Nanoreviews: A Mirror Mended, The Jade Setter of Janloon, The Legacy of Molly Southbourne

A Mirror Mended, by Alix E. Harrow [Tordotcom Publishing]

A Mirror Mended is the follow up / sequel to last year’s Hugo Award finalist novella A Spindle Splintered and picks up the story some five years later where Zinnia Gray is traveling the multiverse of fairy tales and fables, rescuing and facilitating escapes for those varied heroines trapped within a forced narrative that doesn’t quite fit. Rather than chasing her own mortality, Zinnia spends her time avoiding her life in lieu of these adventures until a villain wants that same escape Zinnia has offered so many others.

As much as I liked A Spindle Splintered, this is a much stronger novella that goes deeper. Harrow dives into how women are treated in these stories, slotted into neat roles - even the villains, because what other paths do some women have? With quick dialogue and a sharp eye for storytelling - A Mirror Mended is top notch.
Score: 9/10

The Jade Setter of Janloon, by Fonda Lee [Subterranean Press]

Prequel novella to the Green Bone Saga focuses on a specialty jeweler, a “jade setter”, officially allied with a small and fiercely neutral clan. Pulo is an apprentice jade setter to the master setter Isin. Because their clan is neutral, their business caters to all and is treated as neutral ground. When a ceremonial sword from The Mountain Clan is stolen from the shop, that neutrality will be tested.

What works is that if you’re familiar with the Green Bone Saga, this is a story set on the periphery of characters and clans we know and if you’re not, this is a really good story of fairly regular folk potentially caught in the middle between two much more powerful factions. That’s not what the story is, but it provides color and texture.
Score: 8/10

The Legacy of Molly Southbourne, by Tade Thompson [Tordotcom Publishing]

I never wrote about the Molly Southbourne novellas for Nerds of a Feather, but from the start I was hooked on this series - though I didn’t know it was going to be a series when I first began. The Murders of Molly Southbourne featured Molly, a young woman with a peculiar affliction - everytime she bleeds, another “molly” is born full grown and intent on mindlessly murdering her. What a concept! I loved it. I *liked* the second, but it was a somewhat different thing. Still compelling, but perhaps less. It widened the scope of what we knew of the mollys, it just didn’t reach the same highs.

The Legacy of Molly Southbourne is the third, and this time presumably final book in this sequence - now with a community of molly’s trying to make their lives and, interestingly, a community of Tamaras doing the same, until a presumed dormant Soviet cloning program rears its head and puts them at odds.

I’m not likely to do justice to The Legacy of Molly Southbourne, but it takes so much of what I loved about Murders, broadens it, adds depth, and just hits on every level. There’s a murderous molly, a molly-hunter, and a gathering storm of a final fight on the horizon. It’s friggin great. You absolutely need to read the first two books for Legacy to hit. But if you do, watch out.
Score: 8/10

Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, Hugo Award Winner. Minnesotan. He / Him

Reading the Hugos: Series

Welcome to the first article in the 2020 Edition of Reading the Hugos, where I try to cram as much Hugo related content into my brain in as short a time as possible so I can talk about what's on the ballot and share some thoughts.

I often joke that the Hugo Award Season is eternal and that is only half of a joke because there is only a small breath between the announcement of the winners in August and the end of the year when we start thinking about what the best books of the year may have been, and that leads directly into submitting our nominating ballots and the cycle begins anew.

Today we are going to look at the six finalists for Best Series. Frankly, it's a little weird for me to begin with Series rather than Best Novel or one of the shorter fiction categories, but things work out as they do and here we are thinking about Best Series as a category.

This is the fourth year of having a Best Series category and while each year has had its own flavor based on the works that were eligible that year, I particularly appreciate this year's flavor. This year's finalists represent some of the breadth of science fiction and fantasy, from urban fantasy to space opera and just about everything in between. Even more so, this year's Best Series finalists represent excellence in the genre AND represent series work that is less likely to make the Best Novel ballot - and if that's the case, this is Best Series at it's best. These are works where the encapsulation of the whole is more notable than any single volume - where a single volume is raised up by its association with the rest of the series.

