Review: Falling Through Space: A Novella

Falling Through Space: A Novella by Michael L. Stevens
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Novellas fall into three categories. There are over-padded short stories, underdeveloped novels, and the occasional rare story that is best told at novella length. I think, on the whole, this is an underdeveloped novel.

Perhaps this is why I couldn't figure out, in at least one scene, what was actually going on, and why I felt that the characters didn't behave like real people on occasion. An alien ship turns up randomly in the solar system, set up for habitation by humans (or, at least, human-sized beings who thrive in an Earth-like atmosphere), staffed by sentient robots, capable of bending the laws of physics to teleport itself and other things/people and decide where it "falls" towards, meaning that it operates without fuel. A bunch of scientists come on board, excited to study... the solar system? Not the ship, its origins, its history, its physics, its robots - about the workings of all of which they show remarkably little curiosity?

It reminded me of Gene Wolfe, which is not a compliment coming from me - not because it had finely-worked prose, because it didn't, but for the reasons I just gave: I sometimes couldn't understand what was going on, or why people were acting the way they were.

The dialog was stiff at times, and overly simplistic. In terms of copy editing, the main fault (in the pre-publication version I had from Netgalley, so it may get fixed before publication) was the frequent occurrence of "let's eat Grandma" - missing comma before a term of address. This is despite the author having a degree in English literature, though in my experience people with English degrees often have much worse mechanics than this. The basic rules of prose writing are not something that's usually taught in English classes at universities, sadly.

What I really disliked, though, is a spoiler. (view spoiler)[The earth is destroyed at the end. (hide spoiler)] There was no signal that it was that kind of book, and if I'd known that it was, I wouldn't have picked it up.

Not a success for me.

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Review: The Luck of the Bodkins

The Luck of the Bodkins by P.G. Wodehouse
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's hard not to be put into a good mood when reading about the small (but, to them, vital) vicissitudes of Wodehouse's characters. This is classic Wodehouse: multiple couples, who want to marry but can't, for the usual three reasons: 1. Money; 2. Parental disapproval; 3. Misunderstandings between them which mean It's All Off.

Honestly, if I was Monty Bodkin and engaged to the jealous, suspicious, lacking-in-understanding, easily-offended Gertrude Butterwick, and she broke it off (as she does multiple times), I'd consider myself to have had a lucky escape. But he has his heart set on this tough, sturdy hockey-playing beasel, and is willing to go to great lengths, including splashing considerable cash from his fortunately vast stores, to have her end up as his wife.

As soon as we meet Ivor Llewellyn, the motion-picture magnate (older, richer, not particularly sympathetic), we experienced Wodehouse readers know that this is the poor sap who will end up funding the down-on-their-luck young fellows - in this case, the Tennyson brothers, Ambrose and Ronnie - to marry their chosen mates. We also suspect that the resolution will have a great deal to do with his wife's requirement that he smuggle her new pearl necklace through US Customs without paying duty on it, something that would be cheaper than what he eventually ends up doing rather than defy his wife.

A brown plush Mickey Mouse plays the role of Maguffin, there's a random pet alligator belonging to a film star (whose publicist came up with the idea to get her more press coverage), and a talkative cabin steward on the transatlantic liner where most of the book's action takes place is constantly sticking his oar in and providing everything from the equivalent of Shakespeare's "rude mechanicals" scenes to further complications in an already complicated plot, often simultaneously.

The hero, Monty, remarks several times that there are wheels within wheels, and while this is a biblical expression from the prophet Ezekiel, it's also a good description of the book if you think of the plot as being like a highly sophisticated watch with a lot of moving parts that all fit together closely and drive each other. It's a kind of plotting Wodehouse excelled at, all lubricated by a wonderful sense of absurdity and sparkling dialog and descriptions, often drawn from classic English literature.

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Review: The Brick Moon and Other Stories

The Brick Moon and Other Stories by Edward Everett Hale
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A collection of interesting and unusual short works.

The title story, "The Brick Moon", from 1869, is the first appearance in fiction of the idea of an artificial satellite, in this case for ships to use as a navigation reference. I'm reasonably sure the proposal, even if the launch had gone as planned, would not have worked, because the satellites wouldn't remain on the north-south line that they were launched on; the earth would turn underneath them, and so, given that the proposal is to launch multiple satellites so that there's always one visible (as is done today with GPS), sailors would have needed a way to distinguish which brick moon they were looking at if they wanted to work out their longitude.

But the story isn't really about that. It's about, first, the coming together of the plan by a group of old college chums with various abilities to contribute, including the one who can persuade audiences without seeming to be eloquent, who helps them raise the necessary funds. Secondly, it's about the building of the first moon - out of brick, as the title suggests - and the flywheels to launch it. And finally, it's about what happens when it's launched accidentally with people in it, since a number of the members of the group and their families are living there temporarily because the brick spheres that make up the larger sphere are quite comfortable. They get flung into space, improbably not turned into jam by the sudden acceleration (which doesn't even wake them up, even more improbably, let alone fling disconnected bricks over a wide area, which is what would probably happen in reality), improbably manage to hold onto their atmosphere through the gravity of their tiny moon, improbably discover that their corn and chickens are evolving into other useful crops and livestock for an unspecified reason - though the several children later born there seem to be normal, as far as is mentioned - and, perhaps most improbably of all, form a utopian society and don't wish to return. It's a historical curiosity rather than a credible piece of science fiction, in other words, but it's pleasantly told for all that.

The author's narrative style is capable of pulling off some unpromising subjects, in fact, and making them engaging. The next story is "Crusoe in New York"; a young carpenter named Robinson Crusoe, asked to fence in a vacant lot, figures out that he could hide a cottage there for himself and his mother, and builds one, proceeding to squat there for 12 years. It brings in a number of elements of the original Crusoe story, but transformed: a footprint in the dirt, "savages" (rough men of New York), and a young Swedish woman named Frida instead of Friday were the ones I spotted, but I'm sure if I had read the original book and not just absorbed bits of it by cultural osmosis I'd have seen some more. The author's note indicates that whole passages are lifted verbatim from Defoe. It's odd that a man so opposed to slavery apparently loved Robinson Crusoe, but people are complicated.

"Bread on the Waters" is a Christmas story, and so of course sentimental, but in a way I personally found moving. An honest and blameless civil servant has to prove that he didn't embezzle some money he disbursed during the Civil War, but the receipts have gone missing, and his family and friends search for them frantically. As the title implies, an old kindness eventually comes back to him.

"The Lost Palace" is a tall tale of sorts, about a group of railwaymen who calculate that they can jump a gorge instead of going the long way round. The "palace" of the title is a Pullman "palace car" or luxury sleeper carriage.

"99 Linwood Street" is another Christmas story, in which multiple kind people come together to help a young Irish immigrant find her brother at the address of the title, which is harder than it sounds when there are multiple Linwood Streets and nearly 100 people with the same name as him. I was moved by this one also.

"Ideals" reuses some characters from "The Brick Moon" and refers briefly to it, but is mainly about four couples, close friends, who get fed up with the weather and the political situation where they live in the US and decide to try living in Mexico. There's a gentle twist at the end.

"One Cent" confused me a bit. The main character drops the change out of his pocket in the dark and a one-cent piece rolls under a table, unbeknown to him. He later gets roughly ejected from a streetcar as a bum because he's a cent short of the fare. While this is happening, letters are on the way to him honouring him for his contributions to his field (ceramics manufacture) and offering him large sums of money. He seems to think that there's a lesson there somewhere, but I couldn't find it; the two things had no causal connection. Perhaps the lesson is that you can't judge someone because they don't happen to have money at the time? It's told in an odd mix of narrative and play format.

"Thanksgiving at the Polls" is the story of a newspaper reporter who decides to save money, and time walking to work, by temporarily living in a street polling booth put up for upcoming elections. He takes in some Jewish refugees from Russia to live there with him (the tone is the opposite of antisemitic, which is a nice change from a lot of older books), and through various charitable institutions and gifts from employers they end up with more food than they need for the Thanksgiving holiday and go looking for people to share it with. There's a theme of "we could look after the poor better, all year round" running through the whole story.

"The Survivor's Story" is clearly inspired by Chaucer; four couples (this seems to be a thing with Hale, and I assume reflects his actual friend circle) come together at Christmas away from home and tell each other stories. There's an odd ending, which suggests he didn't know how to end it properly, and is out of keeping with the general tone.

In what is, strictly speaking, original research, Hale's Wikipedia article notes (at time of review) "Hale was active in raising the tone of American life for half a century." I can well believe it. His stories are humane, kindly and warm - although people do die in them for no particular reason sometimes - and their manner is more important than their matter. They remind me of Mark Twain in their style, although without Twain's occasional cynicism and misanthropy.

