published 4 years after Darkover Landfall. I’ve not actually read Russ’s book, but I know the plot from osmosis (and a double check on wikipedia that I had the right book in mind!). In it a spaceship crash lands on a remote planet with no rescue forthcoming. The men propose that they should all make babies and build a civilisation, but the female protagonist sees that there is no way they can survive long term and has no intention of spending the rest of her fertile life being an unwilling baby-machine to no purpose. It escalates (violently) from there. Was Darkover Landfall one of the books Russ was reacting to? There are definitely resonances between the two books (as far as I can tell having not read one of them, of course).

I was going to say more about specific scenes and so on, but I think I’m just going around in circles. I never was particularly keen on this book, but I think that’s moved into active dislike now I’m a bit older and bit more critical about what I read (rather than just swallowing it whole).

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The Rai-Kirah Trilogy by Carol Berg

As I continue to (slowly!) read through the fiction on my shelves I’ve got to two books by Carol Berg – they are the first two of her trilogy The Rai-Kirah. The books are called Transformation and Revelation. I never bought the third one, and it’s things like that that’ve made me taken on this project – did I not buy it because I didn’t fancy it? Did I not buy it because I never got round to it? Should I buy it? It’s definitely not the only series where I’ve got a couple then not the rest.

The protagonist of the story is Seyonne, an Ezzarian who has been a slave in the Derhzi Empire for 16 long and brutal years when the story opens. In the first chapter he is bought by the heir to the Empire, Prince Aleksander, branded on the orders of one of he Prince’s companions (as a form of revenge on the Prince) and forced to brand said companion by the Prince. Aleksander is spoilt, cruel and doesn’t see why he shouldn’t destroy people when it takes his fancy. Seyonne once had magical powers before they were tortured out of him by the Derzhi, and the very fact of his slavery has made him outcast and unclean in the eyes of his own people – he’s just going through the motions of life until he dies. It doesn’t exactly seem like the start of a promising relationship – but there’s more to Aleksander than meets the eye at first, and Seyonne is drawn into not only caring about the Prince but also joining forces with the Prince to save him & the world from the Rai-Kirah demons he was trained to fight in his homeland.

As I read the first book I was assuming that I hadn’t finished buying the trilogy because I’d just forgotten to pick up the third book. The story sucked me in and carried me along. Whilst there were things I wasn’t keen on when I finished it and thought about them, there were other parts I liked. The setting was interesting – not a faux-Europe, instead something with desert flavours. The Derzhi were once nomads in the desert, and this came through in the ways their empire was set up and how their aristocrats interacted. For instance, hospitality rules (sharing food and drink) are still important despite their change of lifestyle, which was plot relevant. I also found the magic interesting. The Rai-Kirah demons come through from another world and set up residence in human souls – the Ezzarians have learnt ways to enter the victim’s soul and fight to drive out the demon. That was Seyonne’s role in his society before his capture. I also like the relationship between Seyonne and Aleksander. I feel it did go too quickly from the very low point at which it started to trust and liking, even with the help of Seyonne’s mystical sense that Aleksander is worth protecting. But still, I didn’t notice that until I’d finished the book, if you see what I mean – I was hooked into it while I was reading it.

Sadly I didn’t really buy any of the interpersonal relationships except the building friendship between Seyonne and Aleksander. Particularly not the relationships between Seyonne and the women in the novel. And that was one of my problems with the second book in the trilogy. I was much less keen on the series after reading it, and I am now intending to give these to charity rather than complete the series.

The second book takes what we know about the world so far, and makes us – and Seyonne – doubt it. Are the Rai-Kirah really just rapacious demons trying to conquer the world? Where did the Ezzarian’s abilities come from? And why is Seyonne’s heavily pregnant wife now not pregnant and pretending she never was? This last is the driving force of the plot for the beginning of the book, which was a shame as it made me cranky every time that bit of the plot came up. I didn’t buy into Seyonne and Ysanne’s relationship, their utter lack of trust in each other and inability to just have an honest conversation made me unable to believe they’d ever been in love ever. And yes, it’s not supposed to be idyllic (far from it), and Seyonne is supposed to be being an idiot, and Ysanne isn’t supposed to have his best interests at heart and I don’t think she’s supposed to’ve been in love with him. But even knowing all of that didn’t make me any more interested in reading about it. And having spent the first few chapters gritting my teeth and rolling my eyes at the characters I wasn’t inclined to be charitable about the rest of it. I suspect if that plot line hadn’t existed I’d’ve enjoyed the rest rather more, but it does exist.