This is not to say that any of the qualifying novels (or stories) that made these series eligible are not worthy of recognition on their own, because they are, but if we pay attention to the shape of the genre and what sort of work is being recognized for Best Novel and other awards and if we're being honest we'll acknowledge that few of these works are likely to make the ballot.

THAT is the truest value of Best Series.

On to the finalists.


The Expanse, by James S.A. Corey (Orbit)
InCryptid, by Seanan McGuire (DAW)
Luna, by Ian McDonald (Tor)
Planetfall, by Emma Newman (Ace)
Winternight, by Katherine Arden (Del Rey)
Wormwood, by Tade Thompson (Orbit)

Luna: I first tried to read Luna: New Moon when it was published in 2015 and at that time I read maybe twenty or thirty pages before I completely lost interest and decided that not only was this series not for me, but perhaps Ian McDonald was not for me. I had tried and failed to get into some of his earlier novels and this was likely the last chance at novel length I was willing to give him. Then came this year's Hugo ballot and my incessant need to read everything on each year's Hugo ballot.

So, I tried again. Perhaps I was in a better place in my life, perhaps Luna: New Moon hit me at a better time of day, but I read the whole thing! That's not necessarily a real accomplishment, but given my previous failure to read this novel I'll take it as a win.

The only problem is that for most of Luna: New Moon, I was disinterested in what happened to any of the characters and the political machinations fell flat. By the end, I was curious what happened next after a fairly explosive conclusion - but more in the sense that I'd rather read a summary of Wolf Moon and Moon Rising than actually read those novels.

Given how many people adore Ian McDonald's work, I do recognize that this is a case of the wrong reader for the wrong book than it is about McDonald's work itself. I may never be an Ian McDonald reader. There's something about his storytelling that does not work for me, and as such, Luna: New Moon is as far as I plan to go with this series.

Wormwood: Rosewater was a novel I figured I would get to eventually, but I had no sense of urgency to read it anytime soon. Until, of course, the series as a whole was up for a Hugo Award.

Like the Winternight and Luna trilogies, Wormwood is one that I am considering solely off of one novel. I've read Rosewater but I am unlikely to read The Rosewater Insurrection in the next month before voting for the Hugo Awards closes. Like Katherine Arden's Winternight novels but unlike Luna, I am inclined to someday read The Rosewater Insurrection. I'm far more curious as to how Tade Thompson will develop this series than I am Ian McDonald - but and this is where we are comparing series, I am far more excited to read more of Katherine Arden. I engaged more with the storytelling of Tade Thompson than Ian McDonald. At no time was I disinterested, though I was mostly confused as to where Thompson was going. But, also at no time was I fully enraptured wtih the storytelling as I was with The Bear and the Nightingale.

It's a fool's errand to rank and compare novels and it is even moreso to compare a series, but when voting for an award requires one to do so, that's how I have to start thinking about. Sometimes it's not what the work is on its own, it is how I do I think about it in relation to another - and in relation to this category's ballot, Wormwood slots in very neatly between Luna and Winternight, but does not excite me as much as the top of the ballot.

Winternight: When I wrote about the John W. Campbell Award (now Astounding Award) for Best New Writer in 2018, I noted that after reading The Bear and the Nightingale that I was as excited to read the second book in the Winternight trilogy as I was to see what she is writing ten years in the future. The Bear and the Nightingale was the announcement of a major new talent. The novel touched on Russian folklore and was a tight family story mostly set in remote regions of Russia.

Now that Katherine Arden's trilogy is complete we can see what an accomplishment the series truly is. I would love to be at least two novels into the series at this point, if not having completed it. Perhaps by the time Hugo voting has closed in the middle of July I will have read The Girl in the Tower, but if not - I can still say with full assurance that Winternight is beautifully written excellence.

Planetfall: At this point I have read Planetfall, After Atlas, and Atlas Alone - only missing the third book, Before Mars. At a very high level, the first novel deals with the colonization of another world and the religious cult / organization which founded the colony. The second novel deals with some of the fallout back on Earth, though each book is far more complex than such a basic description. Planetfall, the series, is a fully realized universe with machinations and deft characterization.

I've thoroughly enjoyed each of the three Planetfall novels I've read, but despite that I never have the urge to go right out and read the next. These are very good science fiction novels and the series is richer because of Emma Newman's excellent worldbuilding - but as good as they are (and they are very good) they've never become essential reading for me.