Recommended, and I would read more Hale.

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Review: No Stress Space Express: A Cozy, Low-Stakes, Slice-of-Life Adventure

No Stress Space Express: A Cozy, Low-Stakes, Slice-of-Life Adventure by Jack Bodett
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This isn't really SF. It's a gentle comedy with some SF set dressing for atmosphere. Kind of what you'd get if Douglas Adams had grown up in the southern US instead of England, only less so. Like its main character, it's kind of dumb, but so amiable that you don't care too much.

Two truckers break down by the side of the highway, and get accidentally abducted by aliens, who have ordered the load of whoopee cushions they are hauling in order to use them in a religious ceremony. On the alien ship, they meet a hot green Martian woman who was the victim of a similar misunderstanding, and ally with her to start a repair business for alien tech, which somehow they're able to figure out. Later on, another Martian woman joins the group.

The worldbuilding is often rudimentary; space is like the 21st-century USA a lot of the time, except when it's conforming to a well-worn sci-fi trope. Many people speak a language that's independently evolved on multiple planets that's almost indistinguishable from contemporary English except for a couple of amusing quirks, there's coffee, and it's served at a diner, where the robot waitress is very much like a stereotypical southern US diner waitress. Spaceship engines are also almost indistinguishable from truck engines; they have liquid fuel in lines which can be bled without special precautions, you can idle them, and they roar. There's a bit at the beginning where the alien written language (or, at least, an alien written language) is incomprehensible, but later on, the alphabets for the English-equivalent languages have apparently evolved to be the same as ours as well, because Rusty, the narrator, has no issues reading a manual for a spaceship engine. (view spoiler)[The wedding conforms absolutely 100% to what a contemporary US wedding would be like, and the Martian women expect it to be exactly that way, never inserting any specifically Martian customs, until near the end the author seems to finally remember there should be some cultural differences and has three Earth wedding customs be unfamiliar to the aliens. (hide spoiler)]

Funnily enough, I recently read an early work of SF ( A Honeymoon in Space by George Chetwynd Griffith) in which there was also a Martian who spoke a language that had evolved to be exactly like English, only Griffith, being Griffith, managed to make it racist, or at least chauvinist; English, being the best language (as proved by how many people on Earth had adopted it), would naturally be the language that a hyperrational and optimised society would evolve, he says.

Having studied the process by which English came into being, I can tell you that it couldn't happen twice - once was unlikely enough (and if a hyperrational society evolved an optimised language, English would definitely not be it). But in this book, it's just a workaround to remove issues of communication between the characters, and it's in the context of a humourous setting that doesn't take its worldbuilding remotely seriously, so I'll let it slide with just a healthy dose of side-eye. To be fair, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, everyone in space speaks English and nobody even remarks on it.

The editing is surprisingly good for this kind of book. Yes, there are too many hyphens (between an adjective and its noun sometimes, and in numbers that aren't between 21 and 99), and sometimes missing hyphens where only the first two words of a three-word adjectival phrase are hyphenated. Yes, there are a few too many commas between adjectives, but there are very few authors, even good ones, who don't make that mistake. It needs another scan for missing punctuation, like closing quotation marks. Otherwise, it's much cleaner than I'm used to. By sticking to his own vocabulary, the author has managed not to commit any vocab errors, for example, apart from "hear, hear" being spelled "here, here."

Apart from the almost aggressively undercooked worldbuilding, its big fault, from my point of view, is that it has no chapters - or rather, it has just one long chapter which rolls on from incident to incident without pausing. This isn't ideal when you don't have time to read it all in one sitting. It does finish up with some significant events that change the situation of the characters, ready for the next book in the series, so it isn't one of those serial stories that just arbitrarily stops at a word count.

The humour lies mostly in folksy imagery ("tugged in more directions than a dog walker at a squirrel convention") and good-natured banter. It manages to be funny without trying too hard, which is always a risk in humourous writing. All the aliens the characters meet are nice and helpful and generous, and it's exactly what the subtitle says it is: a cozy, low-stakes slice-of-life adventure (the subtitle also has a comma it doesn't require). It's a pleasant read, and I wouldn't mind reading more in the series, though it has enough faults that I wouldn't pay full price for them. It's pleasant, but the building of the world is so low-effort that it reduces my desire to spend time there.

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Review: A Honeymoon In Space

A Honeymoon In Space by George Chetwynd Griffith
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A turn-of-last-century piece of early speculative fiction, offering a tour of the solar system as it was then conceived (more or less; the author's grasp on science, even the science of the day, was not always firm). This makes it a "planetary romance," like Barsoom, C.L. Moore's tales of Mars and Venus, or Lewis's Space Trilogy (the latter a very late example of the form). It wouldn't at all surprise me to learn that Lewis had read it, though his Martians are completely unlike Griffith's, and his Venus, while also an unspoiled Eden, is also significantly different.

The hero is an engineer who has built an interplanetary ship powered by basically Cavorite (though I don't think he was copying Wells, whose The First Men in the Moon came out the same year), and uses it to take his newlywed wife on a tour of the Solar System. In line with the author's first book, The Angel of the Revolution: A Tale of the Coming Terror , as the only possessor of the technology of flight, he's in a position to dominate the earth and make everyone behave themselves, and uses this to stop World War I from breaking out early (with different alliances) before departing for his honeymoon.

It's shot through with all the prejudices of its time and its author. The engineer-hero patronises his new wife (daughter of the scientist whose designs he has realized, a couple of years after the professor's death) abominably. He repeatedly calls her "little woman," even though it's established in one scene that she's almost as tall as he is, and he's a tall man. She's one of Griffith's educated women, who's both celebrated for her intelligence and put in her place, similarly to his The Mummy and Miss Nitocris: A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension , which I read recently.

The British Empire is a jolly good thing, hurrah, and Englishmen are the best, with Americans only a little bit inferior (the wife is American). When they reach Mars, there's a lot of dialog about how the Martians, under the pressure of their dying world, have become super-rational and no doubt reduced their "lesser races" to servitude or else eliminated them, as will happen on Earth some day; both of the travellers are highly indignant that the first response of the Martians is to shoot at them, which of course English or American people would never do with strange visitors. The most ludicrous moment of the whole book is when they can understand the Martian leader because, since English is the best language, the Martians have naturally come to speak something almost exactly like it as part of their evolution towards rationality and optimisation.

They consider themselves fully justified in mowing down a bunch of the nasty Martians with Maxim machine guns, and depart for Venus.

The Venusians are unfallen angels of sorts, and although they'd love to stay there, even these two egotists recognize that they'd only spoil the place. One of Jupiter's moons has an advanced and friendly civilization - the humanoid form is, of course, what everything evolves into if it's going to be intelligent - and Saturn is full of monsters.

Finally, they barely make it home, through one of several coincidences that save their bacon by celestial bodies being in the right place at the right time to assist their antigravity drive.

Apart from his various storytelling weaknesses, the author makes two big scientific blunders. First, he assumes that because a (very slow-moving) balloon doesn't throw you around when you fly in it, nor will an extremely fast-moving spaceship. Before Einstein (or maybe before actual aeroplanes), people don't seem to have had much of a grasp of acceleration and how it worked. The other blunder is that as they approach one of the gas giants - I forget whether it's Jupiter or Saturn, I think Saturn - he gets phases completely wrong. As he presents it, the planet goes through its phases rapidly because of the rotation of the planet, whereas in fact it's the angle between the observer, the sun, and the celestial body that produces phases, as he ought to have known if he thought about the moon for even a minute.

In summary, it's not good, though interesting as a sample of how people thought about the Solar System (and humanity) a hundred and twenty-five years or so ago.

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Review: Lucian's True History

Lucian's True History by Lucian of Samosata
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Classic proto-SF, and a probable ancestor of many a fantastic voyage narrative, from St Brendan to Gulliver to Sinbad to the Dawn Treader - though it drew on earlier travellers' tales, and notably on Homer, who Lucian greatly admired and constantly referenced, and who is even a character in this story. It's also arguably among the first works of fiction, though, and the differentiation it explicitly makes between itself and those earlier tales is that the author states upfront that everything in it is made up and a complete lie. It's not presenting wild speculation as authentic chronicle, but as the fiction it always was.

And the speculation is wild. The travellers, led by the first-person narrator, sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules into the Atlantic, and get caught up into the air by a freak wind, landing on the moon. The moon people are at war with the people of the sun over wanting to colonize Venus, and the travellers take part in the war, on what turns out to be the losing side (because of late reinforcements of centaurs). They're ransomed, though, and the king of the moon offers to marry the narrator to his son, which the narrator refuses. The people of the moon have no women; instead, the men under the age of 25 receive the seed of the older men in their thighs, where they gestate the children. (I assume this was satire on the then-common practice of older men having younger male lovers.)

