Review: The Dark Archive

The Dark Archive by Genevieve Cogman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

There's nothing like bringing back an old adversary, especially one the hero thinks they've killed, to ramp up the tension, and that's what we have here. In fact, there are eventually three old adversaries, and they want revenge on Irene the Librarian, but more or less as a side benefit of their larger dastardly schemes.

Once again, the stakes are high: multiversal war and the death or enslavement of billions of humans, but also personal: Irene and her friends are under direct threat, and she's learning things about her own origins, the dragons' origins, the Library's origins, and how everything works that are highly disturbing both individually and collectively.

Throughout, she keeps her cool, pragmatic competence under considerable pressure, not without an occasional wish that her life was easier, but always with an unshakeable commitment to her principles.

I've read several of these books in a short timespan now, and they have a good mix of elements that remain the same in each book (Irene's character, plenty of action, similar threats) with elements that vary (the settings, the exact problems, the exact solutions) and elements that gradually build and develop across the series (Irene's relationships, her understanding of what lies behind it all). They're solid, thorough, competent work by an author I suspect is rather like Irene in those respects.

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Review: Jumpnauts

Jumpnauts by Hao Jingfang
My rating: 0 of 5 stars

This was a DNF, at 27%, mainly because I look for better science in my science fiction, but also because as a story it just wasn't doing much for me.

By wanting better science I mean not only the ridiculous ancient-aliens pseudoarcheology (though certainly that), but the fundamental lack of understanding of a very basic astronomical concept: the light year. Early on, an object is detected which has gone from 300 light years away to 89 light years away over a period of "a few months," but is said to be travelling "almost at the speed of light". Now, the very definition of a light year is that it's the distance light (or something travelling at the speed of light) takes to travel in a year, so if the object was moving at almost the speed of light it would have taken over 200 years, not just "a few months," to travel that distance.

I could probably have forgiven that, and given the ancient-aliens nonsense a trope pass, if the story had engaged me, but it didn't. Though it's supposed to be about first contact, early on it's mostly a love triangle between an archeologist (who believes in ancient aliens, and has very little personality), an alienated playboy astronomer from a wealthy family (who fills the void inside him with booze and sex), and a senior, yet remarkably hands-on, government agent with very little personality (who is engaged to his boss's daughter, a perfectly lovely woman who deserves better than to be sidelined in favour of the archeologist; but then, she probably deserves better than this guy anyway). My personal quirk is that I need to like the people involved in a romance if I'm going to care about it, and in this case I didn't.

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Review: Moonbound

Moonbound by Robin Sloan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I remarked of the author's previous book, Sourdough , "Someday Robin Sloan will write a perfect book. This isn't it." I'd like to repeat that sentiment regarding Moonbound, but switch "will write" to "may write"; for me, this one is slightly further from perfection than his earlier work, mainly because it lacks the central narrative drive of a mystery or constant pursuit of a specific goal. It also turned out to be post-apocalyptic, which isn't a genre I enjoy, and that probably impacted my evaluation. As well as that, I felt that the worldbuilding was in a fight between what was likely and what fitted the feel the author was going for, and that there were missed opportunities for deeper meaning and significance overall.

Of the author's previous novels, the lesser-known Annabel Scheme is definitely science fiction, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore is marginally science-fictional at best, and Sourdough is mostly only science-fictional inasmuch as San Francisco is inherently science-fictional (it's there in the abbreviation), though both of those last two are set in a milieu where technology and its impact are important, and Sourdough does have a mystical element. This book looks at first like a high-concept far-future SF novel, set 11,000 (actually closer to 12,000) years in the future, though as it went on I felt it was more like a fantasy novel with an SF excuse; there are talking animals, quests, wizards (so called; they're genetic-manipulation wizards, but they also feel like fantasy wizards), seven-league boots, and entities called dragons.

The background is that a future version of our civilization, known, for unexplained reasons, at its height as the Anth, has been destroyed by its own creations, the "dragons." These were AIs sent out to explore via an experimental FTL technology who came back changed, took over the moon, defeated the Anth in a war, cloaked the Earth in a screen of particles, and forbade the use of radio. To me, that obviously implies that they'd found something out there that was a huge threat and didn't want broadcasts drawing its attention, but nobody in the book seems to tumble to this (or, at least, to say it out loud that straightforwardly), and the dragons don't seem to have offered this explanation; they just came out swinging. One of them implies that the threat is too complex to explain, but that doesn't remove the option of saying, "A complicated threat is out there, and this is how we need to hide from it." To be fair, encountering whatever it is seems to have driven some of the dragons mad.

The Anth's response to the fact that they were losing the war was to hide the human genome in the other living things of earth and (though it's not put this way) commit mass suicide, so that the dragons won't wipe the earth to get rid of the humans, but they can eventually come back. For handwavy reasons, this kills all the birds and uplifts all the mammals (hence talking animals), and apparently some other creatures (the first to become a wizard and convert/restore themselves to human form is a salamander). There have been multiple civilizations in the thousands of years since then, but when a couple of characters turn up who are, contrary to all likelihood, survivors of the Anth, they appear to have no language difficulties. That was a speed bump for me; I doubt there's a language spoken today that would be easily comprehensible to speakers from even 1100 years ago, and 11,000 years ago humans may not have had language at all - plus there's been a complete cultural break from the Anth, except via archaeology, because genome is not culture. If it had been me, I would have had the AI assistant (who jumps from the tomb of a crashed Anth pilot to Ariel, a boy-with-a-destiny who fortunately happens to find that tomb) learn the boy's language from within him and create a transmissible translation matrix of some kind to give to the other Anth person (Durga) who later joins the cast; but then, I think about language a lot.

