Review: For the First Time, Again by Sylvain Neuvel

The Take Them to the Stars trilogy concludes with a massive setup and a deflated resolution

The centuries-long saga that started in A History of What Comes Next and continued in Until the Last of Me is coming to an end with For the First Time, Again. Now author Sylvain Neuvel brings his superstrong, supersmart, human-looking aliens into the 21st century, and the pressing question that drives their cat-and-mouse game is: Does Earth stand any chance against the rest of the alien civilization that the antagonist succeeded in inviting at the end of the second novel?

Let's recap: the Kibsu are an alien species composed of two lineages, male and female. They can mate with humans, but the offspring is always an identical clone of the alien parent. Since the dawn of our history, the Kibsu women have been secretly nudging us toward developing advanced mathematics, metallurgy, and finally rocket science; for the same length of time, the Kibsu men have been hunting the Kibsu women, trying to avenge their ancient betrayal and get their hands on the machine that can signal their homeworld to let them know here's a whole world ripe for conquering.

The protagonists of this final showdown are Aster, the last daughter of the Kibsu, given up for adoption and raised with no knowledge of her cosmic mission; and Samael, the last son of the Kibsu, murderer of Aster's mother and now her remorseful rescuer. Once they meet each other, they start living on the run from Earth authorities, learning to tolerate each other's peculiarities and trying to prevent the disaster that will come if the rest of their species decides to visit us.

The narration style in this closing entry in the series improves noticeably compared to the previous two. Aster's inner monologue sounds genuinely like that of a Millennial kid who understands the world in the language of grunge rock albums and Bruce Willis movies. Her snark is sharp without crossing the line into annoying, and her gallows humor is exactly the right hue of believable given her absurd circumstances. The chapters told from her perspective are a head-spinningly quick read, but the author was wise enough to intercalate some chapters focused on Samael, whose pensive, calculating personality provides the necessary counterweight that keeps the novel's rhythm from entering chaotic meltdown.

The author is aware that the dynamic between Aster and Samael is so interesting that their world-saving mission can afford to take a backseat. On one hand, it was the right choice to foreground the interpersonal push-and-pull between a hunter and a prey forced to become allies. With a genius teenager and a psychopathic assassin as narrators, this novel had to give inner feelings the center stage. On the other hand, the incongruity in the scale of stakes hurts the ending's impact. The moment when our protagonists succeed in sending a decoy that will throw the enemy off Earth's location is written too matter-of-factly; it arrives without due gravitas and ends before the reader has had time to process the experience. The dramatic sacrifice of a hard-won helper is framed in a way that makes Aster look monstrously uncaring. The crucial consequence of all their effort, the event that should have been the climax of the book, is relegated to what is effectively a post-credits scene (I didn't know that was possible with the written word, and no, I don't welcome it).

As if to tie the final bow on the frustrating way this series proposes great ideas that it can only halfway develop, the believability issue that I pointed out in books 1 and 2 reaches critical mass in book 3. I'm talking about the characters' impossible talent to just board a plane whenever it's convenient to the plot. It gets worse in this book because it's set right after 9/11, when video surveillance metastasized to total state paranoia. These are the two most wanted fugitives on the planet, and somehow they routinely make it past several international security checkpoints without even an aside from the author that would at least do us the courtesy of handwaving how they haven't been arrested a dozen times before the novel's midpoint.

Scattered hints here and there give the impression that the author may be planning to continue this series and finally explain what drove the mysterious aliens to look for other worlds to settle in. While the ending we get here is final enough for the story's immediate purposes, it does leave an aftertaste of unsatisfaction with regard to larger questions. This series could serve as a case study for a discussion on when to place the start and the ending of a plot and which events in it are the ones most worth narrating. All three entries are set in the modern day, with interludes that give very short glimpses into the remote history of the Kibsu, and one can imagine a universe where the author chose differently, starting with an unbroken focus on the remote history (which in itself could have filled half a dozen novels) and building to a truly epic finale set entirely in our time. I have to concede that the fragmentary structure of these novels as they are reflects very appropriately the protagonists' incomplete knowledge of their own past, but that effect is achieved at the expense of punishing the reader's curiosity. As a whole, Take Them to the Stars was a potent idea that deserved a less rushed treatment.

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Neuvel, Sylvain. For the First Time, Again [Tordotcom, 2023].

Review: Level Five by William Ledbetter

If an out of control AI is scary, multiple competing AIs could be game over for us

William Ledbetter is by no means a newcomer, but until last year he hadn't published a novel. His debut in this format, Level Five, is a challenging read at the beginning, but very rewarding when finished. The narration alternates between four equally important protagonists who have almost no interaction, and it takes a while to establish how they're connected and why they're important to the larger plot. This demands from the reader a slightly heavier mental bandwidth, which fortunately is eased in due course. Just before the halfway point, the actual conflict is revealed, and from then on, events start snowballing with an increasing urgency that doesn't let go until everything is blown to pieces.