They leave the moon, and have further adventures, including being swallowed by an immense whale, miles in length, and eventually killing it by setting the trees growing inside it on fire. They come to an island where the Elysian Fields (the Greek afterlife) can be found, and speak with famous people including Homer, some of whom are satirized. In this afterlife, men openly have sex with both men and women, and nobody thinks anything of it, and the women are "in common," but this doesn't stop some of the men being jealous about their wives.

The ruler of the realm of the dead tells them they have to leave, since it's not yet their time to be there, and they eventually make it back home, via Circe's island (the narrator carries a message from Odysseus to Circe, which he's careful not to let Penelope see).

The more you know about ancient Greek literature and culture, the more you'll get out of this, I'm sure, because there are a good few name-drops that I had to look up. But even a superficial knowledge will get you by, and it's interesting as an early example of fantastical fiction. I'm not quite ready to add it to my annual recommendation list, though; it's a bit niche for that.

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Review: The Land That Time Forgot

The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The nonsense racist pseudoscience is strong with this one.

A dastardly World War I German U-boat commander attacks the hero's unarmed civilian passenger ship (with US registry, and I don't think they were in the war yet, so it's neutral shipping) and sinks it, shelling boats with women and children in. The hero survives and rescues his dog and also a young woman, and they are picked up by a British tug - which is then attacked by the same U-boat. The brave tug captain chooses to ram the U-boat and then his men fight the Germans hand-to-hand, capturing it at the cost of the lives of the captain and several crew.

It turns out that the young woman's fiancé is the U-boat commander, but it was an arranged marriage. Fortunately, the hero's father's business is building submarines, and they built this one, so he can take over command.

Then we get a long series of misadventures that end up taking them into the Pacific and all the way down almost to Antarctica, thanks to assorted villainy. (view spoiler)[There's a secondary antagonist who is a filthy Red and just hates people like the hero in general - he was sacked from the hero's father's firm, it's implied for union agitation - and he makes several more or less ineffective attempts to kill them all and/or cause internal dissention, before being killed. (hide spoiler)]

They are running low on fuel and water and well out of their course, and then (about halfway through the book) they come across the land of the title, a large volcanic island with unscalable cliffs all round and just one river discharge, through caves that can only be navigated by submarine. Fortunately, they have a submarine!

(view spoiler)[They trust the German commander's word, even though he's the kind of person who would attack an unarmed neutral civilian ship, and of course he betrays them and takes off with the sub, after discovering a source of crude oil to use for fuel. (hide spoiler)]

This isolated place has a tropical climate (from the volcanic heat, presumably) despite being near Antarctica, and was probably the model for the Marvel Universe's Savage Land. It's full of otherwise extinct creatures from every era and continent, dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, pteranodons, sabre-tooth tigers, cave hyenas, you name it. It's like the Swiss Family Robinson's island, but with palaeontology.

It also has various apes, ape-men, and primitive humans, which is where the racism comes in; the less developed ones, of course, are "negroid" in appearance, even though their skins are white, and that disappears as they become more advanced. This seems to happen in the lifetime of an individual, with people heading further north and adopting more technology as they evolve (or rather metamorphose) in the direction of modern homo sapiens. It also seems to have something to do with the pools in which they bathe - I bet it's radium, that would fit the science of the time. Piltdown Man gets a name-check, being still believed in at the time of publication (1918), and not exposed definitely as a hoax until the 1950s.

It's all a bunch of nonsense, of course, with the flimsiest scientific backing at best, but it's mainly there to be a backdrop for the adventure - and the romance, such as it is, between the hero and the woman he rescued.

There were a couple of sequels, which apparently follow very similar lines to the second part of this book, and it wasn't good enough for me to want to read them. I didn't expect much from Burroughs, a pulp writer among pulp writers, and I didn't get much. The adventure parts are the best parts, of course, and if you're just reading for that, it's OK, but nothing else is very good at all.

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Review: The Mummy and Miss Nitocris A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension

The Mummy and Miss Nitocris A Phantasy of the Fourth Dimension by George Chetwynd Griffith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've recently loaded up my e-reader with a large selection of early science fiction and fantasy titles from Project Gutenberg, after a binge on classic mysteries from the same source. I've often steered clear of early SFF, because it has, let's say, very different strengths from current SFF - it might as well be a different genre in many ways. But there is some good stuff out there - I know, from having read some now and again - and I'm going to explore and see if I can find some more.

The thing about reading hundred-year-old fiction is that the preoccupations and the tropes and the stock characters are very different. (And the prevailing ideologies, naturally.) Anything involving science, too, is liable to involve what we would think of as pseudoscience. That's certainly true of this one.

The central characters are an English professor of mathematics and his daughter, who he named Nitocris after an ancient Egyptian queen, since he's a keen amateur Egyptologist. But it turns out that she is in fact the reincarnation of the ancient queen, and he is the reincarnation of a priest who fell in love with the queen (don't think too hard about them now being father and daughter, or things will become more like ancient Egyptian royalty than modern minds are generally comfortable with) and helped her avenge herself on the murderer of her husband. Of course, the murderer and his associate, another priest, have also been reincarnated, and set out to play their villainous role over again.

Meanwhile, though, the professor, musing on a proposition of Euclid, comes to a gnostic realization of the nature of the fourth dimension, which gives him superpowers. He can become invisible, see into the past and great distances away, and so forth. He confounds his learned peers and rivals by demonstrating three supposed impossibilities: trisecting the triangle, squaring the circle, and doubling the cube (all of which, by that point, had been proved to be impossible with the ancient tools of compass and straightedge, though mathematical cranks continued to try). And then Nitocris, his highly intelligent and well-educated daughter, is raised to a knowledge of her heritage and gets superpowers too, and they decide to use them to solve the mystery of the disappearance of a possible future elective Tsar of Russia, depending how the revolution goes (this is 1906, a couple of years before World War I and several more before the Bolshevik victory). Of course, one of the villains, the reincarnation of the murderer of original-Nitocris's husband, is involved in that disappearance; he's a rival for the imperial throne. His sidekick, the reincarnation of the wicked priest, performs wonders similar to those performed on the music hall stage of the period, some of which were rumoured to be performed by Indian fakirs, but does so out in the open and in the middle of a circle of scientific skeptics, to their extreme annoyance and puzzlement.

Meanwhile, Nitocris wants to marry a naval officer, which her father (who, like many intellectuals of the time, believes in eugenics) opposes, being bitterly opposed to war and warriors. She also manages to pair up an unsuccessful suitor of hers with her American friend, who's the daughter of the professor's chief rival - though the two academics are friends of a sort when they're not trying to tear down each other's arguments.

So, we have: reincarnation (presented by the author as if it was a pretty obvious truth), superpowers arising from the understanding of abstruse mathematics, mystery, international politics, academic politics, two romances, and the plot of the reincarnated villains against the reincarnated Nitocris and her priest, now father. All of these are intertwined like a ball of snakes.

It's a complex way to approach a plot, and should only be attempted by experienced authors. This one, I think, largely pulls it off; he was at the end of his life when he wrote it, and although critics considered his powers were waning (under the influence of alcoholism, which killed him), he does juggle and intertwine the various strands capably. Having so many of them does mean that some remain underdeveloped, notably the romance subplots, which barely get any time devoted to them - not only on the page, but in the lives of the participants. The disappearance and reappearance of the mummy of the title is never explained in any way whatsoever; it just falls under "a wizard did it".

He's not the greatest prose stylist, and his characters and descriptions can be thin and stereotyped. Nitocris, for instance, is simultaneously a nice early-20th-century Gibson girl from a prosperous English background and a ruthless ancient Egyptian, and the contrast is sometimes jarring, because neither side of her has much depth, and so it's simply a contradiction with no bridge in the middle. Griffith also shares the usual anti-foreign bias of his time; practically anyone who's not English is automatically and obviously a villain, with an exception granted for the Americans (who are, however, portrayed as odd people talking a slangy dialect). He conveys the distinct impression that simply by being born English, the professor had taken a big step up from his previous incarnations.

Overall, it's an interesting idea but a less-than-amazing execution, and just makes it into the lowest tier of my annual recommendation list.

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Review: My Big Goblin Space Program: An Astronaut Reincarnation LitRPG

My Big Goblin Space Program: An Astronaut Reincarnation LitRPG by Scott Warren
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I keep forgetting that I've read books by Scott Warren before. The first was The Dragon's Banker , and the second Ought to be Dead . But wait! Before The Dragon's Banker I also partly read Devilbone , so this makes three and (nearly) three-quarters books by him that I've read. I'm happy to report that in this one, for the first time, he's got himself a really good editor and/or finally learned not to make so many mistakes in the first place, because the other three were spectacularly awful in this regard.

