primeideal | Entries tagged with books: sff bingo

Another one from the Yuletide rec list. This is heavily anthropology porn. I may be being unfairly hard on it, but there were parts of it that rubbed me the wrong way for possibly-flimsy reasons.

Premise: a survey team, comprised of people from many diverse planets, is researching the planet Lassti ("Flashfever"), where everything can and will give you electric shocks. In particular, they want to determine if the local species, the "sprookjes," are sapient--if they have language and culture, the humans aren't going to colonize the planet. Unfortunately, it is difficult to determine whether the sprookjes have language; they echo human words, but so far haven't given any indication that they understand what it means. Also unfortunately, one of the team members dies in mysterious circumstances. So another crew member sends for Tocohl Susumo, from the "Hellspark" culture of interplanetary researchers/translators, in the hopes that she can solve the mysteries.

So in terms of "first contact is hard because we don't know if this species has language, and therefore, we don't really know if we can relate to them," it's reminiscent of "A Desolation Called Peace." And if you like the kind of SF books that don't necessarily explain all the worldbuilding details, just throw you in, there's plenty to keep you busy--garbage plants, lightning rods, golden scoffers, zap-mes--and that's just on Flashfever! All of the survey team have very different cultural traditions because they come from very different planets: they represent worlds where women have all the power and men aren't allowed to read or write, where the average height is four feet tall and people love ritual duels, where the language has "reliability" markings which make it extremely difficult and stressful to lie or even commit to uncertain hypotheses, where bare feet are taboo...Lots of culture. There is, at least, a common "GalLing" language that they can speak to each other, though this doesn't remove all issues. But by the time Tocohl shows up, these people have been living together and researching the sprookjes for three years.

Tocohl walks in and basically solves everyone's problems with the power of...body language. Because behaviors like gestures, or how close someone stands to you, or what side of you they sit on, are all culturally dependent; if you can't get those right, you may be able to speak the same vocabulary as someone else, but you don't "really" know their language. Hellsparks, however, are completely fluent in every language, including their unwritten aspects, so Tocohl speaks to everyone like a native without them being consciously aware why or how. Then she engages in lots of "noble lies" to get the crew to get along--misleading one person to believe that a new kind of boot is fashionable on her homeworld so she'll cover her feet and not freak out the foot-taboo culture, lying to another when two cultures both clash over "which side of your conversational partner is more honorable to approach on." Some people learn after-the-fact that she was lying and just applaud her for the chutzpah; others never catch on.

And, like, I think this is supposed to be uplifting! Even well-intentioned people will have culture clashes, but don't worry, with the right background information the hero can come in and save them from themselves! Instead, it hit me as fatalistic. No matter how hard you try, you'll never get anywhere unless you can miraculously master the unwritten rules which nobody will teach you, because nobody thinks they're actually that important. It hits me hard as an autistic person in a world full of neurotypicals; in this setting, the Hellsparks who actually know the unwritten rules are a small minority. We're supposed to believe that none of the interplanetary survey crew, not even the polyglot who's supposed to be the mission's language expert, knew this. The crew mentions that the cultural liaison who got them set up as a team but didn't stick around was a moron, but how often does that happen? The way it comes across is that the Hellsparks are superpowered individuals in a galaxy full of mundanes; either everyone should be wanting to learn what the Hellsparks can do, or the Hellsparks should come across as more condescending and patronizing to everyone else.

At one point, Tocohl puts forward the theory that one character subconsciously put too much trust in another character when he shouldn't have (and this is subsequently backed up by later evidence), because the second character's given name ends with an ee sound, and in the first character's culture, long e at the end of a name or title is associated with power. Her robot friend (more on whom in a moment) points out that this is silly. Tocohl: "I never said human beings were logical, or reasonable, or even sane." Except that everything Tocohl does, even when it's impulsive or spur-of-the-moment, is logical and reasonable and sane and works out in the end. And that's what frustrates me.

Okay, now the robot. The ship's name is Margaret Lord Lynn, aka Maggy, and she has a bigger memory than most computers. She also gets lots of input streams, through Tocohl's implants (so they can have "subvocal" conversations pretty much whenever) as well as radio handhelds and a freeform "arachne" body that walks around and gets input on its own. Other characters get used to addressing the arachne, understanding its "controller" is physically elsewhere, but get weirded out by the concept that Maggy can really be in "two places at once" (or more) including the audio input.

Because there aren't other computers in the galaxy that can do what Maggy can do, people tend to default to thinking the unseen "controller" is a bright child, based on her curiosity and intelligence but also lack of adult-typical maturity in some ways. Tocohl tends to let this assumption go uncorrected, and even admits that Maggy learns like a child--but I don't think that's really true. In the "language acquisition" unit of linguistics, it's usually pointed out that children learn their first language just by listening to "correct" examples of adult speech; no one will ever say something ungrammatical, then point out, "hey, kid, don't do that, it's bad syntax." Likewise, when a kid starts to generate sentences, some of them will be adult-grammatical and some will not; even if you try to "correct" a kid, they will ignore you until they figure the rule out on their own. In contrast, Maggy is more like...combining the perfect memory of a computer with the rule-following ability of an adult. On the other hand, she can have a childlike attitude at times:

“You’re sweet, Maggy.”
“Am I? Tocohl says I’m a pain in the butt.”

“It is possible to be both.”

And she's a very fun character:

(Now, Maggy,) she said, (in answer to your question: Alfvaen finds swift-Kalat sexually attractive—judging from the way Kejesli spoke, that’s no secret. She wants to learn his language in order to be more attractive to him. She’s now afraid that she’ll do it badly and ruin her chances of a relationship, or of learning that he doesn’t return her feeling.)

(Oh,) said Maggy. (—So Alfvaen will tell him she loves him and fight a duel with her closest friend and win and be cruelly wounded?)

(Wait, wait!—Veschke’s sparks, Maggy, what have you been reading?!)

Maggy’s recital of what she had been displaying for Alfvaen lasted through planetfall. (Maggy,) said Tocohl, firmly, (we’re going to have to have a long talk about fiction. I think you still misunderstand its purposes: fiction is a lie for entertainment, it’s a lie the listener willingly accepts for the sake of something else.)

This conversation happened early enough in the story that I was able to flag it as potential foreshadowing, which it is, even if in not quite the way Maggy envisioned :D

Of course, the existence of a computer with unique learning abilities and individuality is also relevant in a story about "how do we test whether this species is sapient," and I enjoyed the Maggy parts much more than "Tocohl fixes everything for the humans." (Perhaps it's because, since Maggy doesn't have a human body, pretty much her only way of communicating with the others is through verbal language.)

As I was writing this, I thought more about examples of "noble lies" I've read about, good or bad. And it occurs to me there may be some symbolism with Alfvaen's ailment. Early on, it's mentioned that Alfvaen contracted a parasitical infestation on a previous survey mission, which converts sugar into alcohol; when she's under stress, she physically gets drunk even if she hasn't actually consumed alcohol. This is known as "Cana's disease." Of course, I caught the allusion--Cana was the site of the Bible story where Jesus turned water into wine, get it?

But there's another detail to the story I hadn't remembered until just now, which is that Jesus doesn't tell the hosts that that's what he's doing. He just has the servants fill the jars up with water, then serve some to the host, who says, "oh, wow, this is great wine!" A lie at the right moment becomes the truth.

Bingo: I'm gonna say that Maggy, although she is technically an "extrapolative computer," is definitely within the spirit of the "Robot" square!

Found this one via a Yuletide promo post and it seemed RTMI. And, parts of it are, but parts of it are not. This is tricky to review in part because it's tricky to categorize. Because it was advertised as a fantasy, I'm primed to read between the lines and look for supernatural happenings, but the characters don't know that they're in that genre, from their perspective it's a meet-cute or an academic detective story for a long time.

Premise: in 1920s Toronto, a pair of best friends meet another pair of best friends on a beach. Elsa Nordqvist is starting her masters' in classics; Harriet Spencer is a flirty, lighthearted undergrad; Peverell "Peachy" Peacham is an effervescent musician who can't hold a real job, and Christopher "Kit" Underhill is quiet but wise. When Harriet and Peachy meet, sparks immediately fly; Elsa and Kit are also quietly drawn to each other, but mostly interested in setting up the Harriet/Peachy romance. Elsa is talkative about her research, her childhood on a farm in Saskatchewan, and her attitude of healthy skepticism. Only when they're going their separate ways does she realize that Kit...is actually an Anglo-Catholic priest. Oops. Awkwardness ensues.

Elsa and her advisor are researching a manuscript called the Bibliotheka Orphika, which purports to be a collection of ancient Greek texts from a cult built around the mystic worship of Orpheus, who has to descend to the underworld to rescue his Eurydice; according to the Bibliotheka, the pure soul needs to descend to the metaphorical otherworld to unlock its spiritual powers and overcome the base world of matter. Elsa doesn't really believe in any of this stuff, but is intrigued enough by it as an academic exercise to research its provenance.

So there's a lot of "what would you do if you could overcome the world of base matter? Would you want to become someone else? How?" that has different resonances in 1925 versus 2014 (when it was written) versus today. Elsa admires her advisor because he represents her ideal of an independent scholar, unbeholden to worldly concerns.

It’s 1925. The ‘confines of your sex’ aren’t what they used to be—are they? I don’t know. Admittedly it isn’t really my field.

Kit and Peachy's conversation on the subject was pretty interesting; they interpret the "soul is good and pure, matter is base and evil" philosophy in the context of the Gnostics, an early Christian sect that the Gospel of John was written in response to.

Peachy was staring thoughtfully at the ceiling. “I find that quite depressing, actually. Maybe not the implications—I mean, I’m as much in favour of debauchery as the next man—but the fundamental idea. I like the world. And I was under the impression that God loved it. You know, to the extent of sending his only begotten Son … ”

I'd known about the Gnostics, and John's emphasis on "no, the Word actually became flesh, Jesus wasn't a hologram projected down from a purer universe, he was made of meat-stuff like the rest of us" theology as a response, but it hadn't occurred to me that the importance of "world" in the famous John 3:16 verse is actually tied up in all of this too!

So as you can see, the Christian stuff can get kind of technical and in the weeds, so I don't blame you for skipping it if it's not your thing. An important caveat here, however, is that even if it is your thing (it sure is mine!), the book is still pretty slow. People speak in unrealistically long infodump paragraphs to each other. There's a lot of timeskip "a week later, Elsa was upset, several pages later we're going to have a flashback as to why she was upset." (This awkwardness is similar to "Hench"; also like "Hench," Elsa has an unpronounceable last name and someone has to be special if they get it right the first time!) And a lot of stuff happens offscreen, in terms of "Harriet and Peachy get together, then timeskip, now they're engaged, then timeskip, Peachy broke it off oh no." And on and on and on. There's a subplot about "the men have survivors' guilt because they didn't fight in World War I," and then it's like, "is that actually true, or is Peachy just making stuff up? If he is, why?" The descriptions of shell shock were an unexpected parallel to "Ghost Talkers." Ultimately Kit's war trauma is an important plot device, but I felt like "Peachy is just a compulsive liar" wasn't meaningful enough for that element to be integrated well.

The characters are wrong-genre savvy; they compare their relationships to Jane Austen novels, but there aren't any obviously-to-them speculative elements for a long time. The academic stuff is interesting--Elsa's insight into how the Bibliotheka might have been written, if it wasn't an authentic compilation, was an impressive twist. Kit's calm matter-of-factness about how important Elsa's research is to her makes me want to root for him and their relationship; it shouldn't be a high bar to clear, but unfortunately, in 1925, it is. And the existence of a character named "Anastasiya Graves" (!!) was very intriguing. (There are also academic rivals named "Arthur" and "Hallam," which I assume can't be a coincidence.) But it is not a fast read, and a lot of that time, even if you suspect some of what's really going on, the characters do not. Elsa's father, it turns out, has maybe-prophetic dreams, he's like "hey, pay attention if you see someone who looks like XYZ, I dreamed about him once!" Is this really important or necessary for the plot? Not really! Couldn't it just as easily be a manifestation of his worries about his daughter in the big city? Yes.

Even in the ending, I felt like a lot of scenes kind of duplicated each other. There's a touching, dramatic scene where something clearly supernatural is going on, and Kit survives in part because Elsa's love is powerful enough to overcome his fear. Very sweet. Okay, is the climax going to be that? Kit and Elsa confessing their love for each other? Elsa's relationship to the church?

No, a couple chapters later...there's another scene that's plot-wise and thematically the same thing. And this later "ending" scene is very well-written, I teared up at the portrayal of Peachy and Kit's friendship and the integration of individual, personal love with liturgical, multisensory tradition of worship! It's great! I don't often find myself moved that strongly! So when I say this book stuck the landing, it really stuck the landing and my feelings of it will probably warm with hindsight. But it's hard to rec to anybody looking for a fast read, or even a clearly-fantasy read.

I learned some things about Prohibition in Canada, it was one of those "I've never considered this but I probably should think beyond my horizons a little more." Anyway, in Ontario, the Prohibition era was 1916-1927. Now you know!

Here are a couple more examples of the dry humor:

They went down the hall by and by, to check on the suicidal poet, and found him toasting a cheese sandwich in his fireplace. He insisted they join him, fetched out more bread and cheese from a desk drawer, and wanted their help with an article that he was writing called “Transcendence: What Is It?” The answer seemed to be “I don’t know, and neither shall you.” Kit thought that was more or less all right. The cheese sandwiches were delicious.

“It’s ten thirty!” Peachy exclaimed. “What are you doing in bed?”

“It’s ten thirty on a Saturday—what are you doing out of bed? I’ve already been to Morning Prayer and a Chancel Guild meeting and had a long conversation with a madman who has pinpointed the date of the Eschaton and wants to know what I am going to do about it. And what I am going to do about it is drink my tea and read my book and take a nap.”

“Nonsense—what you’re going to do is come golfing with me! When is it, by the way?”

“What?”

“The end of the world.”

“Some time in 1952. You’ve ages to repent.”

A police officer came across the wide expanse of St. Clair to investigate the crowd on the church steps.

“Has anything happened?” he asked.

“Of course something has happened, Officer,” said Mr. Cox with dignity. “It is Easter.”

“Yes?”

“Christ is risen.”

“He is risen indeed!” chorused the departing torchbearers and Charlie Boult, and the rest of the congregation joined in, raggedly. “Alleluia!”

“Oh, quite, yes.” The policeman touched his hat and backed away.

Content note: there's an attempted scene of "mind rape" as well as physical assault which is ultimately fended off, it's treated seriously and with concern by the victim's loved ones after the fact.