The Expanse: It is somewhat weird to be disappointed when a favorite series makes the Hugo ballot, but voters had the opportunity here to hold off just this year and wait for the final volume of The Expanse to recognize a completed series. Maybe that's not realistic, and you never know what the future holds so perhaps it is best to recognize excellence when you get the chance - but if The Expanse doesn't win this year it is unlikely to have another chance at Hugo.

At the absolute worst, The Expanse will go down as a two time Hugo Award finalist for Best Series (not to mention the Best Novel nomination for Leviathan Wakes) and one of the most notable and wildly popular science fiction series in some time. The Expanse is alternatingly a heck of a lot of fun and deadly serious with heart rending moments. The most impressive thing about The Expanse is that when James S.A. Corey reset the series with a significant time jump, the series got even better.

InCryptid: When I first wrote about the Incryptid series in 2018 I was only just discovering Seanan McGuire. I had intended that year to read more of the October Daye novels, but was distracted by InCryptid on the Hugo Award ballot. Readers, I was hooked. There was a time I would have said my favorite Seanan McGuire novels were the ones she wrote as Mira Grant. While my esteem for Mira Grant remains high, my love for Seanan McGuire's novels - both October Daye as well as Incryptid - has a special place in my heart. I adore these novels.

There are now nine published Incryptid novels (eight are eligible for consideration for this award), plus a number of novellas and short stories. I made the point earlier that Best Series has the opportunity to recognize long running series where any individual novel will almost certainly never make the Hugo ballot but the series as a whole is absolute excellence and perhaps even where the whole is more significant than any single part.

That is Incryptid, and though I adore each novel with all my heart, it is as part of the larger series where Incryptid shines. It's not just the story of Verity, Alexander, and Antimony Price - it's the story of their family and their life's mission to protect (and study) the supernatural creatures of our world from The Covenant. Each novel is excellent on its own, but Incryptid is so much richer for how our understanding and appreciation builds as the series progresses. If that is not the definition of a Best Series, I don't know what is.


My Vote
1. Incryptid
2. The Expanse
3. Planetfall
4. Winternight
5. Wormwood
6. Luna


POSTED BY: Joe Sherry - Co-editor of Nerds of a Feather, 4x Hugo Award Finalist for Best Fanzine. Minnesotan. He / Him.

Nanoreviews: The Rosewater Redemption, Peter Watts is an Angry Sentient Tumor, Call of Cthulhu

Thompson, Tade. The Rosewater Redemption [Orbit, 2019]

Spoiler warning for the previous two Rosewater novels.

It had to come to this, right? After the fight between Nigeria and the city-state of Rosewater, we now have aliens living in human bodies (corpses, really). They live among the people of Rosewater, and they’re more or less undetectable. But the aliens need bodies, and the troublemakers don’t die when the host corpse dies; they just get downloaded back into a new body. When some aliens start to take up mass murder to get the bodies they need, a human resistance forms. It’s comprised of strange bedfellows, but they’ve got one mission: to stop the extinction of the human race.

Redemption is a fitting conclusion to the trilogy. As with the previous novels, Thompson writes fully formed characters, and then sticks them in this dirty, strange world to see what happens. Some questions lingering in your brain from the previous two novels will get addressed, but Redemption does take some odd detours that haven’t really added up in hindsight. Regardless, so many authors don’t know how to end something, and Thompson, thankfully, does. There’s a minimal amount of deus ex machina, but it works. If you’ve made it this far, and you should because these books are good, see the conclusion.

Score: 8/10

Watts, Peter. Peter Watts Is An Angry Sentient Tumor: Revenge Fantasies and Essays [Tachyon Publications, 2019]

You’ve seen this before, right? The novelist maintains a blog, someone has the brilliant idea to turn that blog into an essay collection, so the author and an editor spend an afternoon collating, winnowing, and editing to produce a new book from old material. If you like Peter Watts, here’s a chance to see his blog posts in paper form. But this isn’t really the kind of thing you want to read in one go, right? It’s kind of a pick-up, put-down. You’re getting a firehose of Peter Watts’ brain in machine gun fashion, so you can take the rapid fire blasts right in the face, but I chose to get a taste and shelve it. You wouldn’t read a blog from beginning to end, so doing the same here is a bad idea. Watts is an easy read (in this form, at least), and the essays are generally entertaining. If you want to know what Watts thinks about enough to put hands to keyboard for a blog post, but you want it to be slightly more edited and selected for quality, here it is. Just don’t read it in one go.