And that was a pity, because I otherwise enjoyed two of them (not Devilbone, which was way too dark for me), and thought they deserved much better editing to bring out their other excellent qualities, namely being well-plotted and original in concept.

This one is also well-plotted and original in concept, though it does remind me of a couple of things. One, of course, is isekai manga, where someone is reincarnated in another world, sometimes as a monster, and speed-runs technological development using the resources to hand. The other is Andy Weir, because of the astronaut aspect to this story. Yes, the reincarnator was an astronaut, who died in a rocket explosion, and now he's a goblin king. His ambition: to lift the tech level of his tribe of goblins to the point that he can finally visit the moon, albeit not Earth's moon but a larger and closer and quite likely inhabited one orbiting his new planet.

Since goblins are chaotic and accident-prone and not all that bright, but highly enthusiastic, this is something of a challenge, which he rises to. Aided by some evolved goblins who have specialist skills, he begins to develop various technologies, though (as is so often the case with these clever-engineer stories) he notably neglects technologies relating to food and cloth, which historically have been extremely important - but don't leave much archaeological evidence, and tend to be mainly "women's work" in a lot of societies.

This world is complete with a System, which has a personality but plays its cards close to its chest, and the usual trappings of a video game, like anything from the original Warcraft through Civilization or Sim City to Clash of Clans. As the isekaied first-person narrator notes, the rules of physics and, apparently, biology don't conform to those of our world. Goblins, for example, are not born through sexual reproduction, but spawn mysteriously overnight, while the existing goblins sleep. This neatly disposes of any messy relationship issues, leaving the narrator free to think about engineering (and the wellbeing of his tribe) all the time.

It's clearly some form of a simulation, which raises the question of whether the narrator's previous world was too, but he doesn't spend a lot of time worrying about it; he's an engineer, not a philosopher (dammit, Jim). He just gets on with climbing the Goblin Tech Tree in the direction of a moon landing.

This is only Volume 1 of a story that started life as a serial on Royal Road, and it ends at a fairly arbitrary point, rather than feeling complete in itself. Also, it's not the kind of book that has a plot, as such, being more in the manga or light novel style of being a series of challenges relatively easily overcome by an overpowered protagonist, though he does face some suspenseful moments. I enjoyed it, though, and found it funny, and was vastly relieved that it was better edited than the previous Scott Warren books I've read, so I will definitely be looking out for Volume 2.

It would make a good anime. The goblins are inherently cartoonish, for one thing.

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Review: Cicero James, Miracle Worker

Cicero James, Miracle Worker by Hal Emerson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is strong. It's the author's eleventh book, or so, and it shows. Very definite Dresden Files vibes, but from the point where Butcher had started to get a good handle on his craft, rather than the less successful early books.

The main character is a wizard-but-not-called-that (they're called "Miracle Workers" or just "Workers"), one of maybe a hundred thousand worldwide, who just wants a quiet life but ends up getting caught up in what amount to cosmic politics. He's snarky and in many ways immature, but whatever his faults, being on the side of evil, or even on the side of ignoring evil when he has the ability to oppose it, is not one of them.

There's swearing, not constant on every page, but in situations in which there would realistically be some. There's also torture, but it's not delighted in (the opposite, in fact), and it's not gratuitous - it's central to the plot.

The editing on the pre-publication review copy I had was good, with occasional small glitches such as might be left over after a skilled editor had gone over an average-quality manuscript (average-quality in terms of editing, I mean, not storytelling; that's excellent). The author covers himself with the fictional frame that this is a book written by an ordinary guy over a few days, so it may have some typos in it.

He also lampshades the fact that the whole scenario becomes reminiscent of the X-Men. There's a clear Magneto character, who I'd identified as such before the lampshade was hung, though I hadn't thought of the narrator's mentor as Professor X until he said it.

It's exciting and action-packed. There are chases and escapes and explosions and fights and monster encounters. There's a heist, or almost. There are emotional ups and downs, and if there are more downs than ups, it still manages not to be too dark in tone, and ends with an appeal for an attitude of hope, cooperation and mutual respect that I wholeheartedly endorse. There's intelligent observation about the state that San Francisco is in these days, without adopting either political extreme.

The worldbuilding is original, and well conveyed; we know pretty well what the magic can and can't do, so when it comes time to use some, the action isn't slowed down with explanations. It doesn't make it all the way to a fully realized "secret history", but it does the job it needs to.

The secondary characters are distinct and memorable, and each has a significant role to play. Their relationships have variety and feel real.

Even though it's not my usual fare (cozy secondary-world fantasy), I enjoyed it considerably, and will be looking forward to more in the series.

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Review: Secrets, Spells, and Chocolate

Secrets, Spells, and Chocolate by Marisa Churchill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I haven't read a lot of "magical academy" books, because they all tend to be the same: Harry Potter redone ineptly, with the serial numbers lightly filed off (but often hitting the exact same plot points with suspiciously similar characters). Frequently with extra cruelty, because what would YA be without some cruelty?

This one is clearly heavily influenced by HP, but it isn't just a bad fanfic or a rewrite. It's a book by someone who has read HP and thought, "Well, sure, but what if it was a magical cooking school? Also, female main character, ditch the Dark Lord, and amp up the whimsy." It's cozy in tone, though there is a bit of a dystopian situation going on.

It has, in other words, a little more originality than some, and since the author is a chef, the cooking aspect is done thoroughly and plays a key role.

The magic world is all related to cooking, and the worldbuilding is largely edible. Magical people ("Sages") go through a ritual when they're young that gives them a Blade, a chef knife which acts like a wand; for unknown reasons, you can only do this once, so if your Blade is destroyed or lost, you can't get another one. Spells are part recipe, and a lot of magic is infused into food and drink. It's reasonably well thought through, and well sustained throughout.

The main character is Sylvie Jones, whose mother was accused of cheating at the big magical cooking contest, the Golden Whisk, some years previously. There wasn't sufficient proof (partly because she didn't actually do it), and now she has been allowed to come back for Golden Whisk All-Stars, while Sylvie is being allowed to take the six-week course that can grant her entry to magical cooking school if she finishes successfully and manifests her Blade at the end. However, a dystopian Minister of Magic - uh, I mean, President of the CCS, the international authority over all magical cooking people - I forget what the abbreviation stands for - is setting them both up to fail. (Unfortunately, this is partly explained in a document which, because of a formatting issue with my review copy, I was unable to read, along with a couple of other documents that were important to the plot.) He's also introduced a hierarchical ranking system for Sages, is prejudiced against people who are from a Scullery (Muggle) background, and his daughter, who's at the school, is a cheat and a bully.

Sylvie's roommate is the daughter of Scullery parents who are not only magical, but can't cook. They're from Louisiana, but not at all participants in the rich Cajun or Southern cooking traditions. The two girls get off on the wrong foot at first, but then manage to get over it and form a key alliance.

Sylvie has a lot of trouble, in fact, deciding who can be trusted and who can't; most of the people she meets come under suspicion at some point, and the final culprit is someone she hadn't suspected, because their motive was, frankly, insane. This makes for plenty of suspense and some surprise reversals.

We're not spared from a few tropes at which I rolled my eyes. Sylvie's name appears on a magical apple that indicates that she is prophesied to do great deeds, so she's sort of a Chosen One, although as it turns out, not a full-on Chosen One, and, thankfully, not one of those spoiled characters who refuses to do any work and then gets their powers at the last moment by sheer plot convenience. She's smart (for a 14-year-old), she's a great cook, and she's creative in her solutions, though sometimes that creativity takes a somewhat destructive turn and causes chaos.

There's also a Convenient Eavesdrop, my absolute least favourite plot device, but it's brief and not pivotal.

What ought to be pivotal to the plot, given how much time and how much risk by Sylvie gets invested in it, is the subplot where she has to deliver a written message from the Resistance to the school's principal at a particular time (the day of the Golden Whisk competition). Because of the formatting issues, I didn't see exactly what was in the message, and unless I missed something the delivery was never shown to have happened, although there's a scene in which it's assumed that it was delivered. It also wasn't ever clear to me why it made more sense for Sylvie (a relatively low-powered kid with a big target on her back) to hang on to the message for several days, rather than giving it to the powerful and canny principal straight away and having her protect it from the suspected mole in the school in any number of ways, including just keeping it to herself and not telling anyone.