Another problem I had with both the books was the sheer level of physical & mental abuse that Seyonne absorbs. I’m not sure I believe that he could be either alive or sane by the beginning of book 1 (given the backstory we see later) … and certainly not by the time that Berg has finished gleefully torturing him over the two books I read.

So my overall verdict is that Berg has some interesting world building and ideas, but ultimately I found the execution too flawed.

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“All the Windwracked Stars” Elizabeth Bear

The next book in my project of re-reading all the fiction I own (that is still on the shelves) is All the Windwracked Stars, by Elizabeth Bear. I actually replaced it with a Kindle version before re-reading it, along with buying the next two in the series (the series as a whole is called The Edda of Burdens). I know I’ve read this before, as I at least recognised the names of the protagonists and something of the world it is set in, but I remembered very little of the actual story so I might as well’ve been reading it for the first time.

We open with the end of the world in the aftermath of an apocalyptic battle, with the survivors – Kasimir, valraven steed of a slain waelcyrge; Muire, child of the Light, one of the wardens of Valdyrgard, poet, historian, metalworker; the Wolf, older than the world itself and has played his part in the ending of it. And after a chapter that establishes the characters (particularly Muire) the story jumps forward nearly two & a half thousand years to the aftermath of another apocalypse. As the book puts it:

Worlds, like gods, are a long time dying, and the deathblow dealt the children of the Light did not stop a civilization of mortal men from rising in their place, inventing medicine and philosophy, metallurgy and space flight.

Until they in turn fell, two-hundred-odd years ago, in a Desolation that left all Valdyrgard a salted garden. All of it, that is, except the two cities – Freimarc and Eiledon – that lingered. Life is tenacious. Even on the brink of death, it holds the battlements and snarls.

And in this end of the world, Muire, Kasimir and the Wolf still live among the shattered remnants of the human civilisation. It’s a world of both technology and magic – where at one moment there are recognisable computing devices, and at another we’re meeting a modified catwoman created from a cat, sorcery and a relic of the past or a modified ratman mage-engineer. The story is primarily Muire’s, although parts are from other points of view. But she’s the central figure, and we follow her from grief-stricken survivor’s guilt through to a realisation that perhaps the world can be reborn (albeit at great cost to herself).

Muire is the linchpin round which the story turns, but I think there are two other legs the plot rests on – the Grey Wolf and Cathoair. The Wolf I’ve already mentioned, he starts in the position of an antagonist – and where Muire feels she should not have survived but somehow can’t help but keep surviving, the Wolf is looking for death and not finding it. He’s been drawn to Eiledon by a sense that a piece of his past is being misused by the mortal ruler of the city, and although he’s no longer part of the company of the children of the Light he’s still not willing to let such things be misused.

Cathoair is a different sort of character – at first sight less mythic, more everyday survivor. He’s one of the mortal inhabitants of Eiledon, living in the slums and making a living in the fighting ring and as a prostitute. But his soul is that of one of Muire’s brothers, returned to life at another ending of the world (although Cathoair never knows about his past life). He gets caught up in the conflict between Muire and the Grey Wolf, as they’re both irresistibly drawn to the presence of someone they had both loved in the past. But he quickly becomes important in his own right, as even ordinary people can make a difference particularly when the world is ending.

The story takes place in a secondary world that is thoroughly steeped in Scandinavian mythology – as is presumably obvious just from the names of people and of things that I’ve mentioned in this review so far. The prose style also has something of that feel to it – recognising the subject matter as Norse in origin predisposes me to think this, but it often feels like some other language’s poetry translated into English prose. Not all of it by any means, but bits like this do:

The song still burns through his mind, scourging, polishing. Stripping him clean.

