Nerds on Tour: Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (c. 1940 novel)

Dossier: Master and Margarita (Мастер и Маргарита)

Location: Soviet Union

Package Type: Novel

Itinerary: Once upon a time, there was a weird weird world in the East where you had to be constantly on the lookout for foreign saboteurs, where people could disappear in dark cars during the night without a trace and where writers could not publish their work if they weren't members in an association of proletarian writers. And even then, there were things that were just utterly unpublishable -- such books as Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov.

Bulgakov, known at the time mainly as a playwright (whose plays were often forbidden), wrote and rewrote the satirical fantasy novel (and burned several drafts of it) for the last twelve years of his life which the Soviet authorities had made increasingly difficult. The novel didn't saw publication until 1966, more than 25 years after Bulgakov's death when it quickly became a cult classic. In addition to the official censored version, a more complete samizdat edition started circling the literary underground and was later smuggled out of the country to be published and cherished.

In the novel, an enigmatic foreign professor Woland who specializes in black magic arrives in Moscow. He first interrupts a discussion between an aspiring poet Ivan and an "editor of a highbrow literary magazine and chairman of the management committee of one of the biggest Moscow literary clubs" about the existence of Jesus. He tells the baffled men a lengthy story of Pontius Pilate, the procurator of Judaea who ends up having to order the execution of a curious prophet even if he does not want to. Woland also predicts that the management committee of the literary club will soon lose their chairman because the head of the man he is speaking with will be cut off. Shortly, that indeed happens in a freak tramcar accident.

 

The quirky death sets in motion a series of uncanny events as Woland and his demonic entourage trick and deceive bureaucrats, officials and ordinary Muscovites. First, they manage to get the control of the dead gentleman's apartment (a notable feat during the severe housing shortage). Then they go on to con the managers of the Variety Theatre in which Woland gives a performance of black magic, creating further comic chaos and confusion. Especially the malevolent pig-sized talking cat Behemoth, by far the most memorable character of the novel, is eager to wreak havoc in entertaining ways.

Amidst all the mayhem, the titular master and his broken-hearted lover Margarita are introduced to the reader. The master is a failed writer whose novel on Pontius Pilate will never see the light of day and whose reputation has been demolished by malignant critics. He is locked away in a lunatic asylum next door from Ivan, but Margarita (who only knows that her lover disappeared) is willing to try to get him back by helping Woland organize something of a satanic ball. In the novel, all of it sort of makes sense.

 

Travel Log: Reading The Master and Margarita 80 years after its completion is a disconcerting experience. You have to not only travel to Moscow but to the Moscow at the height of Stalinism in the 1930s, a place as alien as Mars to most of us. At the time, the novel would have been a death sentence for Bulgakov and his family, but for someone not immersed in the historical context it is not easy to pinpoint why exactly. The redactions of the first official publication (often printed in italics in western editions) are quite baffling as well. Was the fact that Margarita was naked when she turned into an invisible witch and flew with a broom really so subversive in the 1966? I guess it was. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, though, science fiction writers were writing stories like Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.

Bulgakov knew that the work could not be published, but he kept working on it and rewrote it after destroying it several times. The novel within the novel that the master is working on is obviously a reflection on the work that contains it. One of the most oft-cited lines from the novel -- "Manuscripts don't burn" -- comments on this and became the motto of the samizdat underground. Master's novel about Pontius Pilate is burnt as well, but the satanic Woland saves it, and its narrative refuses to stay inside the manuscript. Rather, a big chunk of it is told by Woland in the beginning of the novel, and another segment becomes the dream of Ivan as when he sleeps next to the master in the asylum.

Other elements of the narrative are autobiographical as well. Bulgakov, too, had to suffer unreasonable attacks by the Soviet press and it is easy to consider the militant reviewers who tear the master to shreds as literary payback. His fiercest critics called for an attack on "Bulgakovism" in the same way as the hostile reviewer Lavrovich is propagating for striking hard at "Pilatism" of the master's novel. Most of his plays were forbidden when he was alive and he was able to find work only through the personal intervention by Stalin who reportedly liked some of his plays. 

 

However, the rabbithole of learning more about Bulgakov's life and experiences has so much gravity that it quickly starts to collapse on itself. Master and Margarita is a light, funny and sarcastic book that can be deciphered in a myriad of ways, and even the specialists have not found a consensus on how it should be read. Some have suggested that the character of the master is a reference to Nikolai Gogol who famously burned the second part of Dead Souls while others think he is Maksim Gorky. The devilish Woland can be seen as a stand-in for Stalin, Lenin, Jesus or God, but the most entertaining aspect is that the meanings are shifting and unstable.

Compare it to George Orwell's masterpiece Animal Farm which Orwell wrote not long after Bulgakov had finished Master and Margarita. Both are hallmarks of political fantasy, but whereas Animal Farm offers neat meanings and unambigous anti-Stalinist polemics, Bulgakov's anti-Stalinism is as ambigous as it gets. For example: A bureaucrat has stepped out of his suit and left it sitting on his desk in his stead, going through the papers and making decisions.

Funny as hell, if you can bring yourself to enjoy absurd, nihilistic slapstick. If you can't, the novel is notable for hundreds of pieces of amazing cover art, most featuring cats.

Analytics

The Adventure: 5/5
The Scenery: 5/5
NerdTrip Rating: 10/10

POSTED BY: Spacefaring Kitten, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018.

Microreview [book]: Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow

Online privacy message fiction for the masses

He who controls the online information flows controls everything — including you. When our lives become increasingly digital and our everyday appliances, apartments and cars are assortments of computers with dubious privacy, we can never be truly secure. This is especially true if we disagree with those who control everything. Something along these lines might be the message of Cory Doctorow's novel Attack Surface. Indeed, it is a book with a message which makes it a bit hard for Doctorow to make in truly enjoyable, but he does not do a bad job. As far as online privacy message fiction goes, Attack Surface is in fact a rather good read, especially when Doctorow manages to keep his didactic impulses at bay.

Attack Surface continues the story of Little Brother (2008) and Homeland (2013) in which we followed Marcus Yallow, a nerdy teen who becomes a hacker guerrilla after a terrorist attack on San Fransisco. US that Marcus and his friends live in becomes practically a police state which turns loose its overreaching security agencies with devastating consequences. Whereas the first two novels were YA, I suppose Attack Surface is a book aimed at adult readers. This time the protagonist is Masha Maximow, a conflicted hacker who sneers at Marcus's ethical grandstanding but still cares deeply for privacy and (although a little less) for doing the right thing. Unfortunately, she works for a shady IT firm that specializes in selling surveillance technology for authoritarian regimes.

While working, she helps the bad guys with tech, but off-duty, she helps anti-government protesters stay safe from the same technology. It is inevitable that her hobby will get her into trouble, and that is where the story starts. In the beginning of the book, she is based in "Slovstakia", a code-named East European country where the security apparatus plans to keep democracy activists and other troublemakers pressed down indefinitely. Losing her job is unavoidable, as is losing her friendly connections to the Slovstakian activists, and Masha returns to San Francisco without knowing what to do next. Back home, her childhood friend Tanisha who is also a political activist has run into trouble with surveillance technology as well, and when Masha looks into it, it looks a little too familiar. Turns out Tanisha is targeted by the cyber surveillance technologies Masha had been developing for another shady government contractor. There are demonstrations, weaponized self-driving vehicles, eroding civil liberties, mass surveillance and a lot of hacker talk about security and compromised devices.