The book has a number of small flaws like that; things that don't quite make sense, like the school at night being protected by a number of magical traps but not locked, and scattered examples of a lot of common editing errors, particularly apostrophe errors, lack of a comma before a term of address, missing question marks from questions, missing opening and closing quotation marks and missing past perfect tense. There's a scene early on in which Sylvie goes into her and Georgia's shared room and there are "two boys and a girl" in there with Georgia, but only one of the boys ever gets mentioned or described, suggesting one had been revised out and then the earlier mention had been overlooked. It's just a little scruffy, and needs another pass or two, in other words. Since I saw a pre-publication version from Netgalley, perhaps it will get them.

All these small issues add up, and along with the fact that it's so very based on HP (though with more originality than some I've seen) keep it down in the lowest tier of my annual recommendation list. Still, if you enjoy cozy, like cooking, are a fan of Harry Potter/magical school stories, and don't think too hard about the plot, you'll probably enjoy this considerably. Sylvie is brave and clever, her motivation is clear and compelling, and all her mistakes are honest ones.

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Review: A Tower of Half-Truths

A Tower of Half-Truths by N.J. Prynne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was almost put off by the author's content warning right at the front, but I'm glad I decided to give it a go anyway. Yes, there is violence, but it isn't glorified, and the bad consequences are shown clearly. Yes, there is sex, but it isn't trivialized or casual, and when it gets explicit (which it does), it's after a lot of character development, and in a committed relationship that we've watched develop over time.

In fact, this book is strong in ways that a lot of books I come across are weak: worldbuilding, character development, and especially the romance plot. I don't believe I've seen a better romance plot, in fact, one in which the couple are both genuinely appealing; they actually have excellent reasons for not acting on their attraction and sensibly decide not to do so until those reasons are resolved, like adults; and the tension is built up masterfully over a long period of the development of the relationship, rather than the all-too-common "instalove, now fall into bed" approach. Top marks for the romance.

The worldbuilding is subtle, without a lot of infodumping, but it has plausible month names and day-of-the-week names, a 28-hour day, a pantheon with assigned areas of responsibility (that some people believe in and some don't), and several different schools of magic. Standard stuff, but it's dealt with in the background rather than being placed where you'll trip over it. There's an appendix that explains it all, but you don't need to read it to keep from getting confused, because it's revealed in context that makes it clear, as worldbuilding should be.

The main characters are, as I said, appealing, but damaged realistically by their backstories (not in a way that turns them awful, though). It's like a T. Kingfisher book in that way. The secondary characters also have a bit of depth to them; they're not just one-note. They can be a loyal friend who's also annoyingly boisterous and not that deep, a mother who's cold but, in her own way, caring, a toxic ex who's also going through his own stuff and has a genuine grievance, and so on. They have layers.

In terms of editing, the commas and apostrophes are in the right places (which is notable, these days), and the past perfect tense is used where it needs to be (also notable), though sometimes the form of the verb in the past perfect is wrong, and there are other verb tense slips. There are also quite a few mangled idioms, and some passages of probably the worst pseudo-archaic dialog I've ever seen, which is saying something. That last factor was bad enough to drop it down a tier in my annual Best of the Year rankings; it was going to be Gold, but I can't give a Gold-tier ranking to a book that murders early modern English grammar like that. Note, as always, that what I saw was a pre-publication version from Netgalley, and may not reflect the state of the published book, especially as I plan to alert the publisher to some of the more egregious issues via Netgalley's feedback form.

Overall, with a bit of a tune-up it would be excellent, and even as it is, it's solidly above average. I hope there will be more in this world and with these characters.

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Review: A Tower of Half-Truths

A Tower of Half-Truths by N.J. Prynne
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was almost put off by the author's content warning right at the front, but I'm glad I decided to give it a go anyway. Yes, there is violence, but it isn't glorified, and the bad consequences are shown clearly. Yes, there is sex, but it isn't trivialized or casual, and when it gets explicit (which it does), it's after a lot of character development, and in a committed relationship that we've watched develop over time.

In fact, this book is strong in ways that a lot of books I come across are weak: worldbuilding, character development, and especially the romance plot. I don't believe I've seen a better romance plot, in fact, one in which the couple are both genuinely appealing; they actually have excellent reasons for not acting on their attraction and sensibly decide not to do so until those reasons are resolved, like adults; and the tension is built up masterfully over a long period of the development of the relationship, rather than the all-too-common "instalove, now fall into bed" approach. Top marks for the romance.

The worldbuilding is subtle, without a lot of infodumping, but it has plausible month names and day-of-the-week names, a 28-hour day, a pantheon with assigned areas of responsibility (that some people believe in and some don't), and several different schools of magic. Standard stuff, but it's dealt with in the background rather than being placed where you'll trip over it. There's an appendix that explains it all, but you don't need to read it to keep from getting confused, because it's revealed in context that makes it clear, as worldbuilding should be.

The main characters are, as I said, appealing, but damaged realistically by their backstories (not in a way that turns them awful, though). It's like a T. Kingfisher book in that way. The secondary characters also have a bit of depth to them; they're not just one-note. They can be a loyal friend who's also annoyingly boisterous and not that deep, a mother who's cold but, in her own way, caring, a toxic ex who's also going through his own stuff and has a genuine grievance, and so on. They have layers.

In terms of editing, the commas and apostrophes are in the right places (which is notable, these days), and the past perfect tense is used where it needs to be (also notable), though sometimes the form of the verb in the past perfect is wrong, and there are other verb tense slips. There are also quite a few mangled idioms, and some passages of probably the worst pseudo-archaic dialog I've ever seen, which is saying something. That last factor was bad enough to drop it down a tier in my annual Best of the Year rankings; it was going to be Gold, but I can't give a Gold-tier ranking to a book that murders early modern English grammar like that. Note, as always, that what I saw was a pre-publication version from Netgalley, and may not reflect the state of the published book, especially as I plan to alert the publisher to some of the more egregious issues via Netgalley's feedback form.

Overall, with a bit of a tune-up it would be excellent, and even as it is, it's solidly above average. I hope there will be more in this world and with these characters.

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Review: The Vanishing Castle: A Simarron Mystery

The Vanishing Castle: A Simarron Mystery by Marlena Cannon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A strong piece of work with a likeable protagonist, the self-doubting centaur Simarron. Cast out of his herd, he's come to the city (where centaurs mostly do manual labour) to work as a magical safety inspector. I love a fantasy civil servant, and I also like centaurs, so this was immediately a couple of points in the book's favour.

Simarron isn't supposed to be investigating the murders of a couple of alchemists, but he keeps feeling that it's his duty (he's very dutiful), and risks his job - which means a lot to him - rather than walk away from helping others. I liked him for that, and for his openness to befriending the other characters, even though they were very different from him and not without their annoying individual quirks. These did help to distinguish them from one another, though I found myself looking up names sometimes to remind myself who someone was; making the characters more memorable is an aspect that could be strengthened.

There are some other minor flaws. For example, there's an oddity of timing. At one point, Simarron casts doubt on the idea that the castle of the title might be developed as a resort because it takes a couple of hours to get there from the city. But later, he and a friend take from before lunch until nearly sunset to get to another part of the city - admittedly, it's winter, and we don't know how far north it is, but it still seems like across the city is further than out to the castle.

There was also a scene where a murder suspect was being interrogated, not in a closed room, but in what seemed to be the foyer of the police station, in front of a reporter and the main character. That seemed like an odd place and situation to use to interrogate someone.

Editing is mostly good, apart from the occasional place where I felt the past perfect tense was missing, the use of "may" where it should have been "might" (not every time, but sometimes) and a couple of minor and subtle vocabulary slips or poorly phrased sentences. I had a pre-publication version via Netgalley, and I will provide feedback to the publisher, so these may be resolved by time of publication.

In terms of worldbuilding, there's a bit of "Aerith and Bob," the use of this-worldly names and made-up fantasy names mixed together (sometimes a this-worldly forename and a made-up surname, sometimes a forename and surname that are both from a particular this-world ethnicity) with no apparent plan or consistency that I could make out. But the way the magic system works is, if not presented with full Sandersonian rigor, at least given enough detail that I gained a feel for what it could do. It mostly wasn't what the plot was built on or how things were resolved.

The mystery aspect is solid, with a fully developed mystery plot, not just a gesture in the direction of one like I sometimes see. There's no romance; Simarron notices the attractiveness of several people he meets, but doesn't do anything about it, and given that he's a centaur and they're not, that avoids a world of possible complications.

All in all, a capable piece of work, and the start of a series that I will be keeping an eye out for. The best thing about it is the main character, but it's also well plotted and does a decent job with the worldbuilding.

