Review: Piranesi

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'd been wanting to read this for a long time, but once I bought it I put off starting it. Mainly because I wasn't sure it would live up to the hype, and I really didn't want to be disappointed.

I needn't have worried. It was amazing.

I remained concerned for a while, though. The early part of the book is the first-person protagonist writing in his journal, in a precise and capital-heavy style that suggests mild neurodivergence, about the building he inhabits and his routine in living in and exploring it. In the lower levels, it has the ocean, in the mid-levels there are statues, and in the upper levels there are clouds. It seems like it's one of those magical houses that I, for one, love, but is there going to be a story? And why is it that he seems to know about or recognize so many things from our world - Christmas cake, the smell of petrol, Prince of Wales check - that he wouldn't have encountered in his world? Why does the Other say "OK," and why does the narrator use the horrible jargon phrase "going forward," when the prose initially sounds so old-fashioned? Are these errors? This author wouldn't make that kind of error, would she?

They are not errors. There's a story. It's not the one I expected.

It was gripping, and beautifully told.

I can't say too much about it without spoiling it, but nothing is quite as it initially seems, and there are some terrific characters who are fully believable as real people (view spoiler)[like the transgressive-for-the-sake-of-it occultist/cult leader (hide spoiler)], and a lot of things that initially seemed to be just decorative turned out to be highly functional. There's a plot, and it's a heck of a plot, too, and it's neither just the typical literary arc from helplessness to hopelessness nor the typical fantasy arc from weakness to unmixed and oversimplified triumph. There are twists and turns and revelations and surprises.

I wished it was longer, not because it needed, from a story perspective, to be longer (it was exactly the length it needed to be), but because I wanted the experience of reading it to last longer. It had beauty, it had depth, and it didn't sacrifice telling a good story in order to have those things. It was the very definition of a five-star book for me, and unless I'm very fortunate indeed it will easily get the number one spot in my Best of the Year list for this year.

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Review: Voices from the Radium Age

Voices from the Radium Age by Joshua Glenn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A collection of stories from the early 20th century - before the so-called "Golden Age" of SF, the pulp era - mostly by people who are better known for other things than writing speculative fiction; though most of them are known for writing fiction, and a couple of them were well-known SFF writers of the time who are now less familiar.

Unsurprisingly, most of these century-plus-old stories don't match contemporary taste too closely, and at least one is, by today's standards, highly offensive. That the editor included it anyway - despite acknowledging its extreme racism in the introduction - is a signal that this is, primarily, an academic publication, concerned with what actually existed in the time period rather than what the editor thinks ought (or ought not) to have existed. But the same introduction states that the collection's secondary purpose is to provide some entertainment to fans of the genre.

I have to say I didn't personally enjoy most of the stories that much, mainly because deep thinkers' views of the future in the early 20th century were pretty uniformly bleak (not without good cause) and most of the stories are at least one of apocalyptic, dystopian, or horror, three genres I usually avoid. But even while mostly not enjoying the experience of reading them, I'm able to appreciate the quality of the writing and the historical importance, and that's what I based my four-star rating on.

I'd read a couple of them before: Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Horror of the Heights" and William Hope Hodgson's "The Voice in the Night". Both of them prefigure the cosmic horror later published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales by Lovecraft and others. There were fewer and fewer unknown parts of the world by this time, but, as unknown places always have been for humanity, they were populated by imagination with terrible monsters. Hope Hodgson's remote area is the Pacific Ocean; Conan Doyle's, more imaginatively, the high atmosphere, where aeroplanes were only just becoming able to reach.

Two of the stories are by people better known as activists than fiction writers. Early feminist and education-for-women proponent Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's story "Sultana's Dream" portrays a feminist utopia similar to Charlotte Perkins Gilmour's later Herland, though seen through a specifically Bengali Muslim lens; the men are kept shut up in purdah while the women conduct business and run the country. Like many (not all) early feminist utopias, it assumes that women would do a much better job, and that crime and warfare would largely disappear if you got rid of or at least restrained the men.

W.E.B. Du Bois, the famous early-20th-century black thinker who co-founded the NAACP, is represented here by "The Comet," included in one of his books; it's a well-crafted tale that gives strong voice to the black experience of being treated as less than fully human, in the context of an apocalyptic event in which it appears that only a black man and a white woman have survived. Forced by circumstances to see him as a man, and not just a black man, the white woman comes to an epiphany, but the ending brings matters back to the status quo.