Masha's backstory forms a big chunk of the narrative. She was a supporting character in ther earlier novels but now Doctorow fills in everything around the events featured before. In Little Brother, Masha used Marcus to plan her own escape from government goons and kidnapped him in the process, and in Homeland, she became Marcus's helper and a whistleblower who revealed some dirty secrets. In theory, Attack Surface can be read on its own, but readers who are familiar with the earlier books certainly get the most out of it. Otherwise, the details of how Masha got hold of the information she gave Marcus in the previous novel is probably not very interesting. Switching the main character is a good move, however. At least I preferred Masha Maximow to Marcus Yallow who always felt a bit simplistic protagonist. Now, a well-meaning IT and privacy enthusiast has been replaced by a more Snowden-esque and conflicted character, who has to juggle, negotiate and compartmentalize in order to stay sane. The Edward Snowden quote on the front cover is certainly stamped on the right book.

Attack Surface is a smart technothriller with smart people and smart technologies. The technical side is mostly interesting, but at times Doctorow really cannot hold back. When Masha gets out of jail after a brief and borderline unlawful arrest, she gets back her cellphone that the police has done who knows what while she was in custody. Masha cannot trust the device anymore but having a cellphone at hand and not using it is impossible. So she smashes the phone. That it followed by a page-long discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of the concept of Olysses pacts that at least this specific reader could have done without plowing through. Undoubtedly this is how nerds think and speak but enough is enough. The narrative lecturing and infodumpy dialogue leave little work for the reader.

Sadly, the novel is highly relevant and could take place in our world — or I guess one could make the argument that in fact it does. San Francisco, Iraq and Mexico City are real places that feel real, and it is a little disappointing that the Eastern European country that is so central to the story is so artificial. Like Dr. Doom's Latveria, Slovstakia is an exotic mishmash of stereotypes. It would have been neat to learn something about a real place like Belarus or pre-Maidan Ukraine that Slovstakia is clearly emulating, but the country — like many elements in the novel — is there to make a point.

The Math

Base Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for relevance

Penalties: -2 for overbearing explanations

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 – "an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws"

POSTED BY: Spacefaring Kitten, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018.

Reference: Doctorow, Cory. Attack Surface [Tor Books, 2020]

Paying a visit to Lovecraft Country

 

SFF television is quickly becoming more active in discussions around the politics of race.

A lot has been made out of the fact that a significant portion of the audience of HBO's new Watchmen had not heard a word about the single worst act of racial violence in American history until they saw the first minutes of the first episode. A gripping reminder, perhaps, of the indifference that the contemporary America feels about the more shady bits of its backstory.

Turns out that I was actually better informed than many of my fellow viewers because I had some cursory knowledge about what went down in Tulsa in 1921 – thanks not to my keen grasp of history but to another piece of SFF: the novel Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff. The Greenwood massacre is something of a formative experience for important characters in both the newest interpretation Watchmen and Lovecraft Country, even though in the latter it is a more of a living memory for them as the story is set in 1950s.

I read the book a couple of years ago for Nerds of a feather, flock together and have since been waiting for the TV adaptation to materialize. Now that the first episode has been out for a week, I guess it's a good time to say a word or two about it. I'm obviously writing this without seeing eight tenths of the first season, so let's hope that the upcoming episodes won't render anything I say completely silly. Time will tell, for example, if we'll see the Tulsa events on screen at some point.

For television, Lovecraft Country was developed by Misha Green with people like Jordan Peele and J.J. Abrams as executive producers. Ruff's novel-looking collection of interconnected tales was initially a proposal for a TV series, so maybe the process should be called reverse engineering rather than adaptation. Whatever took place, it carefully preserved very much of the source material, at least judging by the first two episodes. Not counting one gender-swap and surname changes, every character seems like they are lifted straight from the book.

The story starts with the protagonist Atticus Freeman returning home to Chicago through states that are unfriendly for black people such as he, and running into vehicle trouble on the road. Now we meet him on a bus as opposed to his own car in the novel, but either way, getting where they are supposed to go is way easier for whites when the car breaks down.

The problem of traveling in Jim Crow America and staying safe is a central to the plot in many ways. Atticus's family is in the business of publishing a guidebook called The Safe Negro Travel Guide which lists the establishments in which black customers can expect to be welcome and stay alive. Even though it sounds like one, it is not a dark joke. Books like that really existed, and having Atticus's uncle George compile them in the story provides an economic solution for drawing the extended family in sticky situations and adventures.

So, the show is called Lovecraft Country. George and Atticus are huge fans of pulp literature and science fiction, including H.P. Lovecraft, and they get into a discussion about his works right in the first episode. There's remarkably little love for Lovecraft to go around these days, compared to just ten years ago. Even though his problematic batshit insane racist views were discussed here and there, Lovecraft was one of the absolute greats of fantastic horror.

For decades, nobody questioned the fact that a World Fantasy Award trophy that was a bust of the author who had written, for example, a poem titled "On the Creation of Niggers” describing a creature that was half-human and half-beast. When the bulby-eyed Lovecraft statue was finally retired in 2015, his most ardent admirers were so unhappy that they even returned the trophies they had previously won. As much Lovecraftiana is published as before, but the most memorable new works explicitly take aim at the racial attitudes of Lovecraft and his works. Victor LaValle's "Ballad of Black Tom" rewrote the "The Horror at Red Hook" from the viewpoint of a black protagonist, and other such works are making it hard to even think about Lovecraft without considering his politics.

In Lovecraft Country, all the Lovecraftian monstrosities are there to make a very specific political point. Indeed, Shoggoths are roaming the night and there are things with way too many eyes and tentacles (and consonants in their names), but evil-wise they are nothing compared to the darkness of Jim Crow. It's a good premise, even though it reduces the Lovecraftian to a gallery of slimy monsters, missing all the bleak lonely horror that I would actually consider Lovecraft's claim to fame. Beings from alien dimensions and the fact that there used to be towns where non-whites are killed if they don't leave before the sun sets are both terrifying.

One could argue that all the Lovecraftian elements are more or less window dressing and could be replaced with other horror lore just as easily. What is borrowed from Lovecraft are some names of horrific creatures, obsession about ancient magic books and assorted plot elements. What cemented his reputation and got him canonized is, I think, the cosmic horror and the feeling of being alone and in constant danger in a cold, brutal universe.

This is a feeling you don't get to experience with Lovecraft Country. Here, good triumphs, family takes care of each other and the atmosphere is cozy. That's probably as anti-Lovecraftian as it gets.

The novel is a happy book about awful stuff in which nobody is really going to get hurt. In the last pages, we leave the black cast laughing together when they have again defied all odds and made it out of their latest adventure in one piece. It's not yet certain that the show will be all like that. Actually, the second episode which just landed might suggest that the main characters can get hurt more seriously here, but the future episodes will tell what kind of Lovecraft Country we are going to be able to visit this time.

I'm sure that somewhere there are Lovecraft nerds itching to remark that the story isn't entirely accurate in all bibliographic details, and they're right. Lovecraft's vile poem mentioned earlier was never published and it had not yet been even discovered at the time when Atticus, his father and uncle George are discussing it in Lovecraft Country. Personally, I don't particularly care as it makes a better story this way, but it's a bit fast and loose here and there. In all honesty, I don't think that actual black science fiction fans in the 1950s would be as understanding as Atticus and George are about the undertones of Lovecraft's work. At times they feel more like stand-ins for contemporary SFF fans, but that's how it is. Lovecraft Country is entertainment and not a dissertation. 

SPACEFARING KITTEN, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018. @spacefaringk

Summer Reading List 2020: Spacefaring Kitten

I don't like summer, specifically, but usually reading makes it more bearable. Here's my summer reading list for 2020.