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Review: The Purple Sickle Murders

The Purple Sickle Murders by Freeman Wills Crofts
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I recently read the sixth Doctor Thorndyke mystery, by Austin R. Freeman, Freeman Wills Crofts' contemporary, and felt that the series was going downhill, with the author recycling his material and not coming up with much that was new. In contrast, this fifth Inspector French book shows improvement over the earlier ones, and growth in the author's abilities.

Firstly, French is less of a generic Everyman or a crime-solving plot device and more of a developed character. The fact that he talks to his wife about the case is part of this. He's done that once before in the series, but more briefly, and this longer interaction provides characterization for both of them. What's more, French displays emotion and uncertainty, his minor mistakes (and the bad, but very human, choices of other people) have consequences that increase the tension, he has an emotional connection to another character, and instead of a relatively brief action sequence at the end of a plodding police investigation, as in the earlier French books, there's an extended period spanning multiple chapters in which we're kept in suspense about the fate of a character and in which multiple action sequences, chases, fights and desperate attempts to escape occur.

It's a strong piece of work, with (as is usually the case with this author) clever criminals defeated by the perseverance and sound police work of the detective. While Austin R. Freeman's "reverse mystery" approach gave the TV series Columbo its most famous feature - that the audience knows who committed the crime from the beginning - the beloved scruffy detective himself owes a lot more to Freeman Wills Crofts, in whose books clever, arrogant criminals are brought down by persistence and sound methodology employed by a policeman with an ordinary background.

While I won't be reading more Austin W. Freeman, at least for a while, I definitely want to read more Freeman Wills Crofts, if this is any indication of the future direction of his work.

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Review: Spelled in Ink: A hilarious paranormal cozy murder mystery and fantasy featuring a witty female amateur sleuth

Spelled in Ink: A hilarious paranormal cozy murder mystery and fantasy featuring a witty female amateur sleuth by Lina Hansen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I always go on the alert when a book's blurb or, in this case, subtitle goes out of its way to emphasize how funny it is. It's like a second-hand car salesman calling himself "Honest John." And I was right to be cautious in this case; for me, at least, it never got beyond "very mildly amusing," and was never within a thousand miles of "hilarious," nor was the female amateur sleuth notably witty. But maybe I missed something.

Paranormal it is. Cozy... maybe? Someone enjoys a cup of tea at one point, I think. Fantasy, definitely; this is an alternate version of our world in which magic is not only real but publicly known about, though not much trusted, and (in some ill-defined way) starting to wane under the influence of technology. It appears that people who are called "mages," but described at one point as "magically challenged" (so in what sense are they "mages"?), are working to accelerate this shift, and that Leonardo da Vinci was - and perhaps still is - one of them. The worldbuilding is not well defined, and its relationship to the plot is more to provide convenience when needed than to drive events.

The plot itself is unexceptional, and I found the characters bland and generic. The mystery plot is not particularly a focus, and it gets resolved relatively easily, though in a way that leaves a big "why?" to be, presumably, discovered in future books. There are hints that there will be a slow-burn romance between the magic-using first-person narrator and the magic-distrusting academic/burglar, but very little advancement occurs in that subplot in this first book.

All in all, it didn't do much for me, and I was surprised to see the author's extensive list of awards for her other writing at the back of the book. It's mostly decently edited, at least, though with some vocabulary and tense issues (mostly missing past perfect, but some present tense that should be past). I will mention these to the publisher, and they may be fixed by publication.

I received a pre-publication copy via Netgalley for review.

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Review: The Mark of Zorro

The Mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A rip-roaring, swashbuckling classic pulp adventure, providing part of the inspiration for both Batman and Superman, but set in Spanish California.

Zorro (which I didn't realize meant "Fox" in Spanish) is a champion of the oppressed under a corrupt governor; he stands up for the honest, godly friars, the simple "natives," and the proud hidalgo family that has got itself on the wrong side of the governor politically, giving the governor an excuse to pillage their properties for his own gain. Masked (with a mask that covers his mouth, unlike the many subsequent depictions), cloaked, and armed with pistols, a rapier, and a whip, he acts as a Robin Hood-style highwayman, robbing and otherwise punishing evildoers and protecting the innocent.

One thing that impressed me is that Zorro doesn't have things all his own way. He's at genuine risk of death or capture multiple times, and sometimes a turn of fate goes against him rather than in his favour, such as when he destroys a letter which, unbeknown to him, is a copy of one that's already been sent. This is one of the things that lifts this book above the usual run of pulp fiction.

At the time, I think the revelation right at the end that Zorro and the milquetoast caballero Don Diego were one and the same person was supposed to be a big surprise, but to a modern reader, rendered genre-savvy by superhero stories involving mild-mannered and/or wealthy alter egos to men of action, it's utterly obvious from the first. (There was a precedent - the Scarlet Pimpernel - but otherwise this is, if not the originator, at least the means of transmission of the trope to other properties.) He even engages in a love triangle in which he is his own rival, seeking to test and win the beautiful Senorita Lolita, daughter of the persecuted hidalgo who is out of favour with the dastardly governor. The parallel with Superman, Clark Kent and Lois Lane leaps immediately to mind. Lolita is, for her time, a strong female character, defiantly resisting the advances of the guard captain and riding for her life with considerable skill and daring.

Exactly how he switches identities is left vague; the questions of how he carries round his two outfits (including different saddles and horse tack), and why nobody recognizes his horse, aren't ever addressed. Nor do we really care, though, because there are plenty of swordfights, lots of riding about rapidly, daring maneuvers, chases, a rescue from jail, all good adventurous stuff. I can see why it was filmed the year after publication (with Douglas Fairbanks both producing and in the Zorro role). The film was popular enough that the book was republished under the movie's title, The Mark of Zorro, rather than the original The Curse of Capistrano, even though he only makes the iconic "Z" mark once.

Although Zorro is a champion of the oppressed natives when they get unjustly beaten or otherwise individually mistreated, it's taken as read that they are inferior beings who are in their proper place under the Europeans. Only one of them gets a name, and since he's deaf and dumb, he gets no lines; another gets a single line, but no name.

At the end, his antagonist is killed (in a legitimate duel, because they are both of the caballero class and thus allowed to kill each other legally; Zorro doesn't otherwise kill anyone, though he whips several people severely), and Zorro publicly reveals his secret identity to all after securing a commitment from the governor to be more just, or else. When the original standalone book became the first of a series, in an early instance of retconning, this was all ignored; the antagonist lived on, the secret identity was maintained, and Zorro went on fighting corruption and injustice.

I've read a couple of other Johnston McCully books, and they are a superior level of pulp fiction: well plotted, told in competent, fast-moving prose, with plenty of action, and heroic, noblebright protagonists whose abilities don't strain credibility too much. Nor does he rely on coincidence to keep his plots moving, which was almost a universal fault in books of the time. I'll be looking for more of his stuff, definitely.

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Review: The Black Abbot

The Black Abbot by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not a typical Edgar Wallace novel, but I'm starting to think there are no typical Edgar Wallace novels. He was the Melissa McShane of his day: prolific, competent, didn't just work to the same formula all the time, but wrote widely varied books within a broad genre category, most of them good.

This one has just enough of a mystery to it that I've tagged it as "classic-mystery," but, despite the country-house setting, it isn't one of those where the wealthy man is murdered in his locked library. There's a mysterious figure, believed by some to be the ghost of the Black Abbot of the title, who wanders the grounds at intervals; a legendary treasure supposedly buried by an Elizabethan ancestor, which every generation since has put in huge effort searching for; an eccentric, scholarly earl; his practical, athletic younger brother, who runs the estate; their neighbours, a lawyer with a gambling problem who has embezzled extensively to support his habit and is about to be found out, and the lawyer's sister, who is engaged to the earl but in love with the younger brother (who reciprocates); the lawyer's chief clerk, who is too clever by half and also in love with the sister; the earl's former secretary, who tried to get the earl to marry her but was foiled by the younger brother; a footman who is selling information to the clerk; and a Scotland Yard sergeant who looks remarkably like a monkey. (This is purely colour, with no direct impact on events; that's not a criticism, because I believe that there's a place for purely decorative elements in a well-written book.)

It's a promising cast, and it doesn't disappoint. There are plenty of twists and turns, lots of peril and suspense, and it's all well told, with the couple of coincidences playing not too much of a pivotal role in the plot. The sequences in the underground ruins of the monastery have a "perilous dungeons" feel. The financial back-and-forth is easy enough to understand while still being full of reverses and shocks. The romance aspect is, for Wallace and for his time, not badly handled. All of the characters have a bit more to them than their archetype and their plot role, and nobody is unmixedly a villain without any redeeming qualities. As Wallace books go, it's a strong one, and gets a recommendation from me.

The Project Gutenberg editor has put in some work to get rid of a number of typos in the original, which I appreciate.