In contrast to these forward-thinking stories is "The Red One" by Jack London, which is the stunningly racist (and, almost incidentally, sexist) story I referred to above. The white naturalist/explorer protagonist falls into the hands of "savages" inhabiting Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands, and discovers a crashed alien spaceship, but is unable to get out with the knowledge that the "savages" don't appreciate and that could bring great benefits to civilization. I have a suspicion amounting to certainty that if he had brought the alien science out, it would have been used in war within a very short time period, but that's by the by.

I had heard of E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops," which has been widely influential on other writers, but I'd never read it before. It's a vision of a dystopian utopia in which humanity, homogenized and pampered by the Machine, has lost its courage and imagination; people live isolated from one another in small underground apartments, connected in an inadequate fashion by the Machine, a vision that has strange resonance in 2021. Forster, as a member of the educated elite, imagines something like social media, except it's more like live vlogging of short pseudo-academic lectures that people broadcast to each other. It's shallow, but not nearly so shallow (or toxic) as actual social media. And then... the story's title tells you what happens. Forster was an excellent writer, and most of it gripped me strongly and conveyed the sense of dystopian and apocalyptic terror powerfully, but he couldn't resist a bit of soapboxing at the end.

The closing story in the book is by Neil R. Jones, a prolific writer of the time who's largely forgotten today (more so than Hope Hodgson, who I'd heard of and read before). A scientist who has had his body shot into orbit around the earth after his death is picked up by aliens millions of years later, when Earth is a dead world. The aliens, whose civilization has long replaced their biological bodies with mechanical ones, does the same for him and brings him back to life, and he has to come to terms with the loss of everything he remembered and decide whether to accompany them on their exploration of the universe. There's not a whole lot of story, but there is some exploration of how such events would impact on a person, which wasn't always a strength of the pulp era that followed.

This is a varied and wide-ranging collection, despite having only a few stories in it, and it shows just how diverse the early-20th-century landscape of speculative fiction was. "Literary" writers were writing speculative fiction (as they always have and still are) to explore intellectual and emotional territory that was harder to access in other ways; activists were using the form as a way of getting people to think about a different world; and popular writers were prefiguring the pulp adventures that would dominate the mid-century.

Although most of the stories weren't particularly to my personal taste, I'm still glad I read them, because they're an important part of our history as humans and as spec-fic fans. Part of the reason that we aren't more aware of the SFF of this period is that it didn't yet have its own dedicated magazines, but often appeared in "mainstream" venues like Blue Book (Hope Hodgson), The Strand Magazine (Conan Doyle) and The Oxford and Cambridge Review (Forster). It's good that people like the editor of this collection are taking the time and effort to unearth these stories, especially the less-known ones, and make them available again.

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Review: The Book of Never

The Book of Never by Ashley Capes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

DNF, but got far enough through that I'm rating it.

It's just sloppy overall. I marked 95 issues in the roughly 80% of it that I read, which is a lot (see my Kindle notes in the collection of eight fantasy novels where I read it - starts at 30% and ends at 42%). I didn't even mark all of the places where semicolons should have been commas; almost all of the semicolons should have been commas, and a good few of the commas should have been semicolons, or should have been omitted (before main verbs, for example), or should have been inserted in places that they were missing (before terms of address, for example). There are homonym errors like wretched/retched and knocked/nocked.

Worse, the names of two rivers get switched partway through; they are rowing (apparently facing the bow, which is not how you row) down river A on the way to river B, but by the time they reach the confluence they've been rowing down river B on the way to river A.

But I've enjoyed books with editing this bad before if the story rises above it. This didn't.

The main problem is that the main character, Never, is a classic Spoiled Protagonist. Everyone he meets trusts, likes, and wants to help him, except the bad people, which is how you can tell they're bad people. He has Special Blood (literally - his blood is magical - but also figuratively, in that he's apparently descended from ancient godlike rulers who have somehow been largely forgotten, except by people who need to know about them so that they have a bit more of a reason to help him than just liking him on sight). And he keeps stumbling over things that are useful and solving the minimal challenges he's presented with, without a lot of effort on his part, and sometimes by convenient coincidence, Convenient Eavesdrop or Cavalry Rescue. We're told that there's a lot of peril and he's having a rough time, but it never seems to result in any real likelihood that he might fail, and his plot armour extends to his associates.