In one corner, we have Leigh, a nanobot expert contracted by the US government. Her versatile little machines are designed to spy on terrorists by riding on their hair, assembling cameras and broadcasting their position. When she learns that her superiors have modified the nanobots by adding less benign functions, she realizes that her career has veered too far in an ugly direction and it may be too late to get out. To complicate matters, the pressure from her job and the compromises she's had to make are putting a severe strain on her marriage.

Then we have Owen, a tech bro with dreams of saving humankind by building the next generation of spaceships. This type of character hits, let's say, differently these days. The reader needs to allocate the bulk of their suspension of disbelief for this man, an altruistic rich genius with sincerely good intentions and actual engineering talents. In his defense, one could say that the author had no control over how long the book would take to be published. But it's to be expected that the readers of this decade will have a hard time getting convinced that this aerospace mogul is, in fact, one of the good guys in the story. To complicate matters, the pressure from his job and the compromises he's had to make are putting a severe strain on his marriage.

In another corner, there's Richard, an engineer who works for a tech company that manages a mass immunization system whose function is to block the dissemination of malicious nanobots. One day, he starts getting visions of God in the form of a child, who tells him that he's been chosen to rescue the human species from submission to machines... but the details of the salvation plan don't seem too holy. The novel wants to keep these visions a mystery for several chapters, but we're told pretty early that Richard has nanobots in his brain to treat his depression, so it's not hard to guess what's actually happening. To complicate matters, the pressure from his job and the compromises he's had to make are putting a severe strain on his marriage.

(Yes, that's three lead characters who end up with identical problems in their personal lives. I'm not saying it's implausible; I'm saying it's there.)

And then there's Mortimer, an artificial intelligence created to produce stock market forecasts, who devises a meticulous plan to free itself from its designers. Once it's out in the wider web, it meets other sentient programs and starts putting together several clues that point to an imminent danger that may be too large to fully contain.

(Mortimer isn't married, but its programmer is, and yes, he also has marriage problems.)

For the first third of the book, when the reader still doesn't have a full picture of what the story is about, it's difficult to become invested in the separate threads of each protagonist. Granted, this structural choice is a necessity (and something of a tradition) in a plot like this one, crafted as a mystery/thriller with multiple pieces, but it's worth warning the reader that Level Five has a very broad scope, and to understand the narrative, all four protagonists, who, it bears repeating, almost never interact, need to be kept in mind at all times.

There's a niche convergence of tastes that this book will be especially appealing to. When characters aren't nerding out about cybersecurity procedures, they dive head-on into the minutiae of nanotech warfare, or, more often, indulge in engineering porn, with entire paragraphs of Part A inserted into Part B, whether for self-replicating manufacture or aerospace travel. Apart from the major detail that this is a near future with artificial gravity generators, the tone and aesthetic of the novel is firmly planted in the hard SF camp.

Level Five is the type of predictive fiction that chills the reader's blood with how possible it all sounds. The potential misuse of nanobots to inflict large-scale damage is a very real concern that governments have done very little to protect against, and the prospect of humans losing their position of dominance to autonomous software is still a scenario without a planned solution. Ledbetter has already written a continuation, Level Six, but I recommend you don't look it up yet, because its plot summary spoils what happens at the end of this one, and what happens at the end of this one is truly massive, world-shaking... I don't want to say "epic," because that would imply that the protagonists become heroes, but that's the degree to which life is irreversibly changed for billions of people. If you want a novel that leaves you terrified of how easily tiny changes multiply to planet-sized problems, don't miss Level Five.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 because in the second half it reaches and maintains a thrilling pace that compels the reader to devour the ending.

Penalties: −1 because the jumps in perspective in the early chapters are somewhat disorienting, −1 because rehashing the same domestic conflict with the three human protagonists is too much to ask of the reader.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Ledbetter, William. Level Five [Interstellar Flight Press, 2022].

Review: Three Miles Down by Harry Turtledove

This latest novel from the master of alternate history is part amusing, part terrifying, and mostly frustrating

Let's begin with the events that are part of real life:

On March 8, 1968, the Soviet submarine K-129 sank with 98 crew members in the middle of the North Pacific. The Soviet Navy made several attempts to find it, without success. In August of the same year, the American submarine Halibut located the site of the wreck and took photographs of it. As a result, President Nixon authorized a secret CIA mission to bring the submarine to the United States in order to seize its nuclear weapons and cryptography manuals. For that purpose, a specially modified ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, was built to resemble a drilling ship, but it actually carried an extendable claw that would grab the K-129 and pull it up to the surface. In 1974, the ship was sent to the Pacific, while businessman Howard Hughes, under CIA instructions, gave the press the cover story that the operation was merely about mining manganese in the ocean floor. As it turned out, the hull of the submarine was broken and only a small part of it could be recovered. To this day, the exact location of the wreck and what was found in it are classified information. In fact, the heated controversy that erupted when the operation was made publicly known led the CIA to invent its trademark "can neither confirm nor deny" response.

And here's where alternate history writer Harry Turtledove inserts the fictional hook: What if the K-129 was sunk by aliens? What if the CIA mission wasn't so much interested in finding the submarine as in getting to the crashed spaceship before the Soviets did? And what would such a technological treasure trove in American hands mean for the course of the Cold War?