That (unnamed) AI assistant is the narrator, and reminds me very much of the AI assistant in the author's earlier book, Annabel Scheme , except that AI observed via an earring worn by the protagonist, while this AI observes directly through the senses of the protagonist. It's a clever variation on close third person, and works well, particularly because the AI is able to bring a broader perspective to the boy's experiences that he himself could not have. It's certainly not an unbiased narration, though; the AI, a product of the Anth, melodramatically and, to my mind, inaccurately refers to the fall of the Anth as "the end of history," despite the fact that plenty has happened in the intervening 11,000 years.

The author, like the character Durga, does have an unfortunate tendency to say things for rhetorical effect that make no logical sense if you think about them. For example, a storage device is "stuffed so full of entertainment, it didn't even have room for an encyclopedia". I get the symbolism there - Durga is all about performance rather than reality - but in terms of facts it doesn't work; the whole of English Wikipedia takes roughly the same amount of storage as a single movie. They could have fitted an encyclopedia in if they wanted one. (And earlier the same device is said to hold "every book, movie and song produced by the Anth since the 19th century," which would, if remotely literal, include several encyclopedias. I'm not sure why the many fine works of pre-19th-century culture didn't make the cut, either.)

The AI assistant figures out, based on what seems to me to be inadequate evidence, that they're somewhere on the west coast of what used to be Ireland, but a west coast that's somewhat further out because the sea level has dropped substantially (due, presumably, to the filling of the sky with a screen of particles that's produced an effect like a nuclear winter). But... doesn't that mean they're in an ice age? And shouldn't Ireland, therefore, be much colder than it's depicted (it seems about the same as current temperatures)? The worldbuilding sometimes feels like a bricolage of handwaving, incompletely thought-through speculation, whimsy and geekery; there are a ton of Easter eggs, many of which I know I missed, salted through the text. It's not so obtrusively bad that I'd give it my "weak-worldbuilding" tag, which I've been using a bit lately (mostly on books that are so busy being socially conscious about a very narrow part of today's world in particular that they have no idea how worlds work in general), but it's not particularly strong, and certainly not "hard". It's not all the way towards the C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy end of things, but it's on that side of the spectrum - which, to be clear, I have no problem with as such; "soft" SF is often more humane and therefore more interesting to me. I'm just pointing out that the worldbuilding is a bit janky in places from a strict science point of view. There are other things that don't make much sense to me, too, such as the presence of electricity and electronics (excluding radio), and yet, apart from a couple of mentions of immersion blenders, little evidence of the use of electric motors - a simple and highly useful technology. People walk everywhere, and most work seems to be done by hand, which fits the mythic feel and ambiance but, as I say, doesn't make a whole lot of sense pragmatically.

The editing is mostly good, though it does need another quick pass before publication (I received a review copy from Netgalley). The author does have an idiosyncratic way with colons, sometimes using them where I would use a semicolon, a comma, an ellipsis, a dash, or no punctuation at all, but it's not wrong, exactly, just: unusual.

I enjoyed the beavers' method of arguing, where the two disputants finish up by summarizing each other's arguments in good faith, and in which they build a sculpture together (representing the argument, or its subject) which is what the community examines to make its decision. The collaborative-sculpture part is, of course, too mystical to be practical, at least for intelligent beings who aren't beavers, but I think the part where you summarize each other's arguments in a way that the other party will agree is fair is well worth adopting in the real world. I'm sure I've read about it in a book on negotiation, in fact.

What I was left with overall, though, was a sense of missed opportunities. Sourdough is, in part, a critique of Bay Area startup culture; this could have been a critique, as well as a celebration, of our culture as a whole, but because the narrator is an Anth chauvinist, the late Anth is seen as blameless and utopian, having solved all of the problems of the Middle Anth (our era). A charge of hubris against them is specifically denied. I would have liked to see this position interrogated, and more doubt cast on the narrator's reliability; more made of the risks of AI, given that it was rebel AIs that ended the Anth; and, in general, more contemplation of the human/posthuman condition. The protagonist undergoes a coming-of-age transition, and his original intended role is transformed into something finer, but that happens very much at the end of a story in which he mostly doesn't show a lot of focus or have much of a goal, apart from "don't be used in the wizard's scheme, whatever that is". The plot, inasmuch as there is one, is helped along several times by the sort of coincidence that can sometimes, just, be sold as "fate" in a more fantasy-type setting, but that doesn't really work when you've established the setting as a science-fictional one, however much it feels like fantasy. Also, there's a last-moment rescue which, while it isn't truly a deus ex machina - it's a Cavalry Rescue, which has, in retrospect, been foreshadowed - nevertheless feels like a deus ex machina because it's so perfectly timed, when the exact time that it happened was arbitrary. It does at least give Durga a moment of agency in the story that, up to that point, she was sorely lacking.

I've taken the time to critique it in detail because I think it's a good novel, but that with more work it could have been great. I know the author is capable of excellent writing; there's some of it here, at a sentence level, with observations like "Humans were always waking up from some dream, each individually, over the arc of a life, and also together, in the larger arc," and "More people dilute the poison of yourself, so it doesn't kill you," but I felt that I needed to be shown those things more and not just told them. It probably needed to be a longer book, and spend less time on the vibe and more on insight and theme and plot (and character; most of the characters are the one-trick characters of fairy tale), if it was going to feel fully successful to me.

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Review: The Secret Chapter

The Secret Chapter by Genevieve Cogman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoy a heist, and I enjoy this series, but unfortunately I found the heist itself slightly underwhelming; it wasn't really the focus of the book, more of a means to an end, a necessary step that had to be gone through to get to the actual point. Which, sure, fits the rest of the series; they're always about wider questions, not just the action for its own sake, but it did diminish the heist's impact for me. (view spoiler)[Even the death of one of the team members didn't make a lot of impact, and I had to check back at a later point to remind myself how he'd died; his death was almost incidental, rather than a key plot point. (hide spoiler)]

I normally give this series my Well-Edited tag; most of them are flawless, or nearly so, but I spotted four glitches this time. The phrase "constantly in my quarter" should be "constantly in my corner"; "a dark-skinned man, his hair" is technically a dangling modifier, though a fairly subtle one; "leading a double-life" should not have a hyphen between the adjective and the noun it modifies (only between compound adjectives); and "You can't turn us into CENSOR" should be "You can't turn us in to CENSOR" (CENSOR being the dystopian supernatural police). Yes, that last one is an important distinction. I'm still giving it the tag, because compared with most books I read, four subtle errors like that are nothing.