I was reminded often of the YouTube comedian Ryan George's Pitch Meeting videos:
"I bet it'll be difficult for the heroes to get out of that!"
"Actually, it'll be super easy, barely an inconvenience."

It shows some potential, but the author would need to work hard with a good copy editor and a good development editor to realize it. When I figured out that it wasn't going to rise above mediocrity (and read a couple of reviews that let me know that the ending wasn't worth persevering for), I stopped reading.

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Review: World's Edge: The Tethered Citadel Book 2

World's Edge: The Tethered Citadel Book 2 by David Hair
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I may just have been in the wrong mood for this, or it may just not be my kind of book. I'm not sure.

The first volume's big faults were worldbuilding lifted largely from real-world cultures (though with some alterations), and helping the plot along with several big coincidences at the end. I gave it a pass, and even four stars and a place in my Best of the Year list (though barely), because it was adventurous and exciting and everyone gets to make one or two mistakes. I noted, too, that the copy editing even in the pre-release copy I had from Netgalley was quite clean.

This one hasn't been as thoroughly copy edited prior to being sent out for review (I assume it will be before publication, though), revealing the author to be a sloppy typist with a habit of omitting or transposing words. Maybe that wore away at my enjoyment enough that I wasn't as gripped by the plot or charmed by the characters, who don't seem to get a lot more development than they'd had at the end of the previous book. To be fair, they were reasonably well developed at that point; I just felt that this was so much a plot-driven story that character development wasn't as much of a strength as in the first book.

There are certainly plenty of things going on, with multiple factions on each side of an armed stand-off, lots of treachery, and interludes that remind us that there's another worse threat on its way. War and treachery are not themes I generally seek out in my fiction, and that is probably another element of why I didn't like it much (which is about my personal taste, not the book's quality). There's also some gruesome torture, multiple graphic fights, and several threats of rape.

What pushed me over the edge into deciding that I wouldn't continue with the series, though, is another big coincidence near the end. Vaguely enough to avoid spoilers: there's something that's been going on for centuries, and it stops (by complete chance) in the same minute that some of the characters enter the scene. Great for cinematic drama; terrible for suspension of disbelief.

Also bad for my suspension of disbelief was the character armour/badass quotient of the main characters. Again, it's cinematic (though probably with an R rating for graphic violence).

So maybe part of the problem was that the tone was inconsistent. Sometimes grittily realistic (which I didn't personally enjoy), sometimes cinematic (which I found challenged credibility), sometimes a more standard epic fantasy feel lying between the two. The combination meant I could never really settle into the story, and overall I just didn't quite love it.

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Review: Piccadilly Jim

Piccadilly Jim by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

(Vague spoilers follow, mostly for things that are fairly predictable if you know the author/genre.)

Published during, but set presumably before, World War I, this book is one of the best of the early Wodehouse novels I've read lately. It still has the besetting fault of overuse of coincidence, so that both London and New York feel like villages because key characters keep meeting each other by chance when the plot requires them to, but it's not quite as strained as in some of the others.

Also, the couple (most of these early Wodehouse novels are, or at least prominently include, romances) are more appealing than some of the others I've read. The woman in The Girl on the Boat is silly and flighty, the woman in The Intrusion of Jimmy a blank screen onto which the hero projects his desires without actually knowing her, but this heroine, Ann, is both more developed than the latter and more appealing than the former. She's more like the heroines of Jill the Reckless , The Adventures of Sally or Uneasy Money in that regard.

We meet Ann first, and get our first impressions of the title character through her memories of him acting in a thoughtless and cruel way towards her five years previously; it seems he's a typical young Wodehouse waster, except that he's not amiable. I was braced for a bad time, in which he won Ann's hand somehow despite continuing to be a toad, because most of Wodehouse's characters change very little. However, he did manage a heel-face turn, motivated by someone he cared about (not Ann), relatively early on, and stuck to it.