Score: 6/10

Cyanide Studio. Call of Cthulhu [Focus Home Interactive, 2018]

Call of Cthulhu is a first person role-playing video game set in the world of the pen-and-paper role-playing game, Call of Cthulhu, deeply inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. You play a detective sent to the isle of Darkwater to investigate the strange circumstances surrounding the death of a local family. Along the way you find cultists, a mad scientist, elder signs, and deep old ones. Call of Cthulhu starts off very strong as you arrive in Darkwater and start to piece together what the situation is, but it soon deteriorates into a series of linear game levels that demand very little and give very little back in return. It’s like you’re at a theme park and you get to spend the beginning milling about the park, but eventually you get to the roller coaster and then you’re just strapped in for the ride. It’s far from bad, but it does boil out a lot of the flavor and freedom of the pen-and-paper game. Your player stats don’t seem to mean much beyond those first couple hours. It’s also ugly, and not stylistically ugly. It just looks like it was made 5 years ago, put on a shelf, and dusted off to release last year. I played through it all over a weekend, which is about the perfect use for it. A good weekend game, but no need to ever play it again or give it much more thought.

Score: 5/10 

***
POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014  

Microreview [book]: The Rosewater Insurrection by Tade Thompson

A (Mostly) Harmonious Choir

Reviewer's Note: This is a review of the second novel in the Wormwood trilogy, so spoilers for the first novel should be expected. If you haven't read Rosewater, you should do that first because it's excellent, but The Rosewater Insurrection does an admirable job of bringing a new reader up to speed. While I never recommend jumping into the middle of a trilogy, it could work in this case. Either way, the spoiler-free review of The Rosewater Insurrection is that it's action-packed and slightly weird, but doesn't quite live up to the previous novel. 7/10. Last warning, spoilers for Rosewater will follow.

Following the events of Rosewater, The Rosewater Insurrection follows a handful of different perspectives as the city of Rosewater continues to act as host to an invading but seemingly benevolent alien. What the residents of Rosewater don't know is that the alien is just a "footholder" for a subtle but complete invasion as aliens essentially download themselves into human bodies. While this starts to take shape, the government of Rosewater declares its independence from their host county of Nigeria, which turns all eyes inward at a time when the alien is going through some changes.

Where Rosewater largely followed Kaaro, The Rosewater Insurrection makes Kaaro a secondary character to several others, such as Aminat, the alien avatar Anthony, and other characters more central to the plot. The multiple perspective changes serve to give a more complete picture of what's going on within the city of Rosewater than the singular perspective from Kaaro, but the non-linearity of perspective and the expanded cast is a lot to keep track of sometimes. The point, however, is that Rosewater is the focus of the story moreso than any one character.

While this hopping around might make a novel feel jittery or uneven, The Rosewater Insurrection progressively and competently builds to a crescendo that mostly pays off. Like the previous novel, this one suitably combines the near-future with weirdness and it's still fun the second time around. It does pull some stuff out of its pocket that feels like rewriting continuity a bit, but I'm excited to see where the next novel goes.


---

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 Still weird, still engaging

Penalties: -1 Lots of moving parts to keep track of

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 (an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Thompson, Tade. The Rosewater Insurrection (Orbit, 2019)

Microreview [Book]: Creatures: The Legacy of Frankenstein

A collection of varied stories that continue the story and the themes of Frankenstein to great effect.

Joining Vance in his celebration of Frankenstein at 200 this month, I'm looking today at a timely volume from Abaddon books, which explores the mythology two centuries on through a new set of stories edited by David Thomas Moore. Creatures: The Legacy of Frankenstein is a collection of five long novelettes and/or short novellas exploring the legacy of Victor Frankenstein and his creation through a series of shared universe stories, dealing with other creators in other situations, all of which circle the same themes of life, death, autonomy and monstrosity that the original text evokes so effectively.