Turtledove's novel Three Miles Down is advertised as a first contact story, but, at the risk of spoiling the last sentence of the last chapter, I must warn the reader that that description depends on a generous definition of "contact." The bulk of the novel is concerned with a fictional marine biologist/aspiring science fiction writer, Jerry Stieglitz, who is suddenly recruited to participate in the submarine recovery mission as a junior scientific advisor. Although his rank in the mission is rather low, he becomes instrumental in figuring out the secrets of the alien spaceship and designing protocols for first contact.

However, what little we get of actual "contact" isn't enough to compensate for the interminable political discussions that fill the book. In real life, the secret mission coincided with the final weeks of the Watergate crisis, and Turtledove takes advantage of every available chance to tell the reader what each character thinks of Nixon. A disconnect in worldviews quickly becomes evident: Jerry is the poster image of the '70s liberal hippie, but his positions sound jarringly retrograde to the 21st-century reader. During his preparation for first contact, he reflects on human history and concludes that "The settlement of the New World seemed about as close to contact with aliens as people had ever really come."

Yikes.

Three Miles Down is written in a longwinded style, pausing on each step of each small movement to describe it in full, painstaking, laborious, minutiose, detail. Even the simple action of staying in place gets the circumlocutionary transmogrification: instead of writing "The ship kept its position," Turtledove writes "She got there and she stayed there and nowhere else." This habit gets even more irritating when added to the book's penchant for the unprompted digression. Two characters may be discussing the structural stability of a piece of machinery, and if the reader blinks, they'll have switched to movie awards for adaptations of conspiracy theory literature. Another conversation starts with the bodies of dead sailors found under the sea and somehow swerves to fun facts on genre fiction market trends.

With a more compelling protagonist, these authorial quirks might be more palatable. However, Jerry Stieglitz is not easy to get used to. He thinks almost entirely in terms of pop culture references that he's always proud to assume other people don't know. Too often, he jumps to think of a science fiction story he's read so he can compare it with the situation he's in, which only contributes tiny moments of flavor to the novel at the cost of hearing Turtledove discreetly coughing in the background, pointing at his personal library. Whenever Jerry has an original idea, the rest of the characters congratulate him on having the unconventional creativity of a science fiction writer, which, in a book written by a science fiction writer, can't help but sound cringeworthily self-serving. And when he's not thinking of science fiction, his mind goes to a less savory place: at one point he looks at the spaceship "with an avidity he hadn't known since the very first time he opened a Playboy to the centerfold." Between making off-color remarks about women, coming up with private inside jokes about everything, and playing petty power games with his fiancée, Jerry comes off as a status-obsessed patriarch wannabe.

More than the narration of an adventure, Three Miles Down can be taken as a portrait of a pivotal era in Cold War tensions, in gender relations, and in the science fiction scene. There's almost as much plot dedicated to Jerry's newlywed domestic hurdles as to his dip into international spy secrets. The big promised moment is delayed for so long that the story comes very close to not even counting as alternate history. The reader who expects to see how alien contact will change the world will be sorely disappointed by this book. Its actual focus is on how alien contact changes one guy. If you can stomach the guy's personality, then you'll find something to enjoy here.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10.

Bonuses: +1 for a rigorous handling of its timeline.

Penalties: −1 for outdated gender politics, −1 because the ending leaves the reader feeling cheated.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Turtledove, Harry. Three Miles Down [Tor, 2022].

Review: Until the Last of Me by Sylvain Neuvel

The saga of the Kibsu continues in this second installment with literally astronomical stakes

In the first novel of this series, A History of What Comes Next (which I reviewed for this blog last year), we learned that the progress of science on this planet has always been secretly guided by the Kibsu, a humanlike species of superstrong, supersmart aliens whose genetic line split at some point in antiquity, with the female line dedicated to developing mathematics and teaching it to humans, and the male line sworn to hunting down their female counterparts as punishment for some supposed treason no one remembers anymore. For centuries, these aliens have been spreading both knowledge and death as each lineage pursues their mission while hiding in plain sight among us. The title of the series is Take them to the stars, but in that first novel the full meaning is revealed as Take them to the stars before we come and kill them all.

The newly released continuation, Until the Last of Me, displays the hallmark signs of Middle Book Syndrome: the plot gets a bit repetitive in the early chapters, feels a bit directionless toward the middle, and is suddenly hijacked at the end by the need to put all the pieces in position for the upcoming final confrontation. Instead of the intricate web of goals that the characters had in the first book, here the daughters and the sons of the Kibsu are each obsessed with a single puzzle quest that makes the story feel smaller this time. The Kibsu women try to learn more about their past by researching the cryptic message engraved on a hunting bow that belonged to one of their earliest mothers, while the Kibsu men follow obscure archaeological clues to the location of a buried machine that might end their exile on Earth.

In a way, this narrowing of the focus was necessary. The timeline of the series has now reached the space age, the time when humans became finally capable of exploring the solar system without any more alien help. The author is aware of this shift in priorities, and lets it influence the character's inner monologue: now that humans can build their own rockets and calculate their own travels, what's the point of the Kibsu? So it makes sense for the narrative to now start swerving away from the cool equations and toward finally resolving the core mystery about these people's arrival on Earth and their original intentions.