As I've indicated, the heist takes place in a dystopian version of 21st-century Austria in which CENSOR engages in almost literal witch-hunts. Or, at least, vampire and werewolf hunts. That's more of a background inconvenience than a main plot feature, though. It also starts and ends on a private Caribbean island where a powerful, manipulative fae rules, and it gives us more tantalizing background on the real origins of the dragons, which are different from their publicly proclaimed legend. I think I've remarked before that this series has the feel of being inspired by Zelazny's Amber series, in that the dragons represent the pole of order (like Amber itself) and the fae the pole of chaos (like the Courts of Chaos), and there's a multiverse of alternate worlds with different balances of those two forces. The Library, which strives to keep the balance so that humans retain some degree of freedom, doesn't have an analog in the Amberverse, though, and it's a great addition to the worldbuilding.

I enjoy the way that, throughout the series, the protagonist Irene learns more and more about how things actually work behind the scenes, and is more and more stretched to act in line with her personal ethics and preserve what's important to her. We get to know her better, too; in this book, we meet her parents at last.

I also, of course, enjoy Irene's competent and sensible approach to what is often looming disaster at an insane scale. That element is certainly present here, and I rate this book as solid, well-written and entertaining, even though, for me, more could have been made of the heist.

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Review: Time Of Trial

Time Of Trial by Michael Pryor
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I'm doing a reread of the first four books in preparation for completing the series, and reviewing as I go. My rating when I read this first in about 2010 was three stars, and I now see why; I'm going to be retaining that rating.

So far, the even-numbered volumes in the series are particularly messy. Volume 2 had even more instances of the copy editing issues that plague the entire series; this one adds a couple of new issues, like using "St Alban's" as the plural possessive when the name of the place is St Albans and the apostrophe should come after the "s" (also "Hollow's" when the man's name is Hollows), and splitting both "nothing" and "another" into two words, as well as the usual "may" when it should be "might" and "is" when it should be "was," too many commas between adjectives, singular where it should be plural, occasional missing words or punctuation marks, dangling modifiers, repetitive phrasing, and unclear referents for words like "it" and "that".

It had the feel of being rushed, and having missed at least one round of revision, not only because of the copy editing but because of many small infelicities of other kinds, like moments where I didn't believe that a person would act the way they had to act in order for the plot to happen. For example, a Might-As-Well-Be-German policeman is handed a parcel by a foreigner he's never seen before, and told it's a magical bomb found behind the venue where the dignitaries are, but it's been rendered safe and should be disposed of; he instantly believes this, blanches and rushes off without any attempt to argue, or secure said foreigner for questioning. Admittedly, the setting is not actually early-20th-century Germany, but it's a very close analogue, and if you read, say, Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men on the Bummel , about an actual trip to pre-World-War-I Germany, you'll get a very different picture of how German officials behaved. Aubrey, the main character, is twice mistaken for an arms dealer (who hasn't shown up to meetings for reasons that are never explained), on very little evidence and despite being 17; he plays along and gets away with it (and there are several other coincidences that assist the progress of the plot). I didn't believe the general reaction to the revelation that Prince Albert had a claim to the Not-French throne, either.

George, who has no talent for languages and doesn't understand Not-German, contributes to a conversation presumably in that language as if he'd been following it fine.

There are also moments of implausible physics (mostly to do with how much could happen, and be said, while something or someone fell, or flew across a room), and moments where something directly contradicted what had been said earlier. A minor, but particularly clear, example of that last issue: at one point Aubrey reflects on a farmer he had known who could "reliably" cast a spell to locate lost sheep. Two sentences later and still in the same paragraph, it's described as "an erratic, fugitive talent".

Another example that combines both plausibility and continuity issues: Aubrey phones round hospitals pretending to be a visiting foreign medical student, and the hospitals are happy to divulge the names of their coma patients, no questions asked. He begins with Western Hospital and finds the place he's looking for on the third phone call, but when they visit (and aren't asked for any proof of their identity), the hospital is... Western Hospital. The first one he called.

Alongside this, Aubrey is behind the beat on figuring out what's going on a lot of the time. Perhaps I was remembering bits of the plot subconsciously from my previous reading more than 10 years ago, but I could see looming problems several times when he was clueless, and he's supposed to be brilliant. Part of the group's aim is to confront the villain, but despite having plenty of time for preparation, when the villain turns up they're taken by surprise and unprepared.

Finally, there's the issue of Caroline, which other reviewers picked up on earlier in the series than I did. In this book, I finally reached the point of being tired of the fact that we can't just be told that Caroline did something (anything) without also being told that Aubrey found it charming and admirable and was, in general, mooning over her. I mean, I've been 17 with a crush on someone; it was a long time ago, but I still remember it, and yes, it makes you kind of an idiot, and you can get a bit obsessive about it. And yes, the point of view throughout is close third person focused on Aubrey, so naturally we get his perspective on everything that happens. And yes, Caroline is awesome; she's cool-headed and multi-skilled (crack shot, ornithopter pilot, martial artist, can pick locks) thanks to her late father getting his many interesting friends to train her in the hope, presumably, that she'd become an international spy. But it still gets wearing that she can never just do something and have it be about her; it's always about how Aubrey admires her for it.