For me, Creatures draws on some foundational English Literature experiences, as Frankenstein basically bookended my secondary school career. I didn't read the novel itself until my final year, as part of a term paper on Gothic fiction which pretty much my late teen aesthetic (Rebecca-from-Jane-Eyre meets a less experimental version of The Rules of Attraction, I guess), but I have stronger memories of performing parts of a dramatised version in first year. At the time, I was tall, awkward, and had just moved back to the UK from Australia with a deeply uncool hybrid accent. I'd also just started getting periods, and I have strong impressions of trying to work with classmates on this strange, tragic story while feeling crampy and sticky and wrong, as if my entire body was about to give itself away and condemn me to eternal embarrassment on top of all its other betrayals. That I associate this feeling -- which I assume was happening just as much during Maths and Science and History and all the other highlights of the English Year 7 curriculum -- with Frankenstein specifically is, I think, an indicator of how resonant the myth is even when filtered through age-appropriate dramatisations. I've never quite gotten over the tragedy of the creature, perhaps because at the time I encountered it, the feeling of wrongness felt all too real.

The stories in this volume proceed in chronological order, from the mid 19th century to a contemporary tale, and I believe that all five also feature the original creature somewhere in the story, although only in Tade Thompson's "Kaseem's Way" does he get to speak to the audience directly. The story alternates between the first person, epistolary narrative of the creature and the perspective of Kaseem, a Black boy from London who ends up becoming the ward of a scientist named Gull. Twelve years after meeting Gull, Kaseem is now deep into illegal scientific practices alongside Radha, another young scientist, when Gull's discovery of Victor Frankenstein's original notes leads to a replication of that experiment, drawing the attention of the creature and the authorities down on the pair. By placing Frankenstein's work into the hands of two young people of colour in 19th century London, Thompson's opening story immediately sets the myth in a more diverse context, playing on the power structures inherent in both the science fiction conceit and the real-world societies of the time to great effect. Neither Kaseem nor the creature ultimately come out well in this story, but the end has a fitting amount of rage to see them both off in style.

"The New Woman", by Rose Biggin, is a decadent, queer, female-driven story set in the last days of the 19th century, in a "bohemian assemblage" centred around Mrs Stella Moore. Into this company of artists has been brought a medical student, Christine Sparks, who has been experimenting on embalming corpses in formaldehyde, and her description of her work captures the imagination of another artist, Fran, who has been "sculpting" with dead creatures (think taxidermy, but with more glitter). It quickly transpires that Christine and Fran already know each other quite well, and that the next stage in their relationship will be a joint project to create a work of living art out of a corpse. Their creation, Eve, ends up being realised and impacting their relationship in ways that neither predicted. Of all the "creatures" in this volume, Eve ends up being the most well realised, and her journey from "living artwork" to a fully realised person, cognisant of the limitations of her state, is compelling and tragic. Unfortunately, that tragedy also ends up punishing its queer characters in favour of heteronormativity, which I can't quite forgive it for.

Of all the tales here, I felt Paul Meloy's "Reculver" had the least to bring in a speculative sense, although it deals interestingly with disability and wartime experience, drawing parallels between the myths that built up around those who fought, and the parallel mythology of those who, for whatever reason, didn't. Of all the stories, it leans most heavily on the motif of the outsider: its teenage protagonist, who had polio as a child and has been left with a bad leg, feels he does not fit in to his small seaside town, but it's not clear who among the remainder of the cast does. The protagonist's obsession with childhood crush Ann Bennett and the man she begins a relationship with, Geoffrey Dodd, forms a large part of the plot, as does the reaction of Ann's "shellshocked", violent father. Told in an almost slipstream style, with lots of odd dream sequences and narrative skips, the direct appearance of the Frankenstein myth in "Reculver" ends up feeling more minor than any of the other stories, and it was less successful with me as a result, although as a standalone it would still be a strong experience.

Emma Newman brings what, on the surface, feels like a classic Ashes to Ashes style period police procedural in "Made Monstrous", with a detective and his assistant dealing with a series of "mysterious" corpse thefts whose basic purpose won't come as a supririse to a reader coming to this story as part of a Frankenstein collection. However, as the title indicates, this is a story that plays particularly heavily on the "who is the monster" element of Frankenstein and there's an interesting subversion of Victor's original intent in how the mystery plays out. Detective McGregor is a compelling lead in all of this, and I have to note that this is the second time, after Carlos Moreno of After Atlas, that Newman has made me root strongly for a gruff male detective who represents the system but has also been deeply, irreversibly wounded by it. WPC Hannerty, despite a deeply unpromising introduction through McGregor's casual chauvinist lens, ends up being a great addition too, and the relationship between the two leads is one of the best parts of the story. Emma Newman's involvement in this collection was a major factor in my picking it up and I was far from disappointed with her contribution here.