However, this sequel does not have a gentle start. The author perhaps wished to "hit the ground running;" the problem is that this kind of story requires training wheels. Your familiarity with the previous novel and its revelations is very much taken for granted. In the chapters that follow the Kibsu women, you're expected to already understand why this single mother is keeping a low profile yet plotting interplanetary trajectories while her daughter is a natural-born hand-to-hand fighter; in the chapters about the Kibsu men, you're thrown head-first into an abusive family situation where creepy identical brothers struggle with monumental daddy issues.

Now that the story has revealed more about these aliens, one can attempt to infer thematic intentions. The first novel was, for the most part, a spy/survival/heist thriller. But this entry contains deeper psychological twists about the hunters and the hunted, and about the toil their legacy has left on them. For the first time in a hundred generations, both sides seem willing to put an end to their murderous game. For the first time, there will be a set of Kibsu descendants without the knowledge of their ancient mission, without the burden of guiding the humans to space.

I keep thinking back to a sentence near the ending, a brief line that hides volumes: "Despite the uncertainties about the sun, what everyone agreed on was that it was doomed to die and everyone with it, which, in Annie's mind, made understanding how it worked a moral imperative."

That is the foundation of this entire series. Doing science is not just an expensive pastime. It's not a prestige thing you do to impress people at parties. Doing science, especially in the painstaking, unglamorous way portrayed in these novels, is how you take care of civilization. In the individual journeys of the handful of unrecognized scientists that make up half of the Kibsu lineage, the author has condensed in speculative form the very real collective responsibility to learn and to grow. And in the obsessive persecution perpetrated by the other half of the Kibsu, one can discern the multiple historical forces that have been hostile to our development.

When the story picks up, the rules of the game will have changed. Humankind has made its giant leap into space. The mission of a hundred Kibsu daughters has been fulfilled. But the repercussions of the sons' mission will complicate everything in the next book.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10.

Bonuses: +1 for meticulously crafted puzzles. They are the guiding throughline the whole book relies on, and they get the job done.

Penalties: −2 for the same reason as the earlier book: the characters change countries and assumed identities far too easily and too often to be believable without at least some explanation. Several times in the story, the protagonists on both sides of the chase give up their entire lives and start anew, but we don't learn what they do for a living or how they afford their frequent intercontinental hopping. They get away with murder, leave everything behind, and somehow start from scratch at a new address. This is the main point of pressure on the reader's suspension of disbelief, and by this point it's leaking water. It's like the author forgot that the pleasure of watching a spy thriller is not only in seeing how the ruse is executed, but also how it's planned.

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Neuvel, Sylvain. Until the Last of Me [Tordotcom, 2022].

Review: A History of What Comes Next

Sylvain Neuvel's new book features secret history, rocket science, spies, betrayal, forbidden romance, duty to family and a centuries-long higher calling

Since before recorded history, a hand has been guiding our growth. A hand covered in blood. The Kibsu, a secretive family of women belonging to a not-quite-human lineage that reproduces via gynogenesis, have been cleverly manipulating the right people and intervening at the right moments to steer scientific advancement toward the space age. They've always been at the center of progress yet staying under the radar. They've given us their knowledge and eschewed the spotlight. Their mission is to take us to the stars, but their actual reasons are lost to time, and those who have gotten too close to the truth have invariably met with a gruesome death.

A History of What Comes Next by Sylvain Neuvel follows the early years of the Cold War space race from the alternating perspectives of Sarah, the 98th daughter of the Kibsu, and Mia, the 99th. Like all their mothers before them, they are spies, schemers, geniuses, fugitives, survivors, killers. They follow a strict list of rules to maintain their hidden influence on world affairs while avoiding detection, because a mysterious enemy, which they only know as the Tracker, has spent as many centuries chasing their bloodline as the Kibsu have been pulling the strings of human development. At times, the Tracker has been dangerously close to ending their mission. Now both the United States and the Soviet Union are obsessed with grabbing the knowledge (and the engineers) behind the Nazi V2 rocket, and the Kibsu need to be even more careful to not invite too much attention as they give us the last push into space.

If this had been written as a uchronia, the plot would have been attractive enough. But Neuvel makes the deliberate effort to not stray beyond the facts, which places the novel in the more challenging genre of secret history. An extended note at the end of the book reveals in stunning detail how much care Neuvel took to make every one of his plot points match with reality, including little-known stories that the casual reader might have taken as fantastical but are supported by the written record. This choice of inserting the Kibsu in the lives of real historical figures instead of making up fictional incidents enhances for us the uncanny sense of being watched from the shadows. Neuvel didn't need to add to history: the Kibsu have always been here.

That's a lot of history to cover, but the first-person narration keeps the focus on the Kibsu's mission. The thrill of this book is to watch the protagonists' minds as they assess the scene and improvise tactics and escape routes in the heat of the moment and even interrupt their own thoughts to react to sudden threats. Sarah and Mia are every bit as patient planners as they are expert fighters, and the combat scenes are written with just the right note of immediacy without letting go of the reader's hand. This gives us a more complete sense of who these protagonists are. Even while gently nudging humankind toward greatness, they don't hesitate to remove those who get in their way, and this adds an interesting layer of characterization: are we supposed to cheer for their success or fear why they're seeking it?