I will carry on and read the last two books, since that's why I started the reread in the first place, and there are things to enjoy about them; the author can write a great action set-piece with spectacular magic, and there are some wonderful phrases scattered about, like "All of these groups had axes to grind and there were plenty of shady business people ready to sell them bigger and better axes," but they are badly outnumbered by issues that the author and/or editor should have picked up on and fixed. It's scruffy and lacking in professionalism, and it frustrates me.

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Review: Word of Honour

Word of Honour by Michael Pryor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An improvement on the previous book; the same editing issues are there ("may" when it should be "might," occasionally "is" when it should be "was," verb and noun not agreeing in number, too many commas between adjectives, a dangling modifier, and this time a homonym error too: "racked" for "wracked," and an incompletely revised and therefore garbled sentence: "Sounds like a pair music hall of music hall performers"), but they're less frequent, and the plot almost gets along completely without helpful coincidences, in contrast to the multiple ones in the previous book. It even manages to avert both a deus ex machina and a heel-face turn at the climax, which the protagonist manages by protagonizing; this is good.

It does explain a little more about how magic works: the bigger the effect, the more complex the spell needs to be and the more it costs the caster (which surely means that Aubrey should not have been able to levitate a 5-storey stone tower with minimal preparation, or even at all, in the previous book, but never mind). The one fortunate coincidence supplies Aubrey with a kind of Rosetta stone to Egyptian hieroglyphics, one which seems too small for the purpose and oddly situated in a Roman temple, but again, never mind; this enables him to advance his theories on how to manage his unfortunate partly-dead condition, though not to the point where he can actually take care of it. The Aubrey-Caroline romance gets somewhat back on track, but makes little progress. Caroline points out that they did dance at the ball in Not-Paris, at least, but if my memory is correct they in fact did not, since Aubrey started out looking for people, and then events occurred, and there really wasn't any room for dancing in there.

This is a middle book; things progress incrementally, but nothing is really resolved. The villain appears again, and all the same problems are there (and a couple of new ones, at least one of which does resolve within the book). Notwithstanding, this is an action-packed volume with some strong set-pieces, though still let down a bit for me by the poor standard of editing. Something has gone wrong with the paragraphing, too, in this series; it doesn't follow the convention that a new speaker gets a new paragraph, and sometimes there's a paragraph break in the middle of someone's speech for no reason. Poor conversion from a print book to an ebook, perhaps.

The whole series frustrates me, because with just a bit more work by a competent editor it could be really good (and an experienced author like this shouldn't make the errors in the first place). But the storytelling is good, the emotional arc is sound, and despite all my carping I did enjoy it and am now reading the next one.

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Review: Debunked

Debunked by Dito Abbott
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There seems to be an unwritten rule that you can have airships in your book, or you can use vocabulary words correctly, but not both. This book mostly breaks that rule, except that it calls something a mace that's actually a flail, based on the description, and something else a pyramid that's actually a cone. That's not the kind of vocabulary error I'm talking about, though; not knowing what things are called is different from using the wrong word because it's similar to the right one, like, say, "riffed" instead of "riffled" or "rigorous" instead of "vigorous" - oh, wait, it does confuse those words. Myth confirmed.

Like every book I've got through BookBub in the past couple of years, it could do with more editing, mostly for excess coordinate commas, absent past perfect tense, missing second hyphens in phrases like "four-foot-tall cockroach" and a couple of misplaced apostrophes when the possessive noun is plural.
It differs from a lot of "funny" fantasy in that it is occasionally funny, and has a plot that isn't just a series of tropes involving people with silly names, but it's honestly not that much above average for the genre (and the average is poor). It failed, in the end, to engage me enough to finish it, even though I'd got most of the way through; I started reading something else and didn't feel like going back to it, and that's down to the thin characters and the need for better editing.

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Review: Heart of Gold

Heart of Gold by Michael Pryor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Sadly, I felt this book went downhill from the already imperfect first book, both in editing and also in plot. I still enjoyed it, but I was frustrated by the avoidable issues that made it less than it could have been.

The typesetting is very sloppy, with a lot of instances where there's a space before a quotation mark, for instance; there are words left out of sentences, words repeated, all the usual mess. There are also missing hyphens, multiple dangling modifiers, lots of "may" where it should be "might" in past tense, and two occasions where characters are given the wrong name (once a contorted misspelling, once the surname of a completely different character). As I remarked about the first book, this is why I don't buy trad-pub books but get them from the library; you never know when you're going to get a sub-par piece of work like this, and they cost a lot more than indie books which are sometimes better edited.

This time, we're in Not-France ("Gallia"), mostly Not-Paris ("Lutetia"), where Aubrey is theoretically on holiday. I say "theoretically" because, as well as trying to casually bump into his love interest, who's studying there, he's trying to fulfil commissions from his cousin the crown prince, his father the prime minister, his mother the naturalist, his grandmother the duchess, and the head of the magical secret service. Plus he needs to get a rest, because he's still suffering from his foolish experiment with death magic in the first book.

No chance of a rest, though, because (and this was one of the things that irked me) he is constantly happening to be in places where something plot-relevant is happening. I lost count of the number of times he was coincidentally right there at a key moment. For example, he happens to be taking a tour of Not-Notre-Dame at the exact time that the McGuffin of the title, a magical artifact that holds France together, is stolen from a chapel there. This is, in my view, no way to run a plot; if a protagonist is somewhere where an important event is happening, it ought to be because they are protagonizing, not by sheer lucky chance. Also, he's still improvising ridiculously powerful, unprecedented magic whenever there's a problem to solve.

Setting all that aside, it's action-packed and varied, and both the storytelling and emotional arc are sound. Aubrey makes just the kind of stupid, selfish decision a privileged, talented 17-year-old would make (notably without involving his sidekick George, which implies that he knows it's wrong and doesn't want to be told so), and he suffers consequences for it, which is good.