Bingo: Probably using it for Angels and Demons. Could also count for Mundane Jobs and Self/Indie Published.

So, full disclosure, this book was one of the inspirations for "Debrief," and has kinda sorta been on my TBR since then. On the one hand, if it was anywhere close to as affecting as Debrief, I might really really love it; on the other, if it was anywhere close to as affecting as Debrief, I might have too many feelings and be self-conscious about writing them up. Ahem. So the good news/bad news is that this was not as affecting as Debrief, however, it's a fast read, well-plotted, and has some fun worldbuilding! And overall, I enjoyed it more than "The Calculating Stars," which is the other Kowal novel I've read.

The premise, both here and in Debrief, is that the British military employs "spirit mediums" to get messages from ghosts who have died in battle. Here, it's WWI, and Ginny Stuyvesant is from the US, but her fiance is a British officer. When they become aware of a threat to the mediums, they need to investigate and find the traitor in their midst, amid all the perils of war. So there are red herrings and questionable motives like "this guy may be a cad, but he didn't deserve to be murdered."

Like in "Calculating Stars," Kowal is very conscious of both the diversity in historical settings, and the ways in which women and ethnic minorities are held back by discrimination. (There are a couple cases of threatened sexual abuse, sometimes leading to "why are you guys fighting each other, you're all on the same side," but nobody gets away with it.) In this case, I think the earlier timeframe is an advantage for "Ghost Talkers"; the didacticism is slightly less heavy-handed, and there are cases where the characters are like "okay, let's consider how our prejudices may have interfered with our enemies' plans; maybe the allies we dismiss as unimportant or beneath notice are also people our enemies dismiss as unimportant or beneath notice, and therefore, they aren't moles!"

And then there are conversations like:

"Please. Surely you have seen men in his condition before."

"If you are referring to the shirkers, who pretend to 'shell shock' so they can get away from the front, then yes. I have."

Oof.

There's a lot of more pleasant "did do the research" moments, though. One character learns about martial arts from reading Sherlock Holmes; and there's a brief cameo from an RL historical figure, of the sort that's kind of gimmicky if it's the entire plot of the book, but works well for a throwaway appearance. Kowal cites the history of Spiritualism as taught by Andrew Jackson Davis and Emanuel Swedenborg as background to the spirit mediums.

She also shows her work with book ciphers that characters might actually have used, and even over-the-top free-verse poetry encoding the numbers for the cipher. However, this turns into a nerd snipe; if we see the decoded messages, we don't really need the numeric codes, unless we need to double-check that they aren't also a code for this book (which they're not...I don't think.)

There's also a harrowing description of sneaking out to a "listening trench," which isn't even a post set up with radio tech, just a tunnel near the front lines where you can (try to) spy on enemy troops. Doesn't need ghosts to be disturbing and well-drawn.

Unlike in Debrief, holding frequent summonings requires a team effort; Ginny is part of a "circle" that consists of two mediums and four "mundanes"--the way she and her partner pass "control" of the circle back and forth, so they can get some rest between ghosts, is very reminiscent of Wheel of Time!

"My next shift ends at eight p.m."

"Twenty--"

"Twenty hundred. Yes, I know. But this is a social call, so...pick me up at my billet at half past."

A century later, Americans are still bickering about "yeah sometimes we use military time but sometimes we use civilian time, deal with it."

At one point, the characters are returning from Amiens via train, and they get held up talking about "is this train going to Étretat or Le Havre." Just like Lupin! :D

More broadly, just the general implications of "soldiers become ghosts when they die" are interesting on plot and worldbuilding levels. Ginny realizes she can send messages via dying soldiers. Enemies have to be captured alive because they can just kill themselves to deliver secret information back home. Soldiers who die in inglorious circumstances need to be prompted for their last words:

"Who raised you?"

"My da."

"Shall I tell him that you died honorably and that your last thought was of him?"

"Yeah! That sounds real fine, only...I died in bed."

"It was still in service to your country, and you are to be commended for it." Ginger tried to project reassurance. "At ease, soldier. You are relieved of duty."

So yeah, even if these characters probably won't live rent-free in my head, it's still a cool worldbuilding premise!

Bingo: "Title with a Title." Looks like it was also a Book Club at one point!

Superhero books aren't something I normally pick up, so this was a "noticed it at the library, realized I would probably need it for bingo" choice.

"The Meister of Decimen City" is a lot like Hench, minus utilitarianism, plus dinosaurs. Also, like Light Years From Home and Wildings, it's about screwed-up fraternal twin relationships. (It's an even better match for "Light Years" because in addition to the twins, there's an older sister involved in family trauma.)

In a world where superheroes and -villains are normal, Rex is a supergenius who has her own lairs complete with AI and genetically engineered dinosaurs; the dinosaurs' intelligence is evolving throughout the book. This sets up a bunch of comedy.

"This might not be a good time," one of the techs said behind her, "but some of the dinosaurs have become ashamed of their nakedness and are fashioning clothes out of leaves."
...
"Clearly you need more structure in your lives. I'm putting you all in sports. I don't care what sport--you're all going to participate and you're going to learn about teamwork and discipline and working hard to achieve your dreams."

Unfortunately, Rex's twin brother Sam and their older sister Vivian are also superpowered, which is indirectly due to some of Rex's childhood experimentation gone wrong; Vivian is telekinetic, and Sam reads people's thoughts, which is more a villainous origin story than a useful power. Viv is the leader of a team of superheroes known as the "Protectors of the World," who have all the flair and over-the-top silliness you'd hope for from a hero team.

"Manta Man operates in Seattle, not New Orleans," Gorgeous cut in kindly.

Rex blinked a few times, derailed. "Then who am I thinking of?"

"You're probably thinking of Mantis Man. He's active in New Orleans."

"Oh, right." Rex tried to think. "Powers of a praying mantis?"

"No. Manta Man has the powers of a manta ray; Mantis Man emulates a praying mantis."

Rex internally groaned as she remembered the details. "Oh, wait--he's one of those gray-morality superheroes with the especially disturbing backstories, isn't he?"

When the dinosaurs get out of hand, Rex is assigned governmental "oversight" to protect her, and she has to put up with interfering civilians in her life. Most are annoying, but a couple actually become good friends. After she breaks up with her boyfriend, one of them helps her realize that maybe the reason her relationships haven't worked out so far is because she's ace, and so this becomes a long-running plot thread about earnestly researching her identity and realizing "hmm, maybe this is me." It also comes with increasingly heavy-handed metaphors about her tastes in food.

"No, thanks. I don't like cheese."

The shuffle of Pixie turning around on a couch caught Rex's attention, and she stopped short at the hero's look of distress. "That's so sad! Cheese is one of the best things in life."

Don Conjure offered, "There are many kinds of cheese. Perhaps you merely have not found the variety to suit your taste."

"Sounds like you're scared of it," Undertaker said as Cat Man stretched languidly across her to spear a piece of pepperoni on his claw.

"You should try it again," Manta Man said. "Cheese improves with experience."

"In my time, all who refused to share cheese with their king were burned as witches," King George announced.

The Jester sneered as he piled pizza on his plate. "She's just looking for attention. No one doesn't like cheese."

"I can't imagine not liking cheese," Pixie said mournfully. You should see a doctor."

Very much like Anna in Hench, Rex is frustrated by society's easy categorization of "heroes" and "villains," and the way people ignore the collateral damage that the "heroes" cause. And she (with help from her AI) inadvertently starts a social media discussion about the phenomenon, while working through her own trauma with trusted friends. I'm not sure if she's meant to be read as neurodiverse beyond the ace stuff, there's a mention of her attending special schools to provide her enrichment/intellectual stimulation as a kid, but she has a lawyer/BFF who helps her with PR stuff and it kind of feels like she's there to be "emotional support neurotypical," like, what is she getting out of this relationship?

It's possible that if I hadn't read Hench this would feel more fresh, but as it is, there's a lot of mood whiplash; one minute people are being very earnest-millennial talking about asexuality and trauma, and the next, dinosaurs are saving the day. Maybe that's the point, but I found it jarring. (Rex cured cancer in her spare time, between experiments that tried to help Sam, but nobody gives her credit for this anymore, it's old hat.)

For a book called "The Meister of Decimen City" we get very little context about what or where Decimen City is--mentions of New York, Seattle, etc. rule those out, and towards the end they start talking about Colorado a couple times; is it alt-universe Denver? I don't think so, but...? Also, the plot convolutions get a little over-the-top, because a lot of the conflict boils down to "Rex is testing out superpower hoods either to give to Sam or to use when fighting him, she's not sure which ones will work," and so there are a couple cases of "okay, remember, the blue hood is here, the red one is there, the yellow one is with the dinosaurs..." and then a chapter later wires have been crossed behind the scenes and that plan fell apart anyway. It's not a big deal, just kind of annoying.

Bingo: Title with a Title, Superheroes (obviously), Published in 2023. Could possibly count as featuring robots (the AI is a recurring character) or Multiverse/Alternate Realities (Rex and Viv have an emotional conversation while trapped in the "Cat Dimension" by Cat Man).

Disclaimer: Glewwe is a friend and I was at a release event for this book, I bought "Sparkers" (to which "Wildings" is a sequel) then and had it autographed, so this isn't like a strictly impartial review or anything. But none of them are!

"The reasonable [girl] adapts [herself] to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to [herself]. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable [girl]." The original quote is from George Bernard Shaw, but it applies to both of these middle-grade novels. In Sparkers, 14-year-old Marah Levi investigates the truth behind a pandemic in her city-state of Ashara; Wildings picks up four years later, when Rivka Kadmiel and her ambassador father move to Ashara. (Although Marah and her family show up as side characters in Wildings, it makes sense without having read Sparkers.) Marah's friend is resigned about her sickness and potential death, and Rivka's twin brother is resigned to being separated from his family because he's non-magical. But both Marah and Rivka stand out by their stubbornness, and this moves them to create change.

An important difference between the books is in their narrators' social position; Marah is non-magical ("halani"), while Rivka is part of the magical ("kasiri") elite minority. I think this change works well, for a couple reasons. Both books are quite explicitly about discrimination, segregated schools, police brutality, etc. and Rivka's slower evolution from "hey, my brother doesn't deserve to be separated from me" to "nobody should be separated from their families" is realistic and not excruciatingly heavy-handed. (To be clear, it's still heavy-handed on plenty of occasions, and I'm probably too far from the target age range to assess if that "works" or not; I'm not sure I'd have been a good judge even when I was in the target age range.) Also, we get to see Rivka practicing magic; she's from the city-state of Atsan, and their magic relies heavily on music theory. This was cool.

A maid helped carry in the harpsichord, which one magician painstakingly tuned while his colleagues, a cellist, a violinist, and a recorder player, arranged their chairs and stands. When they began to play, it was the first time I had heard polyphonic spells being cast, and despite my devastation over Arik and my worry for Mother, I was curious. The music was different from the kind I heard at concerts. The spells sounded more mathematical, somehow, composed not to be melodious but instead to shape magic into powerful currents.

There are several ways someone could handle a story about the divide between the magical elite and everyone else. One approach would be to have the majority group be genuinely mundane, and grapple with the implications of "yeah, it's just fundamentally not fair that we can't do what they can do." Another approach would be to have halani have a different form of magic that's looked down upon for absurd cultural reasons; maybe halani magic involves more motion and body language and kasiri are just prejudiced when they deride it as inferior to their incantations. But the rather painfully kludgy approach taken here is for halani to have "the intuition," which gives them gut feelings when ~~the plot demands it,~~ uh, something important is happening. Again, maybe the target audience doesn't find this lazy writing, but I do, sorry.

Rivka has an unwavering commitment to reunite with her brother, despite the obstacles society puts in her way. However, compared to Marah, I felt like there was more "things falling into her lap" than her initiative moving the plot. It just so happens that, for the first time in four years, political hero Marah has come forward to speak out against forced adoption before even hearing about Rivka and her plight. Rivka happens to be attending class with Marah's brother, so she reaches out to him in order to contact Marah, and he unsurprisingly is like "you're just using me to get to my sister, everyone wants that, leave me alone." But oh look, the plot grants them another reason to hang out.

"Sparkers" starts out with small-scale events; Marah just wants to get into a good secondary school. Not till over a third of the way into the book does it escalate into "and maybe my friend and I can cure the plague." By the end, however, they discover corruption that brings down Ashara's government. "Wildings" starts with Rivka trying to find her brother, escalates with her trying to change unjust laws, and then, towards the climax, the plot veers into a thriller. I enjoyed getting to see the complications of interacting magic systems, but the abrupt "oh this rescue needs to be completed in the next couple hours" shift was jarring.

The kasiri/halani dynamic mostly seems to be drawn from RL racial injustice, ie, flashback Rivka (age 10): "He was plainly terrified of the police officer, which I didn’t understand. Mother and Father had taught us that the police were here to protect us." Towards the end, though, the legal arguments feel more like the 2010s fight for same-sex marriage equality.

"One by one, the parliamentarians make speeches. They all seem to want to say their piece, as though they hope to be immortalized in history books someday, whether as a hero who staved off an attack on the Family Laws or a visionary who led the way for progress." Compare this Onion take from June 2013. :P

A minor worldbuilding thing that I wanted to know more about, also in Sparkers: the characters have ten-day weeks, six "workdays" and four "weekend" days (although some jobs do work on weekends). Okay, whatever, they don't have the Genesis creation narrative or the Indo-European pantheon, we don't need seven-day weeks. But letting the kids and white-collar workers only work 60% of the time, is that going to fly? They have breaks between school years...

A couple funny parallels/tie-ins to other recent reads; Rivka's father is an ambassador, so part of his embassy is the chancery, which is also the court of government in Unraveller. (Yes, it's a real world, just one I hardly ever see.) And in both "Wildings" and "Tress of the Emerald Sea," there's a Deaf character who communicates by writing on a slate, and is temporarily cut off from the world when bad guys break the slate. In both cases I think it's an example of "having disability just be magically cured in a fantasy world is not good representation, what disabled people want to see is characters using accommodations that make sense given the setting."

Bingo: This should probably actually be "bottom of the TBR" for me since I read Sparkers when it came out seven years ago :P It's middle grade, so probably not YA. Glewwe is multiracial, so POC author square works. I'll probably use it for Sequel square.

J had lots of good things to say about this one and

cahn gave it a thumbs-up too, and I wasn't running across much YA on my own, so onto the bingo list it goes.

"Unraveller" is set in the realm of Raddith, where humans live alongside creatures of "the Wilds." There's a lot of "be very careful with the exact language of your bargains" when dealing with nonhuman beings, and this principle has carried over into the foundation of their government system--the most important power isn't monarchy or democracy, but precise contracts and treaties. Some humans have been granted the power to curse others, and curses often result in shapeshifting/change of forms, which leads to bizarre situations such as "During his year as a boat, he had witnessed a host of other rules infringements."

