Review: The Last Uncharted Sky

The Last Uncharted Sky by Curtis Craddock
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read and enjoyed the first in this series when it came out several years ago (long enough ago that I didn't remember that much), and somehow missed the middle one. But there was enough "previously-on" that I didn't feel too confused.

It's a wonderful high-concept swashbuckler, with a world of floating skylands and skyships plying between them, multiple imaginative types of sorcerers, political intrigue, religious fanaticism, ancient magical artefacts, action, adventure, exploration, quests, espionage, loyalty, friendship, mentorship, twue wuv... really, it has a bit of everything, but doesn't feel patched together as a result. All of the elements are well handled, and the multiple plot threads are brought to a rousing and satisfying conclusion.

Unfortunately, in the pre-publication ARC I got from Netgalley, it's clear that the author is an extremely sloppy typist and has a slightly smaller vocabulary than he thinks he does, two things that will take a lot of work from a good editor to correct. Hopefully it will get that work, because it is a terrific story.

And the protagonist is exactly the kind of protagonist I love: an intelligent, capable woman who is also unshakeably determined to do the right thing, which is the kind thing; who wins over others (even the crazy memories of her awful ancestors) by her goodness and insight and empathy, without ever being weak or foolishly idealistic, and accepts risk herself rather than pushing it onto others.

Now I want to read the second volume.

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Review: The Second Star

The Second Star by Alma Alexander
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have liked several of this author's YA books, but this (coincidentally or not, not YA) I didn't much care for.

There was a lack of clarity and momentum to the plot, because it kept swapping around story goals. Each goal was in itself compelling for the protagonist, but there was no real throughline.

Christianity (Catholicism) comes into the story, but the research is not there. Jesuits are clerics regular, not monks (which is fairly well known, I thought), and the magi, despite what your Christmas cards may have told you, were not kings, quite probably were not three in number, and did not attend the birth of Christ.

The world of 200 years from now felt much, much too similar to today. Despite a great deal being made of how people from shortly after our time would not have been able to cope with all the changes, we weren't shown very many changes at all. Cellphones, for example, are still around, and in people's pockets, not (for example) installed in their heads; new versions come out periodically, and old technology may or may not be compatible with new, and yet how they work and what they do is indistinguishable from how they work and what they do today.

I was not a fan of the big reveal, either, and it came out of nowhere late in the book.

There was one good feature, which was the psychologist protagonist's powerful commitment to the wellbeing and just treatment of her patients. If it had been coupled with better decision-making on her part, I would have liked her even more.

As it was, this was not a book I much enjoyed, and if it had been the first I'd read from the author I probably wouldn't read another. It's not representative of her other work, though, so I will keep picking up her books - but with more caution in the future.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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Review: The Midnight Bargain

The Midnight Bargain by C.L. Polk
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A secondary-world fantasy that is strongly Regency-romance-adjacent, and has (for me) the best parts of Regency romance.

It's all too easy, I suspect, to write a Regency romance about silly, vain women and stern, harsh men without confronting key truths about the era. Namely, that women of the upper and upper-middle classes were prevented by their society from doing anything productive or learning any useful skills, that they were supposed to be silly and vain, and that their economic security hinged terrifyingly on marriage to a (probably) stern, harsh man who would quite likely keep getting them pregnant until they died of it.

Those facts are very much present in this book, which also adds a fantasy layer that brings them out more sharply. In this setting, several different kinds of magic exist, including "high magic," which involves summoning and binding spirits. These spirits are capricious and hard to control, and love to experience the physical world via their hosts; if a pregnant woman has one, it will embody itself in the child, taking over from the human soul. So married women are bound with collars that prevent them from accessing magic throughout their fertile years.

The two main female characters of the book find this horrifying, and one of them is (in present-day terms) asexual or something like it as well; she wants to avoid marrying completely, and pursue magic instead. The other, the main protagonist and viewpoint character, also deeply desires magic, but she is in love, and struggles to choose between what seem like two incompatible goods. The object of her affections is a man who isn't stern and harsh, but empathetic and supportive; despite this, he still doesn't really get what the women are on about for a long time, a touch of realism that I appreciated.

The whole is well handled, with a motivated protagonist in a dynamic situation from the start, a powerful and seemingly insoluble dilemma, strong secondary characters both supporting and antagonistic, courageous and determined action from the main character, and a rich setting. The only criticism I really have is that I didn't see enough evidence of magic's impact on society in ways that didn't relate directly to the plot.