I like Caroline, the love interest, a lot, for much the same reasons as Aubrey does; she's extremely competent and intelligent, and acts like it (it's not just a decal stuck superficially onto a character who actually demonstrates ineptness and stupidity). And despite his shenanigans, I like Aubrey, too; he has a good heart, mostly, and wants to do the right thing, and knows he's driven by wanting his father's approval and to live up to his family tradition but doesn't know how to cope with that. His imperfections actually make him more appealing than a total Gary Stu, even though he's ridiculously talented.

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Review: Blaze of Glory

Blaze of Glory by Michael Pryor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read the first four books in this series some years ago (more than 10), and now that the series is complete and I can get the ebooks from my library - more on that later - I'm doing a reread from the beginning. That was the right decision, since I don't remember them very well.

I enjoyed the book, but I am going to highlight some issues I had with it that reduced how much I enjoyed it.

The setting is basically early-20th-century Europe with all the names of places and historical figures changed; a few minor changes, like importing the mad king/crown prince in charge situation from the early 19th century; and magic as a reasonably well understood and widespread phenomenon. I'm not a huge fan of this kind of worldbuilding; I'd rather the author left the names the same and just did an alternate-history version. I don't think calling England "Albion" and Germany "Holmland" adds anything, or enables anything that the familiar names wouldn't, and so much else is the same (including a looming European war between the two) that it feels like the changed names are an attempt to distract from a lack of worldbuilding imagination.

The magic system is built on a number of "laws," but they're not explained in any depth, so the magic is not truly Sandersonian. This means that the protagonist, Aubrey, a privileged young man of 17 with all the wisdom that implies (not much), can essentially pull any magical effect the plot requires out of nowhere at the drop of a hat; he's a magical prodigy. His use of magic is in theory tempered, but in practice not really hindered much at all, by a foolish experiment with death magic at the beginning of the book that renders his soul in danger of detaching from his body if he exerts himself too much. Nevertheless, he runs around to a considerable extent foiling a series of interlinking plots. The journey is enjoyable, and even though he's sometimes a bit of an ass, he's generally well-intentioned and I was in his corner throughout. His sidekick George is essentially Sam Gamgee (he even carries Aubrey at one point in the second book), but with less angst and more self-respect; I like him, though he doesn't, in the two books I've re-read so far, get much of an arc of his own.

The editing is disappointing. There are a lot of excess commas between adjectives, including such egregious examples as "one, long sigh," "whole, marvellous construction" and "single, squat, stone building," none of which should have any commas in. "May" is used in narration in the past tense where it should be "might," there are a couple of missing quotation marks and a missing full stop, some replies don't match the sentence they're replying to (a sign of incomplete checking after a revision), and there's a dangling modifier. The second book is worse. It's a pity, because the storytelling and emotional arc are strong, and I feel an experienced author and one of the largest publishers in the world should do a better job than this. This is why I get trad-pub books from the library; the book costs twice as much as an indie work like Melissa McShane's The Smoke-Scented Girl , which I choose as a comparison because this one reminded me of it (a similar, though more imaginative, setting and a strong male friendship between broadly similar characters), but the McShane is much better edited.

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Top Books for 2023

This is, amazingly, my tenth annual roundup of recommended books that I read in the previous year. Ten years is a long time to keep something like this going, especially for me, though I've remained true to my mercurial nature by changing something about how I do it each year. My summary page links to all the previous roundups.

In the early years, I arbitrarily matched the number of top books to the number of the year (so I had 14 books on the list in 2014). I abandoned that practice after the first four years, and last year I loosened the criteria even further and included almost anything that I gave four or five stars to; this year's list has the largest number of books so far, at 88 (out of the 102 books I read in 2023; the high total number, which almost equals my 2014 record, is partly attributable to getting Covid, which meant I mostly stayed in bed and read for several days). I've left several short pieces and a number of books I started but didn't finish out of the total. I've also been reading some manga lately online, and it's difficult or impossible to find those on GR, so they're not reflected either.

Here are my figures in a table:

	5 star	4 star	3 star	2 star	Total
2023	6	82	12	2	102
2022	6	59	13	4	82
2021	5	54	29	3	90
2020	8	53	21	0	82
2019	11	36	17	1	65
2018	5	72	15	2	94
2017	10	56	19	0	85
2016	11	53	12	1	77
2015	11	68	19	2	101
2014	9	70	23	2	104
Total	82	600	180	17	882
Average	8	60	18	2	88

Tier Rankings

Since 2021, I have ranked the books in four tiers: Platinum (equal to 5 stars), and Gold, Silver and Bronze (which provide more gradation within the four-star space). Essentially, Bronze indicates that the storytelling and the emotional arc were sound and I enjoyed the book on the whole, but with caveats, usually to do with poor copy editing and/or weak worldbuilding; Silver indicates a sound, solid book with no serious flaws; and Gold is a sound, solid book that also has something a bit extra, usually depth of characterization or insight into the human condition, but somehow or other doesn't quite make it all the way to Platinum. Platinum means I thoroughly enjoyed it, no significant flaws, depth, originality, an all-around winner. Significant issues in a book that's strong in other ways can knock it down one or even two tiers.

Here's the link to all of my "Best of 2023" books, and here are my Platinum tier (6 books), Gold tier (8 books), Silver tier (38 books) and Bronze tier (37 books).

A note: I've figured out how to link to lists of books on Goodreads that have the same tag (or "shelf") and were read in the same year. I will take the risk of using these links, knowing that if GR revises their code - which is honestly long overdue - the links may well stop working. They changed their front end recently, increasing the number of clicks needed to do basic tasks and making it difficult or impossible to find notes and highlights, so I don't trust them to do a good job or make it backwards-compatible if they do a revision. But it saves me a lot of work to use those links rather than laboriously copying and pasting as I've done in previous years, and there are more books than ever this year. I will give brief rundowns on the Gold and Platinum books below, though.