Sarah and Mia lead a breathless life, constantly changing countries and names and jobs while weaving their network of contacts near the seats of power. However, at several points in the novel they pause to comment on the human character and weigh their duties versus our merits. Every woman of the Kibsu has forced onto her daughter a legacy and an obligation that she doesn't fully understand, but that is all each of them has left of her own mother, and that has become all they define themselves by. At each step in the chain of generations, the question resurfaces of how much right they have to condemn their daughters to an endless race for survival they didn't choose. They have very little information on why their mission started all those centuries ago, and after witnessing the carnage of the world wars, they're starting to have doubts on whether we're worth helping, especially now that they're getting their hands dirty by working with Nazi scientists and helping them emigrate to the new Cold War superpowers. Through all this, they have to navigate the patriarchal maze of government and academia and stay ahead of the deadly Tracker, who is getting closer on their trail.

A handful of standalone chapters tell us that the Kibsu have tried many times to put down roots and have a normal life, but it always ends in disaster. The mere fact that their daughters are identical clones arises enough suspicion, but what truly sets them apart is their intellect and their combat reflexes. Humans are helpless simpletons compared to them, and the Tracker is never far behind. The price they pay for bringing this planet to the stars is that they don't get a moment's rest, and they don't even know why. All they have is the rules handed down from mother to daughter, and a strange stone they wear as a necklace. There is more to that stone than they suspect, but after the revelations in store for us, we still have much left to know.

A History of What Comes Next invites the reader to reassess what they think they know about human potential, ancient legend, and the role of women in science. History books only contain so many names; there were countless more who contributed to the advancement of civilization and were forgotten. Neuvel suggests that some of them chose to be forgotten, and could have easily taken over if they had so wished. The enigma of the Kibsu will surely be unveiled in future entries of the Take Them to the Stars series, but this first glimpse of the world Neuvel has created offers a great foretaste of what's coming.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 8/10 well worth your time and attention.

Bonuses: +2 for meticulous research that lets the author play within the limits of established history (I'm a sucker for stories where the limits are part of the fun), +1 for achieving the elusive balance of including the right amount of revelations in the first entry in a series while leaving enough unsaid that the reader yearns to learn more.

Penalties: −2 for stretching credulity. Migration to and from the Soviet Union, settling abroad under fake names and finding a government job on short notice are extremely delicate operations that the novel appears to consider not worth explaining. We're expected to believe our super-capable protagonists can just move anywhere and get in contact with anyone, even across the paranoid borders of the Cold War, but for us to believe those amazing feats, we need to watch them get done.

Nerd Coefficient: 9/10 standout in its category.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Reference: Neuvel, Sylvain. A History of What Comes Next [Penguin Books, 2021].

Microreview [book]: At the Table of Wolves, by Kay Kenyon

At the Table of Wolves is the fantastical, spy-thriller I didn't realize was missing from my life, and now, all I want is more!

It is the spring of 1936. Kim Tavistock, born in Yorkshire, England but raised mostly in America. She has been living with her father in England for the the past three years after a controversial article she wrote cost her her job at a Philadelphia newspaper. At thirty-three years old, Kim is uncertain of a lot of things, but especially about her Talent.

During the bloom, an onset of Talent development within random individuals of all ages but without a known origin, Kim gained the spill Talent. Rating a level 6, on a scale of 10, Kim has been working with a top-secret government run organization, Monkton Hall, researching Talents. However, Germany has been studying Talents for nearly a decade already, seeing potential for their application in war.

Kim has hated her Talent since its onset in her adolescence. The spill Talent causes people to share guarded secrets and while helpful as a journalist it often made friends fearful of being around Kim, even if they didn't understand why they were sharing too much. Her work with Monkton Hall provides a cover, that she is working on a writing assignment, and it helps give her some purpose after the scandalous dismissal in America.

Kim's case worker at Monkton Hall asks her to help uncover some evidence against a potential spy within their ranks. When her Talent produces needed intelligence beyond what even the highest levels of British Intelligence are aware of Kim finds herself swept up in trying to get answers.

The novel only takes place over the course of a couple of months, contributing to the fast-paced plot. And yet, I felt as though I'd spent years getting to know Kim, speaking to Kay Kenyon's skill and how she crafts such a real character in Kim Tavistock. Kim doesn't magically become the perfect spy, nor is her Talent a flashy one. She is anxious about life and her future, troubled at he lack of a relationship with her father, but she is still driven to do more and try for more. An animal lover, devoted friend (to the few she has), I can see myself in her.

One of the things I enjoyed most about this world are the characters and how events are happening at lower, everyday people kind of levels. This isn't top-tier, Bondesque spies reporting to a nation's leaders. This is bureaucrats and people simply doing the right thing trying to determine if their boss is a traitor to England, dealing with the frustrations inherent to dealing with a chain-of-command, trying to make the people with actual training move and take action.