Highly recommended if you enjoy Regency romance with a feminist slant that still has room for positive portrayals of men, and adds in a magical dimension that contributes greatly to both plot and theme.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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Review: Pundragon

Pundragon by Chandra Clarke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's rare for me to encounter a comic fantasy (other than Terry Pratchett, of course) that I actually find funny. I found this one funny, though, and I'm glad I picked it up from Netgalley, having earlier reviewed the author's more serious Echoes of Another: A Novel of the Near Future and found it enjoyable.

What often lets "funny" fantasy down is that the protagonists aren't too bright, and nor, often, are the authors, meaning that the humour can be heavy-handed and overly obvious. This author has (for my taste) a good level of judgement for when to let the reader pick up on the joke for themselves.

There are, as the title hints, lots of puns. That's not to everyone's taste, but I personally love clever wordplay, and the puns here are that. The punning is done with restraint, too; there aren't dozens of them used to paper over weak spots in the plot, as I sometimes see in so-called funny fantasy.

The other thing about a comedy for me is that, in order to work, it needs (like Dorothy's companions) a brain and a heart and a bit of courage. This book has all three. The prose shows some skill, there are clever bits that aren't trying to be too clever, it has a strong emotional arc, and it's not afraid to tackle a couple of serious issues among the comedy. The protagonist learns a lot from his portal-fantasy trip, and becomes a better person. And I cheered for the critique of grimdark fantasy, as well.

Recommended.

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Review: Taking Time: a Tale of Physics, Lust and Greed

Taking Time: a Tale of Physics, Lust and Greed by Mike Murphey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Started out promising, though without much of a central question to drive the plot; but unraveled in the second half, and only managed an OK ending by taking a couple of dubious shortcuts.

This book, for me, has two major problems. The first is that it's not clear to me what genre it's attempting, but it is clear to me that it's not succeeding in whichever one it is. If it's a thriller, it needs a tighter plot, a clearer goal, and a faster pace, especially in the first half. If it's a comedy, it needs to be funnier, and have more going on than an extended dick joke. If it's serious SF, it needs not to be so absurd; there's an incredibly handwaved explanation of why the time travelers' destinations are distinguishable by the theme songs from old TV shows that play over the tracking equipment when they get there, which makes no sense whatsoever. There's never a satisfactory explanation for the fact that any non-living organic matter catches fire and explodes when the travelers are sent through the equipment, either; that seems to be just a setup to require the travelers to be nude, for (inadequately) comedic purposes. It also doesn't seem to apply to the fillings in their teeth, for example, though it does apply to breast implants (apparently as an excuse to underline that the most attractive female traveler is all natural).

The time travel itself, with the travelers' bodies disappearing although it's really only their minds that are traveling, makes little sense either. And (view spoiler)[it has the issue of a lot of alternate-world stories, in that the travelers' existence, probably the least likely thing to remain constant between different worlds, remains constant, while everything else up to and including their evolutionary biology changes. (hide spoiler)]

The other major problem is that, at several key moments, rather than the (perfectly competent) characters discovering plot-relevant facts by their hard work and cleverness, they discover them by overly convenient coincidence. This is how the ending is achieved, in fact, along with a bit of continuity being forgotten about.

Also, especially early on, the narrative timeline wanders around, dipping suddenly into flashbacks (often without the past perfect tense or past continuous aspect where they should be). I couldn't decide if this was a deliberate (but unsuccessful) attempt to reflect the theme of time travel or if the author just wasn't very good at telling a story in coherent order and using grammatical markers.

There were positives. The relationships between the characters, and their internal struggles, are mostly depicted well. If the author could manage more clarity of focus and more character agency (along the lines set out so well by Jack M. Bickham in Scene & Structure ), he could probably write a good book. But for me, this was not it.

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Review: Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire

Captain Moxley and the Embers of the Empire by Dan Hanks
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is basically what you would get if an author said to himself, "I would love a highly cinematic, almost video-game-like pulp novel set in the 1950s, but with a female protagonist who's a former Spitfire pilot and woke about colonialism. I should write one."

If you're up for that - and don't mind some deaths of innocents, quite a bit of swearing, a protagonist who's cynical and world-weary but also carries on when injured to a ridiculous degree, highly unrealistic temples full of traps that are fully functional despite their great age, and a number of small anachronisms - this is the book for you.

Personally, I do mind those things, though, which lost the book a star. The temple-traps thing is a trope of the genre, I suppose, and normally I give those a pass, but they really are over-the-top unbelievable.