Discovery/Sources

As with last year, I read a lot of classics, mostly from Project Gutenberg. This is partly because my previous best sources, Netgalley and BookBub, have been increasingly disappointing over the past couple of years, featuring a lot of unimaginative cookie-cutter books, many of them in genres I don't care for. I read 32 books from Project Gutenberg: one, H.G. Wells's The Wheels of Chance, ranked in Platinum, three in Gold, eight in Silver, and 15 in Bronze, with the remaining books earning only three stars each.

In contrast, 20 of this year's books came from Netgalley, down from 25 in 2022 and 41 in the previous two years: three Platinum, three Gold, six Silver, six Bronze, and two which earned three stars.

I bought only six through BookBub this year, down from 10 last year, all but one tagged "Needs-Editing" (the exception is by Lindsay Buroker); three of them made Bronze, and the remainder consisted of two three-stars and a two-star. You can see why I'm considering dropping BookBub entirely. (As an ironic indirect consequence of the poor showing from BookBub, I can no longer post reviews on Amazon, even though I'm a Vine Voice, because I haven't spent enough money with them lately.) By the way, BookBub claim on their website under their FAQ about how they select books for their newsletter, "We look for content that is well-formatted and free of typos and grammatical errors." I'm here to tell you that they absolutely do not.

I trialled Amazon's Kindle Unlimited for the free month in 2023, but, as I more or less expected, many of the books I want to read are not in KU, and those that are were mostly very poorly edited (with the exception of A.J. Lancaster's The King of Faerie, which went all the way to the Platinum tier and earned my rarely-awarded Well-Edited tag). Of the five books I read in KU, two were Bronze tier and two Silver tier, and one in each tier got the Seriously-Needs-Editing tag. They did all make the recommendation list, though.

In October, a friend kindly gave me his old Kobo when he upgraded, meaning I could access my local library system's ebook collection (for stupid licensing reasons, library books can't be read on Kindle in New Zealand), and that opened up a new source of books that would normally be beyond my admittedly very low price tolerance. I read 13 ebooks from the library, the high number being largely down to Covid, and they consisted of one Gold, seven Silver, and six Bronze-tier books. I also borrowed four physical books from the library earlier in the year to complete my reading of the Jeeves and Wooster series.

Speaking of price, I maintain a large wishlist (80-odd titles) on Amazon entitled "Await Ebook Price Drop," and monitor it regularly. I bought six books from my wishlist this year, a Platinum (Brandon Sanderson's The Lost Metal, from his Mistborn series, which I always seem to give five stars to), a Gold (The Burning Page, from Genevieve Cogman's Invisible Library series, which I also consistently rate high), two Silvers, and two Bronzes. The two Bronze-tier books reminded me why I wait until these books are on sale; it's Forrest Gump's box of chocolates.

I'm part of the Codex writers' forum, though I haven't been on there much lately, and I picked up five books from fellow Codexians in 2023, two of them via Netgalley and the rest directly from the authors. As I'd expect from Codexians, they consisted of four Silvers and a Gold, the Gold-tier book being Alex Shvartsman's Kakistocracy.

I bought two books based on Amazon recommendations, a Silver and a Bronze.

Best of the Best

Rather than summarize all 88, I'll just highlight the Platinum and Gold books this year - coincidentally taking me back to a list of 14, as in my first annual top books list. Don't despise the Silver or even Bronze tiers, though; those are still recommendations, still books I enjoyed.

Gold Tier

Let's start with the books I liked a lot but that didn't quite make it to the highest possible level. In alphabetical order by author (links to my Goodreads reviews):

• The Tainted Cup (Shadow of the Leviathan #1), Robert Jackson Bennett. I enjoyed this author's previous series a lot, and this gives us another high-concept fantasy world, this time with kaiju, genetic manipulation, superpowers, imperial politics and a twisty murder mystery.
• The Burning Page (The Invisible Library #3), Genevieve Cogman. Cogman always writes well and brings great action with a competent, matter-of-fact, ingenious and principled female protagonist (my favourite kind). Here, she's struggling against a rogue Librarian who's trying to destroy the multiverse.
• The Lost Plot (The Invisible Library #4), Genevieve Cogman. One of the cool things about setting your series in a multiverse of alternate worlds is that you can have what amounts to time travel to different eras (in this case 1920s-style New York, with gangsters and Prohibition) without the complications of actual time travel, and with the option to have the worlds be different from ours in key ways. Cogman makes the most of that ability here, and throws in a dragon fight and a corruption scandal.
• The Kuiper Belt Job, David D. Levine. A heist, and what a heist; actually, a series of smaller heists as the crew is assembled, and then a big heist (and a huge plot twist) as the climax. The characters are instantly distinct and memorable, as well, which is a challenge to pull off when you're writing an ensemble cast. If "an Ocean's movie, but in space" makes you say "Ooh!", you'll want to read this one.
• England, Their England, A.G. Macdonell. A comedy classic from the 1930s, in which a Scotsman attempts to write a book about the English and discovers that they're all different, except that they're all mad. Some wonderful set-piece scenes, including one of the best examples of "show, don't tell" I've ever read.
• Kakistocracy, Alex Schvartsman. An urban fantasy underdog hero with a bad habit of speaking snark to power is inexplicably appointed as a mediator between angels and devils, while also trying to resolve several other tangled plots and keep from being assassinated by elves. To this end, he applies intelligence, courage, perseverance, generosity, kindness, courage and self-sacrifice, aided by assorted and sometimes surprising allies.
• Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit, P.G. Wodehouse. The best Wooster books, for me, are the ones set at Brinkley Court, with Bertie's scheming Aunt Agatha and choleric Uncle Thomas and the selection of assorted lunatics who cluster around them. Wodehouse at the peak of his game.
• Meet Mr. Mulliner, P.G. Wodehouse. The shenanigans of the many relatives and acquaintences of the inveterate bar-parlour raconteur Mr. Mulliner are varied and hilarious, and he swears all his stories are true, even the highly unlikely ones.