Fortunately, our hero, Kellen, has the gift of "unravelling"--he can break curses, given access to enough particulars about the curser's means and motivations. The other protagonist, Nettle, and her siblings were cursed by their evil stepmother and turned into birds; Kellen unravelled the curse, and Nettle is now human again, but her brother, Yannick, has chosen to stay a gull. When Yannick and Nettle are close, they can communicate telepathically. The details of shapeshifting, like Nettle having to get used to walking again, and Yannick's reluctance to leave the sky together with his utility as a scout/mail carrier/secret weapon (he complains about it but he deeply appreciates staying close to Nettle), were all reminiscent of the nothlits from Animorphs--and if you know how much I love Animorphs, you know that's very high praise.

Kellen got his gifts by being bitten by a "Little Brother," a magical spider-like creature that passed his powers to him as it died. Yes, he was exposed to a magic spider and gained powers. It's fantasy Luddite Spider-Man. (If you have a spider squick, you probably want to avoid this one, there are lots of descriptions of spiders.)

When I say fantasy Luddites, by the way, I don't just mean "people who dislike technology"--Kellen's family and hometown are literally trying to destroy the looms that undercut individual weavers' trades. Similarly, the existence of "bicycle rickshaws, cycle sedans, pedal-coaches, and tandems" on bridge roads built above the magical forests was a neat depiction of the tech level and mix of technology and magic that exist here.

Unfortunately, while Kellen has superpowers, he is also a fifteen-year-old boy with a temper, so he often spends time getting on the authorities' bad side and needing to be bailed out. The plot is a bit episodic in terms of "go to point A, deal with miniquest 1, find clue that leads you to point B, deal with miniquest 2," and so on; it's also one of those plots that could be elided somewhat if the characters just communicated better with each other (although, again, they are all dealing with their own trauma and/or underdeveloped frontal lobes). But I enjoyed the mystery and puzzle-solving aspects; in terms of being able to reason though "okay, realistically there are only so many viable suspects in this scene, who can it be," I found it satisfying (but maybe because it's "only" YA so I don't have to be "really perceptive" to make the right deductions, idk). And the twist of why a small village is surprisingly chill about the bog witch that's been haunting the woods for thirty years was impressive!

The Deep Wilds follow some of the same rules for human-nonhuman communication as the realm of the Finn in Wheel of Time: "Don’t carry iron. Don’t harm the trees or break the soil without their permission. And bring a gift, in case you’re asked for one." Magical beings hate technology like iron! There's also a "market" reminiscent of the one in Neverwhere, which has similar rules:

I beg your pardon. Kellen had always thought of it as an apology, but it was actually a request. The man had asked for Kellen’s pardon—his forgiveness—and Kellen had almost given it without thinking. What would have happened if he had? Would this man have taken his forgiveness away, leaving Kellen unable to forgive ever again?

The ending felt a little cheap, in particular, there's a part that relies on the villain making a Humperdinck-level blunder of rushing to "say man and wife!" without waiting for Buttercup to say "I do," rather than anything the heroes do succeeding.

Also, one of the points the narrative is trying to make is that "people who have been through abusive/traumatic experiences need more than healing/rescuing in the moment, they need long term support to recover and shouldn't expect their trajectory to be perfectly linear. There will be bumps in the road and you shouldn't compare yourself to others because you don't know what they're going through." All true. I don't agree that this support needs to come from the same person who provides the initial healing/rescuing in the moment. The story seems to be saying "Kellen's unravelling power isn't enough, he also has to have all these social skills too," and like...if you ask me, his anger issues aren't because he needs to be the #1 empathetic counselor, maybe he has anger issues because he's a fifteen-year-old boy with an underdeveloped frontal lobe.

Bingo: I picked it up looking for Young Adult; it also fits for Title with a Title. Another Coastal setting, with lots of marshes and seafaring (specifically in the second half of the book, the first half is more inland forests and highlands). The descriptions of trees growing out of the wetlands called to mind "Where the Crawdads Sing," which had lovely scenery but was not a good film. Also, queernorm: there's a married m/m couple, one of whom saves his husband's life in an extremely tropey but adorable way.

In college I saw the Berlioz opera version of "Faust" as a first-year, and read a translation of Goethe's poem as a senior. Neither one made much of an impression on me. But I recently read an interesting essay about this Soviet-era satire, and it's a perfect fit for two bingo squares, so here we are. Classics appreciation time!

M&M consists of three-ish interwoven narratives. The first concerns the visit of Satan (he goes by the name "Woland," which is apparently a Faust allusion I didn't remember) and his posse to 1930s Moscow. The gang makes trouble, handing out ten-ruble bills that disappear or turn to embarrassing foreign currency, but even the literal forces of darkness are no match for the resolutely materialistic Soviet regime trying, and failing, to explain away all the strangeness. The second is about the titular characters; "the Master" is a novelist who has faced intense criticism for trying to write a novel about Pontius Pilate, and his lover, Margarita, who fiercely believes in him. (Margarita is the cognate to Marguerite/Gretchen in Faust.) And the third is the story-within-a-story about Pilate, as told in turns by Woland and the Master. In some ways it's a suitable-for-Soviet-print, "historical" version of the Passion story without any of that dangerous supernatural stuff, but it's plenty weird in its own right.

Russian novels are often stereotyped as "everyone has names like 'Mikhail Alexandrovich Berlioz,' and sometimes he's 'Mikhail Alexandrovich,' sometimes he's 'Berlioz,' sometimes he's 'Misha,' depending on who's talking." I don't think that this is a problem, because a lot of the characters aren't so much names as archetypes or roles: "the financial director of the theater," "the overworked landlord." Even if you don't remember who's who, you can figure it out by the vibes.

Even if it's not laugh-out-loud funny, there are plenty of moments of dry humor, particularly as regards one of the devilish companions, a cat named Behemoth (who sometimes appears as a man with a catlike face).

As soon as she saw the cat climbing onto the streetcar, she began shouting with such fury that she shook all over, “Cats aren’t allowed! No passengers with cats! Shoo! Get off, or I’ll call the police!” But neither the conductress nor the passengers were amazed by the most important thing of all, namely, that a cat was not merely getting on a streetcar, which wasn’t so bad, but that he intended to pay his fare!

Ivan, the witness of this account, later summarizes these events to the Master, who is amused by this part of the story. Clearly he has good taste. There's also a living chessboard, much like Harry Potter, where Behemoth and Woland play chess. (Behemoth tries to cheat by getting his king and bishop to switch places.)

Meanwhile, the chessboards was in chaos. An utterly distraught king in a white cape stamped on his square, his arms raised in despair. Three white lansquenet pawns with halberds stared in confusion at a bishop who was waving his crozier and pointing ahead to where Woland’s black knights could be seen on adjacent black and white squares, mounted on two mettlesome steeds, who were pawing the squares with their hooves.

And when the Master finally meets Behemoth:

“Excuse me . . . was it thou . . . er, you, sir . . .” he corrected himself, not sure whether to use the intimate or polite form of address to the cat, “are you, sir, the same cat who got on the streetcar?” “I am,” confirmed the cat, flattered, and he added, “It’s nice to hear you address a cat so politely. For some reason cats are usually addressed with the familiar ‘thou,’ despite the fact that no cat has ever drunk Bruderschaft with anyone.”

There's also humor to be found in the absurdities of Soviet life. When a famous writer dies violently, everyone is desperate to apply for his apartment, because the housing shortage is so terrible. Too relatable. :/

They contained pleas, threats, slanderous gossip, denunciations, offers to undertake renovations at their own expense, references to unbearable overcrowding, and the impossibility of sharing an apartment with bandits. Included too was an artistically powerful and gripping account of someone stealing pelmeni from apartment No. 31 and stuffing them into a jacket pocket, plus two threats of suicide and one confession of a secret pregnancy.

And the devils' fake money is transformed from rubles to useless bottle labels to illegal foreign currency at will. This is what American money looks like from an outside POV:

They removed the newspaper, but the package turned out to contain not rubles, but some unknown currency that was blue-green in color and had a picture on it of an old man.

Even if the authorities can't succeed in quashing the supernatural, they can try to subdue or eliminate anyone whose stories--by reporting the truth--sound insane. (Big content warning for a lot of forced medicalization/drugs, if that's a squick for you.) But by the end, even the authority figures are pleading to be locked up in padded rooms so the devils can't miraculously remove their heads or teleport them to Yalta. When the regime is out to suppress truth, the sane look mad.

The Master realizes that some of his critics' attacks are really just towing the party line out of fear and pressure to conform. Again, here we are ninety years later. Relatable.

There was something uncommonly fake and uncertain in every line of these articles, despite their threatening and self-assured tone. I kept thinking—and I couldn’t rid myself of the thought—that the authors of these articles weren’t saying what they wanted to say, and that that was why they were so furious.

On the other hand, in the early sections, a lot of the humor comes from idiomatic usage of "devil"/"hell" phrases. Like, "where is the mysterious professor from?" "Oh, I don't know, the devil knows where." "What happened to the ten-ruble bills?" "I don't know where in hell they went." The humor is that, in this case, it's literally true; the devil knows where he and his friends are from, the money literally came from Satan's realms. While this is funny, the novelty wears off pretty quickly.

The edition I used had some useful afterwords (and endnotes for each chapter--it's an ebook, couldn't they have linked it? /petty gripe.) Even I did pick up on some obvious parallels between the outer and frame stories: full moons, thunderstorms, the symbolic Friday-to-Sunday timeframe of many of the events (also the case for "Divine Comedy.") One thing I appreciated the notes spelling out and dumbing down is that a lot of the things you'd expect to see in the Easter narrative--last suppers, miraculous events--take place in Moscow, while a lot of the harshest realities of the Stalin era--show trials, secret police informants, executions--take place in ancient Yershalaim. It's a good way to avoid the censors.

(The novel was originally written in the 1929-1940 timeframe, and the manuscript burned at least once, but recreated with help from Bulgakov's wife; it was first published in Russia, in somewhat abridged/censored format, in 1966. This adds poignancy/life-imitates-art to some of the Master's experiences.)

Some other things the notes help with/the text didn't make clear (at least to me, who is not the most observant) is that the Master is arrested offscreen shortly after parting with Margarita in a flashback, and the reason for the lovers' separation has to do with his detention before he winds up in a mental asylum. Also, in the Pilate sections, there's a weird plot development involving Judas of Kerioth (Iscariot, of course), that the notes explain better.

Another silly gripe: I understand that the Pilate chapters were supposed to be non-supernatural. But "symbolic and important dreams" are an established literary device, even in this book. Missed opportunity not to have Pilate's wife show up, just for a line or two about "ugh I had a nightmare about Yeshua, I hope this case can be over with soon." Meanwhile, "Jesus Christ Superstar" gives the dream to Pilate, when we could have had another female character with a basis in the Gospels! Just saying. ;)

When Margarita is asked to host the devil's ball (he needs a Marguerite/Gretchen/Margaret wherever he goes), she temporarily turns into a witch and flies on a broomstick to hang out with dancing witches, mermaids, and a satyr-like creature. This was the one part where I kind of went "okay, I think something similar happened in Faust, just fun black magic without any real 'evil.'" Like I said, my memory is hazy.

At the ball, Margarita meets lots of infamous sinners who are there for good reason--poisoners, assassins, executed criminals, and all the people you'd expect the devil to be hanging out with. But she also meets a woman who's been tormented endlessly by reminders of a crime she was driven to by desperation. I don't want to project too much onto modern culture-war issues, but there's something to be said for Margarita, the main female character, calling out the hypocrisy of a society that demonizes (if not literally) women while letting the deadbeat men responsible for their problems off the hook.

Later, when Woland asks what she'd like in return, she's been planning to demand the Master be reunited with her--her devotion to him was what made her willing to do a Faustian bargain in the first place--but she can't help asking for mercy for Frieda, instead. Woland is pleasantly surprised--Margarita admits she isn't even all that selfless. But mercy isn't his "department;" Margarita herself has to take on the power of pronouncing Frieda's forgiveness and liberation. Since that didn't count as a gift from Woland, she's free to boldly demand the Master's freedom, too.

This pattern repeats itself in the end; the Master and Margarita die to one life, and are resurrected into a new one. As they depart, they meet Pilate himself, and the Master realizes how he needs to finish his story; by setting Pilate free from his self-imposed guilt, so that he can reunite with "Yeshua," the kind man who sees good in everyone. In turn, Woland tells the Master:

"The one whom the hero you created and just released so yearned to see has read your novel," and then "Someone was releasing the Master into freedom, as he himself had released the hero he created."

The devil can play a lot of tricks, and sometimes those "miracles" that defy all laws of nature are exactly what's needed to shake up repressive authorities. But grace needs to come from humans, or a divine source of goodness. My interpretations are probably more orthodox than Bulgakov's, but the idea of the One whom we all yearn to see reading our small creations, and granting us "absolution" and "release," is pretty much the best end you could write.

Bingo: Perfect fit for "Literary Fantasy" and "Angels and Demons." Could probably be considered for "Myths and Retellings" (the Easter story and Faust), and "Title with a Title"?

I acquired this because the digital edition was heavily discounted and came with a strong recommendation from J. Unfortunately, this is going to be another case where our tastes didn't align.

The titular character, Inda, is the third child in an aristocratic family in a fantasy world. His elder brother is a bully, while his elder sister is a sweetheart. But while younger sons (who aren't expected to inherit) usually don't go to the military academy in the capital city, the rules change just as Inda is turning ten, so it's off to school to learn military skills, and demonstrate them in highly competitive wargames. Inda proves to be a natural leader, rallying people to him with humility and brilliance: even if he doesn't take credit for being in charge, he comes up with genius strategies like engaging the bullies in fights while the tiny kid who no one expects runs around capturing all the flags.

So, "Ender's Game," but fantasy. Except, "Ender's Game"'s SFy worldbuilding is compelling--when I read about the zero-gravity battle rooms or the "giant's drink" RPG or the arcade games, I wanted to experience them. In "Inda," there are hints of magic behind the medieval warfare, but it's so sparse that it's hard to be caught up in the wonder. Centuries ago, magic was more prevalent in the realm of Iasca, and it persists in other parts of the world. But in Iasca, magic is mostly limited to practical cleaning spells for bathing and personal care. Which makes sense, honestly--of all the things to use magic for in a low-tech world, replacing indoor plumbing is a big upgrade! But also, there are hints of more fantastical goings-on that get brought up every couple hundred pages or so and then dropped. Inda's home castle is haunted, literally, by the ghost of his father's first wife. There's a notorious pirate on the seas who is said to not just burn ships, but literally open portals to hell and send them through. (And the glossary at the end of the book has more details about how portals work, which seems to be really burying the lede in terms of magical scope.) These are the kinds of things I'd like to talk about more and not just mention sporadically. The book is seven hundred pages long! That's long enough to resolve some plotlines!

