Review: Harry Takes Off

Harry Takes Off by Steve Turnbull
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I received a copy from the author, who I know on social media, for purposes of review.

Reading a book that positions itself as steampunk is the triumph of hope over experience for me. This is because, almost without exception, the execution fails to measure up to the ideas. Fails by a wide margin. The average steampunk book is poorly written, both in terms of story and in terms of basic competence with the elements of prose.

This book is that rare exception.

Firstly, Turnbull doesn't flood us with absurd gadgetry. His sole technological difference is a form of antigravity, which I think is a wise approach. We don't have steam this and brass that and clockwork the other thing, with none of them making any kind of technological or sociological sense. We have steam-powered heavier-than-air flight, and airships that can carry much greater payloads. Otherwise, it's a straight historical adventure.

Secondly, he knows how to write a pulp story. It's exciting, it occasionally stretches belief, but I forgive it because it reminds me of the thrilling adventure stories of my childhood. There aren't the problems with pacing, massive plot holes, and excessive description that so often plague the genre.

Thirdly, his characters aren't idiots. Because this is a fast-moving, action-packed, plot-driven pulp story, they don't achieve tremendous depth, perhaps, but they're sensible, pragmatic, capable, and don't get themselves into trouble by doing things that are obviously thickheaded. Nor do they need to be rescued by men, like so many steampunk heroines. Instead, they bravely escape from the Germans by themselves and take a warning to the British government, which is, of course, ignored because they are only teenage girls (and one is African). Then they bravely escape again (I did find the fact that the Sultan of Zanzibar lets the engineer sister fix, indeed improve, their aircraft while holding them captive suspiciously plot-convenient).

Fourth, he only uses vocabulary that he actually understands. This is one of the worst things about steampunk for me: the authors try to write "Victorian" and end up making a horrible hash of it, misusing words left and right and revealing their ignorance of history, language and culture. Turnbull dodges this bullet, or rather artillery shell.

I give this book my rare "well-edited" tag, which I don't think has ever been earned by a steampunk book before (several of them have got the "seriously-needs-editing" tag, though). In part, this is, of course, because Turnbull doesn't make a lot of mistakes to begin with. Quality begins with the author, and if the author makes hundreds of errors, there will be tens of errors even after a very good editor has gone over it.

A very good editor (whom I know) has gone over this, and there are very few issues left, all minor. The copy that I read came bundled with another book of Turnbull's, edited by a different person, which revealed that he has a habit of comma-splicing. There was no sign of this issue in Harry Takes Off.

Overall, a fine piece of adventure fiction, which didn't distract me from the plot by dropping constant clangers like so much steampunk does.

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Review: Under the Ice Blades

Under the Ice Blades by Lindsay Buroker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another reliably entertaining Lindsay Buroker book. She keeps writing them and I keep buying them.

One thing I do notice about this series in particular is that all of the couples seem to have the same dynamic: they're confident on the outside, and on the inside they're always wondering insecurely how they're coming across, and not knowing, because the other person is also not letting on. Maybe a new schtick would be good for a change?

The last scene also seemed a bit out of character for one of the participants, given several specific statements made earlier in the book.

Overall, though, a good mixture of adventure with a bit of romance, and it adds a couple of complications to the series in progress. I have the next book on preorder.


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Review: Fool Moon

Fool Moon by Jim Butcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is my, I don't know, third or fourth re-read, at least, and I still couldn't remember the ins and outs of the plot. Perhaps this is because the author thought it would be cool to come up with as many kinds of werewolves as possible, and then put all of them in the book, so for a long time it's extremely unclear which of them are responsible for the crimes.

I suppose that's similar to the Agatha Christie school of mystery writing, where everyone could have done the murder. It's confusing, though. Maybe even more so than it's meant to be.

There's also a lot more graphic violence and horrible death than I usually go for, so I'm trying to remember why it was that I stuck with this series back when I had a lower tolerance for that than I do now (and it's still pretty low).

I think it's the characters. Harry is so committed to doing the right thing, even when badly and repeatedly beaten up and facing highly probable death, that you can't help being on his side.