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Review: A Silent Witness

A Silent Witness by R. Austin Freeman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not a strong entry in the Thorndyke series for me, and I'm thinking I might stop seeking these out. Freeman is recycling a lot of his material, and relying on multiple unlikely coincidences to hold his plots together, and what's more, I figured out most of the mystery well before Thorndyke started into his usual detailed recap.

The setup is one we've seen multiple times before in the series. Young, newly-qualified doctor, who has been taught by Thorndyke, is (without much enjoyment or enthusiasm) doing an easy locum job, stumbles across a couple of odd happenings that are, by complete coincidence, connected, and also meets a nice young woman who becomes the love interest (but doesn't ever get much of a personality or play any real role in the plot to speak of). Freeman even reuses another plot device from an earlier book: (view spoiler)[the property that backs onto another one, indicating, when Thorndyke looks at a map that we, the readers, are not privy to, that particular people are likely connected to the crime. (hide spoiler)]

This young man, the narrator, bumps into several people who are important to the plot in a place where he is only present by complete accident. He's too stupid to live, and keeps failing to take elementary precautions, even though he's only escaped being murdered by the villain by several strokes of luck.

The villain's plot is moderately clever, but overly elaborate, and is detected because of his inept attempts to cover up what doesn't actually need covering up in the first place. The narrator and Thorndyke's assistant profess complete bafflement, long after it was obvious to me how various identities fitted together and what the crime had been.

On balance, not a recommendation, and something of a disappointment.

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Review: The Crystal Key: The Dream Rider Saga, #2

The Crystal Key: The Dream Rider Saga, #2 by Douglas Smith
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Contemporary cosmic fantasy is not my usual fare. I tend more to cozy and secondary-world at the moment. But I had read, and enjoyed, the first in this series, so when it popped up on BookBub I grabbed it. I was not disappointed.

It's that rare thing, a supers novel (more or less) that's had good and thorough editing, though there are a few basic errors here and there that the editor presumably missed. (Even very good editors do miss a small percentage of errors.)

It's also a good story. Everyone gets to step up, even a couple of minor characters, and the main characters grow and develop. Even though their powers are considerable by the end, they never make the challenges feel trivial or take away the tension and danger and the need to make smart choices. They're characters I could feel for and cheer for, despite their flaws.

The relationship dynamics between the characters, and their personal issues, are also well developed and help to drive the plot, even though the main plot driver is the machinations of external parties. There's a twist that I absolutely did not see coming, too, which still made sense even though it recontextualized a lot of what had gone before.

It's a strong piece of work, and while it doesn't have the extra depth of reflection that would propel it into the Gold tier of my annual recommendation list, it's firmly at the top of Silver: soundly constructed and enjoyable.

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Review: Modern Magic: A contemporary fantasy novel

Modern Magic: A contemporary fantasy novel by Beth Williams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The shadow of the late lamented Sir Terry Pratchett looms over every humourous fantasy novel, and especially every British humourous fantasy novel; comparisons are inevitable. This one doesn't set out to imitate him too closely, though the influence is there, mainly in the more-than-Dickensian names, but also in the general feel of the world: diverse people doing their best to get along, noblebright main characters, a lot of imperfections in how things work day-to-day, and yet somehow it all manages to operate.

In a Terry Pratchett book, or even a Tom Holt book, to which this also bears some similarity because of the corporate bureaucracy, the nerdy auditor, Hop, would probably have been the main character or at least the love interest, and Ivy, the actual main character, would have been less capable and less attractive, but still have triumphed through sheer perseverance and good intent. (She does have perseverance and good intent, though.)

The identity of the people behind all the trouble sticks out half a mile, and no tropes were averted or even given a twist in that part of the storytelling.

It is, though, a generous and kind-hearted story, in which more-or-less ordinary, imperfect people trapped in a less-than-ideal system dare to challenge it and overcome at least the worst consequences of the fact that others are abusing it from selfish motives, and those people in turn get some comeuppance. I found it amusing rather than hilarious, but it was consistently amusing, and didn't try too hard for laughs (which usually fails). It was decently edited, too, with a few minor glitches, mainly vocabulary or simple typos.

It's a recommendation from me, and I'll be looking for more from this author.

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Review: The Book of Lost Hours

The Book of Lost Hours by Hayley Gelfuso
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The problem with this one for me is that I like my speculative fiction to give me a thoroughly-worked-out, consistent premise and have the plot arise from it, and this is the other way around. It has the feel of a book where the author knew where they wanted the plot to go, and the worldbuilding had to fit around that, even if it made no sense whatsoever.

The premise here is that there's a "time dimension" which is accessible in various ways - most commonly (in the 20th century, at least) by magical watches - where human memory is stored like a library. One of the main characters is Lisavet Levy, who, at the age of 11, is shoved into this dimension by her father - one of the few people who knows how to make the watches - for safety on what turns out to be Kristallnacht, while he goes off to get her brother so they can all escape to the US through the time dimension.

Her father never returns, and Lisavet grows up in the time dimension and learns from the ghostlike people there - the ones who haven't yet been put into books - and from her own experimentation how to visit the memories, where she learns languages and other useful skills. After a while, she's able to take objects from the memories for her own use, and they remain real when she brings them out, except they don't remain real to other people, except when they do.

Yes, there are other people who can enter the time dimension, known as "timekeepers," which is ironic because most of them are there to destroy books - which contain people's memories - thus destroying the memory other people have of the person, and their impact on history. Or something. It's not particularly clear or consistent, and it becomes obvious that the so-called "memories" are not just the memories individuals have (or had); Lisavet goes into one of her father's "memories," and it's not the way he always told the story, suggesting that the "memories" are in fact objective records of events, and that when someone messes with the "memories," they are changing history. Or are they just changing the perception people have of it? No; Lisavet leaves something in a "memory" which is then there in the real world, so these aren't actually memories at all. It's time travel. Which raises the question: Why are they associated with a specific person, when you can go into a room that the person whose "memory" it supposedly is hasn't been into and can't see into? Or go into their room, and another room in the same building that they probably haven't visited, while they're unconscious?

This is another part of what I mean by the plot driving the worldbuilding, even when it makes no sense: Lisavet doesn't have to eat and drink in the time dimension, presumably because if she did, the author would have to explain where the food and drink came from. (Why not the "memories," since she can take things from them? Yes, it takes her a while to gain that skill, but she could gain it sooner.) But she has to grow and age, because she starts out 11 years old, and she has to be older for key parts of the plot to happen, so her body gets bigger despite taking no nourishment. She doesn't excrete or sleep in the time dimension either. What's more, (view spoiler)[she doesn't menstruate - she says this specifically - and yet she gets pregnant, to an American man who comes into the time dimension on behalf of the CIA. While they are making love for the first time, the memory they are in "comes to an end" (whatever that means; isn't memory continuous while awake?), and she shifts them seamlessly into another one without using a book, but not long after this scene she's said to develop the ability to go into memories without using a book, and to keep this from her lover so that he won't freak out. (hide spoiler)]

Interwoven with Lisavet's story - going back and forth in time, as is appropriate for what is, let's be honest, a time travel novel - are several other characters: Amelia, a sullen teenager; her Uncle Ernest, a timekeeper; Moira, Ernest's boss in the secret agency that works with the time dimension from the US end; and Jack, head of the CIA, who's Moira's boss, and thoroughly despicable in every possible way. All of these people have complicated interrelationships which evolve or are revealed throughout the book.

I could probably have forgiven the... let's say rather improvised worldbuilding if the emotional beats had been sound, if I'd been moved and surprised and excited. But (and this may just be me) I wasn't. The twists didn't surprise me; one I saw coming from a little way off, and while I didn't see the other big one coming, when it arrived I thought it was a conventional choice. Big spoilers here: (view spoiler)[Lisavet and Moira are the same person, but they come across quite differently from each other. One is vulnerable, gentle, and innocent; the other is hard and dangerous and ends up killing two men who she knows well with no hesitation. Yes, there was a traumatic transition from one identity to the other, and a powerful motivation for the killing, but I still didn't completely buy it. Also, the scene where she picks the name "Moira". Moira is a very Irish name, and goes extremely well with "Donnelley", her assigned surname, but her explanation for choosing it - that it was her (Swiss) mother's name - struck me as implausible. As did the idea of a German Jewish woman who has carefully avoided finding out anything about the world since she was aged 11 convincingly portraying an American of Irish Catholic background who has grown up in that world. It feels to me - and I'm very likely wrong - that the decision that Moira was actually Lisavet came relatively late in the development of the book, when Moira's quite different personality was already established, and, once again, the backstory was forced in order to fit. Which, for me, it didn't. (hide spoiler)]

It is, with the occasional glitch, at least well edited. But the worldbuilding made no sense to me, and I never really came to care about the characters, to the point that I stopped reading at 75%, so it only gets three stars and no recommendation from me. Once again, claims in the blurb that something is for fans of something else prove hollow; I thought the The Ministry of Time was amazing, but this is no Ministry of Time.