Moreover, Inda is incredibly unrelenting on the horrors of military-school "discipline." Big brothers beat up little brothers to toughen them up and "prepare" them for their classes. Older students beat up younger students, then lie about it and expect their victims to go along with it because snitches get stitches. Teachers beat up students. Students prank their classmates, then the entire class is collectively punished for it. Students prank third parties and frame their classmates for it, and the entire class is collectively punished for it. It's very much a case of "with friends like these, who needs enemies." Again, "Ender's Game" doesn't hold back on the bullying either, but the humor/worldbuilding/etc. was more compelling there.

Another book that "Inda" reminded me of was "Dune," specifically, the third-person omniscient style that jumps between characters' POV from paragraph to paragraph, not just chapter to chapter or scene to scene. In both cases, I found this jarring and anticlimactic: if we immediately hear "oh yeah, the king's brother is plotting a ruse and brainstorming how to frame the good guys for it," it lacks some of the suspense/curiosity that might motivate us to keep reading if we only saw from a couple POVs, or at least one at a time.

Not every character falls in either one of these extremes, but as a general rule of thumb: if someone cares about reading history and learning from the archives, they're a good person, if someone has only disdain for reading and history, they're a bad person. This includes one character who clearly has some kind of learning disability (dyslexia & stuttering). Of course, someone can be disabled and also be a terrible person, but the way it comes across here is kind of...unfortunate implications.

Among the aristocratic families, there's a lot of arranged marriages from early ages; girls will go to be raised with their future husbands' families, so there's a weird level of Westermarck effect. That being said, Inda's society is admirably matter-of-fact about "oh yeah, some people just prefer their own sex, the king himself has a boyfriend (as well as the wife he married for political reasons)." And some sailors "liked an east and west wind--males and females--down in the dark hold, when they should have been on night duty."

However, I found the blithe repeats of "oh, you don't know how sex works? Don't worry, pleasure houses are great, people will literally show you how it's done as a career!" to be disconcerting. Ditto this flashback:

“I’ve seen the dogs and horses at it, and I’m told that people are much the same.” She did not say that last summer she and Inda had talked about this very thing, knowing that they’d be expected to do it someday. So they’d retreated up to his room and taken off their clothes and stood looking at one another in their skin, and laughed at the idea of boys having nipples just like girls; they both knew it, but no one actually ever thought about it. Even funnier was how their butts looked exactly alike from the back. They snickered and looked at the parts that were different, but nothing happened. So then they’d lain on the bed together, and still nothing happened, except that Inda fell asleep, for he was tired from early rising.

Inda's ten or maybe eleven during this section, so during the flashback he's nine or ten at the most?? Do not want. (On the other hand, the frequency of the word "butt" is fairly accurate for ten-year-old POV characters, which isn't something I can say a lot.)

Halfway through the book, Inda gets framed for a crime he wasn't responsible for, and is exiled by going to sea, despite knowing nothing about being a sailor; Part II brings an entirely new group of hazing, bullying, and rapid POV jumps! Inda's complete ignorance is a good excuse for "as you know, Bob" infodumping; he's unresponsive and traumatized, so everyone assumes he's very slow, until his knowledge of fighting comes out.

Unfortunately, the second part has a lot more jerky timeskips. The ships' first round-the-world voyage takes almost two years, which is relegated to a couple chapters offscreen; Inda and his crew spend three months as prisoners during a civil war in an unfamiliar country, which is glossed over in a paragraph. There's only so many times you can repeat "and then Inda showed off his brilliance and everyone deferred to him even though he wasn't nominally in charge," and sailors at sea don't have as many opportunities for organized wargames. But Part I covers about a year and a half, while Part II covers about five years, and they're both about the same size; I think this could have been balanced better. Or maybe we could have met the seafaring characters earlier, before they intersected with Inda's plot?

I'm curious about the phonology of the Marlovan language. We have interesting double-vowel combinations like "Sierlaef" and "Sierandael," but also double consonants like "Tdor" and "Tlennen."

There are several more books in the series, but as it stands, I'm not really motivated to track them down. Inda's Games weren't playful enough for me.

Bingo: Published in the 2000s, was a readalong at one point, the second half certainly features Coastal/Island settings.

I don't know a whole lot about Star Trek or the Arsenal football/soccer team, but I do know what it's like to be fannish about something, and that was a vibe that Mike Chen captured well in "Here and Now and Then," a time travel story with d'aww-ish family feelings. So I was excited to run across "Light Years from Home," about a family that grows apart in the aftermath of an alien abduction.

At the beginning of the story, sisters Kass and Evie Chao live on opposite sides of the country and aren't on speaking terms. The parallel is a stretch, but I sort of, kind of, got "Proof" vibes from the setup; Evie, the younger sister, is a UFO conspiracy theorist who believes she's carrying on their father's last wishes in investigating the mystery of their brother Jakob's disappearance; Kass, the elder, is the pragmatist who has no time for Evie's nonsense; she's taken on the responsibility of caring for their mother, Sonia, who is suffering from dementia.

But fifteen years after his disappearance, Jakob shows up! It turns out he really was abducted by aliens, and that was the catalyst from changing him into a druggie and slacker into a motivated engineer defending the freedom of the galaxy from a menacing enemy. He just wants to stay on Earth long enough to complete his mission and then head back out. Between Evie's research and Jakob's teleportation, both siblings converge on an overwhelmed Kass, and they have to come to terms with their family trauma while avoiding the FBI and the hostile aliens.

At times, it felt like the plot kind of repeated itself. We, the readers, know that Jakob really has been traveling with aliens, that's made clear from page 1. So his dithering about "oh I can't tell them everything, just gotta complete my mission" and Evie's "do I trust him? do I not?" felt like a lot of back-and-forth and/or characters refusing to communicate just for the sake of complicating the plot. Similarly, when we learn early on that Kass has held onto a memento their father believed was associated with Jakob, it's clearly going to be Chekhov's alien tech.

The parallels between the family members were nicely drawn. At different times, the characters take turns doing things like narrowing their focus to one-step-at-a-time plans; making, and then breaking, promises to themselves about quitting smoking or keeping the peace; and being too responsible to gloat--most of the time. They may be neurotic, but they come by it honestly!

There are some nice moments of computer-based humor:

A window appeared, informing her that her log-in password had expired and she needed to put in a new one. Her fingers flew with muscle memory, trying several of her go-to passwords. Red Xs appeared each time, along with messages that each had apparently been used in the past two years and she needed something different.
Quite the life metaphor.

Typical Jakob doing everything half-assed. If she were to break into a computer and use a browser, she'd at least have the sense to put it in Private Browsing mode.

Evie flipped the laptop around. "Look, I've been reading."
Mom leaned forward, squinting at the screen. "What's Reddit?"
"That doesn't count as reading. Jesus, Evie."

And we even get a glimpse of post-pandemic realism. "From the front seat, the rideshare driver gave him a look. 'Does he need a doctor? If he's not well, he should wear a mask.'"

There are a couple occasions when Jakob compares his experiences to "not glamorous like in science fiction, this is real," sigh.

When it comes to a serious disorder like dementia, a miracle cure might come across as insensitive or in poor taste. In this case, I felt like the short-term effects of alien tech that provided Sonia with the opportunity for some closure/resolution with her kids, while not diminishing the serious challenges that lie ahead for her, was handled well. While bittersweet, "Light Years from Home" indeed provided more of the complicated but realistic family dynamics that are Chen's strength!

Bingo: author of color. It's hard to say there's a single protagonist since all three siblings are POV characters, but I would argue this fits the spirit of "Mundane Jobs" too; Kass is a therapist, and Evie is a veterinary technician!

I picked up "Untethered Sky" because it hits the Middle Eastern setting bingo square (it's set in fantasy Persia). It's a novella and a pretty quick read; the narrator, Ester, is a rukher who teams up with her roc to hunt landbound creatures, particularly the manticores that terrorize the kingdom of Dartha. Rukhing is a stressful career--many apprentices flunk out, or are injured or killed, before they successfully hunt. And Ester has a personal stake in the matter, since her mother and baby brother were killed by a manticore years ago, and her relationship with her father never recovered. There are also several mentions of birds taking a crap in this book. Good job, points for realism.

Unfortunately, the premise didn't really grab me. The stuff about apprenticeship being very dangerous felt more "background information" than "narrative stakes"--we know Ester's narrating this book, we can be pretty sure she's going to make it through training. And while it may be realistic that her family relationship fell apart, it meant I didn't get invested in the flashbacks very much--yeah, she wants vengeance on manticores, we get it. Spoilers to follow:

The section endings also felt pretty lampshady with their "This Is Ominous Foreshadowing, Guys." Like, here are the last lines of Part I:

That's how I want to remember the three of us. Not marred and bowed by tragedy, but young and joyous. What I would give to return to those days, riding together across the country on a perfect morning, a roc balanced in the air above us like an angel guarding our happiness.

and Part II...

"I'll miss you when you're gone, though."

That was truer than I could've imagined even then.

And the introduction of another character:

"Only the best of us," he said with admiration in his voice, "embrace God's purpose as clearly as wild beasts."
...
Prince Khovash's words that day have lingered with me so long that even now I can't hate him.

Actually the ending is less bleak than you'd expect given all that!

Based on some of the blurbs, I think some of the themes Lee was trying to engage with were "monsters" and "obsession"--the rocs are trained to hunt manticores, but if somehow the manticores were to be defeated forever, would the rocs and rukhers lose their purpose? Does the grueling training process produce humans who are just as "monstrous" as their bird partners? "Innumerable tedious hours are spent training and hunting, leading to a few crucial seconds to prove oneself, and those seconds are often determined by sheer luck," rang true in the context of sports, but I didn't really think Ester came across as a monster or bad example.

Towards the end, however, the parallels between "you can't really own a roc forever" and "you can't really own a human forever" became a strength of the writing style.

If only people were as simple and instinctive as raptors. I wished for a special reed whistle around my neck that I could blow to call him back.

The "dark days" training described in the beginning sounds brutal for the roc as well as the human; a captured fledgling is trapped in a sensory-deprivation tent to desensitize them to all associations except the rukhers' voice. The real "monstrosity" is not the rukhers' hunting behaviors or even any difficulties they face in relating to other people, but this form of captivity! In this context, the fact that Ester's roc leaves her in the end is bittersweet, but not devastating; despite everything she's been through, she still has the resilience to live freely and form relationships with her own kind. And Ester does, too.

Bingo: Middle Eastern setting for sure, also a great fit for Published in 2023, Novella, and Mythical Beasts!

(Yeah it's another Christianity-themed bingo pick, there will probably be more where this came from, sorry if this is not your thing.)

A few months ago I was having a heavy conversation with a board game friend in which, among other things, I despaired of my possibilities for "real friendship," whatever that means. (This is not the same person from Debrief, but similar vibes.) Basically, there are lots of people I can enjoy spending time with, because we have similar hobbies and those hobbies are more fun together. But there are very few people where I feel like I would be okay with them dumping their emotions on me. By the principle of fairness/reciprocity, there are very few people where I feel like I would be okay dumping my feelings on them! Now, it's possible, even likely, that different people bring different strengths and weaknesses to a relationship, and it might sometimes be okay to show friendship in one way and receive it in another...but for someone like me, there's still a lot of anxiety about what counts as "fair" on those terms.

My friend's response, in part, was to bring up "The Great Divorce," and the philosophy that where you wind up in life isn't the result of one consequential turning point but rather many small turning points that add up. Maybe sometimes relationships are like that too--ones that succeed aren't the result of grand gestures, but lots of small cases of deliberate effort into trying to make them work?

Anyway, I'd heard of the book before but hadn't actually read it, so it went on the list, and fortunately it fits a couple different bingo squares so here we are! :P

"The Great Divorce" is told by a narrator who sort of kind of is "Lewis himself," who finds himself in a gray and grungy town and gets on a bus with some of the other locals, which drops them off in a sunny and pleasant forest. There, among other things, he meets his (or at least the RL Lewis') hero, George MacDonald, and spends a lot of time asking him questions and following around and hugging him when things get scary. So I was very glad to have started the Divine Comedy readalong before this, because it's very similar to the Dante & Virgil vibes. In fact, Lewis makes the parallel explicit: "I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I first bought a copy of Phantastes (being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: Here begins the New Life."

Lewis, unlike Dante, does not have people staring at him and going "...why are you here, you're not even dead," nor does he spend as much time talking smack about people from his city or awkwardly being translated into weird-scanning Longfellow lines of iambic pentameter. Points for Lewis.

The overall conceit is that people from the Gray Town have the appearance of Ghosts, and the people who live in the green place are Bright Spirits, and each of the Ghosts is met with a Spirit who tells them how great everything is and how all wounds of the past are forgiven, and they are allowed and encouraged to stay. The Ghosts, however, find the green place uncomfortable at first (walking on grass hurts because everything is "too" solid!), and most of them, rather than adapt, prefer the familiarity of the Gray Town. You get where this is going.

Several of the ghosts and their rationalizations for refusing the invitation were very well-drawn. Early on we meet an Intelligent Episcopalian ghost who is way, way too familiar as the progressive liberal sort who cares so much about being the right sort of open-minded chap that he's drifted away from, you know, actual faith:

‘Ah, I see. You mean that the grey town with its continual hope of morning (we must all live by hope, must we not?), with its field for indefinite progress, is, in a sense, Heaven, if only we have eyes to see it? That is a beautiful idea.’

...Jesus (here the Ghost bowed) was a comparatively young man when he died. He would have outgrown some of his earlier views, you know, if he’d lived. As he might have done, with a little more tact and patience. I am going to ask my audience to consider what his mature views would have been...

The parentheticals :D His friend, having circled back to orthodoxy before he died, calls him out on how "brave" the skeptic was in life:

‘What risk? What was at all likely to come of it except what actually came—popularity, sales for your books, invitations, and finally a bishopric?’

There's an Artist Ghost who's at first overwhelmed by the beauty of Heaven and wants to paint it right away; his friend tells him to take it easy and learn to just appreciate seeing it all first before he worries about subcreation. All the artists/musicians/writers who create beauty in their Earthly lives are, at first, reflecting some tiny fragment of the ultimate joy and beauty of Heaven, but they can be easily led astray by the desire for approval and fame. The Artist, at least in this scene, isn't able to overcome the idea of living without fame or appreciation. Lewis has a difficult balance to strike here in terms of "oh yeah some artists can be selfish and in it for the wrong reasons, but not me, I'm one of the good artists..." I'm not entirely sure I got a sense of what a Good Artist looks like, based on this scene, but oh well.