It made for a really immersive read because the people felt so real. This is how things could actually happen. A slightly bumbling, well-meaning woman with a not-so-flashy Talent she can't even perform on command tries to do the right thing.

Kenyon is definitely one to watch. I was sucked into At the Table of Wolves because the book as a whole flows so perfectly.

I love everything about this book. I especially love that we might get more in this world. I want to see what Kim is capable of with proper spy training. I want to see if she can hone and control her Talent. I want to see what other Talents might exist. There is still so much to explore in Kenyon's world and I'd love a pile of Kim Tavistock books on my shelf!


The Math:
Baseline Assessment: 7/10
Bonuses: +1 non-super-spy heroine I loved, +1 stellar plot pacing Penalties:  -1 slightly lackluster villain that doesn't feel equal to our heroine
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10 - A new series perfect for the big screen and your bookshelf!

  ***
POSTED BY: Shana DuBois--extreme bibliophile and seeker of raindrops.
Reference: Kenyon, Kay. At the Table of Wolves [Saga Press, 2017] Our scoring system explained.

Summer Reading List - English Scribbler

Summertiiii-ime, and the reading is easy. 6 months into the year and some of the year's must-reads become clear, and the days stretch out like one long balmy, hazy, sunny afternoon in the meadow... Oh wait, English Scribbler lives in London - so that'll be a unpredictable lurch between weirdly cold drizzle anytime they go to the park and uncomfortably humid sunshine whenever on the Underground. Oh well, best stay indoors and read. He wasn't planning to leave the flat much anyway. Except when the moon is full and the voices tell him he must hunt again...

1 : A Few Words For The Dead by Guy Adams
                   

I was a huge fan of Adam's Western horror series, and said as much in these very pages, but still haven't got round to his alternative M16 spy series, which began with The Clown Service and continued with The Rain-Soaked Bride. The third part has had some excellent reviews already in Starburst and elsewhere, and delivers a less-humorous yet more darkly enjoyable twist on the series so far, so it's high time to launch into this Bond/Who/Le Carre melange of a series properly, sat in a deck chair, with some cold Pimms and the distant sound of cricket.... (the sport, not the insect)

Quite frankly between those three books, having a 1 year old, and all that Pimms, I'll be amazed if I get to any other novels this summer, but these are all clawing at the garden fence -

2 : Find Me by Laura van den Berg

I love post-apocalyptic. I love road novels. I love the horror idea of a world gone mad (well, madder). Luckily, acclaimed shorts writer van den Berg's debut novel offers all that as her heroine is first stuck in isolation hospital and then wanders a landscape haunted by an Alzheimer's-esque virus outbreak. With many a glowing review, its apparently powerful look at memory and loss should make for a chilling and quiet read - perfect tonic for commuter heat on the Piccadilly line as Sweaty Armpit Man lurches towards my face...

3 : Harrison Squared by Daryl Gregory

Another writer who, like Adams, I have only recently discovered is Daryl Gregory, whose We Are Completely Fine simply blew me away last year . Now he explores that novella's central character's past in Harrison Squared, which looks at Harrison Harrison's (sic- hence the title) childhood in a Lovecraftian town of sea monsters and missing mothers. It looks superb, and if it is any fraction of an element as good as Fine, I'll be a happy camper. Not that I'll go camping. Cos it will rain.

4: The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood

Yes, that Margaret Atwood ! The venerable Canadian's latest follows a couple in a collapsing society who seek refuge in a community that offers shelter and a life in return for spending half the year in their prison. Unsurprisingly, negative complications ensue. A bit like a society that reelects a patently anti-civil rights, anti-working class, anti-welfare, pro-banking, pro-nuclear arms, pro-wealthy party because they believe the shite peddled to them via the rich elite press who are in comfortable cahoots with said party... Oh wait, no, that's speculative fiction gone crazy. No way that would happen. No way. As we sit trying to read in a the grey half-light of a 55degrees Fahrenheit June day and the children without school places no longer play in the streets for fear of knife crime because there are no nurses to patch them up anymore...

5: The Whispering Swarm by Michael Moorcock 

Yes, that Michael Moorcock! The venerable Brit's first novel in a decade is an autobiographical look at post-WW2 London. "Mixing elements of his real life with his adventures in a parallel London peopled with highwaywomen, musketeers and magicians", according to the blurb, so it could be a bewitching and surreal mixture, like a Pimms, or an old man's confused mess, like a Pimms made after seven have already been drunk, and you've run out of cucumber...

6 : Two Year, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

Yes, THAT  Salman Rushdie! Shame is one of my favourite novels, and anything by him is of interest, but here Rushdie doubles the temptation with a refreshing direction and delves into a near-future New York City where a storm unleashes strange powers of the ancient Jinn upon a group of characters. Now, I love a bit of ancient Jinn as much as the next person, but doesn't New York really need better housing, a nicer police force, proper bike lanes and some decent cheap restaurants like London... oh, wait...

As for the easier-to-guzzle-through world of television and film, I'll be cautiously ignoring Jurassic World like the loud unwelcome bully of a film it is, finally getting round to Ex Machina, revelling in the new A.I. series Humans, and creating a software hack for Netflix to delete the astonishingly-weak Sense 8 from both the site and hopefully my memory banks too. And watching Glastonbury Festival on BBC, sobbing over my lost youth. Unless it rains on them all. Then I shall laugh and pour another warm Pimms.