The Texas-Israeli War: 1999 by Jake Saunders and Howard Waldrop

What, according to Foreign Policy, constitutes "one of the most bizarre SF books ever written"? In a world pretty much demolished after Ireland spiced up the UK water supplies with LSD, causing spaced out British politicians to invoke nuclear armageddon, Texas has declared independence and kidnapped the president of the United States. The novel, AFAIK, tells about an Israeli squadron of tanks with nuclear reactors going in to save the president. Foreign policy promises punchy prose and a fair bit of sex and I hope that is what I'll get!

I've long been fascinated by works of Howard Waldrop, the short-fiction author best known for his Nebula and World Fantasy Award winning "Ugly Chickens" — I suppose that is why I happen to have this book on my shelf. Until sitting down to write this summer reading list, I had absolutely no idea who Jake Saunders was. But what do you know? Turns out he is the comic shop owner who famously campaigned against superhero comics featuring too subversive and unwholesome stuff, his key grievance being the realistically rendered childbirth in Alan Moore and Rick Veitch's Miracleman #9 in 1986 (not, for example, silly spandex violence).

Books of Blood by Clive Barker

Summer is the season of bodies and flesh, so what would be a better time to read some horror stories about them? Books of Blood is Barker's series of collections of visceral horror tales that first made him famous. I have vague memories of reading "The Midnight Meat Train" here and "Pig Blood Blues" there as I have come across them in some anthologies, but I have never exposed myself to an actual Book of Blood in its entirety. About time!

Pretty Monsters by Kelly Link

Compensating for Barker's gorefest, a book with monsters who are a little prettier might be a good idea. I've read a bunch of fascinating stories by Kelly Link but haven't yet got to this beautiful book with black-edge paper, cool graphic design and illustrations by Shaun Tan. I believe it's a YA collection that repackages some stories printed in earlier Link collections Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners as well as some that were not in them.

Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

Zoo City and Invisible Girls by Beukes are two of my favorite books I have read in a long time, and I'm literally itching to get my hands on her debut novel Moxyland. I expect it to be shorter, meaner, grungier and more cyberpunk-ish take on near-future South Africa with corporate wars, future tech and teenage riot. Hope I won't be disappointed.

October by China Miéville

Due to an academic project, I've been diving quite deep into the early years of the Soviet Russia and the later Stalinist purges. The October Revolution (which happened in November but they had a shitty calendar) is a colossal moment for the history of the 20th century, and I cannot think of a better person to reconstruct the eery, revolutionary world filled with great promise, brutal violence and intense future shock than fantasy author China Miéville. Even though his October is strictly speaking nonfiction, there's bound to be some genre atmosphere in here somewhere.

Xenogenesis Trilogy by Octavia Butler

Getting my hand dirty with Octavia Butler's works is something I have been planning to do for some time. It took some time and effort to hunt copies of the translations of Dawn, Adulthood Rites and Imago from used books stores — they are the only Butler books translated around this part of the world and they were published 30 years ago. Summer is a nice time for flexing some other language muscles as well.

Booky summer, everybody!

***

POSTED BY: Spacefaring Kitten, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018.

Microreview [Comic]: Doomsday Clock by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank

Hey-look-at-me-I'm-doing-Watchmen comic with some nice touches, impossible ambitions and silly morals

DC Comics did a fine job in resisting the urge to do a Watchmen sequel. It took them 30 years to pull the trigger and come up with a story that continues from where Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons left off in 1987 — a notable feat for an entertainment corporate giant. The topic is not as hot as it once was, though. I remember Watchmen fans vowing to never again read anything by any comics creator who dared to contribute to the Before Watchmen project which comprised several miniseries interpreting the pre-Watchmen activities of the characters in 2012—2013. Brian Azzarello, J. Michael Straczynski and others were criticized quite harshly but this time around writer Geoff Johns and artist Gary Frank survived doing their own take on Watchmen pretty much unscathed as far as I can tell. The first issue come out at the end of 2017 and it took them two years to complete their 12-issue miniseries Doomsday Clock, but now the whole thing has been released as a graphic novel.

So, is there still somebody who watches the watchmen after 30 plus years?

The original Watchmen by Moore and Gibbons defined the feel of revisionary superhero narratives for decades and is probably to blame for establishing the whole nihilistic subgenre in mid-80's along with Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns. It has since been adapted and supplemented by a Zack Snyder blockbuster movie in 2009, the multiple prologue miniseries of Before Watchmen by a Azzarello, Straczynski et al and a TV series by Damon Lindelof that was aired on HBO last year. Each of these works took Watchmen in their own direction. Whereas Snyder made it into heavy-handed spectacle that ramped up violence, faithfully replicated much of the plot and missed all the themes, HBO's Watchmen is a fresh take on racial politics in the US. That is something that Englishmen Moore and Gibbons completely left aside and there is not a single black costumed adventurer in Watchmen, which the new Watchmen series takes issue with. On the comics front, Before Watchmen was an uneven collection of prequel tales, some quite good and others more forgettable. It's a huge thing page-wise but in its scope nothing compared to what Johns and Frank are aspiring to.

Doomsday Clock is the culmination of New 52 and Rebirth story arcs which relaunched the whole DC universe, and it seeks to combine the separate worlds of Watchmen and the DC heroes, pitting the blue quantum-powered overman Dr. Manhattan against Superman. In the story, Ozymandias dimension-hops with a new substitute Rorschach (because Moore and Gibbons blew the original up) and two super criminals into the DC universe to search for Dr. Manhattan. The world of Watchmen is again on the brink of nuclear disaster, desperately needing a divine intervention, but Dr. Manhattan has left. In fact, he has jumped into DCU to cause troubles for its heroes and rewrite their timelines for… who knows why? The weakest part of the set-up is that some of the stuff just does not make very much sense, but the plot rolls forward nicely and soon the reader gets plenty of other story threads to worry about.

Johns and Frank's main addition to the Watchmen lore is the criminal duo of Marionette and Mime who are actually based on old Charlton comics characters, just as all the original Watchmen cast. As the new Rorschach, they have recruited a supporting character from the original graphic novel, and that works quite well too. All in all, there are a lot of enjoyable and intelligent elements which, sadly, just do not come together well enough to make it a very memorable. There are just way too many characters, as practically everyone who is somebody in the DCU makes an appearance and the story is even peppered with some real-world personalities like Vladimir Putin and a US president whose name is not mentioned but who likes short sentences and superlatives. At least the most prominent players Batman, Joker, Lex Luthor and Superman are interesting, but the major backdrop of the story dealing with a sort of a cold war of superhumans of different nations is just a mess.

Visually and narratively, Doomsday Clock is trying very hard to be like Watchmen. It's a 12-issue limited series employing a 3×3 panel layout, with the last pages of each issue reserved for extracts from different documents originating in the storyworld — newspaper clippings, government files et cetera. Panels of the main storyline and a story-within-a-story (this time a noir detective movie) overlap and comment on each other, and the title of each chapter is lifted from a quote that is revealed in the last black panel next to the shape of a yellow doomsday clock clicking closer to midnight issue by issue.

At the end of the day, however, it's just a new DC superhero crossover epic with a happy end. It sets up some interesting dichotomies between two superpersons: Dr. Manhattan is so far beyond any of his fellow humans that he is losing his humanity altogether, whereas Superman who is not a human at all but an illegal alien who embodies superhero morality and compassion for humankind. It admittedly tries very hard, but I'm not convinced that Doomsday Clock will be something that anybody is going to be celebrating in ten years, let alone 30. In addition to copying so much of the stylistic stuff from Watchmen, having some of its moral ambiguity and open-endedness would have served Doomsday Clock well. That is not what Johns and Frank were after, however, and at the end of the book we learn how everyone gets what they deserve and how everything ends. Sigh. A Watchmen sequel where absolutely nothing is morally gray and everyone's either a good guy or a bad guy just doesn't cut it.