I received a review copy via Netgalley.

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Review: The Duke in the Suburbs

The Duke in the Suburbs by Edgar Wallace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Not a typical Edgar Wallace. He mostly wrote mysteries and thrillers, and while there are some moments of action, this is mostly a comedy. For me, quite a successful comedy, too.

For reasons that are never explained, presumably because it makes no sense at all, the Duc de Montvilliers has decided to rent a suburban villa in a quiet middle-class neighbourhood in London. He's not an English duke, but a (presumably purely nominal) French duke, descendant of refugees from the Terror, born and raised in England. He has plenty of money, because he's been to the US and struck silver, along with his American friend Hank, who's also living with him in the suburban house (no, not like that, this is 1909). While in America, he lived a rough-and-tumble life and was the cause of a ruffian being jailed, and this ruffian, having by some pull and corruption got out of jail, is now trying to hunt him down.

Meanwhile, by coincidence, the uncle of his neighbour (a young woman who he falls in love with and proposes to almost immediately on meeting her), a schemer named Sir Harry Tanneur, is trying, by completely dodgy means, to wrest the silver mine from him in a US court. Sir Harry's lawyer there cunningly fulfils the letter of the law by advertising the action in three small local newspapers, but then has an agent buy up the entire run of all three papers so the duke has no chance of finding out in practice, since if he defends the claim he will definitely win. However, the lawyer sends the clippings to Sir Harry, and by a series of highly unlikely coincidences one of them ends up being read out at a parish concert, alerting the duke, who rushes to the US and crushes the fraudulent claim.

This annoys Sir Harry significantly. His family were actually tanners, surnamed Tanner, but when they made a lot of money in the 19th century changed it to Tanneur, presumably to rhyme with "poseur," which is what Sir Harry is. He's busily engaged in producing false documentation of ancient and exalted genealogy. He deeply resents the duke legally asserting his right to his own property and scotching Sir Harry's attempt to pinch it, and considers it cause for a vendetta.

The two men then buy newspapers in order to campaign against one another, and the suburbanites, who are amusingly characterized, divide into factions. The characters are wonderful in general: the urbane duke, a mixture of Eton old boy and Wild West adventurer; his phlegmatic buddy Hank, who shows a lot more sophistication than the usual stock American character; the permanently broke but always genial Lord Tupping, known to one and all as "Tuppy"; the self-deceiving and bitter Sir Harry; the absurd would-be detective. It's unfortunate, though, that the love interest doesn't have a lot of personality, which is a flaw in an otherwise strong and amusing book.

I think this must have been one of the books Wallace dictated, and whoever transcribed and/or edited it was weak on punctuation. The comma usage is erratic and frequently incorrect, apostrophes are missing, closing quotation marks get missed (or put where they don't belong), and the duke's American nickname is spelled "Dukey" or "Jukey" seemingly at random. It's the kind of book that makes me want to produce my own edition, so that it can shine as it deserves.

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Review: The Geomagician

The Geomagician by Jennifer Mandula
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I very nearly didn't pick this up, because practically all of the existing reviews were about how excited the reviewer felt, more than about the book itself, and that's usually a sign that it's not for me. But I took the risk, and I'm glad of it. It has sound emotional beats, and more thought has gone into it than is often the case with period fantasy, particularly about the social impact of technology - a huge factor in the real 19th century - and the role of religion, which also features in a way largely realistic for the period. (Taking into account that this isn't exactly our world, where nobody would have been under threat of execution for heresy in early 19th century Britain.) It isn't just set in a scenery-flats-and-costumes version of 19th-century Britain for the sake of the aesthetic; it uses real concerns of the period, and the speculative element, to drive the plot, which is what worldbuilding should do.

It's set in 1829, which in our world was after the former Prince Regent had succeeded his father as king, but before Victoria. The name of the monarch isn't mentioned, but it's a queen, not a king. I'm choosing to believe that this isn't the author starting the Victorian era eight years earlier by accident, but instead part of the difference from our version of history. This England does have a similar technology level and a similar society to the England of our 1829.

The fantasy element is that everyone has at least a small amount of magic, which can be concentrated into "reliqs" and then used by someone else to do useful things, like create light or heat, or clean things, or separate different substances, or heal. Fossils, for some reason, make particularly good reliqs, and the main character and narrator, Mary Anning, is a fossil hunter from Lyme Regis (based on an actual historical figure, I was surprised to discover in the afterword, as are several other characters). She has, through the support of a "geomagician" named Buckland - who studies fossils, and buys them from her - received some informal training in paleontology, taught herself a lot more, and become very knowledgeable, and she now wants to become the first female member of the Society of Geomagicians. To do this, though, will involve a lot of politics, complicated by the fact that her mentor and her ex-sweetheart are rivals for the presidency of the Society.

The ex-sweetheart, Henry, who gradually and quietly ghosted her while he was away being educated, is wealthy and initially comes off as arrogant and untrustworthy, seen through Mary's eyes at least. They were both friends as teenagers with a brother and sister, of whom the brother, Edgar, is now a viscount and in the House of Lords, while the sister, Lucy, is a witch (someone who can work magic without a reliq), also living in Lyme Regis; Mary's best friend; and heavily involved in the Prometheans, who oppose the whole system of people selling their magic for others' use as being contrary to human dignity. The four are still friends and allies to varying degrees, apart from the fact that Mary now can't stand Henry.

All of this supplies plenty of potential for conflict, and when Mary, on one of her fossil expeditions, brings a pterodactyl egg to life and it hatches, it precipitates a sequence of events starting with Mary's mentor and Henry coming on behalf of the Society to buy the creature. Mary demands nomination to the Society as part of the price, and they all head to London, where there are political, scientific, religious and social conflicts aplenty. Not to mention that Henry takes Mary on as his assistant, and they start secretly studying her ability to bring fossils to life - secretly, because it's theologically fraught, and she could, at least in theory, be executed if things turn the wrong way.

The book raises some important questions. If the system works in a way that disadvantages you and people like you, is it better to try to force your way into it - and end up beholden to people who benefit from it and who you had to ally with in order to get in, and benefiting from it yourself - or to work against it from outside, perhaps having to ally with people who want to tear it down, have nothing to put in its place, and are fully prepared to do harm, even to the people they supposedly support, in order to bring about change? What's more, should you sacrifice a place you've earned in order to open the way in the future for others like yourself? Is it right to suppress the truth or actively mislead others in the cause of self-preservation or a greater good? There are no easy answers given here; it's not setting out to resolve those questions, but to explore them, and show how struggling with them impacts people, especially people who respect or love each other but disagree on important points.

On the downside, it has the usual level of Americanisms (such as "fall" for "autumn" or "a few blocks away"), anachronisms ("boycott" - the term originated in 1880; "psychological break"; "workstation"), and malapropisms (most frequently "clamored" for "clambered," but also "toothsome" to mean "toothy" when it actually means "appetizing") that I generally see in books by 21st-century Americans set in 19th-century Britain. Also several of the other common mistakes that practically everyone makes, like frequently putting commas between adjectives that aren't coordinate, putting the apostrophe in the wrong place when referring to a family's home by the name of the family ("the Buckland's" where it should be "Bucklands'"), and sometimes (though not nearly as often as many writers) writing in the simple past tense when it should be past perfect. Also, practically every hyphen in the book is between an adjective and the noun it modifies, which is a place no hyphen should be.

There are a couple of outright cultural errors, too, like treating "pence" as if it was singular and referring to a member of the House of Lords as a "Member of Parliament," a term that only applies to the Commons. It needs another go-through by a really good copy editor, in other words, and perhaps, given that I saw a pre-publication version via Netgalley and this is a major publisher (Penguin Random House), it will get one - though that's never guaranteed. Also, the author gives a long list of people who I take to be beta readers at the end, and thanks two editors (though they might not be copy editors), and it has got this far with these issues uncorrected.

While all of that annoyed me, it was still better edited than average (the average is quite low), and the story itself was a big step above that again. If you enjoy period fantasy set in Britain, and can set aside, or don't notice, the occasional anachronism or Americanism, and especially if you appreciate a narrative that takes actual concerns of the period and makes them central to the plot, this is probably for you. I hovered between assigning it to the Gold or Silver tier of my annual Best of the Year, because of the editing; in the end, I gave it the benefit of the doubt that the more significant errors would be fixed by publication, and, considering the depth and complexity of the story and its relationship to the premise and setting, put it in Gold.

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