I think I was predisposed to notice the other issues because of the names. I'm very aware of the fact that fashions in naming change a lot over time, which is something that not many people seem to be aware of - including many authors who set their stories in a historical period. Here we have Samantha, for example, born in the 1920s, and named after an 18th-century French woman - but Samantha was a very rare name indeed until Bewitched made it popular in the 60s. Her sister, born about 1930, is Jessica, also a rare name until a couple of years before the story is set (1952). It even bothered me slightly that Jessica's friend William was known as Will (as he would be today) rather than Bill (as he would more likely be mid-century). Most people are not going to notice these, or other anachronisms and setting details that made no sense for where they were, but I did, and it wore away at my enjoyment of the book and predisposed me to disbelieve some of the more unlikely plot points.

Because I read a pre-publication version via Netgalley, I'm not mentioning examples which are likely to change by publication; I'm focusing on things like the characters' names, and the protagonist's ex-military rank - which she insists on, and which is part of the book's title. "Captain" is not and has never been a rank in the RAF, which 30 seconds with Google will confirm.

Of course, there weren't any women flying Spitfires in combat in WW II either, but I'm willing to put that in the same category as the ancient Atlantean magic: part of the setup for the plot, a necessary counterfactual. If you want people to buy into the big counterfactuals, though, it serves you well to do your research and make all the small details believable, so that people aren't wasting their suspension of disbelief on things that don't matter.

Leaving all that aside, there's plenty of cinematic action in varied locales to carry you through the story, if you're not thrown out of it by things that are hard to swallow (like a character who is specifically not a badass briefly becoming one for plot purposes). The ending is not a cliffhanger, as such, but it does take a left turn leading straight into setting up a sequel, and for me it was a downer, almost an anticlimax in a way.

I won't be reading that sequel. But plenty of people will probably love this and follow the series on through.

tl;dr: Not for me, might be for you.

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Review: Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958 to 1963): Yesterday's Luminaries Introduced by Today's Rising Stars

Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958 to 1963): Yesterday's Luminaries Introduced by Today's Rising Stars by Gideon Marcus
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This reminded me very much of The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers , in that it reintroduces us to excellent stories by writers who are mostly, undeservedly, forgotten today. The other book has an earlier timeframe (1873 to 1930), and there are some clear differences. The women of that earlier time were mostly writing male points of view, sometimes under male names; by the late 1950s, when Rediscovery kicks off, women were still sometimes writing under male or ambiguous names (as indeed they are today), but a lot of their stories were from a female viewpoint.

It also reminded me a little of stories I've read by male authors in the same period, in that a lot of the stories assume that men are inherently this way and women are inherently that way, and the sexes are at war, and there will never be peace or alliance between them; they're too different. However far we still have to go, the intervening three generations have, at least, made progress in both of those respects; we recognize a much wider (and much more overlapping) range of ways of being for both men and women, and, while, as I say, there's still plenty of room for improvement, men and women are now able to be friends, allies, and colleagues while also being or not being lovers. Here, though, we see the early stirrings of modern feminism, when men (rather than patriarchy) were still seen as the problem, and a hard problem at that - perhaps insoluble.

Not every story is like that, though (and, don't get me wrong, the ones that are like that are still fine stories with a strong impact). Some of them are just really good stories of their time; some would stand up well if first published today, though there are a few that lean a bit too heavily on the tropes (and social assumptions) of the period to have aged well. They often take those tropes in a new and interesting direction, though.

One unfortunate thing, and I will mention it even though I read a review copy from Netgalley, because I know the book's been out for a while and assume I got the published version. Stories of the pre-digital age are usually reprinted by being scanned and having optical character recognition run over them, and despite being in use for more than 25 years, this technology is still not always accurate in its transcriptions and tends to produce typos. Some of them were easy to miss (some of them, no doubt, I did miss), but about half of the ones I noticed could have been caught with spellcheck. I don't know why people use OCR and then don't spellcheck. (Getting a machine to read it aloud while you read along would also be a good means of avoiding these issues, if you had the time.)

This doesn't detract much, though, from what is a fine collection of stories that should be more widely known. They are unpredictable, emotionally powerful, thoughtful, humane, and excellently crafted. As the editor's introduction notes, because of the prejudice against women that existed in the SFF field at the time, a woman had to be that much better to compete, and these women are fine writers who are long overdue to be rediscovered.

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