Madness is nothing. Madness is an old friend, a comfort to him. He is the son of a god and a giantess. He is a god-monster. He is the Sun-eater. He was born to destruction, to mayhem, to wrath. The world is full of things that want destroying, and also full of those who do not covet destruction. So he was chained to the end of the world. There was a poem that was also a prophecy, and he lived it. The wolf, till world’s end.

And now he is a wolf driven by the goad and the hunt, crazed by the cage and the chain. He is the wolf run mad —

One thing I particularly like about the world it’s set in is that magic and technology aren’t mutually exclusive. The bulk of the story is set in the remnants of a world that’s at least as technologically advanced as ours, if not more so. But it also has working magic, and some of (all of?) the technology is magic based – magic doesn’t replace the need for tech, nor vice versa. Which I think grows out of the Norse underpinnings of the world building – magic here is based on the word (runes, poetry, song) and also on metalworking. Muire as poet, historian, smith is also a mage, in a way that seems to go without saying. Some workings require music, some require working at the forge.

Having forgotten most of the story, I’d also forgotten how much I liked this book. I’m not sure why I didn’t get round to buying the other two in the series till now, but at halfway through the next one I’m pleased I finally got round to it 🙂

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“Grail” Elizabeth Bear

Grail is the final book in Elizabeth Bear’s Jacob’s Ladder trilogy. I’ve posted about the previous two here and here. The first time I read the book I read the first couple of pages, then double checked I had the right book – the start is completely different from what I was expecting! (I should’ve been a bit more trusting, it’s clear by halfway down page 3 that it’s the right book …)

As with Chill it’s a bit hard to talk about the plot of this one without spoilers for the plot of the previous ones. The overall structure of the trilogy is that book one is about beginning (resuming) the journey, book two is making the journey and now book three is arrival. Well, one of the overall structures 🙂 So in Grail the generation ship Jacob’s Ladder arrives at the destination planet they picked out, only to discover that in the meantime humanity has spread and overtaken them. There’s a colony on the planet already, and it’s not clear if they’ll be welcome. Both from the perspective of the amount of resources needed to absorb a sudden increase in population, and from the perspective of how much both cultures have changed since their common origin many centuries ago. The story isn’t just about the meeting and interaction of these two cultures – the antagonists from books 1 & 2 are still present and have their own answers to the question of whether the population of Jacob’s Ladder should settle on this new planet.

Bear again uses the narrative trick I mentioned when I talked about Carnival several months ago (post). Both cultures have things that are familiar to us and things that are not, and the things that the current point of view character regards as Other are often the familiar things. But the stuff they take for granted is often the things that feel alien to us. Of course in this case it’s also a chance for Bear to remind us that these characters we’ve got comfortable with across the last two books would look and feel very very alien if we were actually to meet them.

I find myself unsatisfied with the ending. I can see how it grows organically out of the story so far, and I can see how it mirrors the ending of the first book of the trilogy (a choice made in extremis to save the population by changing them into something else, perhaps against their will). I can even see how it fits in with a central idea of the trilogy – sometimes all the choices suck, but you still have to choose and accept the consequences of that choice. And all three books have endings that involve finding a way to shift the paradigm to improve your choices (however this doesn’t contradict my previous sentence!). I just find it unsatisfying, somehow. I guess perhaps I’d prefer to imagine the two cultures co-existing uneasily and having to deal with each other, than a solution that avoids that?

There’s also a narrative thread that felt like it went nowhere much. The existence of other intelligences than the human ones in this book felt like it was only present to highlight how both human cultures had blindspots and a somewhat hubristic approach to their place in the greater universe. This is as opposed to book 2 where I felt the alien life form gave a sense of a wider and more wondrous universe outside the confines of the Jacob’s Ladder.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, don’t be fooled by the last couple of paragraphs!

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“Chill” Elizabeth Bear

Chill is the second book in the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy by Elizabeth Bear – the first one was Dust (post). I read this on the plane back from Egypt immediately after finishing Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword (post) which definitely influenced the thoughts I was having while reading it.