And then there's "Love Thee Better", by Kaaron Warren. This story, frankly, terrified the hell out of me. Protagonist Nina, and her partner Declan, are gifted paid berths on a mysterious medically-inclined cruise ship run by her father's family friend, after an accident leaves accident at the building site he works on which ends up completely removing his arm. It quickly becomes clear that the main passengers are either waiting for limb donations or want to be donors; this is only the tip of the weird iceberg and there's very little hope of Declan or Nina getting out untouched. Worse, there's a sense of claustrophobia and fatalism among all of the passengers, Nina included - while there are hints that not everybody is on board with the captain's agenda, nobody does anything to stop themselves from falling prey to it. I find stories which feature utter complacency in the face of horror far more terrifying than reading a story where people are struggling against their fate, and the timelessness and lack of escape that the cruise setting brings only makes this worse. Of course, this is a Frankenstein story, so limb transplants are not the whole story, and the way the introduction of artificial life takes place here is just part of the tense, relentless escalation. I think this was an excellent story, but I felt sick for about an hour after finishing it, so there's no way I'm going back to check.

Put together, this is a very strong collection: what the stories as a whole lack in inter-relatedness and consistency, they make up for in terms of the sheer breadth of the Frankenstein experience that they cover between them. There's no simple moralities here, no clear answer to questions about scientific progress, life and death, revenge and forgiveness, or the condition of otherness which the original story deals with so successfully. Equally, with the possible exception of "Kaseem's Way", these are all stories that I think would work even for readers unfamiliar with the original: each stands alone, narratively speaking, and these are universal themes. Whether or not you're a fan of Shelley's 200-year-old masterpiece, Creatures is a worthy, varied anthology.

The Math

"Kaseem's Way" by Tade Thompson: 8/10 - smart and socially aware, with a strong sense of continuity from the original novel.

"The New Woman" by Rose Biggin: 7/10 - lush, unsettling queer aesthetic let down by the ending.

"Reculver" by Paul Meloy: 6/10 - effective as an exploration of otherness and belonging, not so much as a work of speculative fiction

"Made Monstrous" by Emma Newman: 8/10 - feels straightforward on the surface but has powerful hidden depths

"Love Thee Better" by Kaaron Warren: 7/10 - creepy as hell, which I guess is a good thing here?

Average: 7.2/10.

Bonus: +0.8 covers a wide range of thematic areas without detracting from the coherent whole.

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10.

POSTED BY: Adri is a semi-aquatic migratory mammal most often found in the UK. She has many opinions about SFF books, and is also partial to gaming, baking, interacting with dogs, and Asian-style karaoke. Find her on Twitter at @adrijjy.

Reference: Moore, David Thomas (ed). Creatures: The Legacy of Frankenstein [Abaddon Books, 2018]

6 Books with Author Tade Thompson

Tade Thompson lives and works in the UK. He writes crime, speculative fiction and general fiction. He is an occasional artist, enjoys jazz, but cannot play the guitar to save his own life. He's on Twitter as @tadethompson and has a website, Long Time After Midnight.

Topically, Nerds of a Feather just ran a review of his latest novel, Making Wolf.

1. What book are you currently reading?

I should point out that I never read one book at a time, so this is a difficult exercise for me. I'm reading The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell. I'm a big fan of Cloud Atlas and while I've read everything else that Mitchell has written, nothing has given me a frisson of excitement like this book. The characters are vivid and read from the first page. I'm only on page 46, but I already feel I know Holly Sykes and the possible transdimensional horrors that might be in store for her. Mitchell is a writer of consummate skill.

2. What upcoming book you are really excited about?

Saga vol 5 Brian K Vaughn and Fiona Staples.

I didn't ask if it was cool to pick graphic novels.