When compared with Lindelof's TV series, the other Watchmen sequel that came out during the same time, Doomsday Clock is not doing very well. Watchmen, just as the original Watchmen, does something unexpected, challenges its predecessors and says something important about the social and political reality that surrounds it. Doomsday Clock offers some familiar ticking, but the reader can rest assured that it will never get to midnight.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for ambitious effort

Penalties: -2 for playing too safe

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 – "an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws"


SPACEFARING KITTEN, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018.

Reference: Doomsday Clock Part 1-2 by Geoff Johns & Gary Frank [DC Comics, 2019 & 2020]

Microreview [Book]: Summerland by Hannu Rajaniemi

Hannu Rajaniemi's latest novel serves alt-history, alt-science, espionage and ectoplasm

At this point, Hannu Rajaniemi's latest novel Summerland from 2018 is not exactly new anymore, but I guess nobody is going to keep me from reviewing it here. It is still a great book and as good a place to getting started with his work as any — maybe even a better one than his highly praised debut trilogy (The Quantum Thief 2010 / The Fractal Prince 2012 / The Causal Angel 2014) of cutting edge SF if occasional intense carpet bombing of science-y concepts can put you off.

A fantasy espionage novel entertaining almost as-unscientific-as-you-can-get spiritualist ideas about souls, aether and ectoplasm first looks like a nice opposite of Rajaniemi's previous work but the first impression starts to fade once the narrative really gets going. It turns out that the unscience-y concepts can very well be explored in a rigorous way, but the overall feel of the narrative is lighter when we are not in space (which somehow seems like a serious place) and the ideas are so ridiculous. However, Rajaniemi's tone is so science-y that I actually almost waited for a revelation on the last few pages that all the characters were in fact some kind of digital consciousnesses or AIs inside a bizarre simulation. That didn't come, though, which is probably for the best.

Summerland is something of an intelligence agency procedural situated in the alternative thirties when there's life after death. In addition to much of the corporeal world, the British empire has colonised the afterlife — or an afterlife — and Queen Victoria keeps reigning from beyond the grave, or from Summer Court as Summerland puts it. In the world of the living, the British intelligence operatives work in the Winter Court, and these two agencies are locked in a bureaucratic power struggle as the British empire as a whole is engaged in conflict with the Soviet Union in Spanish Civil War and elsewhere in cold war style. This is probably quite a crude oversimplification of a very complex and intriguing setting which sort of makes sense when you're reading the book, but it's not easy to explain afterwards.

The novel kicks off as Winter Court officer Rachel White has to work hard to keep a Russian defector alive and learns of a communist double agent in the Summer Court. Because of workplace politics and the "Etonian boy-children" running the intelligence apparatus, she has to go rogue in order to hunt the mole. The double agent she is after is the other viewpoint character of the novel, and it's a shame that his chapters don't hold the interest quite as well. His personal history through Cambridge and into the Russians' arms is all cleverly constructed but he does not come to life as Rachel. Well, to be fair, he is dead, but I wasn't compelled to get under his skin (which he doesn't have anymore) in the same way.

He is needed for laying out how the afterlife business actually operates in the novel, though. There's not one afterlife but many. Each government has their own version of it and by granting Tickets they mandate who are going to have a permament place there after death. From there, the ghosts can communicate with the living through mediums and devices called ectophones. The Soviet afterlife is a Communist hive-mind called Presence through which the ghost of Lenin is still calling the shots — in the novel, his real-life successor Stalin is a fringe dissident working undercover in Spain, fighting the Soviet Union and attempting to make death final again.

Many of the novel's characters are borrowed from actual espionage history. Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, Richard Brooman-White, Mikhail Shpiegelglass, Józef Unszlicht and others have lived on our world as well, but I'm not quite certain why Rajaniemi has decided to use all these people. If there is some meta-level meaning one should draw from this gallery of quite obscure personalities other than just have an alternative history populated with real people, I missed it. The British prime minister is Lovecraftian Herbert West himself, so there's also some attempt at metatextual fun but for me the novel would have worked better if Rajaniemi had sticked to all the weird ideas and maybe even gone a bit further with the ectotechnology and the concept of alternative afterlives instead of throwing all these references around.

All in all, it's a solidly weird novel packed with enjoyable, curious stuff and I liked it.

The Math

Base Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for serious discussion of ridiculous ideas

Penalties: -1 for unnecessary (or too hard to decipher) references

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 – "well worth your time and attention"

Reference: Rajaniemi, Hannu. Summerland [Gollancz 2018]

POSTED BY: Spacefaring Kitten, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018.

Microreview [Comic]: Sonata vol. 1 — The Valley of the Gods

David Hine and Brian Haberlin's scifi adventure comic Sonata is a beautiful planet opera which has a hard time taking off.

On planet Perdita (or alternatively Vianna), somewhere in the farthest reaches of the galaxy, two competing human civilizations have founded their own colonies. Their spaceships are able to reach it only once in a while when the worlds are favourably aligned, so the colonies of both the peaceful Ran and the less gentle Tayans have to mostly make do on their own.

These civilizations are polar opposites of each other. The Ran are peaceful, dinosaur-flying environmentalists who are on good terms with the less advanced ogre-like Lumani natives of the planet whereas the Tayans are into guns, technology, looking down on the "primitives" and, if needed, destabilizing the planet's ecosystem with huge dam constructions and the like. Obviously, the new inhabitants of Perdita/Vianna (both sides have their own name for their new homeworld) are made to not get along, even though the green and flourishing planet should be able to support them all. That is, if you steer clear of humongous mythical monsters known as sleeping giants, of course.

The story starts rolling when the Ran decide to sabotage the Tayans' new dam which deprives them and the Lumani of necessary water. The two factions are quickly on each other's throats, apart from two individuals: Sonata, the daughter of one of the Ran leaders, and Pau, son of the Tayans' bossman. The two teenagers end up adventuring together (along with Sonata's Lumani friend Treen) and becoming fond of each other, in addition to discovering that the Lumani are not the illiterate, unadvanced primitives everyone imagines.

So, let's see: strange worlds, intriguing aliens, a love story between characters whose races/civilizations are not getting along… For a contemporary science fiction comics series, it sounds quite familiar, right? Dismissing Sonata as a poor man's Saga clone would be a bit harsh but it wouldn't have hurt to spice it up a notch so that Hine and Haberlin's creation would stand out.

Haberlin's art is superb and it makes the world really come to life but the story itself feels like a fat stack of clichés. Even if it is a well-paced and entertaining story, the worn-out themes of star-crossed lovers and nature versus technology could really have used some twists and more imaginative and unexpected takes. Very few plot developments that the comic threw at the reader were things I did not see coming, and that is always disappointing. Only one thing which took place towards the end of the story (and which I won't spoil it here) seemed to take the tale to an interesting direction, and that was basically the set-up for the next story arc.

Hopefully the subsequent adventures of Sonata and Pau manage to lift them off the beaten track and make them really come to life. The first graphic novel Valley of the Gods which collects Sonata issues 1 through 6 did not succeed in establishing the series' main characters as anything other than two curious teenagers, so there's certainly room for development.

***

The Math

Base Score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for dazzling art

Penalties: -2 for fizzling story

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10 – "still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore"

Reference: Hine, David & Haberlin, Brian. Sonata, volume 1: Valley of the Gods [Image 2019]

***

POSTED BY: Spacefaring Kitten, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018.

Microreview [Comic]: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Tempest

The Last Headscratcher

Alan Moore is finished with comics. A scent of nostalgia in the air suggests that he may have announced something similar before, but this time it seems final. The British comics writer legend and his co-creator, illustrator Kevin O'Neill, are both ending their respective careers with the final six-issue instalment of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen saga which hit the stores last year and is about to be published as a graphic novel any time now.