It’s pretty much impossible to talk about the plot of Chill in any way at all without spoilers for the end of Dust – but given these are four or five years old now I shan’t put a spoiler cut, just don’t read the rest of this paragraph if it bothers you 🙂 At the end of Dust the generation ship, Jacob’s Ladder, has started moving again. Now that the immediate danger of exploding stars is over the occupants of the ship need to deal with questions like where their destination is. The plot of this book reminds me in some ways of Sherri S. Tepper’s general plot – there’s an Awful Truth waiting for our protagonists about the foundations of their world & society. There are also the remnants of some of the antagonists from last book to deal with, and the repercussions of the decision Perceval et al took at the end of Dust in order to save the lives of the Mean population of the ship.

So one of the themes of the book is consequences, and grief. Living with the result of a decision you or someone else made, because even if it was the best choice there’s always a price to pay. Which also ties into the theme of identity that I picked out in my micro-review last time I read this (post on Livejournal). Where you are now, who you are now, depends on the choices you made and the prices you were willing to pay – and the choices available depend on who you are and where you came from. I think everyone in the story has done things they’d rather not’ve done. Either because who they’ve become changes the choice they would make if they faced that now, or because there were no good choices and now they must live with the consequences of the lesser of two evils.

The ideas about identity were interesting to read straight after Ancillary Sword. Bear and Leckie both explore the idea of putting a different personality into a body, replacing the one that grew there. But they seem to come to different conclusions about how it would work, or more accurately I think they start with different premises about how minds and bodies function. Leckie’s ships have personalities not just in the ship, but distributed throughout ancillaries – human bodies with the mind replaced by the ship’s mind. And the ancilliaries are to a large extent interchangeable – if the ancillary-making process “takes” then each unit is a part of the whole mind. Even the failure that we see leaves a fragment of the mind that isn’t a part of the whole, the original person is still gone. So the premise seems to be that body and mind are separate and putting a mind into a new body doesn’t alter the mind. (I keep saying “seems to” because I think there are hints in the books that whilst the Radch might think it works like that it actually doesn’t but I don’t know yet if Leckie’s going anywhere with that). Bear believes the mind and body to be much more closely intertwined (and I’m inclined to agree). So the multiple cases in the Jacob’s Ladder trilogy where we have a mind put into a new body the resulting person is no longer quite the person they were in their original body. Who you are, determined not just by the choices you’ve made but also by the meat your mind wears.

I seem to’ve ended up only really talking about what’s underneath the surface (in part because it’s a re-read not a first time read), but it also has a good surface. I’d be hard pushed to pick whether this series or the Promethean Age books are my favourites of Bear’s work.

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“Dust” Elizabeth Bear

I bought Elizabeth Bear’s “Dust” about 3 years ago when I read it for an online book club (which has since vanished without trace so I can’t even link to it). I did write about it on my own livejournal so I can link to that first impression. This is another of the backlog of book posts that I’m catching up on (the last one! I’m nearly up to date!) so again I think this’ll be less in depth than I would’ve written had I got to it quicker.

The book at first seems to exist in the space between science fiction and fantasy. The opening scene could almost come out of a pseudo-historical medievaloid fantasy – there’s a Lady, there are knights, a housekeeper, a named sword, and our point of view character is an upstairs maid. But look at it more closely and you see the science fiction – nanotech chains, references to extruded material, beam weapons. The literal blue blood for the Family (the Exalt, the aristocracy of this world) could go in either camp at this point. Reading on it becomes more clear that this is science fiction – the story is set on a generation ship, a spaceship travelling at slower than light speed where the crew are awake and expecting their voyage to take several generations to complete. But something has gone wrong, and the ship isn’t travelling any more and hasn’t been for centuries. A lot (most?) of the crew are Means – they don’t have nanotech symbionts and their lifespans are what we would consider normal. The Exalt are effectively immortal, and so the older ones were alive before the disaster. You might naively think that would make it easier to keep society together and work on fixing the ship. But the Family are split into factions and in many cases more concerned with their internal political games than worrying about anything else. This isn’t helped by the fact that the ship’s AI is also fragmented. With a crisis looming the status quo can’t continue, so at least the AI is trying to regroup and gather itselves together. Of course, it isn’t that easy – each fragmentary personality wants to be the last one standing and will fight with whatever tools it has to achieve that goal.