Along the way, we get some of the complicated, farcical scheming and multiple intersecting plots that Wodehouse was later known for; Jimmy ends up impersonating himself, his father impersonates a butler, aunts and uncles abound, there are criminal and technically-criminal-but-well-intentioned schemes afoot (with a couple more impersonations and some ordinary posing), worms turn, a repellant child (also featured in the earlier book The Little Nugget ) gets his comeuppance, and an exciting time is had by all.

Apparently there were movie versions made in 1919, 1936, and 2004. I haven't seen any of them, but it seems the 1936 movie changed the plot considerably, while the 2004 version was all over the map in terms of the time it was apparently set in and the tone, and lost what is, to me, the saving grace of the novel, Jim's reformation, while also making him a womanizer.

The Project Gutenberg version, which I read, has taken the odd editorial decision to follow the original US edition (rather than the UK edition) in not capitalizing "aunt" and "uncle" when they form part of a name (so, "aunt Nesta" rather than "Aunt Nesta"). This is now considered incorrect usage on both sides of the Atlantic, and it annoyed me mildly throughout. Otherwise, the copy editing was mostly not bad.

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Review: The Enchanted Forest Chronicles [Boxed Set]

The Enchanted Forest Chronicles [Boxed Set] by Patricia C. Wrede
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

According to my Goodreads records, I had read all of these previously in 2012 - nearly 10 years ago, so I had largely forgotten them. I enjoyed the re-read.

They are firmly in the genre of fairy-tale retelling in which practically the whole of society apparently consists of royalty, with the odd knight, the very occasional steward or other upper servant, and maybe a farmer when the plot requires one, plus witches, wizards, sorceresses, non-human talking creatures of various kinds, and a very vaguely implied merchant class who never actually enter into the story. You needn't bother to think about the economic basis of all of this, where the food is coming from or who is paying the taxes that provide the king's income or even who makes the swords and jewellery. That's not what the story is about. It also consciously plays with tropes and characters out of fairy tales, with a bit of a spin, and also adds in a few original touches that fit into the world well enough.

The four books, while complete in themselves for the most part, do have an overall arc, and some characters recur across several books.

Cimorene, the protagonist of the first book, is exactly the kind of pragmatic, sensible, capable young woman I enjoy as a protagonist. She can't see the sense in conforming to what's expected if there's no actual good reason to do so, and so she volunteers to be a dragon's princess and then firmly sends away the knights and princes who try to rescue her. That, by itself, wouldn't be a plot, though; she discovers that the wizards are up to no good, and, by being courageous and level-headed and making good use of allies and resources, brings about a satisfactory conclusion.

The second book centres on the King of the Enchanted Forest, who joins forces with Cimorene to thwart the wizards' next gambit. Compared with Cimorene, he's not as vividly drawn, but he's courageous and determined and, importantly, open to considering Cimorene as an equal partner.

The third book's protagonist is Morwen, a witch who has nine cats (none of them black; she doesn't care for convention any more than Cimorene does). The author has given the cats distinct personalities, and conveyed them so successfully that I could remember clearly which was which and what they were like, which is something that a lot of authors can't manage with human characters. One thing I didn't particularly enjoy in this book; the magician character is given to explaining magic in somewhat complicated terms, and Cimorene, who has shown herself previously to be intelligent and well-read and capable with magic, has to keep asking Morwen for a plain-language translation. I suppose someone had to, as a reader proxy, but really the explanations aren't that complicated in their vocabulary for the most part, and it seemed out of character for Cimorene to be the one who didn't follow them.

The fourth book was actually the first to be written, as a standalone, though when you read them all together the first three books are very necessary backstory for it. Cimorene's son Daystar must go on a deliberately ill-defined quest, and he does so by meeting a series of obstacles and overcoming them largely through politeness (Cimorene has trained him to be almost comically polite) and firm perseverance, plus the help of people he meets along the way. He mostly doesn't solve difficult problems by intelligence, though he sometimes comes to correct conclusions when he needs to. I didn't feel that he had a lot of development as a character, nor was the plot as satisfying as in the other books. Daystar is too sensible to succumb to the usual temptations to leave the path that fairy-tale heroes are often faced with, and it means his quest is mostly linear.

This one-volume edition is worth having for the author's introductions, which talk about how and why she wrote the books.

Overall, recommended.

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