Another really strong character was a woman whose son had predeceased her. She's greeted by her brother, but all she wants to talk about is getting her son back.

"Give me my boy. Do you hear? I don’t care about all your rules and regulations. I don’t believe in a God who keeps mother and son apart. I believe in a God of love. No one had a right to come between me and my son. Not even God. Tell Him that to His face. I want my boy, and I mean to have him. He is mine, do you understand? Mine, mine, mine, for ever and ever."

I feel like I've seen this sort of "take" expressed in the contemporary zeitgeist as a sympathetic figure, like, "if God had told Sarah to sacrifice Isaac she would have done the right thing, which is to tell God where to shove it *clap emoji*". Lewis realize what he's up against in portraying this sort of attitude as, while extremely relatable and human, ultimately negative:

‘I don’t know that I dare repeat this on Earth, Sir,’ said I. ‘They’d say I was inhuman: they’d say I believed in total depravity: they’d say I was attacking the best and the holiest things. They’d call me…’

This was written in 1945, the same year that "That Hideous Strength" came out to complete the Space Trilogy, and five years before the first Narnia book was published. We can see early glimpses of some of the Narnian whimsy (lions playing in the grass! a unicorn stampede! even people afraid of being "taken in" in the double entendre "deceived"/"received" context the Dwarves use it). And the skepticism towards modernity that also appears in That Hideous Strength:

There were planning Ghosts who implored them to dam the river, cut down the trees, kill the animals, build a mountain railway, smooth out the horrible grass and moss and heather with asphalt.

There's also an original poem which I think is trying to imitate the Psalms in its loose couplet structure (every line is broken into two parts with a colon).

Towards the end of the book, Lewis-as-narrator continues to question the mercy of Spirits who cannot, or will not, help the Ghosts reach heaven:

What some people say on Earth is that the final loss of one soul gives the lie to all the joy of those who are saved.

To which MacDonald (Lewis-as-author?) says, among other things:

Every disease that submits to a cure shall be cured: but we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on still having jaundice...

Which, oof, that still resonates today. Then they devolve into a "well this is all just a metaphor, really, from a God's-eye-view things don't happen in linear time, so don't read too much into this," and in this sense I'd say the ending fizzles.

I guess my tradition emphasizes the aspects of "God is the agent, we are not agents, we don't have a whole lot of efficacy in the matter," so we'd be more likely to join Lewis-as-narrator in the camp of "God can and will drag you to heaven kicking and screaming, whether you want to come or not. Lewis has written lots of other, pithier lines about "aim at heaven and you'll get Earth thrown in, aim at Earth and you'll get neither," which I've found relatable as metaphors in non-religious contexts. So from this perspective, I'm not sure this adds a lot to my understanding. But I think the depiction of the Ghosts is very well-done.

And while I still don't think I'd describe "real friendship" along these lines, either, I definitely appreciate that this friend thought of me enough to share a specific reference!

[Edit to add: I wonder whether Lewis would have agreed with the "watch your thoughts" copypasta. It's a philosophy I reject, and specifically, I reject the first link in the chain--that one's thoughts necessarily become one's words, spoken aloud. (If you count "incessant internal monologue" as "words," then I reject the second link, that one's words determine one's actions.) In some sense this is the contrapositive to Luther, who points out "even if your heart is faithful, you can never earn your way to heaven based on good works." Of course, if I get too self-righteous about "well I'm a good person because I don't lash out or get violently angry at anybody," then maybe I am in fact the target audience for Lewis' criticism--"sure, but in your heart you're still grumbling, that's not good enough." To which I would reply: "I have a free will module, I can choose what to do, I just can't choose how to feel, you're asking the impossible." But I sometimes get the sense that even my approach to my free will module doesn't match up with those around me...]

Bingo: Novella for sure. Maybe Angels & Demons or Mythical Creatures, although I'm not sure if either would count as "prominent" enough. Literary Fantasy? Multiverse/Alternate Realities? They take a bus between worlds, that's pretty unique? ;)

Through keeping an eye on short story markets I ran across "Silence and Starsong," a new market that publishes SF/F with Christian worldviews and themes. In some ways it's similar to Mysterion, although Mysterion is more deliberate/transparent about paying (formerly) SFWA rates, and makes their stories free. One of the drawbacks to the current short fiction world is that it's unlikely people are earning a living through short fiction, and to some extent, people in fortunate socioeconomic situations like myself don't really need to be paid for their work--but, pay rates serve as an unofficial proxy for market prestige within the genre, and there doesn't seem to be a good alternative metric for that. Does that lead to ambitious/hopeful authors self-selecting towards better-paying markets, leaving markets (like S&S) that don't specify a concrete payrate to be like "sure, we'll take whatever"? I don't think that's entirely fair, but it was definitely a cognitive bias framing my reading experience.

Obligatory disclaimer that I'm not going to agree entirely with all the editors'/authors' beliefs, nor am I going to disavow all of them, if you're looking for ideological purity you should probably go elsewhere.

Some of the shorter stories didn't really rise above their premises, and required a lot of tropiness/genre-savviness to make work. "Have Ye Offered Unto Me" by Zachary Grafman is about a tired grad student whose advisor is an evil Indiana Jones/Lovecraft villain, and when the hero realizes he needs to defeat this evil (if only for the sake of saving the cute secretary), his mindset is "okay, better get my gun and a rosary." Results are predictable. "Free Lunch" by S. Kirk Pierzchala features a well-read girl who has to save her family from being trapped in the realms of the fae; she mentions "oh yeah, you can't eat someone else's food that was left over in our vacation rental, it might be cursed!" Surprise, she's right, but I didn't really feel that payoff was earned--for someone who previously had no "real" experience with fantasy realms, it felt like a leap to say "oh this must be an uncanny, supernatural experience." This might be a case of "longer would have been better," but on the other hand, there were a few scenes from her brother's POV trapped with the demonic forces that didn't really add much and could have been cut.

On the other hand, some of the longer stories were able to worldbuild at their own pace. Two stories worked well paired together as reflections on the Cold War in an era of weapons of mass destruction: "Archangel" by Frederick Gero Heimbach was a very imaginative alternate history in which the Czardom survived, and Russian Orthodoxy coexists with modern submarines. Here's the opening:

Every officer in the control room snapped to attention. "Archimandrite arriving!" called the submarine's chief petty officer. Captain Karlin Igorovich Ivanov rose, all two meters of him. He watched the Right Reverend Alexei Mikhailovich Abramov descend through the sail with his feet in the top of a bow line.

As the priest's ancient face came into view, Captain Ivanov suppressed a gasp. He knew Fr. Alexei by reputation but had never laid eyes on him. The priest's skin was blue, completely blue, discolored with argyria from years of ingesting blessed colloidal silver.

Like, how many blue-skinned archimandrites have you read about recently? Bold. Captain Ivanov's tragic childhood backstory felt like a distraction/plot device, but overall I really liked the imagination of this one.

In contrast, "Hidden Empire" by T.R. Alexander requires very few changes in history--at least, the history of the public record. The story's conceit for how the Pax Americana came to be is cynical, but all-too-believable.

I sat in a sterile white-washed room in CIA headquarters in Langley for over an hour. Like all respectable bureaucracies, the building had a sprawling parking lot, which was now teeming with people lately returning from lunch.

Huge federal bureaucracies: they do be like that sometimes! The first-person "I'm writing this all down so there's some copy of the truth even if I go insane or sell out" is kind of cheesy, but again, as a "why the state of the world is so messed up" story it works.

"The Two Godly Fishmongers: A Tale of Strange Providences" by Kevin White has a droll sense of humor. The characters are 1600s Puritans, so we get to see great names like "Preserved Fisher" and his son-in-law, "Trout Roundtree." Fisher and his BFF Dudley have fallen out, only to be terrified by forces beyond their knowing. They know Scripture well, and quote Psalm 131 and Jonah's prayer for deliverance. To some extent, I wasn't sure this would work as a pay-by-the-word story--did we really need to quote Jonah twice? But the twist at the end is clever, and partially justifies the setup.

"The Gamer" by Nathan Karnes doesn't engage a lot with traditional Christianity, but its fourth-wall self-awareness is also very clever. It's not as over-the-top as "The Adventures of Ledo and Ix," but it has a similar take on video game logic.

He avoided the pub on the street through the center of town, instead seeking out a more modest establishment on the west side of town. This one was closer to the site of the race, but more importantly it carried that marvelous blend of warmth and shadiness that he had come to appreciate. The innkeeper was round and industrious, the lamps lit the room just to the point of sufficiency, and a handful of figures ranging in appearance from friendly to downright suspicious sat around the room, mostly at corner tables. These places always seemed to be made of corner tables.

Overall, the collection leaned strongly towards historical fiction and/or horror, which is one reason that "Gamer"'s lighter fantasy tropes stood out and provided some nice variety. While not all of the stories were to my taste, I hope the market succeeds, in part for selfish reasons--maybe it's the kind of place I'd submit someday!

Bingo: Again, this is a little bit of a stretch, but the Kindle edition is estimated at 193 pages, and I think that probably counts as novel-length. I also think it's a good fit for "self/indie published," as well as "published in 2023" and "5+ short stories." (Would the horror stories taken on their own count as novel-length for the horror square? Mayyyyybe but that's really a stretch.)

Reading in translation is a good way to discover writers who engage with themes that aren't helplessly tied down in "terminally online US-influenced Anglophone culture wars" topics. Something translated from Chinese or Polish or German isn't guaranteed to be original or mind-blowing, but it has an increased chance of showing me a different perspective that isn't The Current Thing. So I was optimistic when I picked up "Readymade Bodhisattva," an anthology of short stories (and excerpt from longer works) originally published in South Korea from the 1960s to the 2010s.

Unfortunately, most of the stories didn't click for me, for one reason or another. In many cases, it felt like the authors were kind of regurgitating tropes without creating characters I got invested in or worldbuilding that I cared about. I don't want to generalize or jump to conclusions from these selections, of course: it might just be that the editors' tastes are bleaker than mine! But for me, there wasn't much new or exciting. Here is a brief, and jaded, table of contents:

what if a robot achieved enlightenment (or realized it had been enlightened all along?)
what if women solved sexism by exiling all the men, but there was still classism and economic inequality?
what if a few underground Japanese occupiers survived in Korea after World War II and had a secret radio network where they insulted the stupid, pathetic Koreans, and pointed out that the 1960s' coups/rigged elections was just evidence that Koreans are helpless losers who can't govern themselves? (This is alternate history, so I guess it qualifies as SF, but there was very little speculative about it and the over-the-top villain narrator was just...a lot of yikes. The introduction to this piece was also a lot of pretentions academic jargon, do not want.)
what if a woman really wanted to go to space, but then she got paralyzed? (There are a lot of Go metaphors in this one, I wanted to enjoy it more than I did--I think maybe if it had been longer and had room to be more show-y and less infodumpy? Or I just wanted more board games, whatever.)
what if robots are like the ship of Theseus, how do you know if someone is still the same person?
what if our bodies were still on Earth, but our minds got uploaded to a spaceship somewhere?
what if an alien species' rite of passage was to have thirty-eight boys grow up on planets like Earth and hunt each other to the death over the course of centuries? (This was kind of over-the-top and maybe supposed to be humorous, but I couldn't really suspend disbelief for the "is this what happens to everyone?" angle handwaved at the beginning.)
what if someone who killed themselves in this timeline is still alive in another timeline, because of, like, quantum stuff?
what if South Koreans and North Koreans were still killing each other on alien planets, even though it's been years and no one really remembers why? (This was written in 2008, but in terms of "we're terrified of this isolated country because they're all sick with an alien virus, better lockdown really hard just to be sure" it anticipated COVID well. :/ )
what if robots made humans obsolescent, and the robots pondered "hmm are these human feelings I have? very mysterious?" while the humans played Russian roulette to try to earn money to broker their way out? (Shades of "Squid Game." Written in 2011.)
what if adults kept secrets from kids all the time because they're patronizing and think they know everything, but really, despite their condescension, they mean well and want to protect kids?
what if aliens destroyed the world and I was sad so I wrote a journal about it?

I guess for the sake of whoever reads this, I'd better start by explaining in detail what happened just prior to that two-month mark. Though to be truly honest, I doubt that anyone will ever read this. I mean, who the hell is going to survive this place? And it's unlikely that anyone who does will want to read this stupid story. Why would anyone want to read something as depressing as this, a record not of hope but of despair? And yet I have no choice but to write, to record.

If this is supposed to be a takedown of the genre as a whole, it's successful! But if it's supposed to be breaking the fourth wall to be "ha ha, this is so weird, just like a movie" ...you're not making me want to read your story.

The story I found most original, by some distance, was "The Sky Walker" by Yun I-hyeong. Eight centuries after nuclear war, humans have different beliefs about how Earth bounced back--was it a dragon deity? Kindly aliens? Just human resilience? Meanwhile, in an area out beyond an enormous wall (that was originally the limits of a radiation zone), the descendants of exiles and a few others demonstrate gravity-manipulation powers that make them incredible trampolinists.

They were standing perpendicular to the Wall like a handful of nails that had been hammered into it, their bodies parallel to the ground. On the ground directly below them, the lengths of their shadows were equal to their erect bodies. For a split second, I expected them to fall towards the ground, tumbling down, but of course nothing like that happened. After slowly approaching them, I plopped myself down on the ground and sat facing the Wall. I lay back until I felt the soles of my sneaker placed firmly against the gray Wall, the ground beneath my back. By then, they'd begun heading down the Wall toward me.

And from the Dragon Scriptures:

But piercing that mantle of darkness, a colossal white Dragon flew from the sky, Its wings covered the earth and Its body glowed with light so bright that no human dared to gaze upon It. With eyes blazing like jewels and sharp fangs as hard as steel, the Serpent was merciless. As It opened Its mouth and inhaled the air, It sucked the black clouds in the sky like meek cattle into Its body. As It spread Its wings and beat the air, the sky recovered its blue and the sun regained its light. As the Serpent set foot on the earth, humans scattered away, fearing for their lives. Wherever Its breath touched, flowers rebloomed, frozen rivers began flowing, and dead animals rose to walk and roam the earth. When a few courageous humans approached the Serpent and asked for Its name, with a voice that shook the heaven and land and sea It answered, I am Drakis, who will save you from this ruin.