In short, the series goes out with a headscrathing boom – a nice way to end anything, be it comics or careers.

It's incredibly hard to sum up the 20 years of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen in any meaningful way for those who are not familiar with it. The crossover steampunk adventure comic with established Victorian characters and literary jokes quickly evolved into a tale incorporating scenes of harrowing sexual violence, wild experimentation and the most abysmally awful film adaptation of a comic in living memory. (Speaking of confusing ways to end careers, the movie was the last screen appearance of Sir Sean Connery who took the job after feeling bad for not agreeing to play Gandalf in Lord of the Rings.)

In 1999, the first miniseries Volume I laid the foundation for an intriguing storyworld: Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, H.G. Well's The Invisible Man, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and numerous other Victorian fictions are actually situated in the same alternate history. In this steampunk world, the British government assembles a team of operatives with extraordinary abilities to deal with exceptional threats to the empire. Wilhelmina Murray (or Harker), Captain Nemo, Allan Quatermain, the shapeshifting Dr. Jekyll and an invisible sex criminal form something of a Victorian-era Justice League to fight off Dr. Moriarty, an invasion or Martian tripods and what have you.

Along the way, the comic commented on Victorian attitudes, played with metafictionality and propagated Moore and O'Neill's distaste for authorities and superheroes. The first two miniseries published in 1999-2000 and 2002-2003 were mainstream successes – even if the metafictional play becomes quite complex sometimes, they are highly accessible stories. After all, reading Moore's episodic prose bonus features describing wonders from different corners of the storyworld and weaving together elements from hundreds if not thousands of myths, stories, novels and other sources from Moomins to House of Leaves were not necessary for enjoying the main storyline.

After Volumes I and II Moore and O'Neill could probably have kept milking the steampunk cow for a long time, but they chose to move the story in new directions instead. In the graphic novel Black Dossier (2007), they jumped to Britain in the fifties after the downfall of Orwell's Big Brother government, and in the album trilogy Century (2009-2012) they race through the 20th century, visiting Jack the Ripper years, the trippy sixties and ending up in the 2000s with computers, endless wars in the Middle East and Harry Potter who has become Antichrist.

In addition to the crazy plot points, Black Dossier and Century experimented with the comics storytelling. For the Black Dossier, Moore wrote a "disappeared" Shakespeare play in Shakespearean pentameter and recorded early faux rock and roll songs for a vinyl record to come with the album, whereas O'Neill's drawings representing the magical dimension of Margaret Cavendish's proto scifi novel The Blazing World have to be read with red-and-green 3D glasses. For the first Century album, they decided to go with a comics adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's socialist agit prop musical The Threepenny Opera – you may want to read Century: 1910 in case you're interested in why one of the characters is called Pirate Jenny in the new Watchmen TV series (but don't fall off you chair when the comics final apocalyptic fight scene turns into a burlesque cabaret show).

So, this sets the scene for Volume 4: The Tempest, the final volume in the series.

It starts where Century trilogy ended up: satanic Harry Potter is defeated, the misogynist MI5 agent and Black Dossier's antagonist James Bond is old and debilitated and the last remnants of the League – Mina Murray and genderbending Orlando from the Virginia Woolf novel of the same name – are adventuring together again. They are joined by MI5 leader Emma Night (from the British TV show Avengers) who chose to switch sides and team up with the good guys instead of government spooks.

To sum it up, all seemed to be more or less in order in the storyworld, all thinkable storytelling fireworks were shot in the previous volumes and the contents of most of the classics of imaginative fiction have already been crammed somewhere in the series. The obvious question was "is there anywhere left to go now?", but it seems that we didn't really have to worry about that.

After going through Victorian adventure fiction in Volumes I and II, a mishmash of earlier cultural history, Orwell and detective fiction in Black Dossier and occult stuff and children's fantasies in Century, Moore and O'Neill tackle the history of comics and superheroes, especially British ones.

It's an interesting choice for sure. Mostly The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen has steered clear of the cultural history of its own medium, even if it has taken a deep dive in the cultural history of practically everything else. Of course much of Moore's bibliography has been thematizing comics history extremely hard – think of works like Watchmen, Miracleman (formerly Marvelman), Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, Supreme and Tomorrow Stories – and a great chunk of Kevin O'Neill's body of work consists of brutal, polemic satires of superheroes and comics heroism like Nemesis the Warlock or Marshal Law (frequently created with writer Pat Mills). There is no shortage of comics going through the history of American superhero comics with some kind of a meta sensibility, but outside US there's still new ground to be covered, it seems.

Also, it turns out that discarding the super-misogynistic "Jimmy" Bond as a key threat was too quick a conclusion. Agent 007, even if he is barely alive and glued to a wheelchair and a breathing apparatus, is able to take back control of MI5 and raise some serious hell. He tracks the hero trio's journey to Africa where they take a dip in the magic pool of R. Rider Haggard's stories restoring their youth. With his henchmen (who are actually the Bond actors from different James Bond movies), Bond follows them, regains his young and able body and, being the murderous and sleazy character that the original Bond is, blows up the pool with a nuclear bomb, butchers Night's allies within the agency and gets ready to attack The Blazing World with weapons of mass destruction.

The plot is again a convoluted mess with Murray, Orlando and Night visiting different magical realities, meeting fictional characters like Prospero from Shakespeare's Tempest and teaming up with original Nemo's great-grandchild Jack Nemo. We see fairies performing the fictional Shakespeare play of Black Dossier, have to again tinker with 3D glasses and get to try to make sense of extremely obscure intertextual references. Which is what one would expect of the finale of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I guess.

On the one hand, it's hard to not think that the comic goes a bit overboard with this stuff if you practically have to read it with a commentary website open, but the weird storytelling levels actually work out quite well and the series stays enjoyable if you're not allergic to scratching your head here and there.

The best parts of the narrative are not the plot twists – Prospero and the fairies might actually be out to wipe out humanity turning everything that came before in the series into a perplexing hoax scheme – but different comics pastiches. Some Bond sequences are presented as James Bond newspaper strips whereas other scenes are meticulous parodies of British girls' comics magazines and children's comics à la Beano. The last issue where we leave Earth takes the form of a 2000AD issue – it's the legendary British science fiction magazine which was instrumental in launching both Moore and O'Neill's careers, so it's a neat meta way to finish their time in comics business. In order to really get the meta levels up, the creators also enter the story in the last issue to attend a wedding ceremony with the art swiped from the Fantastic Four annual in which Stan Lee and Jack Kirby tried to get in to see Invisible Girl marry Mister Fantastic.

This time we don't get bonus prose features at the back of the comic books. Instead, there's a black-and-white comic-book-inside-a-comic-book thing which mimics a cheap British rip-off of early American superhero comic with characters who are actually real British rip-offs of early American superheroes. It's harder to explain than to read and enjoy, really, and I can't believe nobody had told me about the ice-cream powered superhero Tommy Walls who is actually a thing. Well, now I know!

I'm not sure if they will be included in the graphic novel but the comic books begin and end with editorials and letter columns by "Al and Kev" who shed light on forgotten British comics talents and answer letters (probably 99% of which are ghost-written by themselves). It's fun stuff in its own right and if it is dropped from the graphic novel I suggest you try to hunt the original floppies.