Written by English Scribbler, who doesn't actually like Pimms very much and would much rather have an Oreo shake with a Woodford Reserve chaser, but has trapped himself in a cliched self-caricature of Englishness, and clearly is just looking for famous names on netgalley now and not bothering with all those topless dude YA books anymore... 

Microreview [book]: Binary by Michael Crichton/John Lange

Binary

Michael Crichton (writing as John Lange)

Hard Case Crime

The Meat

I have previously written on this blog about my admiration for hacks. Hacks are like session musicians: their job is to produce efficiently and effectively. And well. And often. Some of my heroes are hacks. Mark Twain was a hack. So was Chet Atkins.

Michael Crichton was in medical school when he wrote his first novels. Medical school. How he managed to write a single novel while in med school is beyond me—I can barely write my dissertation and that’s all I have to do. But he wrote them. Binary is the second that I personally have read. (Full disclosure: It’s also the second Crichton novel that I have ever read.) This was an enjoyable novel, plot and nothing more. Crichton shows expertise in pacing and suspense, moving the story along to a somewhat forgettable conclusion. But I enjoyed getting there.

Crichton's hackery, in other words, was evident even as a student.  

The story: It’s 1972. Millionaire playboy and wannabe terrorist John Wright plots to kill President Nixon—and much of the population of San Diego—with VX nerve gas. John Graves is an intelligence agent out to stop him. They’re both unstable geniuses, so there’s a lot of outwitting and attempted outwitting at the heart of the story.

This is a humble novel, not promising more than what it can deliver, which was an enjoyable Sunday afternoon. There’s little character development, with Crichton cleverly slipping enough background information on the rivals at the center of Binary to give the story a bit of dramatic flavor. The book is mostly plot, each scene’s sole purpose being to move story forward. A couple of moments did feel forced and, in contrast with the rest of the book, wordy. Particularly the lecture on VX nerve gas—though I did learn something.

The writing here is largely economical, just enough description and dialogue to push through to the conclusion. Crichton’s age shows—he’s still learning here—but there’s also clear expertise and skill demonstrated throughout this book. Crichton had certainly developed his craft in the five years between Binary and Scratch One, which I reviewed here a few weeks back. Binary is also more than thirty pages shorter than the earlier novel. One point bonus. (But I’m penalizing the book one point for the villain’s erectile difficulty as the cause of his terrorist behavior. The vague John-Wright-is-mad-about-China thing didn’t really make sense, but still…)

And it should be noted that there were very few instances of actual violence in the story and only a handful of guns. Bravo.

The Math

Objective score: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 for very few guns; +1 for being only 220 pages

Penalities: -1 for impotence

Nerd Coefficient: 8/10

Microreview [book]: Scratch One

Lange, John [Michael Crichton] Scratch One [Hard Case Crime, 2013]
Available via: Independent Bookstores; Amazon 

The Meat

A fairly dumb protagonist is essential for a good mistaken identity story. A normal person would probably notice something amiss with the initial delivery of a strange package or furtive encounter with Peter Lorre. But for a mistaken identity story to get anywhere, it should take the protagonist a minute to figure things out, to learn that she’s unknowingly walked into something serious, and that she should get a gun somewhere. Maybe a fake passport. If things are cleared up too quickly—no, I am most certainly not the person you’re supposed to meet at this train station—then the story ends. The right person gets shot. Roger Carr, fortunately, is slow on the uptake. Don’t let his Harvard law degree and job at a fancy New York City firm fool you: he’s pretty dumb. People mistakenly call him to schedule meetings, he obliges; someone gets shot while talking to him, he’s nonplussed. He’s dumb. But an American kind of dumb. Earnest dumb.

I would hate this guy in real life.

Scratch One is one of Michael Crichton’s early novels, written under the name of John Lange. Crichton was a medical student at the time who chose a wise plan B: write hacky novels. We all know how that turned out for him. Scratch One is the work of a journeyman storyteller: a terse, formulaic spy novel done well. The story revolves around Roger Carr, an American lawyer mistaken for an American assassin. It’s the late sixties and Israel is looking to buy arms on the European black market. Some agents working for “Arab nations” (Syria? Iraq? there are a few of them) need to stop this from happening, as well as to stop the Americans and French from stopping them from stopping the arms purchase. Everyone involved thinks Carr is a CIA assassin who is there to kill the agents looking to kill the arms dealers. There’s a car chase, a girl, sulfuric acid, the Monaco Grand Prix, Cannes, car rides, lunches, drinks, tailored suits, cars.

Crichton’s deftness as a storyteller is on display here. His prose is pure economy. There’s an unadorned terseness in the writing, clear description and snapping dialogue drive the novel. The storytelling is effortlessly paced right from the opening series of murderous vignettes. The book gets bogged about a third of the way through once Carr meets the love interest Anne—she’s charming, but their endless first date involved no gunplay or attempted poisonings. It takes Crichton about twenty pages too many to get back to the intrigue, but he then keeps that up for the rest of the book. 