The first scene also introduces us to the two primary protagonists, who are certainly intended to be tools of one (or more) of these fragments. There is Rien, through whose eyes we see the scene. She’s a teenager, an orphan, a maid, a Mean who turns out to have a rather more Exalted heritage than she imagined (pun fully intended). We also see Sir Perceval, a Knight from Engine captured by the Lady Arianne Conn of Rule who has mutilated her and will kill her. Perceval is also a young woman, but fully Exalt and aware of her heritage, and happens to be Rien’s half-sister. Their story is of a pattern that’s more from the fantasy side of the dividing line – they escape and go on a quest across the world. Both are Chosen Ones in their own way, and together they must try to save their world. No matter what the cost.

It’s another book that feels like it would reward going through with a fine tooth comb and noting all the little details. As with the Promethean Age books names are very important, although in these books knowing someone’s name doesn’t give you power over them per se – this series is after all on the science fiction side of the line. But names, their meanings and the choices behind the names reveal things about the person or object once you’re paying attention (whether that’s you-the-reader or a character in the story). Choice is again a theme. In this story there’s a lot about the horror of having your ability to choose taken away, or your choices coerced. And about how even when you’re suffering the knowledge that you freely chose to pay this price for something you consider worth it can bring a certain strength and endurance.

A good book, I definitely enjoyed it as much the second time around as the first 🙂

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“Hell and Earth” Elizabeth Bear

Hell and Earth is the second half of the story begun in Ink and Steel (post). I have unfortunately left this too long between reading and writing up (3 weeks? maybe more) so this will be briefer notes than originally intended.

This pair of books are very much two halves of a larger story – although there’s some degree of resolution at the end of Ink and Steel (and it’s not a cliff hanger), most of the plotlines don’t come to fruition until this book. But this half of the story feels more like Kit Marlowe’s story (where the first half was more Will Shakespeare’s or perhaps more balanced between the two). Over the course of Ink and Steel Bear set up her world where the land of mortals (England as ruled by Elizabeth I) is linked to the court of the Daoine Sidhe (as ruled by the Mebd). Now Elizabeth is dying, as all mortals inevitably must, which threatens the Fae due to this linkage as well as potentially plunging the mortal world into the chaos of a succession crisis. But that’s almost the B-plot, the main thrust of the story is Kit discovering what was done to him in his youth that’s left him with PTSD and symbols carved into his flesh. It wasn’t just petty sadism on the part of his tormentor, but is another way in which Kit is a tool that has been shaped to fit a long term plan to alter the stories that shape the world.

Mortality is a thread that runs through the whole book – it even opens with the discovery of Edmund Spenser dead in his home. But it’s not just mortality that keeps cropping up it’s also the aftermath and the grieving, and how the people left behind cope. Not just Elizabeth and whether & how the country and the Fae are going to survive the turmoil of her passing away. But also on a more intimate level – Will is dying, slowly but surely, as all mortals will. But Kit is not entirely mortal any more and beginning to live with the realisation that all that he loved in the mortal realm will inevitably fade away.

As with Ink and Steel (and Bear’s books in general) one of the things I like best about this world she has created is the sense of reality, even tho the plot and premise are fantastical. The characters react plausibly to the situation(s) they’re in, I have a strong sense of personality for them all. Even if I might not predict what’s going to happen next it doesn’t feel forced, rather grows organically out of the characters & their interactions.

I wish I’d either taken a few notes or written this up sooner, as I’m sure I had more to say. It’s a series that continues to feel like it would reward paying close attention and taking notes, whilst still being a lot of fun to read on a surface level. There’s another book in the series just recently come out, which I’ve not picked up a copy of yet – I need to rectify this soon! 🙂

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“Ink and Steel” Elizabeth Bear

Ink and Steel is the third book in Elizabeth Bear’s Promethean Age series. It’s the first part of a tightly linked duology set in Elizabethan England, with Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare as our view point characters. It opens with Marlowe’s death, but given his presence as a character in Whiskey and Water (set some 400 years later) it comes as no surprise that this isn’t the last we’ve seen of him. He’s “rescued” by one of the Queens of Faerie – Morgan – and while he is still alive, he can’t leave Faerie for long, so as far as the world of the living goes he might as well be dead. But Marlowe has no desire to give up his ties to the world just yet.