Twenty years from now when the present culture wars have been long forgotten, future readers will scratch their heads with letters like this but maybe it goes with the rest of the confusion:

"Dear Al and Kev: As a middle-aged conservative incel sitting wedged behind my keyboard, trolling Alexandra Ocasio Cortez with my Batman T-shirt covered with Pringles, can I just ask, with a straight face, why you're leaving the comics business? Yours,
Hiram J. Comicsgate III"

The Math

Baseline: 8/10

Bonuses: +5 for weird, weird, weird pastiches and other irresistibly crazy things from the dustbins of comics history.

Penalties: -5 for the fact that trying to spot references and obsessing about it takes a toll on the reading fun.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 – "well worth your time and attention"

POSTED BY: Spacefaring Kitten, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018.

Reference: Moore, Alan & O'Neill, Kevin. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume 4: The Tempest #1-6 [Top Shelf & Knockabout Comics, 2018-19]

Microreview [music video]: Deutschland by Rammstein

(Content warning: Discussion of possibly disturbing visual material, violence, sex and the Holocaust.)

With new material from the German industrial metal/rock/NDH band Rammstein in nearly a decade, pretty much nobody expected anything safe-for-work — at least nobody familiar with the grand scheme of Rammstein videography. Videos of lead singles of their past albums have included, for example, Pussy, a collection of hardcore pornography clips featuring the band members, and Mein Teil, a smorgasboard of fighting and copulating bodies with a fellatio performed by an angel who is later eaten.

Fortunately, instead of NSFW (or in addition to it, depending on one's coworkers' appetite for concentration camp visuals, cannibalism and kissing severed heads), Rammstein delivered some amazing SFF this spring with their music video Deutschland, the flagship song from their new self-titled album.

Let me argue why the video directed by Specter Berlin is definitely something to enjoy from an SFF perspective (and maybe even consider when filling out the Hugo nomination ballot in the category of Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form next year so that we could have the first non-English finalist in this category for the first time in 18 years).

Well, depending on one's appetite for a number of things, as the case always is with Rammstein.

For those unfamiliar with the band, it's a musical act from Germany, probably best known for their Du Hast hit which was included in the original Matrix soundtrack back in the 90s. The band has had a long career, though, even if nothing they have published since has done quite as well in global terms. In Europe, however, it is a massive cultural force, seemingly becoming more and more popular even without publishing new music for quite some time now. Their new album has topped the album charts in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal and Switzerland (in addition to being #2 in Spain and Sweden).

I'm not a huge fan of the band's music per se, but on the other hand I'm not sure that the music is what they have been about for some time now. In interviews, the members often joke about how everything in music has been invented already and they are not skilled enough to play anything else than their style of monotonous, ramming, sample-heavy metal. Their last fifteen years since Reise, Reise came out have been a slow slog towards somewhat more accessible (if at times uninspired) rock while their edgier creative energies have went to dreaming up crazy flame thrower and missile pyrotechnics for their tours. Rammstein gigs are state-of-the-art horror circus, basically like Eurovision song contest with all the songs not about love but hate, perversions and cannibalism with some over-the-top silliness (like keyboardist's treadmill on stage) and sex antics thrown into the mix. On a US tour, performing Bück dich ("Bend down") with the customary slime-throwing dildo skit even got singer Till Lindemann and keyboardist Flake Lorenz arrested.

In addition to the bizarre sex stuff, Rammstein has been in some sort of trouble over their aesthetics and politics for numerous times. They took some heat after using footage from Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propadanda film in their music video of Depeche Mode cover "Stripped", and some more after it has been reported that fans of theirs have perpetrated a number of violent crimes. Apparently a favorite band of several school shooters and right wing extremists, they even decided to do a song about the fact that, when push comes to shove, they are politically on the left: the chorus of Links-2-3-4 ("Left-2-3-4") states: "They want my heart in the right place, but when I look down, it beats left". Not to be confused with any sort of politically correct or culturally sensitive Anglo-American left, of course.

However, it's an open question whether the actual lyrics make any difference when most listeners are not fluent in German. Similarly, the language barrier makes it kosher to casually listen to songs about sadomasochism, abuse, sexual violence, necrophilia, cannibalism and related topics (at least when there are no Germans, Austrians or Swiss people present), so there's a tremendous amount of irony around Rammstein to appreciate.

As far as the Deutschland video is considered, there has been some criticism over the inclusion of concentration camp imagery, but for Rammstein's standards, the song and the video are probably some of the least provocative ones in their disco/videography even if Holocaust is definitely as sensitive a subject as it gets in Germany. In contrast, their previous album's second single (after the X-rated Pussy) Ich tu dir weh ("I want to hurt you") was blacklisted by German officials due to violent content for some time so that the album had to be rereleased without it and only an instrumental version of the song could be played on tour.

This time around, the habitual record publishing controversy is a little more nuanced — and what's better, involves some science fiction.

The song Deutschland itself is a mundane rock anthem discussing the love/hate relationship Germans have with their country and its history for obvious reasons. In the chorus, between rhythmic DEUTSCHLAND chants, the I of the song announces their desire to love and condemn a thing at the same time with a flaming heart.

"Deutschland
Mein Herz in Flammen
Will dich lieben und verdammen
Deutschland"

Lindeman's lyrics are a mishmash of dark, megalomaniac metaphors delivered with ominous rolling r's, which are both his trademarks. It's an extremely catchy song trying very hard to get the listener throw their fist in the air during the chorus, as many characters do on the video, or at least nod their heads during the Deutschland shouts.

Still, the song is probably not of interest for the Nerds of the Feather readers out there. All the science fiction content is found on the visual track of Specter Berlin's video. While the track addresses the nation's dark past on symbolic terms without much in the way of specifics, Berlin's dramatization adds more of them than one can easily digest.

Black actress Ruby Commey plays the part of Germania, the embodied nation who is also a space amazon of some sort, coming from the futuristic space age to unearth or relive the past. With her, we take a tour through German history starting from the wars between the Roman empire and Germanic tribes 2000 years ago, focusing mostly on the violent bits: with jarring synthesizer effects on the background, Germania saws off the head of Till Lindemann's corpse and faces the attacking Roman legionnaries. At this point, the song and the fast forward time jumps really start.

We see glimpses of Germania with astronauts in space, her organizing a fist fight between two moustachioed gentlemen during (perhaps) the Weimar-era, at the scene of a Medieval battle clad in a golden armor, in a GDR office with Stasi operatives, and other times and places. A memorable segment features gluttonous monks with a serious rat problem feasting on Germania's body while a BDSM party is taking place under the table — everything is symbolically turbocharged.

There's guns, dogs, flames, crashing Hindenburg zeppelin, antique cars, prisons, protests, police brutality and V2 rockets taking off until we get to the concentration camp scenes which have caused some controversy in Germany. An SS commander (guitarist Richard Kruspe if I'm not mistaken) executes some of the other Rammstein members while Germania, this time wearing a Nazi uniform and an eye patch, looks on and Lindemann delivers the National Socialist "Deutschland Deutschland über allen" quote for good measure. It's difficult to fault Holocaust survivors' criticisms about it, but to be fair, the camp is only a part of a tapestry of violent events taking place in the German history and leaving that out would have been quite odd considering what the song is about.

Later, Baader-Meinhof Group gunmen from the violent 70s exchange fire with police and the monks burning Germania's body at stake meet and greet NSDAP goons burning books in the 30s until we get to the more apocalyptic visions. Concentration camp prisoners, knights, riot police and laser guns from space take part in the same epic fight scene and Germania in transformed into an mechanical angel, gives birth to puppies and is shot into space in a casket.

Your guess is as good as mine as to what the hell it is supposed to mean (if it is in fact supposed to mean anything) but I rather enjoy the mind blowing collage and insane production values.