I've been a fan of Fiona Staples' art since the Hawksmoor graphic novel she did way back when. Vaughn's work I can take or leave, but I do have all five Ex Machina volumes on my shelf.

Whatever alchemy brought them together on Saga should be bottled. It is an amazing series that grabs you by the gonads from page one of volume one. It tickles the hybrid fantasy/space opera bone. It's surreal and funny and farcical. It has a royal family with TVs for heads. It has a strange interracial couple running away from powerful factions tickling that Capulet and Montague bone. It has a lying cat-not a cat that lies, but one that detects lies in anyone around it. I want a lying cat for Christmas.

I can't wait to see what they get up to in Volume 5.

3. Is there a book you're currently itching to re-read?

No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.

McCarthy needs no introduction, but there's something about this book, something powerful about the voice of the narrator, or the absolute evil of the antagonist, Chigurh, or the utter tragedy of the Moss family. I've always wanted to go back to this book to give it a close, slow read. I want to know how he got me to care about these characters. He also manages to make all the settings seem apocalyptic and bleak. All of McCarthy's books are uncompromising, but this is the one that keeps pulling me back.

4. How about a book you've changed your mind about over time--either positively or negatively?

Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood.

I first read this book ten years ago. I'm a big Atwood fan, but I've never understood her need to distance herself from Science Fiction, even when she's writing science fiction. That may have been the reason I responded negatively to 'Oryx and Crake'. It's the first of a trilogy, and my friend Stephanie Saulter recently read the last book and encouraged me to try again. Maybe it's because I'm older and (one presumes) wiser than I was ten years ago, but I really enjoyed it this time, despite the wonky science and the so-so Sci-fi tropes. The language is exquisite. I have the other two books in the trilogy and I now feel like reading them.

5. What's one book, which you read as a child or young adult, that has had a lasting influence on your writing?

The Masters of Solitude by Marvin Kaye and Parke Godwin.

It's out of print, but you can find second hand versions. I have bought three copies of this book. The first one I read to tatters and I had to buy another. The second one I gave to someone dear. The third one is on its way to decrepitude.

This book was the first non-twee fantasy I read. It isn't Grimdark by any stretch, but it does not look away from the grimy aspects of humanity. It's about leadership, the sacrifices that brings, about the abuse of power (both supernatural and temporal) and intolerance. There is some exploration of telepathy (which interests me as a trope) as well as magic. It's about Wicca versus magic in a far-future, post-apocalyptic world.

It's part of a trilogy that the writers did not finish (one is now dead), but this is the only book that I cannot stop reading.

6. And speaking of that, what's *your* latest book, and why is it awesome?

My book's called Making Wolf. It's a crime noir book set in an imaginary country in an alternate history West Africa. It's a gritty narrative in which I mash up Chandler and Spillane against West African culture. I think it's awesome because I have a bad guy called Church who will get completely under your skin. Don't take my word for it. Read the book and see. Money back guarantee if your skin doesn't crawl.

Microreview [book]: Making Wolf by Tade Thompson

A book that makes grimdark fantasy feel like a slightly lukewarm but otherwise pleasant bath.

The novel is available on Amazon here.

The Meat:

Sometimes novels take us to the heights of achievement. Heroes overcoming great trials, great evils. There is a sense of jubilation as villains are defeated in the last moment, as battles are won, as good triumphs. As readers there is a shared pride at having reached such an ending. Sometimes, though, novels have no interest in the heights of achievement, in evil as something that can be banished or defeated, in heroes of any sort. In such books, instead of sharing the triumphs of the protagonist, the reader is made complicit in their sins. Making Wolf definitely fits into the later category, creating a rich and haunting narrative that moves with power and destructive energy of a truck tearing a man in half.

This is not a book for the feint of heart. The speculative element comes from the alternate history it creates taking place in Alcacia, a fictional Yoruba nation that in this setting formed during the Nigerian Civil War. What arrives out of this speculative landscape is a world where bribes are king, where violence is omnipresent, and where the food sounds delicious. Seriously, the detail given to the world here is vibrant, revealing a setting torn and stitched back together and torn again. The nation is one defined by the damage done by colonizers, the corruption that is the lasting legacy of the West.