And there's even an "Ender's Game" type of "the enemy's gate is down" reorientation/perception! The end sort of trails off to something vaguely about "even if you can't make a revolutionary change in your own abilities/the social order, you can at least push the limits and create a little more freedom than was there yesterday"? But the setup was very compelling, I wanted more unique worlds like this.

Another small nitpick: the introductory essays are written in a weird font where the capital S looks more like a § (section sign). So every time they talked about §outh Korea, §eoul, or §F in general, it threw me. Fortunately the stories themselves had a different font.

Bingo: Author of Color, 5+ short stories

Anthology of retellings of mythic stories from across the world, looks like they were newly commissioned for this volume. Impressive mix of cultures, new settings, and closeness to/farness from the original myth. For some of them, I'm not sure how long it would have taken me to recognize the source if it hadn't been in the table of contents, and for others, I would never have recognized the source. :p

I enjoyed the humorous tones of "Fisher-Bird," T. Kingfisher's take on the Labors of Hercules:

"I got my cousin's girdle."

Fisher-Bird had been looking for more crawfish, but she stopped and turned her head real slow to look at him. "...You got that kinda family, do you?"

"No!" And when Fisher-Bird gave him a steady look, "Well...all right. My mother-in-law's married to her brother and they say her daddy was a cannibal."

"Take an old bird's advice, son, and get the hell away from those people. Marrying kin ain't good, but you start eating each other and all bets are off."

And while "Across the River," Leah Cypess' version of The Legend of Akdamot/The Legend of Rabbi Meir and the Sambatyon got bleak at times, the way the narrator used his skills to defeat a bigoted sorcerer was fantastic:

Training as a cantor does not build muscles, but it builds a very precise sense of time. I need to know just when the sun appears over the horizon, which is when the recitation of the morning prayer is permitted. I need to know the moment the gates of Heaven close on Yom Kippur, which is when my pleas should reach their greatest intensity. I need to be able to judge precisely when the Sabbath begins.

There were two pairs of stories that I found to coincidentally parallel each other. Seanan McGuire's "Phantoms of the Midway" is based on Hades and Persephone, and JY Yang's Bridge of Crows is based on the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl. Both of the retellings explicitly engage with the fact that the same story might be "running away to find freedom with your lover" from one perspective and "unwanted kidnapping" from another. And both stories have the romantic aspect genderswapped to f/f.

Meanwhile, Indrapramit Das' "Kali Na," based on Durga and Kali, and Alyssa Wong's "Live Stream," based on Artemis and Acteon, both draw on the misogyny and cruelty of internet trolls and reimagine ways of bringing them to justice. (They appeared consecutively, which heightens the parallels.) "Live Stream" is present-day, but not speculative--existing technology already has everything a modern-day Diana might need to turn the tables. And "Kali Na" is near-futuristic, but based on chatbot technology that is getting more powerful every day.

Bingo: Grabbed it from the library because it fits perfectly for "Myths and Retellings." Also fits perfectly for "5+ Short Stories," but I'll surely fill that square with something else. Maybe soon ;)

This book is, by Sanderson standards, a pretty fast read. But there's a lot going on here, so my inter-book comparisons are likely going to jump around from book to book.

First of all: it begins as a white room mystery. The narrator has no individual memories and no idea what he's doing in this alternate dimension, but gradually, identity trickles back. So we're in the territory of Project Hail Mary or Nine Princes in Amber. Also like PHM, when the narrator remembers that someone he cares about is dead, he gets choked up but without specific memories to accompany it: "It was strange to feel a sudden sense of loss and pain for a person whose face I couldn’t remember." Later, as he (John West) gradually regains his memories, he realizes that his past and motivation for showing up here weren't as heroic as he first assumed--again, much like Ryland Grace. In the afterword, Sanderson cites PHM as an influence. Unfortunately, "Frugal Wizard's Handbook" is less catchy with the science than PHM, but also, less "ah, somehow, I remembered!" than NPiM, at least after the early going.

I also noticed some parallels to other (especially non-Cosmere) Sanderson works. Like David from the Reckoners, John has a running narrative "joke" gimmick--in this case, rating all his experiences on a five-star scale. Like Legion 2, his futuristic tech contrasts "Local, on-body data" and "wetware hard drive"s with remote access. And like the narrator from Snapshot, he's resentful of a system that contrasts "good cops" and "bad cops"--not the kind that beat you up, but the kind that do boring grunt work because they can't be trusted with anything else.

But most of all, like Ann the incompetent assistant cannonmaster from Tress of the Emerald Sea, John is a loser. Not a born loser, and not cursed by the gods. But both John and Ann experience setbacks in their lives (Ann in shooting guns, John in everything he tries), and that creates self-reinforcing prophecies. If you enter a situation with the mindset that of course you're a failure, it perpetuates and becomes a vicious circle. The good news is, it also works the other way!

The setting is a slightly-alternate universe version of medieval England. The locals are Anglo-Saxons, whose bards speak in alliterative verse, and who live in fear of the Hordamen (Vikings) from across the sea. Their lives are hard, but they're very brave and loyal, and not dumb; in fact, their perspective on John's world (2100s Seattle) is very insightful.

“So many people living together,” she said, “but not fighting. You only learned to fight as a contest, for others to watch. There might be people among you who…who have never seen someone die…”

“Most don’t even know how to fight,” I said. “You’d think us all weak, Ealstan.”

“You misunderstand, Runian,” he said. “Killing is desperation, not strength. To live without killing…that is a strong society. If the reverse were true, my lands would not be withering away, like crops long without water…”

There's also Yazad, a cheerful monotheist from the Middle East who has come to Britain in search of adventure, and to spread the good word of...Zoroastrianism!

“Ah,” Yazad said. “You speak of Yeshuans? They are our cousins, you might say! Many mix us up. I’m surprised an aelv pays enough attention to mortals to know of our doings!”

“I…pay attention to some things,” I said. “Yeshua. He was crucified by the Romans?”

“Ha!” Yazad said. “They tried. But he was rescued by Ahura Mazda. We were one people for a short time, and together we fought as a coalition of all the lands of Abraham! But this was all many centuries ago, before the Hunas destroyed Rome entirely. You know the history of our region well for a fair creature of the north!”

“I find mortals interesting,” I told him.

“Excellent!” Yazad said. “Would you be willing to listen to me teach?”

I frowned. “You’d…try to convert an aelv?”

“I will try to convert anyone!” Yazad said. “Because all deserve to know of Ahura Mazda’s love.” Then he winked at me. “But an aelv would be a particular accomplishment, I think.”

This sort of character is a familiar trope for Sanderson fans, and again, I think he's very well-written here!

As the AU elements make clear, this is not quite our own world, but rather, a slightly divergent alternate dimension. That's where the story-within-a-story comes in; much like in the Stormlight Archive, the title of the book is shared with an in-universe book, in this case a mostly-useless "handbook"/marketing tome about the virtues of pocket dimensions that people from future-Earth can purchase and inhabit in order to become conquerors, introduce modern technology, or anything else. (Similarly to the way the not-quite-time-travel chuanyue elements play out in "The Snow of Jinyang"!)

At first, quoting from the in-universe Handbook is pretty amusing; for instance, when explaining how these dimensions are not really time travel:

Still confused? Think of Nebraska. Nebraska is a landlocked state in the center of the United States of America. Because of its general lack of importance—and its distance from trendy population centers—it lags a few years behind the coasts in fashion, music, and distribution of collectible card games.

You might feel like you’ve time traveled when visiting Nebraska, but careful scientific experiments using synchronized timepieces have proven no time dilation is in effect. (See Luddow, Sing, and Coffman, “Nebraska really is just like that” in Journal of Relativistic Studies, Volume 57, June 2072.)

But as it goes on, the quoted excerpts get more and more handwavey/breaking-the-fourth wall.

Why Does Everyone in Britain Speak Modern English in My Pre-Norman-Conquest Dimension? Shouldn’t That Require an Incredible Alignment of Social and Linguistic Factors That Would Never in a Million Years Align in Such a Convenient Way?

Apparently not.

Wait. Did I Just Do a Colonialism?

What If I'm Still Worried about the Ethics of Essentially Colonizing the British Isles, Influencing the Course of History for an Entire People?

If you realize that this entire premise is fundamentally messed up, I kind of expect John to have to pay a cost for it somehow--either sacrificing himself, or at least, leaving behind the people and places he's come to love. Allowing him a relatively happy ending, while simultaneously thumbing your nose at the fourth wall feels like a cop-out.

There are some fantasy elements in play beyond John's SFish portals and augmentations; the Anglo-Saxons believe in the Norse pantheon, making offerings to friendly local wights or blood sacrifices to Wodin, and John comes to realize there's more to this than myth. (There's also a tantalizing offscreen subplot hinted at involving the "Waelish" who preceded the Anglo-Saxon arrivals, but despite my guesses and extrapolations about what was going on there, it didn't really turn out to be as prominent as I'd expected.) While the main plot tensions--John's struggle to be the best, bravest version of himself, the Anglo-Saxons' fight against the Hordamen, and the nefarious schemes of the bad guy who really wants this dimension for himself--have all been resolved by the last chapter, the epilogue drops tantalizing hints of a much greater multiverse beyond what we've seen so far. This can be appealing, but also frustrating, in a "classic Sanderson" way. (See: Mistborn original trilogy.)

I read the ebook version, which like I said, was a fast read. There are a lot of illustrations/marginalia (especially for the in-universe portions), done by Steve Argyle, which I think I'll be able to better appreciate when I get a hard copy.

Bingo: Multiverse/Alternate Realities for sure, and John has a lot of (attempts at) Mundane Jobs in his Earth life. "Frugal Wizard" probably counts for Title with a Title. The Myths/Retellings angle is only a small portion of the plot, so I probably wouldn't use it for that square, but you could make the case for it. I'm gonna say no Druids, sorry (Celts are clearly distinguished from Anglo-Saxons in the Handbook). [Edit to add: there is also a "published in 2023" square, which this obviously fits very well.]

My first bingo read for this year was by a writer whose work I'd previously enjoyed is from the 70s-90s timeframe, and deals with weird science-and-religion interactions. My second is by a writer whose work I'd previously enjoyed is from the 70s-80s timeframe, and deals with weird science-and-religion interactions. So there are going to be some parallels, not only between this Engdahl and previous Engdahl, but also between this Engdahl and recent Hogan. Bear with me!

The "Children of the Star" trilogy, my previous exposure to Engdahl, is about a young man named Noren from a low-tech fantasy society who questions many of the dogmatic assumptions that govern his world. When he commits heresy, the Scholars in authority warn him that the punishments he must face are very severe, and that he's not going to like it, and it would be much easier if he just admits folly and confesses now. But his desire of knowledge is so overwhelming that he's willing to face any cost, and undergoes a punishment that is indeed harrowing, though not exactly in the way he expects. The main scholar, Stefred, sympathizes with Noren's idealistic impulses, but is unrelenting in the pain he inflicts. Later in the trilogy (spoilers), Noren meets a woman named Lianne with whom he has chemistry, and has to navigate his feelings for her while also mourning his late wife, Talyra.

While Noren's "heretical" attitude makes him somewhat of an outsider among his own people, they are also, certainly, his own people. Anyone from his world could have taken the path he did (and, we learn, others do). In contrast, Lianne is an outsider; she shares Noren's curiosity and love of learning, but her preconceptions of what is and isn't possible with science make her exceptional.

"Stewards of the Flame" focuses on a man named Jesse Sanders, a starship captain for the Earth-based Fleet who finds that interstellar space doesn't really live up to the hype. On a mission to the planet Undine, he is detained for public drunkenness, which puts him in the custody of the planet's extremely extensive medical system. This initial interaction does not endear him to the paternalistic government of Undine, and he finds himself drawn to a mysterious Group (just called "the Group," they've abstracted away a lot of the symbolism) who are seeking alternatives to the safetyist policies. In order to unlock the psionic powers of his unconscious mind, Jesse needs to face his fears and overcome them; only by risking losing control, whether that be physical or mental pain or anything else, can he truly rely on the mental powers that transcend any bodily limits.

So on the one hand, there's a parallel between Jesse and Noren, as the POV characters who have to undergo grueling trials to gain greater knowledge/empowerment. There's a corresponding parallel between Stefred and Peter, one of the group leaders, who telepathically empathizes with Jesse and feels his pain, but has to keep pushing him to the edge of his limits.

But there's also a parallel between Jesse and Lianne, as the outsiders who bring a new perspective to the worlds where they find themselves, and love interests Noren and Carla, who is drawn to Jesse even as she's mourning her first husband, Ramón. While the rest of the Group are Undine natives who are likely to be first interested in the paranormal and only later intrigued by the prospect of an alternative to the medical system, Jesse is at first horrified by the Meds and only secondarily, if at all, willing to embrace the paranormal. This means that he can be an effective audience surrogate; when Peter's arguments about the ultimate superiority of mind over matter or the pitfalls of an overly-zealous bureaucracy go too far, Jesse dials it back and goes "hey, wait a minute, there are times when trading a little freedom for a lot of security is good, actually."

Which is good, because as Engdahl notes in the introduction/afterword, many readers will find this weirdly preachy, especially in the context of COVID. ("Stewards" was written in 2007.) She mentions that there's a direct sequel and a later trilogy in the same universe (but with different characters) that some people might prefer even if they bounced hard off this one. Given the constraints of bingo, it might be a while, if ever, before I try those, so all I can say is: if you are a strong believer in government regulation of public health, there will be many parts you'll bounce off of, and it does sometimes read as a commentary on COVID even though it wasn't. The most yikes-inducing part for me was when a member of the Group somewhat-inadvertently betrays them; "She was bipolar, and would have been diagnosed as mentally ill even on Earth." Her impetus for rebelling against Undine's Meds is her terror of more electroshock treatment, which is an "improvement" over the 20th-century kind, but still not good. But yeah, "the only reason someone would sell us out is because they really were sick" is...kind of not a good look.

But, Jesse's role as the voice of skepticism helps to counterbalance that, and the Group does have some principles that aren't obvious from the outset. For instance, if having your body kept alive indefinitely long after brain-death is abhorrent, and accepting death when it comes is much to be preferred, can hastening suicide ever be acceptable? Only if the goal is to protect others, the Group claims: self-harm for self-serving reasons is always wrong.

On the other hand, while Noren is extremely brilliant even by the standards of Stefred and the other Scholars, and this gets him put on a pedestal at times, Jesse's role as an outsider can get him typecast as "Chosen One." The narrative plays with both sides of this--on the one hand, it's not a lot of fun if you don't have free will and are just doing what prophecy demands. On the other, if everyone is unlocking psionic and paranormal powers...well, there's gonna be some precognition involved, it's an occupational hazard!