Some of the elements are swipes from previous Rammstein videos. The band crawling on all fours towards the camera is also seen on Mein Teil and the casket holding Germania's body is quite similar to the one in which midgets place Snow White after she OD's in the video of Sonne — and the a piano version of the song is also heard during credits. Not to mention Till Lindemann's flame-throwing angel wings he uses when performing Engel. Recognizing these easter eggs is not necessary for enjoying the ride, though.

All in all, Deutschland lives up to the Rammstein motto of "Do you own thing — and then overdo it!" For anybody who read this far, I heartily recommend watching the video below.

(Apparently, the video cannot be embedded here — you have to sign in to YouTube to verify your age and conform that you really really want to see it. So, heres a link.)

The Math

Baseline Score: 10/10

Bonuses: +1 for overall craziness and production values

Penalties: -1 for the song being probably not that good (even if it's way better than the horrible Pussy), -1 for shock aesthetic getting inflated eventually

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 – "Very high quality/standout in its category"

***

Reference: Rammstein. Deutschland [2019]

Song written by: Richard Z. Kruspe, Paul Landers, Till Lindemann, Christian Lorenz, Oliver Riedel and Christoph Schneider

Video directed by: Specter Berlin

***

POSTED BY: Spacefaring Kitten, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018. 

Ode to GoT Nihilism

When a genre accumulates enough history, traditions, tradition-conscious fans and demolition-ready clichés, a certain kind of work will emerge: something that takes everything a little further, makes it a little more believable and makes everything that came before look a little silly.

That's what happened to superhero comics in 1980s with Watchmen (by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons, 1986-87) and Dark Knight Returns (by Frank Miller, 1986), and now it has happened to audiovisual epic fantasy. Or, well, to be fair it probably happened almost a decade ago in 2011 when we first found out that unexpectedly decapitating the show's protagonist is indeed possible and not all dwarfs in fantasy have to be small fake Scots who are heavily invested in the mining industry.

For those in the audience who had read Martin's books there was nothing unexpected in Ned Stark's death (or any of the other Stark deaths), of course, but majority of the millions of viewers (including me) has never read a single line of Song of Ice and Fire. 

So, Game of Thrones is finished. What are we left with?

A monumental piece of work that all future fantasy shows will probably be compared to, whether that makes any sense or not. Just as any morally complex superhero work interrogating its genre and history will always be measured against Watchmen, any piece of fantasy television that tries to look beyond the Manichean moralities of Tolkien is going to be evaluated with Game of Thrones at the back of everyone's head.

Whereas Watchmen was "the superhero story to end all superhero stories" (which it of course didn't do), Game of Thrones maxed out everything in the epic, post-Tolkien fantasy: more characters, more exquisitely constructed world, more nihilist politics and royal succession play-offs, more mysterious religions, more brutal battle scenes (nevermind the goofy military tactics in season 8), more sex and incest. It's a "fantasy TV show to end all fantasy TV shows", in the sense that all future fantasy entertainment will be informed by GoT on some level.

Watchmen seemed like the ultimate takedown of superhero lore. Wholesome, child-friendly superheroes were exposed as reactionary superjerks, alienated superhumans or in the very least a bit unstable people with unorthodox sex drives — that is basically the history of superhero comics in 1987-2019. I can safely predict that going forward, heroes in epic pseudo-medieval fantasy shows will have to make difficult and morally grey choices, suffer brutality and brace themselves for some complex, deadly scheming.

For me, the special ingredient of the show was always the nihilist outlook, something quite nonexistent in pre-GoT audiovisual fantasy. Despite all pompous talk about honor, gods or good and evil, there's no getting around the fact that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun (or it's medieval counterparts), as Mao Zedong opined. Nobody is safe and cruel things happen to people who don't deserve them. These themes will probably be developed further in post-GoT shows. Hopefully they'll be a little more thoughtful than the bulk of "edgy" 90s superheroes and choose to emulate other aspects than just tone-deaf brutality and sexual violence.

One can perhaps make the case that it was in some sense visionary to butcher children, soon-to-be mothers, old women and animals on-screen in the most popular and most expensive TV show of all time to underline that nobody is ever safe. However, I was more impressed with less bombastic lessons of nihilism, like Littlefinger's plot (in season 4, I think) featuring Ser Dontos Hollard, the fat lord who Joffrey wanted to kill but Sansa Stark saved by making him the court fool in some earlier season. Dontos's thank you speech to Sansa about his house's demise is heart-breaking — we think we know the character and sympathize with his bleak circumstances — but later it turns out that it's all part of an elaborate hoax put together by Littlefinger.

Playing with characterization and audience expectations, it's the small details like this that made the show really memorable for me. Sadly, poignant details cleverly playing with the characterization and audience expectations are exactly what was missing from the final season. What also seems to have disappeared somewhere along the way is the show's nihilist attitude altogether. Sure, Daenerys becomes a cruel despot in the end, but that is easily fixed with a knife through her heart, and justice and harmony prevail.

What in seven hells is that?

This was supposed to be a world in which Hollywood morality is challenged and everything is complex and precarious. I really feel we would have deserved an end in which all the good lords and ladies of Westeros are ready to stab each other in the back to get just a little more power. Instead, all we get from the final minutes of the great struggle for power is the phrase "Uncle, sit down" — like the democratic presidential primaries needed any more weaponizable pop culture quotes at this point.


POSTED BY: Spacefaring Kitten, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018. 

Microreview [Book]: Shadow Captain by Alastair Reynolds

There's something in the dying (or at-least-super-old) Earth subgenre that has always resonated with me: a storyworld littered with weird and wondrous leftovers from times so far past that people are not quite sure what to make of them. In those stories, the massive weight of history hangs over the world and makes it alien in a very specific way. There's an intriguing contrast to our own situation in history where we (at least think we) can understand everything in sight better than our ancestors ever could, and there's (as far as we know) no unrealistically advanced technology we can dig out and play with without really grasping it. What a bummer.

In his Congregation series, Alastair Reynolds transposes the core of this subgenre into space. The human civilization is millions of years old and has gone through a number of different phases known as 'occupations'. Some of them left behind strange artifacts like big skulls that can be used for communication between spacecrafts and weapons defying the laws of nature. These objects are then scavenged from artificial mini-planets or 'baubles' that are normally closed but open at certain intervals to let daring adventurers in. Small spaceship crews of relic-harvesting semi-pirates try to make a profit by rushing in and taking what they can before the baubles close again – hopefully steering clear of actual pirates who are ready to kill you and take your cargo, or worse.

It's a rich setting filled with manufactured worlds, robots, alien races, spaceships with massive sails, and a mystery around 'quoins' that are used as currency, so there's a lot of storytelling potential. Reynolds is working on a trilogy set in the Congregation, and his new novel Shadow Captain continues the story of the Ness sisters Adrana and Arafura who in the first book Revenger escaped from their home planet in order to start a life of spacefaring adventure.

It didn't go as planned, of course, and Adrana was captured by the murderous space pirate Bosa Sennen. Revenger followed Arafura who tried (and finally managed) to free her sister, losing parts of her body and personality in the process. Arafura became rather murderous herself during the course of the book and finally killed Sennen and took over her pirate ship.

In Shadow Captain, we continue from there. Now the protagonist is Adrana who is suspicious of her sister's new Sennen-like behavior. On the other hand, Adrana herself was held by the pirate who intended to transform her into the next incarnation of Bosa Sennen with the technologies of tomorrow. So, Adrana and Arafura both seem to have features of Sennen in them, and this conflict is driving the plot forward for much of the book. In addition to them not being able to trust each other (or even themselves completely), they find out that their ship is being followed by a mysterious vessel which should be impossible.