Platinum Tier

And now, the best of the best of the best, also in no particular order.

• The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley. You can always spot a really intelligent author, and in this case part of her intelligence is the way in which she doesn't feel bound to current orthodoxies but can think in historical perspective - a useful skill when you're writing a time-travel novel, and a rare one. Alongside this, a powerful emotional arc beautifully executed in polished, but not overpolished, language.
• Dead Country (The Craft Wars, #1), Max Gladstone. Tara Abernathy is far and away my favourite character in Gladstone's Craft series, and in this first volume in the spinoff/sequel series, she is at her best. She's another competent, sensible, principled female protagonist, which is always a good start for me, but on top of that Gladstone layers bravura writing, action that has meaning, and both the highest and most personal of stakes.
• The King of Faerie (Stariel, #4), A.J. Lancaster. Another of those competent, matter-of-fact, ingenious and principled female protagonists I enjoy so much deals wonderfully with romance, the court politics of two worlds, and the mundane issues of being responsible for a run-down noble estate and also pregnant out of wedlock in a society that considers that scandalous.
• Charming, Jade Linwood. Not a heist, but a sting, in which Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Rapunzel scheme to take down the confidence trickster known as Prince Charming. Fairy-tale retellings can easily be kitschy, superficial and cliched; this is none of those things. The characters have depth and arcs of growth and change, the female protagonists are competent and principled and basically superheroes, and the comical narrative voice reminded me strongly of early Terry Pratchett.
• The Lost Metal (The Mistborn Saga, #7), Brandon Sanderson. Sanderson is great at describing action, but it's never mindless action; there's a good deal of reflection on the human condition that absolutely does not slow down the fantasy-superhero plot (and it's funny, at times hilarious). For maximum enjoyment you need to have read, and remembered, a lot of lore from several of the author's sprawling series, but it's not essential; I haven't read all of that and have forgotten most of what I have read, and I still loved it.
• The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll, H.G. Wells. A surprise entry in the list, this somewhat obscure classic by an author whose other works I've not always enjoyed is a tremendous celebration of the newfound mobility that the bicycle gave to the common man before the era of the car. It's partly inspired by Three Men in a Boat, and like its model it's a comedy, but there's more to it; there are reflections on how people outsource their thinking to the zeitgeist, for instance, and the protagonist is a terrific Everyman hero, a small-minded fantasist who becomes more through taking principled action on behalf of someone else. This isn't science fiction strictly defined, but it is partly about the social impact of a real-world technology.

Series

This year, I've been doing a lot of series reading. If you look at my 2023 list sorted by author, you can see this reflected clearly. A couple of the series I've read come from Project Gutenberg, but I've also read most of the Ethshar series via my library. The series I want to recommend are:

• Jeeves and Wooster, by P.G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse is someone you either enjoy or you don't; if you do, this is some of his best work. I was delighted to discover that I had not, in fact, read all of these books, and to rectify this in 2023.
• Ethshar, by Lawrence Watt-Evans. Sword and sorcery, and the author makes full use of the genre; these stories couldn't exist in any other setting. The characters are noblebright (usually), though the world is sometimes dark, and the author changes things up a bit in each book rather than sticking to a formula.
• Arsene Lupin, by Maurice Leblanc. I haven't read all of these, not even all of the ones on Project Gutenberg, but I intend to. They're thrilling pulp adventures with a remarkable, but also flawed, hero and highly intelligent, twisty plots, and no two of them are quite alike.
• The Invisible Library, by Genevieve Cogman. I started the series before 2023, but I read books 3-5 this year, so I'm counting it. It's a thoroughly enjoyable, well-edited series.

Conclusion

I'm not going to go through 102 books and look at the gender of the authors or the protagonists, as I did in previous years; I'm increasingly convinced that it doesn't matter (and the large number of classics I've read will skew the results male, compared to earlier lists, which doesn't reflect my taste so much as the sociology of the past).

This year, I continued the shift away from the increasingly insipid or poorly-executed offerings from BookBub and Netgalley towards more classics. At the end of the year, with my library's ebook collection newly opened up to me, I began reading some books that I wouldn't otherwise have access to, and that should continue in 2024, so I'm likely to review more recent fiction again. Still, I managed to continue several favourite series, and to pick up some new series starters and standalones, some of which will get the hype train treatment (because of their authors' connections rather than their quality) and some of which will not, but are nevertheless excellent books that I highly recommend.

Review: The Unwelcome Warlock

The Unwelcome Warlock by Lawrence Watt-Evans
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The series has built up enough continuity now that this book references most of the previous ones to some degree, particularly, of course, the similarly named The Unwilling Warlord. (I'd be prepared to bet the author sooner or later regretted naming two books in a way that enables them to be confused with each other.) It also seems to have a lot of references to Night of Madness, which I skipped in the series because it didn't appeal to me. I followed it OK, though; you could begin here, because even though it's not as self-contained as the earlier books, everything from previous continuity is adequately explained as it becomes relevant, but ideally read the earlier books first.

The mysterious power that feeds warlocks has changed, and Vond, the most powerful of them, is back. He built an empire in The Unwilling Warlord and then was drawn away by the Calling, which compelled warlocks who used too much magic to go to a particular place that was also the power source, but now he's returned, and since he has the very loosest possible grasp on the concept of "other people's concerns are important too" and is the most powerful magician alive, that's a problem for everyone around him. In particular, it's a problem for the former leader of the warlocks (now depowered), not least because Vond has decided to take over his house.

The book proceeds with a clash of pretty much every faction and person who has an interest in dealing with Vond, which is a lot of them, and none of them really have much of a plan most of the time; there are some regrettable consequences to that. One thing I like about these books is that the characters, even the very powerful ones, are often quite limited in their problem-solving ability, in that they're encountering new situations outside their experience and having to improvise, and often they get it wrong at first. That gives a realistic feel that anchors the plentiful magic and other fantastic elements, and means the resolutions don't come too easily, which is a risk of high-magic stories. Another thing I like is that they're generally well-disposed towards their fellow humans as a matter of course, and those who aren't are depicted as despicable.