I was pleased to see that even with the difficult bingo card, this fits the "Coastal Setting" square. Undine is an aquatic planet, and there's lots of time spent on the Group's private island, canal-type streets, scuba-diving, and travel by seaplane. The word "undine" refers to a mermaid-type creature, but it also calls to mind "undying"--the Meds' focus on preserving health at any cost has turned their planet into a dystopia.

Sex is greatly enhanced with telepathy, but members need a certain proficiency before they can enjoy it--it's not really fair for one partner to be doing all the mental/emotional sharing, with another missing out. When Jesse's powers begin developing, at first he's unnerved by his attraction to everyone around him, but Peter points out that that's normal. "We do get people who're bi and don't know it." And as Carla explains later, "Sexual arousal is an altered state, you see—when are you least distracted by rational thinking, if not during sex? It releases latent psi power in a way nothing else can. Among us telepathic control’s always learned from a partner." Which is also a little yikes-inducing: is there nobody who just isn't into sex? (Jesse also gets an "ignore us, officer, we're just embracing deeply, nothing to see here but heartwarming hugs!" moment with a nonagenarian male friend!)

In Christianity, the rite of initiation is baptism--sprinkling with or immersion in water. But in many denominations, another part of the ritual is the reception of a baptismal candle, linking the baptized person with the Paschal candle. On Undine, the water planet, "the Ritual" of initiation (again, they don't do metaphor) involves using the group's telepathic strength to survive flame, similar to the tradition of firewalking. Hence the title drop. When the Group performs another Ritual in exceptional circumstances near the novel's climax, they first blindfold the novices and members' children who haven't joined themselves yet, so they won't have the experience spoiled for their own Ritual--similar to the former practice of dismissing catechumens before Communion because they're not ready to witness it unless they're participating! (For what it's worth, the Group's rationale for why Earth-based religions haven't thrived on other planets is because large-scale collective unconsciousness/telepathy/the metaphor that religions are enacting can't function over an interstellar distance. So there's that.)

One of the lines from the Ritual is very reminiscent of the Litany Against Fear from Dune. "Unfaced fear is the destroyer. We will acknowledge fear and accept it, we will go past it and live free."'

"Peter—Warick must be aware that you know Ian didn’t start the fire." Billy Joel approves of this plot twist.

It's not entirely clear how much Earth-based culture endures. Characters mention things like "lotus-eaters," "Catch-22," and "the dark side of the Force" without explanation. But we also get this:

“Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” Michelle agreed.

“Huh?”

“Oh, that’s an old saying about a ship—not a starship, an ocean liner on Earth—that was doomed to sink. I don’t know if it was a real one or just a legend.”

Both "Voyage From Yesteryear" and "Stewards of the Flame" portray the new societies as a new stage of human evolution. But for these beliefs and practices to thrive, they need their own planet, without the baggage of previous societies' prejudices. In "Voyage," the US-based ship that journeys to Alpha Centauri (a couple generations after the robot-raised kids settled it) is the uncreatively-named "Mayflower II." And in "Stewards," well...

Then he transferred his previously-untouched back pay and retirement accounts to Fleet as down payment on charter of the colonizer Mayflower XI.

“Mayflower?” asked Peter incredulously when they met later that day in a safe house. “Starships haven’t been given that name since before Undine’s founding! Is there a revival of sentiment for Earth’s ancient history?”

“You knew it was going to be an old ship,” Jesse said. “Didn’t your contact mention its name?”

Hahahaha. Great minds think alike?

Ultimately, it would have been hard for this to live up to "Children of the Star" for me, because that one set a really high bar. But there's one specific contrast where I think "Children" has a non-obvious edge. The first stage of the "heresy punishments" for Noren consists of being hooked up to a machine that exposes him to recorded memories from the past. It's painful, because he's never experienced anything like it, and many of the memories themselves are very unpleasant material. But for the readers, it's just a different form of narrative exposition. Instead of a flashback or an in-universe document, we, along with Noren, learn the story of how the Founders set up this world.

For Jesse, he has to undergo "altered mental states" and match "mind patterns" with his teachers. He experiences these patterns as colorful graphs projected on a wall, but for the readers, it's mostly just torture porn. Yeah, it's indescribable, so why are we trying to describe it?

Definitely not this much. Swift sickness struck him; his stomach heaved as his body rebelled against the sustained neural assault. He was engulfed by a wave of agony, suddenly aware that he had never felt anything like this, never imagined anything like it. You heard about pain, you experienced tastes of it, but there were things you did not know beforehand.

But if you enjoyed Noren's reflections on the difficult, but deep, edges between faith and reason, Jesse (and Peter and Carla)'s journey will provide more of the same!

Bingo: like I said, I think it'll probably be "Coastal Setting," but also counts as "published in the 2000s" and "self/indie published."

Happy new year!

One of the squares for this year's bingo card is "the book that's been on your to-be-read list the longest," or, if you don't have a formal one, "a book you've been meaning to read for a very long time." I don't have a formal one, and of a small handful of books I'd been putting off until new bingo year, this was the one I acquired earliest (although still not very long ago). So we're going with it. To be specific, I picked it up at a used bookstore. James P. Hogan has written some good stuff ("Making Light" and "Star Child" both have amusing satirical looks at "religion versus science.") But even I, who tend to be more open-minded than the zeitgeist about "#cancellation is bad, people can say things you disagree with without being monsters unworthy to have their art engaged with," would probably not purchase a new book if money was going directly to this particular dude or his estate. However, he has been dead for twelve-plus years, and the premise of this book seemed similar to "Star Child," and it was used, so...I gave it a go.

Premise: decades ago, with war and nationalism and tensions flaring on Earth, scientists decided at the last minute to add some embryonic DNA material and caretaker robots on a scientific ship heading for Alpha Centauri, so a new generation of humans could grow up away from the problems of Earth. Now, a US-based colony ship that's been in flight for twenty years is about to land and meet planet "Chiron." The first chunk of the book is about the colony ship; the ideology of the people in power there is "we must bring Proper Authoritarian Leadership and the Good Old American Way to these helpless infants, because without it, people from Bad Countries start believing that they deserve Rights and Equality and As You Know Bob, That's Terrible." Given that this author rates pretty high on the yikestastic scale, I was suitably unnerved by this. But let me reassure you: this is not, in fact, true! Sometimes, the messages sent by important people in power, or even held by ordinary people, are wrong, and the narrative is self-aware enough to reveal that! Whew.

So the colonists attempt to start exporting their ways to the Chironians, who are...politely bemused. Without adults to contaminate them with scarcity-based Earth ideologies, the first generation (and their descendants) have embraced fully automated space communism. (Population growth is important and it's mentioned obliquely that many Chironians start having kids relatively early by Earth standards, which is the closest that things there swivel to yikes territory.) Many of the colonists, quickly or more slowly, realize "hey this is great, we don't need a government, we don't need weapons, let's just do science and live life," but a few stragglers are desperate for power for its own sake.

"Star Child," similarly, featured a culture clash between planetary humans doing the same things they have for centuries, and a generation of robot-reared kids innocent of those preconceptions. However, none of them are Earthlings, we don't have asides about RL politics; it includes both fantasy and SF elements, where "Voyage from Yesteryear" is exclusively SF; and it focuses more closely on a smaller set of character POVs (including robots), whereas "Voyage" jumps around quickly among more flat former-USian characters whose jobs, relationships, social structures are predominantly 1950s gender roles-esque. And again, Hogan is smart enough to know that this is not a good thing! It's just less engaging.

"Voyage" does have a sense of humor. Space travelers bet on sports--both games on the ship, and scores from Earth beamed with a four-year lightspeed delay! Chironians and their freethinking counterparts on the ship have no time for superstition: "She wanted to know what sign I was born under. I told her MATERNITY WARD." The bureaucratic shenanigans as Chironians new and old ignore the authority's increasingly dystopic nonsense were funny. And "Catch-22" was probably an influence in the early chapters; being judged as "sane," by a society who wants you to go kill one group of strangers for the benefit of another group of strangers, is not necessarily something to strive for!

This was published in 1982, before "Ender's Game" the novel (but after the short story it's based on); there's a similar "enemy's gate" tactic in the opening chapter (which the readers don't know is a simulation for eight pages!) that gets a thoughtful callback:

"He told me about the way you ruined the exercise on the ship too. I thought it was wonderful."
"If you're going to lose anyway, you might as well win," Smyley replied. "If you win the wrong way, you lose, and if you lose either way, you lose. So why not enjoy it?"
"What happens if you win the right way?" Kath asked him.
"Then you lose out to the system. It's like playing against [card trick expert] Driscoll--the system makes its own aces."

Nice.

There's also an extremely infodumpy aside about the post-Standard Model physics that arises, and ultimately leads Chironians to invent antimatter tech. Hogan's "what underlying structures could unify our understanding both of quarks and leptons?" is...imaginative, but very much pulls you out of the narrative for several pages. The antimatter tech is a MacGuffin that comes up later, but...almost all of the conflict boils down to "false flags" and "bad guys not comprehending that most people are decent and can be trusted to do their own thing." Hogan wants to both point out the absurdity of our Earthling prejudices, but also, have a quirky ragtag squadron of misfits come to the rescue and blast open the doors to save the day, and I'm not sure you can have it both ways.

Bingo: like I said, I'm using it for "bottom of the TBR." While not as predominant as they are in "Star Child," there are a few named robot characters (many of them have Earth history names like "Cromwell" or "Wellington"), so I think you could count it for that square. This card looks to have more specifically fantasy (rather than SF) tropes compared to last year, so I'm not sure how well my random browsing/backlog will work, I may need to be more deliberate!

P.S. Told my work friends about this. "Yeah it's military SF about the colonization of Alpha Centauri. Some of the humor was nice, but not the author's best." MF comments: "so, overall, three stars?" Me: "I don't really have a numeric...waaaaaait that's an Alpha Centauri joke." Groan.

[Edit October 2024, since I link back to this post from other reviews: Neil Gaiman has recently been accused of sexual assault by five different women. muccamukk has an extensive link roundup here.]

Let's talk about the setting/worldbuilding/magic system in "Neverwhere," because it's great.

Neverwhere is set in a "London Below" that parallels the mundane "London Above." Except, in London Below, names like Angel, Black Friars, Night's Bridge, Earl's Court, and Shepherd's Bush aren't just the names (or soundalikes) of Underground stations: they're very real, and home to anachronistic earls, friars, and shepherds, who can be very dangerous. Travelers journey through tunnels and sewers, or along rooftops and ladders, and two points that appear distant in London Above might be reached more easily--or more perilously--in London Below. All these liminal spaces come together to make something compelling, and I am absolutely here for it.

The labyrinth itself was a place of pure madness. It was built of lost fragments of London Above: alleys and roads and corridors and sewers that had fallen through the cracks over the millennia, and entered the world of the lost and the forgotten. The two men and the girl walked over cobbles, and through mud, and through dung of various kinds, and over rotting wooden boards. They walked through daylight and night, through gaslit streets, and sodium-lit streets, and streets lit with burning rushes and links. It was an ever-changing place: and each path divided and circled and doubled back on itself.

Adding to this whimsy are the affable assassins, Croup and Vandemar. Croup is loquacious and foxlike, Vandemar blunt and wolflike, but they're united in their taste for murder. A couple of enjoyable Croup-isms: "Her days are numbered, and the number in question isn't even in the double digits." "We brought the Black Plague to Flanders. We have assassinated a dozen kings, five popes, half a hundred heroes and two accredited gods. Our last commission before this was the torturing to death of an entire monastery in sixteenth-century Tuscany. We are utterly professional."

So those are the strengths of "Neverwhere." What are the weaknesses?

In the introduction to the "Author's Preferred Edition" (merging some of the descriptions from previous UK and US printings), Gaiman gives us a clue of where this is going: "I wanted to talk about the people who fall through the cracks, to talk about the dispossessed—using the mirror of fantasy, which can sometimes show us things we have seen so many times that we never see them at all—for the very first time." London Below is not for people who have stable lives in London Above; it's for the homeless, the marginalized.

Our protagonist is an everyman named Richard Mayhew who discovers London Below when he sees a badly wounded girl on the run. When he stops to assist her, she tells him that she doesn't want an ambulance or the authorities to get involved, so he'll just have to bring her to his home to recuperate. He carries her with him, and "did not, any point on his walk, stop to think. It was not something over which he had any volition." There's that pesky free will again! Richard's fiance, Jessica, "who gave to charity and invested ethically," is of course too sensible to do things like seeing and noticing homeless people as people.

Well, no good deed goes unpunished; for the mistake of showing empathy, Richard is made invisible to London Above, reduced to the glanced-over condition of homeless people. So he has no choice but to follow the girl he rescued, Door (her deceased family had names like Portico and Arch) into London Below, where she's still on the run from people who want to hurt her. People in London Below speak to rats, and have complicated systems of owing one another favors or bartering: "food cost him a ballpoint pen, and a book of matches he had forgotten he had." (The absurd "trades" reminded me of Wayne from Mistborn Era 2: he likes to think that his trades are a way of mocking the pretensions of rich people, but his "partners" aren't asked for their opinions on the transactions.) All Richard wants is his normal life back, no matter how many times people tell him it's impossible, so he tags along with Door, partly in the hopes that helping her will see him rewarded.

But Gaiman seems to be trying to have it both ways: "if you were really a good and heroic person, you'd eat cats and hang out with rats and you'd like it! Just like this guy, who...is not impressed with the portal fantasy and would prefer the mundane." Or, as another character puts it: "I’ve passed the people who fall through the cracks, Richard: they sleep in shop doorways all down the Strand. They don’t go to a special London. They freeze to death in the winter." Okay, the internal logic of the world contradicts this statement...but what are those of us who live in this world supposed to take from it?

Door is a character with talents (unlocking things) and goals (avenging her family) in her own right, not exclusively a manic pixie dream girl or an outlet for Richard's pity. But. The word "opal" is used on eleven different occasions to describe her eyes. The word "caramel" is used seven times to describe another woman's appearance. We get it!

(It's possible that this is just an unfair criticism time-wise, the original book came out in 1996, writing styles may have shifted since then. Compare the first page of "Tress of the Emerald Sea:" "Men often described the girl as having hair the color of wheat. Others called it the color of caramel, or occasionally the color of honey. The girl wondered why men so often used food to describe women’s features. There was a hunger to such men that was best avoided." But since I've already opened the door, as it were, to temporally unfair criticisms, the "Lego Movie" issue of "woman works long and hard to develop her skills, but falls just short of The Quest; random everyman succeeds in her place just because...the Narrative??" is relevant here, too.)