This is the canvas for Shadow Captain, and its noticeably smaller than its predecessor had. The small crew lead by the Ness sisters is confined inside their spaceship (plus the occational bauble) for the first half of the book, trying to get their hands on necessary resources, planning for the future and being skeptical of each others' intentions. This is quite different than Revenger, in which we got to see several weird worlds and plenty more action, but Reynolds is not bad with the thickening suspense either.

My main criticism is that the other crew members are quite forgettable characters and they could have been spiced up quite a bit. Adrana is probably meant to be a little more adult version of Arafura, but to me she just felt like a more passive and frankly boring character. The book doesn't really get going until they make their way to a backwater planet for supplies and treatment for an injured crew member.

Finally, there's action, weird worlds and answers for mysteries, so I guess I got mostly what I wanted. Still, there's no hyper enigmatic adversary this time (just an enigmatic one), or same kind of a clear purpose that would be driving the main character forward. I was hoping for a little more energy in the book, even if it's still definitely worth your time and will hopefully set the stage for the final book that will – fingers crossed – be swashbuckling as hell.


***

The Math

Base Score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for the most amazingly fascinating fictional universe in recent memory

Penalties: -1 for not living up to Revenger in some respects, -1 lack of energy here and there

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10 – "still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore"

Reference: Reynolds, Alastair. Shadow Captain [Gollancz 2019]

***

POSTED BY: Spacefaring Kitten, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018. 

Microreview [Book]: The Outcast Hours edited by Mahvesh Murad & Jared Shurin

There's a fine line between an anthology not really holding together and being intriguingly diverse. Every reader of The Outcast Hours by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin probably has their own opinion on which side the book ultimately falls for them.

It is very diverse: there are stories about a toothfairy, feuding apothecaries, a babysitter for criminals' children, a babysitter for homeless dogs. Sam Beckbessinger, Lauren Beukes and Dale Halvorsen's opening story is one of the best pieces of socially relevant occult gore short fiction I've ever read – I confess I didn't know there's such a niche before picking the book up.

Night is a great theme for a short story anthology. It is mysterious, atmospheric, intriguing, fleeting and uncertain – as all enjoyable art and fiction – so there's plenty of room to play with and not too many restrictions on where you can go. My main criticism of the anthology is that quite many of the stories leave these possibilities on the table and focus on night just being synonymous with darkness.

I mean, in some stories, night is not a mysterious landscape for whatever you can dream up. Instead, it's a place of nightmares. On the other hand, that's probably entertaining for readers who enjoy whispering to their protagonists that going down to the basement with an enigmatic, sargophagus-collecting millionaire in Karachi or to the home of a bit-too-eager Tinder date in New York City is arguably not the best thing to do if you're in this kind of a book. Nevermind the continent, your chances of living long and happy are going to take a dive.

However, this whispering business is not what I'm into when it comes to horror. I appreciate horrific stories that do a little more to make me afraid than relying solely on a spooky twist-ending, as demonstrated by Beckbessinger, Beukes and Halvorsen's great opening for the book. I fear that even that would have lost some of its power if the editors had decided to place it deeper in the anthology after some other horrors had numbed my senses first.

The best part of reading anthologies like this is of course discovering interesting new authors you had never heard of before. For me, the most promising new acquaintance is maybe Matt Suddain whose tale about two chemists in a weird fantasy (or maybe not) town that is too small for both of them is quirky, weird and suggestive with perfect dosages of each. Suddain delivers his simple story just right, which isn't that easy to do.

In the short space that each story is given, some tales feel that they would have what it takes for being longer, whereas some others seem a bit forced at this length. Couple of the stories would probably have worked better in the same form as China Miéville's ambient one-or-two-page microstories or vignettes sprinkled through the book, as not very much is always happening.

Because the stories are so short, there's a lot of them – 25 in total, not counting Miéville's nine short-shorts. There's something to like and dislike for everyone, and the best way to experience The Outcast Hours is perhaps not to accelerate through it (it's a rapid series of accelerations and sudden stops) but rather to read one or two before before going to sleep – or at any rate before the night comes.

Good night and good luck!
***

The Math

Base Score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for variance and diversity

Penalties: -1 for the cheap scares, -1 for doing too many things at once

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 – "An enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws"

Reference: Murad, Mahvesh & Shurin, Jared (eds). The Outcast Hours [Solaris 2019]

***

POSTED BY: Spacefaring Kitten, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018.

Microreview [Book]: Unholy Land by Lavie Tidhar

In the beginning of Lavie Tidhar's new novel Unholy Land, it seems like the book is based on one big politicohistorical What If: What if the Jewish state of Israel (which is called Palestina in the novel) was established in Eastern Africa instead of Middle East?

What if the displaced people who had to make room for the new state were the inhabitants of a strip of land between Kenya and Uganda instead of Palestinians? What if there were illegal Jewish settlements beyond the Green Line and "a separation wall" being built on the disputed territories of Nakuru instead of West Bank?

This poor man's promised land, featuring human rights abuses, ethnic tensions, civil unrest and suicide bombings, is not all there is to the novel, however.

The book begins with Lior Tirosh, a troubled novelist, returning to Palestina, catching up with old acquintances, getting worried about a relative of his, and running into trouble with the state's brutal security operatives. Then the whole tale becomes something else: it's not a politically charged alternative historical thriller but something much more fantastic.

I was first a little taken aback by the inclusion of Kabbalistic slash quantum mechanical explorations of parallel realities very reminiscent of Miéville's The City & The City, but when you get your mind around it, the metaphorics do work.

Unholy Land discusses Israel, and in everything related to Israel, people live in different political universes. They look at the same thing but see completely different realities, as if there were different worlds on top of each other, not completely aligning. In Unholy Land, the borders between realities are porous, but once you get settled to one of them, its logic takes hold and its harder to see things in any other way. I feel there's a profound point that the novel is trying to make here, although occasionally it tries quite hard.

The execution is a bit tangled in places, but Tidhar manages to keep the narratives of the third-person Tirosh, a first-person security spook Bloom and a second-person reality-hopping literary scholar and some sort of a (non-literary) agent Nur under control. Especially the latter two narratives deliver some very quirky and enjoyable prose.

Some chapters describing Tirosh's dealings with different characters feel a bit contrived here and there. Certain characters he meets seem little more than mouthpieces for different ideas and worldviews which Tidhar wishes to discuss, not real people with real personalities, and that's a bit disappointing.

In one of the more heavy-handed instances, Bloom even invokes some Nuremberg logic when defending to himself and to the reader the horrible things he must do: "I was merely doing my job!" Not very subtle, eh? In the novel, there are so many comments made about how the persecuted have themselves become persecutors that Tidhar really doesn't leave the reader uncertain of how he feels about the current situation in Israel.

However, despite a couple of unplausible-sounding exchanges, Unholy Land still manages to hold my interest quite well. I especially enjoyed the poignancy of its worldbuilding and the inventiveness of the narrative levels – fans of more straight-faced fantasy are probably not going to enjoy it as much.

Tidhar throws in a heavy dose of metafictionality into the mix as well, mentioning several of his own previous novels as works by an alternative-dimension Lior Tirosh. Depending on whether you are into that sort of thing, maybe you ought to give Unholy Land a go. There's quite much going on at times and Tidhar struggles to keep all the balls simultaneously in the air, but it is an engaging book with something worthwhile to say.

***

The Math

Base Score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for poignant worldbuilding, +1 for metafictional shenanigans

Penalties: -1 for occasional ham-fisted characters, -1 for metafictional shenanigans

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 – "an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws"

Reference: Tidhar, Lavie. Unholy Land [Tachyon 2018]
***

POSTED BY: Spacefaring Kitten, an extradimensional enthusiast of speculative fiction, comics, and general weirdness. Contributor since 2018.