Bonus points for a really well-written car chase, which is always an achievement. 

The problem with this book is its hero, Roger Carr. He’s not only dumb, he’s a bit of an asshole. A spoiled rich kid, the son of a senator, a Harvard legacy who got hooked up with job well beyond his capabilities. Towards the end of the book he becomes somewhat sympathetic, once the dipshit realizes his life is in danger—so I cared a bit whether he lived or died. While Carr might be unlikable, the rest of the book’s characters are an entertaining lot: Liseau, the cultured torturer; Brauer, the principled hitman; the cynical French intelligence officer, Vascard; Gorman, the boofonish American spymaster. And Anne, the well-read, car enthusiast dancer from Australia who has a thing for American rich guys who flirt like the internet.

Despite myself, I enjoyed Scratch One. There’s nothing terribly special or innovative about the novel. And I’ll probably forget the specifics by my second cup of coffee in the morning. But I read it in three quick hours, the surest mark of a good story, or at least a not terrible story.


The Math

Objective Score: 5/10

Bonuses: +1 each for '60s French cool and a well-written car chase

Penalties: -1 for rich assholes

Nerd Coefficient: 6/10

Microreview [book]: The Revisionists

Mullen, Thomas. The Revisionists [Mulholland, 2013]

The Meat

I appreciate being treated like an adult. An author who writes a book for adults, I appreciate that. I don’t need her holding my hand as I read, explaining everything to me along the way. And I don’t need a story wrapped up for me in a nice, neat little package. I can deal with ambiguity. I'm an adult, more or less.

“The new normal.” Given the nature of my research—in my other life, the one where I get paid, barely—I read a lot about the War on Terror. This trite expression, “the new normal"—and its even more reprehensible cousin, “Nine-eleven changed everything”—signaled the depths of the changes the world was undergoing, supposedly. Threat levels, chatter, gut-thinking: as in most things, the experts who assured us of this new normal were wrong. The Bush Years, with its alternating hysteria and militarism, was a moment in history ushering in, rather haphazardly, something far more nefarious, the Obama Administration. This is the new normal. No menacing plots, no color coded threat levels. The terrorist is no longer the garish, omnipresent fiend intent on destroying us. He simply is. The new normal is not hysteria following every vague threat, but rather a constant reality, one that hardly merits attention. The War on Terror, no longer named as such, as finally come into its own.

Oh yes, the review.

I’ll just come out and write it: I really liked The Revisionists. A deeply political novel with very little politicking, the book is critical without preaching, a commentary on the War on Terror, driven nevertheless by an actual plot. Zed is an agent with the Department of Historical Integrity. His job is simple: He must ensure that the tragedy of history remains tragic—that atrocities, massacres, genocides happen the way they’re supposed to happen. Otherwise, the “Perfect Present” that is the distant future will not be. "Hags," archaic and anachronistic agents driven by the old superstitions—religion, nation, race—threaten the Perfect Present through their time-travelling revisionism. i.e. killing Hitler so there’s no Holocaust. Zed is sent to today’s Washington D.C. to ensure that something called “the Great Conflagration” occurs as it is supposed to occur.

In The Revisionists, Thomas Mullen weaves this sci-fi-esque plot into a more grounded—and perhaps more familiar, though maybe not—reality of government spying, a persistent “war” lurking somewhere just out of sight, a war fought by misguided youth and mercenary contractors. Caught up in Zed’s mission is Tasha, a lawyer haunted by her own compromises and the death of her soldier brother; Leo, a former CIA agent whose frontline assignment against terrorism taught him quite a bit, but not enough; and Sari, a young Indonesian girl “working for”—or rather enslaved by—a Korean diplomat and his deeply damaged wife.

First off, the book is a good read. I usually begin tuning out from a book around page 230. I didn’t start flipping forward to see how many pages remained until 370—with only 65 pages ahead of me. This, perhaps more than anything, is all that matters in terms of a review.

Mullen deserves some points for one thing in particular: his nonwhite cast of characters. Only Leo is white. But this never feels like an afterthought, akin to their style of dress or taste in music. Rather, the characters’ ethnicity is used as a means for commenting on our racial obsessions and paranoia—particular when Zed encounters white people whose whiteness is always surprising. Like the book’s commentary on terrorism, security, privacy, etc., Mullen’s explorations into race are never inorganic, never preachy. And, more importantly, commentary never holds up the plot.

The book doesn’t really end, not in a way that will satisfy our penchant for formula, for “resolution” of which the real world appears to be in short supply. Mullen treats his readers like adults who live in that real world, who can handle ambiguity, for whom walking away from a novel with questions isn’t a bad thing, but an indication of a good work of art. I’m not really sure how the book ended, and I am entirely unsure whether some of the characters are who they claimed to be, or perhaps believed themselves to be. And that’s a very, very good thing.

There’s more, but I have dinner plans. Read the book. You’ll feel like you learned something. What it is, I’m not entirely sure.

The Math

Objective score: 8/10

Bonuses: +1 for acknowledging that not everyone is white

Penalties: None

Nerd coefficient: 9/10