I personally didn't find aspects such as Richard having his fortune told in the prologue, or having prophetic dreams about a monstrous Beast, as interesting/compelling as the weird urban worldbuilding. In fairness, Richard noticing the old woman who reads his fortune counts as a display of his character. But the foreshadowing wasn't really that necessary.

You know what they say about the life of an amateur con artist: the pros are the cons, and the cons are the pros. In "Neverwhere," the upside is an engaging and richly constructed "downside"--but the discrepancy between the dubious rewards for virtue in Gaiman's London and our own fell flat for me.

Bingo: using it for Urban Fantasy. Is also a Standalone, Award Finalist But Non-Winner, No Ifs Ands Or Buts. I would make the case that Richard counts as an anti-hero, his stated motivations are self-interested for most of the book.

And that's it, with most of the month to spare! I'll probably do a wrap-up post tomorrow before crossposting to Reddit. :D

Twelve pages into "Hench," our narrator, Anna, is talking to her friend, Greg, when Greg does something that, to me, hints (perhaps inadvertently) at the reality and strength of their friendship. Anna and Greg are both temp workers in the gig economy--they do what they can to make ends meet, and in their case, that often means taking short-term jobs for supervillains. Capitalism is screwed up, and a lot of smart people, like Anna and Greg, have frustrating, dead-end jobs without secure access to quality health care! The fact that they're stuck in these jobs should not be taken as a negative reflection of their intelligence or skill or potential! Anna makes allusions to Gustave Doré's art and headless bodies from the "Nuremberg chronicles" that sail over my head! As someone who's fortunate to have a cushy white-collar job, I'm in no place to judge Anna and Greg and how they make a living.

What does Greg do? While talking on the phone with his boss, a hapless supervillain who needs to be reminded to try turning the death ray off and on again: "He caught my eye and mimed shooting himself in the head, his first two fingers pointed to his temple."

Why did this line grab me? Because I've been in what's supposed to be a fun, social situation with board game friends and friends-of-friends, where one person did this all the time. His job? Awful. His love life? The worst. The fact that he's stuck playing this stupid game where he doesn't feel like he has much agency? Hell on earth. (Of course, he won.) Again, as someone who's been dealt a luckier hand in life than him, it's not my place to criticize. But if everything going on makes him performatively act like "I just hate life and wish I was dead, tee hee hee!", it's never going to be "my turn" to speak up or even to mention that it's making me uncomfortable (who am I to add more problems to the pile?) And the reactions of everyone else, acting like we're all friends and everything is fine, feel like self-delusion.

After a short-term gig in data processing goes well, Anna is invited to go join her villainous employer in the field. Only when she gets there does she learn his newest evil scheme: kidnapping the mayor's son and mind-controlling him in the hopes that he'll obediently cut his own finger off--if the mayor pays $5 million in cryptocurrency, he'll let the kid go with no further damage! But before the mind control kicks in, a mighty superhero comes to "save the day," shoving Anna out of the way while he takes down the villain. By superheroic standards, this is a relative "success," with only a few henchpeople killed and maimed. But for Anna, even a very brief injury leads to a serious leg fracture requiring hospitalization and a long time recovering--no fun for anyone, but particularly if your economic situation was already precarious.

So Anna, being a smart twenty-first century nerd, turns to...utilitarianism! Yes, that's right; she's going to expose how terrible superheroes are in a quantifiable way, by measuring the toll in death, injury, and property damage, and converting this all to a single scale by using the unit of "disability-adjusted life years." But don't worry, she cites her sources (two paragraphs from the European Centre for Economic Policy Research are quoted verbatim, with a footnote).

I side-eyed this for several reasons. First of all, anyone who's this tendentious about "my ideological frameworks, let me show you them" should in a work of fiction should be taken with salt. Not disregarded altogether--there are plenty of enjoyable works of fiction that have very explicit didacticism!--but taken with salt. Secondly, the quantification of "disability-adjusted" is something that's gotten rightful pushback. It's certainly true that if I was badly injured or disabled like Anna had been, my reaction would be, like hers, "well this sucks and I sure wish it hadn't happened!" But the implication that people with long-term physical disabilities or illnesses are worth "less than one healthy person, per unit of lifespan remaining"...like, I don't have to describe why that's a yikes?

And if you're going to go utilitarian, you'd better go all the way. Anna points out that compared to the DALY toll exerted by the superhero, five million dollars and a finger is not really that high a cost. Okay, let's take that as given. Do we expect hostage-taking to be more or less prevalent, in this world? What happens to the economy, the political system, to society as a whole when the default rationality is "you'd better give me what I want or else, what's a few digits between friends?"

I recognize that I'm defending the status quo, which again, is probably a function of my position in the world; the USA's "we don't negotiate with terrorists >:( " is in many ways screwed up! But having reached this conclusion, I'd expect some level of "okay, well, the superheroes are a net negative for the world, utilitarianly speaking...what about the supervillains?" And the book doesn't really go there, except indirectly. We learn that there's a "Draft" government agency that finds and trains any potential superheroes; those who follow the system are praised, those who try to go their own way are deemed "villains." In which case, yeah, it's the system itself that's bad and needs to be fixed or burned down! But in that case, I would not have expected Anna to be the first person to ever come up with that idea...?

I've been pretty harsh so far, so let's talk about some of the fun stuff. On the first page, we learn that our narrator's full name is "Anna Tromedlov" and her original choice for a secret identity was "the Palindrome," nice! Although she now finds that cheesy and juvenile. For a long time I just rolled with the theme of "most people doing boring day jobs don't care enough to learn the right way to pronounce any slightly unfamiliar last name, if someone gets it right the first time, it means they're serious and care about you"--so it took me way too long to realize that "Tromedlov" is just "Voldemort" backwards. This has no plot relevance, it's just hilarious.

Cheesy hero monologuing:

"In chess, a pawn is the feeblest piece, and the most vulnerable--the most expendable. It's easy to ignore a pawn, to take it for granted while you concern yourself with the more powerful pieces. However, a pawn is also the one and only piece that, if left unchecked for too long, can become a queen."
I stared at him. "I am aware of what chess is."

"Supercollider had a great deal in common with a diamond: aesthetically tacky; value artificially ascribed by corporate greed; cultural significance vastly overinflated; and incredibly hard to damage."
"The old man chose ideas over the boy he'd loved, because that's what heroes always choose: their ideas and ideals."
"we should change the name of our department to Negligence or Malice, considering how often our activities were thus attributed in the media."
Anna quotes Farscape when heading into a dangerous conflict, love to see it! :D

A lot of the timeskips felt jerky--like, she'd be interviewing for a job, then suddenly she'd be at the new job, and only later do we get a rushed transition of "and this is how I got the job." Among the other squicks you might expect, there's a lot of threatened loss of bodily autonomy (the antagonists don't seriously screw Anna up permanently despite trying to, but her allies trying to come to the rescue do have long-term consequences), and more body horror inflicted on an antagonist.

I should say that I have very little familiarity with superhero comics/movies/culture in general. From what I've osmosed from being in fandom, superheroes are absolutely divas with a lot of dramatic bisexual love triangles, so "Hench"'s personalities seem entirely appropriate in that regard. Both this book and "Steelheart" (the "Reckoners" trilogy by Brandon Sanderson), I think, are deconstructions of superheroes where the antagonist dude is patterned on "what if Superman, but evil." It's possible that someone more familiar with the stereotype would enjoy the deconstruction more than I did.

I'm not sure if "Hench" is trying to say more about #metoo or #allcopsarebastards or #thegigeconomyisprettybadactually, and it's possible it isn't saying any of these! It might even be stronger if it wasn't? But ultimately, it's the utilitarianism that's the make-or-break for me. And whether it's fiction or RL, my instinctive response is "okay! I see I have had way too much good and happiness in my life, this is quite unfair! Please direct me towards the grinder where I can be ground down into happy utility particles that are redistributed to those more in need! Thanks in advance! :D " Which...doesn't really get results. And ironically, by writing this out, I'm just as awful as the annoying guy from the board games event--maybe worse, because at least I have the self-awareness to realize I'm annoying.

Bingo: using this for Anti-Heroes. Would also count for No Ifs Ands or Buts, Mental Health (Anna spends a lot of time processing the trauma she's been through, this was too verbose for my tastes but I appreciate I may not be the target audience), Reddit Readalongs, Award Finalist but Non-Winner.

"Tress of the Emerald Sea" is the first of Brandon Sanderson's "secret projects" released via kickstarter this year. And it's also a Sanderson novel set in the wider Cosmere universe. This has its pros and cons. The pros: I like Sanderson, and I've devoured most of his oeuvre over the years. The cons: the interconnected Cosmere magic systems lend themselves to "kicking it upstairs" explanations at times, and trying to recall/review all the relevant canon can be intimidating. Like, I haven't tried Stormlight Archive 4 or the newest Mistborn Era 2 installment yet--dare I try this sight unseen? (Mild spoilers ahead for both this book and the Cosmere as a whole, nothing too incriminating IMO, but warning for the very averse.)

Tress is a window-washer from an island called "the Rock" in the "Emerald Sea" (more on that in a minute), who is in love with Charlie, who unconvincingly claims to be a gardener when he is quite clearly the duke's son. (There's an aside about "some people aren't always what they seem" and I thought it might have been a set up for "what if he's not the duke's son, despite all the evidence" but that's not it.) When Charlie is taken captive by a cruel Sorceress, and the duke shrugs it off, Tress figures "well, if nobody else is going to do anything about this, I guess I better step up," and leaves home to rescue him. This quickly involves her falling in with a ship that recently became pirates and then having adventures in piracy. So for most of the story, Charlie remains a flat cipher--yeah, the entire adventure is motivated by Tress seeking him, but he's more a MacGuffin than a personality.

The Emerald Sea is not an aquatic sea. The twelve enormous moons hovering near Tress' planet (which I think fill space around the planet in a sort of dodecahedron sphere packing, leading to pentagonal seas below!) each drop colorful but dangerous spores, and ships sail over the oceans of spores, which are violently reactive to water. So any amount of bodily fluids present imminent danger. The different types of magic include immense vines that can grow into or out of a person, mangling them in horrific ways (like hanahaki but for pirates!!), and winds that can be used to propel cannonballs. But different types of metal (such as silver or aluminum) will contain these reactions, making them valuable (shades of "Mistborn.") This type of magic system stuff is classic Sanderson--if it bores you, too bad, but I'm definitely here for it.

Ships need "sprouters" who study the spores and make use of them. For obvious reasons, most people are terrified of spores, and so the profession attracts the foolhardy and they have a short life expectancy. Fair. But some of the "discoveries" the characters make felt a bit cheesy/predictable, especially if you've read "The Reckoners"--like, your mental state and attitude towards the spores influences the magic? Who knew? I guess there are only so many ways to approach mental magic, but still.

Sanderson has said that this book began as a private story for his wife early in lockdown. To some extent, the characters' fear of the spores and vigilance against infection felt like a pandemic story at first--but with Tress in particular, things go in a different direction.

So there's Tress, the pirates, and the magic system. But there's also the narrative voice. One of the running Easter eggs in the Cosmere is that every book, across space and time, features a minor jester/wit character named Hoid who dispenses cryptic advice. Hoid is also the narrator of this book. Which is great, as it allows the prose to feature lots of humor and turns of phrase that Tress' rescue quest on its own might not have called for. If I listed all my favorite Hoidisms we'd be here all day, but a few: his disdain for slant rhymes, "a jaw so straight it made other men question if they were," "miners...chatting about their boring boring." The "you" he narrates to appears to be a resident of a modern Earthlike planet, because a lot of the vocabulary he uses is contemporary jargon that Tress might not recognize, but I'm not sure who that is or where they fit into the Cosmere.

The fact that Hoid appears everywhere in the Cosmere means he has to be extremely powerful and fluent in magic, compared to the other main characters. In most of the books, this is compensated for by making him a minor side character who only shows up for the cryptic advice. Here, that isn't going to work. Instead, he's nerfed by being under a curse that makes him speak almost complete gibberish when talking to the other characters (but not as the narrator, fortunately). The first half or so of the book is pretty accessible if you don't have much Cosmere knowledge: it basically helps to know who Hoid is, and that there is a species of shapeshifters (known as "kandra," but that word doesn't appear here) who are almost immortal, although their methods of shapeshifting tend to gross out unfamiliar humans. But towards the end, Hoid makes offhand mention of a bunch of the other magic systems the Sorceress has access too, and even if you just go with it, it's like...who is she? What does she want on this world? Should I recognize her? So that can be a little distracting.

There is a talking rat in this book. So far, the Cosmere has mostly been about humans and humanoid creatures--there aren't a whole lot of Redwall-esque anthropomorphic animals. So I was curious how this was going to fit into the larger magic system. No spoilers, but Sanderson stuck the landing without making me question the human-centricity of the series so far. Knowing that he likes big "ending avalanches" made me on the lookout for foreshadowing--like, there's one character who excels in a certain skill that you figure has to tie into an apparently unrelated plot element, and yes, it does. On the other hand, there's another character who I felt was being set up to be "a hidden agent of the king's authority" based on other foreshadowing/people not being what they seemed, but nope, this person is just who they say they are. Also, "tress" is a universally-used nickname based on the messiness of her hair, and I wanted that to be more of a hindrance/plot element rather than an informed trait.

Tress begins as someone who's very polite, accommodating, afraid to impose or ask for help. But her time with the pirates changes her, and she eventually becomes more willing to stand up for herself and ask for what she wants. Hoid (who may or may not be a reliable narrator) makes the point that this is a good thing; there are good people in the world, you can do your friends a favor and they will pay it forward. But I found this unsatisfying. As Matthew 5 points out, it's easy to be nice to people who are nice to you or can pay you back. Anyone can do that. I feel like the real world calls for a lot more zero-sumness--helping someone else by giving of yourself and, therefore, having less of what you want. Granted, a lot of this is my neuroses and goes beyond what Sanderson can help me with. But it's something to be aware of.

I can say that this is a very funny story with an engaging magic system and characters you can root for, while the tie-ins to the wider Cosmere are not necessary to follow from Tress' POV (but might be confusing for the reader). I think most interested people will have made up their minds about whether Sanderson is an author they like and don't need a thumbs up/thumbs down from me. But just in case, overall thumbs-up!

Bingo: I was happy to see that this counts for "name in the title," which is one of only a couple outstanding squares! (And now that I only have a couple outstanding squares...I should probably reread Mistborn Era 2 before diving into "The Lost Metal," regardless of whether I get around to "Rhythm of War.") Would also be a lock for weird ecology. And the kandra is a shapeshifter.