"Alcacia isn't kind to anyone" (262)

I think that might be the most comprehensive summary I can give to the plot. The novel follows Weston Kogi as he returns to his home country to attend a funeral. From there he is drawn into a plot that places him in the sights of just about every faction in play. Told to solve the murder of a beloved figure in the region, Weston accepts as much to stay alive as because he has nothing else to do. As a character he is drifting, passive, and completely buying into his own lack in agency. He moves through life as an outsider in his former home, constantly reminded through beatings, through the crimes he witnesses and participates in, that the world he left is rotten.

If Alcacia is rotten, though, it is because it has been bruised. Hard. The prose does such a great job of capturing both the humanity and beauty of the place right alongside the extreme and pervasive ugliness. And Weston, for all he wants to be above and separate from the crimes he sees, is right in the middle of them. It's an unsettling read, because as a reader there was a part of me rooting for Weston, wanting to see him survive, win. It's a trap, though, that the novel expertly lays. There is no winning here, no escape. For all that Weston believes it's not really his fault, for all that it's understanding what he does, he does some terrible and unforgivable things during his time in Alcacia, and in the end he does them because he wants to, because he wants to be a person with power, of power. And I, in wanting him to survive, became just as guilty. In rooting for Weston, I was rooting for murder, for rape, for corruption. Because Weston is not strong enough to resist, to fight for something that might benefit more than just himself. He is drawn along, and as much as it doesn't seem like he has any better options, the truth is that he decides to keep going, decides to try and see it through, is bought and sold no less than anyone else that he looks down on as corrupt.

It is an incredibly difficult read. I would call it a grimdark fantasy, because as alt-history it fits into a sort of fantasy, but it has none of the distance that grimdark normally affords from the real world. Here there is no comfort. Which is part of my overall dissatisfaction with grimdark as a genre. It posits the world as dark, gritty, and relentless, but the depictions always toss those things into the past, into some fantasy realm that looks like historical Europe. When George R.R. Martin is asked about all the rape in his stories, he falls back on the "well that's how things were" logic that falls apart in the face of a work like Making Wolf. Because here the crimes are not pushed back into the past. They exist on (basically) our planet, in our time, are witnessed and committed by a man who has been in many ways "Westernized" from living in London most of his life. And though the plot unfolds in Alcacia, his Western-ness does not save him or keep him above what happens. If anything it locks him into being part of the problem, in trying to believe that the things he sees are separate from himself. It is the scars of colonization that exist right now that open up the ugliness of humanity to be viewed, that make colonizers of Alcacia's own sons, including Weston.

And it is the strength of Making Wolf that it refuses to let the reader off the hook. [And here we might get into some mild spoilers, so be warned!] There is no moment of redemption for Weston. There is ugliness and it does not end. In fact, Weston benefits from it. Is seduced by it. And it's hard to blame him. It's impossible to forgive, but it's hard to blame, and that is the ultimate triumph of the book, to leave the reader no easy release, no easy victory. To force that confrontation with the dark. And fuck I think I need a drink after reading this. For every sweeping snapshot of persevering beauty there are five moments of terror and filth and gut-wrenching pain. There are no heroes and, in some ways, no villains either. There are victims. Layers of victims. It would be difficult to say that Weston is not a victim, for example. But his victimization is very different from, say, that of the women in the story, which he becomes complicit in, which he in many ways condones by writing their hurt off as just part of the setting. So the novel is very much engaging the ideas of victimization and grittiness and pain and agency and providing a damning look at how basically being a man and opting to still try to be the hero plays out.

So I have to applaud the book for its unflinching look at humanity. At crime and punishment. It's not really the most pleasant book to read (though the food is lovingly detailed and I want to try it all), nor the most uplifting. Nor is the ending all that satisfying in the traditional sense. But it all works. It works and it's dark and it's a definitely worth picking up and struggling with. And I'm off to get that drink.

The Math:

Baseline Assessment: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for being unflinching, uncomfortable, and uncompromising

Negatives: -1 for leaving me numb to happiness (seriously, I need to go look at kitten videos for a while now)

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 "quite, quite good!" (check out our rating system here)

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POSTED BY: Charles, avid reader, reviewer, and sometimes writer of speculative fiction. Contributor to Nerds of a Feather since 2014.

REFERENCE:Thompson, Tade. Making Wolf [Rosarium, 2015]