Solidly crafted, this is a strong addition to a good series.

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Review: Arsène Lupin in the Teeth of the Tiger

Arsène Lupin in the Teeth of the Tiger by Maurice Leblanc
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

These are action-packed, swashbuckling books, full of unexpected twists and turns, and this one even more so than average for the series. Lupin, under a pseudonym which continues to be used even after his identity as Lupin is well established, sets out to solve a series of murders, some of which don't even seem to be murders at first, and discovers an intricate plot in which the antagonist keeps changing and what seem to be airtight clues turn out to be not so much.

There is a hard-to-swallow twist partway through, when Lupin is exposed and captured and bargaining for his freedom with the President of France; what he brings to the table is (view spoiler)[an empire in Africa which he has conquered and brought to a high level of organization in the space of about five years, essentially through sheer awesomeness and with the help of 60 of his men, to the point that he can leave it and it keeps ticking over. (hide spoiler)]

Lupin is an interesting paradox; he's sometimes an unstoppable force of nature, a pulp hero who can achieve any ridiculous goal, while at other times he's baffled and threatened with real danger. The author manages this contradiction well, for the most part, and his plotting shows a high level of skill; he's not just writing an intelligent character, he's an intelligent author, which makes a big difference. Lupin's tendency to fall in love is, I suppose, to be expected in a French character, and it raises the stakes and increases the complications. The women are never entirely three-dimensional, though this one at least plays quite an active role in the plot.

While sometimes going over the top, these are gripping pulp stories that thrill, puzzle and excite, and I recommend them as an entertaining read.

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Review: The Mortal Word

The Mortal Word by Genevieve Cogman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fun series, and I love the main character, whose general attitude is, "Everyone's trying to kill me and bring about terrible consequences for the multiverse, and I could really do with a break from that, but hey ho, no use whining, let's get on and thwart them again."

The setting is a peace conference of sorts in an alternate-world Paris between the dragons (who are forces of order) and the fae (forces of chaos), with the Librarians, who try to keep a cosmic balance so that humanity can continue to survive in the multiverse, acting as neutral arbiters. The protagonist is a Librarian who has a history of foiling plots and figuring out culprits, and when there's a murder at the conference, she's called in, along with a Great Detective from the alternate London where she's based and representatives from both the fae and dragon sides.

Cue plenty of action, scary fae and dragons defied and escaped, and development of long-running relationships that have been building through the series, all conveyed by a lot of sound, capable writing. Even if I didn't like Irene as much as I do, I'd still read this series, just because it's far more competently written than most of the other books I come across.

The weakness of the series for me - and it's not a big one - continues to be the magic system. There's a clearer definition in this book of what the quasi-magical Language of the librarians requires (you have to clearly name a thing and describe what you want it to do, seemingly within its nature, and the larger the thing you're influencing the harder it is), but it still remains a bit vague and plot-convenient. Also, it takes a physical toll on the librarian who uses it, but in practice, even when Irene has supposedly almost crippled herself with a headache from using the Language, she still has one or two more uses of it in her as needed. At one point, when she'd made what was described as an "ultimate effort," I made a small bet with myself that she'd use it at least once more within the same scene; nor was I wrong.

Setting that aside, these are excellent books and I recommend them (but start from Book 1).

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Review: Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces

Cleek: the Man of the Forty Faces by Thomas W. Hanshew
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This was a recommendation from my wife, who listens to a lot of older books on Librevox.

Cleek is a classic pulp hero: he has an unlikely power, which is to be able to reshape his face without using makeup or prosthetics so that he can look completely different (and can even look like other people, presumably with a bit of extra work on wigs, false moustaches, clothes, padding and so forth, though this isn't really gone into). At the start of the book, he's using this ability, and his considerable intelligence, to commit crimes, but he meets a woman, falls for her, and determines to reform.

Based on Cleek's bare, unsupported word and apparently on his own authority, a Scotland Yard inspector accepts that this notorious criminal is setting out to reform and gives him a position as a detective that appears to be semi-official; he doesn't seem to be a regular member of the force, but he's offered cases and has an ID that the police recognize. Even though he was well known, under the same name, as a criminal to both the police and the newspapers, after his reformation those same police and newspapers celebrate him as a detective; he doesn't appear to suffer any public consequences for his past crimes (it turns out that he is using any money he earns to compensate his victims, but he does this secretly).

There's a reveal about his background at the end of the book that plays into a trope I dislike. (view spoiler)[He's actually an exiled European prince, which is presumably meant to account for his nobility of character. (hide spoiler)] Also, the author is increasingly vague about details the further east of Suffolk he gets; his fictional European country is French-speaking but has Eastern European elements, his Sri Lankan Sinhalese people speak Hindustani rather than Sinhala and their Buddhism feels like a mishmash of what a not-very-well-informed English person would know about Hinduism and Islam, and a devout Turkish Muslim woman twice refers to her "gods," even though strict monotheism is one of the most famous tenets of Islam. (view spoiler)[It turns out that this person is a Westerner impersonating a Turk, but the error isn't called out as a clue, so I suspect it's the author's ignorance rather than the character's. (hide spoiler)]

All of this kept the book out of the Silver tier of my recommendation list, but it's still a ripping pulp adventure, full of larger-than-life characters, tension, drama and dastardly plots cleverly detected. The plots do tend to have a certain sameness about them, in that they are frequently about gaining money through inheritance, but not all of them are like that, and even within that formula there's variation.

With more pleasant characters (for my taste) than Raffles, though not as well written as Arsene Lupin, these stories are worth a read if you're willing to go along with the pulpiness and just enjoy the ride.

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