The Shakespeare strand of the story begins with him still in shock from the news of his friend’s murder, and learning that Marlowe had been part of a secret society – the Prometheus Club – sworn to protect England and her Queen. Marlowe’s plays had been a part of their protections, there was a magic in them to nudge events along in the right way. And now William Shakespeare is being asked to step into that role, and to start moving in a world of politics and intrigue. Made even more difficult by the fact that Marlowe’s murder implies a traitor within the Prometheus Club.

The plot then follows both of them as they try to fit into their new roles & worlds – separately and together. Kit was always supposed to survive (not that he knows it at first) but he wasn’t supposed to end up bound to a Faerie Queen, and a lot of his story is about him figuring out why Morgan “rescued” him and what she wants with him. And that’s the plot thread that comes to a resolution to provide a climax to this book – Shakespeare’s dealing with the aftermath of Marlowe’s murder out in the human world is mostly not tied up.

I like Bear’s Shakespeare. I like the other characters too, but having been learning a bit more about the historical character recently it was neat to see how she weaves her imaginings in with the known facts. Particularly good was the way that Shakespeare’s relationship with his wife is fleshed out – Anne is a character as well, and even though you always see her through Shakespeare’s eyes you get a feel for the woman’s character. And also for the relationship between the two in all its complexity. Bear makes one reason that Shakespeare spends so much time in London and not in Stratford with Anne a reason of love – in this story Anne nearly died when giving birth to the twins, and so Will doesn’t want to risk getting her pregnant again. Of course in the 16th Century there aren’t contraceptives or abortions, the only way to avoid children is to not have sex. He stays away so that he won’t give into temptation, and she knows this and hates it (and its necessity) too. But he also stays away because he’s got a good life in London, and because the theatre is as important to him as his family.

The setting feels realistic, rather than modern people slapped down in “ye olden days”. The characters don’t have modern attitudes, even the sympathetic ones say or do things that would feel out of place now but just right in context. Particularly attitudes towards women – who are mostly secondary characters in the story (rather than viewpoint characters) but are a lot more central to events than the men whose eyes we see through really appreciate. Attitudes to sexuality are also full of things that are seen as hopelessly bigoted today. Part of Shakespeare’s character arc during the book has him discovering that his prejudices about women, and about non-hetrosexuals, aren’t as founded in reality as he might think. It’s not just attitudes that evoke the people of a different era – the dialogue is Elizabethan-lite. It’s not an accurate representation of how people would’ve spoken at the time, but it’s full of little turns of phrase that evoke the era. For example: “Richard, you come hand in hand with fortune tonight. You did perchance bring wine?”. And Shakespeare’s lines are full of wordplay and being clever with words, not in an obtrusive way but just enough to make you believe he’s the man who wrote the plays.

In terms of the overall series this and its sequel are the other half of the backstory for the events of Whiskey and Water – this is about Kit Marlowe and Faerie and Hell. It’s also something of an origin story for the Prometheans, who are not (all) the antagonists in this book. In Elizabethan England they are not just one society, they’ve split into two with different interpretations of their goal to protect the realm & Queen. And different methods they’re willing to use. I think the Prometheans of the 20th Century novels grow out of the Prometheans that Shakespeare is part of, not the ones he’s working against. Although I’m not entirely sure about that. But that means that the organisation that’s on the antagonist side in books 1 & 2 is on the protagonist side in books 3 & 4. And I like the way that this story is not the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, instead it’s more complicated and more of a matter of perspective.

As well as sacrifice and choices which run as themes through the whole series this book also has a lot of time being out of joint which feels significant. A lot of the communication is asynchronous – by letters only sporadically delivered/collected. And time runs differently in Faerie, so Kit and Will can never be quite sure how long has passed for the other one. I’m not sure what the deeper significance is, but it definitely feels like something I’m intended to notice.

This book is a return to the heights of Blood & Iron for me – a combination of my favourite historical era and the Fair Folk.

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