I agree with those who say that this isn't nearly as good as the series became later on. The minor characters are more developed, later, and the plots consist of more than "Harry blunders about getting beaten on in the noir tradition, until eventually the mystery shakes loose more through his persistence than his skill." Still, I did enjoy the ride, for the most part (could have done with less grisly death).

The audio this time is better than the first book. The gasps, sighs and sniffs have been edited out this time, and only the reader's occasional word blunders remain to annoy.

I'm enjoying going back through the series and reminding myself of how the secondary characters (and even Harry) started out. The Alphas, the late-teenage werewolves, are so young and earnest here, though they seem to have lost their environmental activism after this book. I think this may also have been the last book that had potions in it, which is probably a good decision, on the whole. They're a bit like Q's devices in James Bond: you know they'll turn out to be exactly what the hero needs at some critical juncture, and then they'll never be mentioned again.

Plenty of flaws, but also plenty going for it, and so I press on through the audio reread.

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Review: Herland

Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first thing to understand about Herland is that it's what's sometimes called a "milieu story". In other words, exploration of the setting takes priority over plot or characterisation. This isn't to say that there is no plot and no characterisation, or that they're badly done, just that the plot is basic and stretched over a lot of material, and the characterisation is also basic and doesn't involve a lot of character development. This is normal for a utopian novel, and as utopian novels go, this one has more plot and characterisation than most.

With that caveat out of the way, this is not only a classic feminist utopia, but a competently written one. It's told almost as if it's a pulp adventure of the "lost world" type, by a male narrator. The narrator is one of three men who find an all-woman society on an isolated plateau which is implied to be somewhere near the headwaters of the Amazon (partly, I'm sure, for symbolic reasons, the Amazons being a classical, legendary all-female society). At least two of the three are types, and risk being straw men, but in my opinion are accurate and recognisable enough types to escape that pitfall.

Terry is a "man's man," the classic two-fisted pulp adventurer, who recognises two types of women: attractive and to be used for his sexual satisfaction, and unattractive and therefore to be ignored. When he meets with the independent, intelligent women of Herland, who have no time for his crap, he reacts with anger, and ultimately violence.

Jeff is the kind of man who puts women on a pedestal. He fits happily into Herland, and adapts himself to it.

Van, the narrator, claims to be somewhere between the two, though he's a lot closer to Jeff. His main fault is that, like the other men, he can't bring himself to be completely honest about the defects of their society in the face of the well-ordered society of Herland, which the women have been consciously improving for a thousand years.

The women are not arrogant about their society, but are open to learn, and even to re-adopt "bisexual reproduction" (by a miracle which they attribute to their Mother Goddess, they give birth by parthenogenesis, all of their men having been killed in a series of unfortunate events many centuries before). It's pretty clear, though, that they have a lot less to learn from the rest of the world's cultures than vice versa.

This kind of book easily becomes preachy and filled with infodumps. In my view, the author manages to avoid both of these traps (perhaps narrowly on occasion); exposition is mostly in dialogue, and the superiority of the women's society emerges as a reluctant conclusion reached by the narrator, rather than in speeches from the women themselves.

There are some excellent observations about society, culture, the nature of humanity, and, of course, gender scattered throughout, and I recommend it for anyone who doesn't automatically run from the words "feminist utopia".

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Review: Beginnings, Middles & Ends

Beginnings, Middles & Ends by Nancy Kress
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This was excellent, not least because it's very well laid out, with a clear flow from point to point and chapter to chapter. (As you would hope from a book on beginnings, middles and ends.)

All too many craft books, I'm finding, don't have much to teach anyone who isn't a beginner. This is an exception. Even though some of the ground it covers is inevitably ground I've seen covered before, it does it so clearly and thoroughly that it provides fresh insight.

For example, the section on endings gave me an "aha!" moment about one of my own stories. The editor I'd submitted to liked it apart from the ending, and requested a rewrite. I realised, reading Nancy Kress's explanation, why the rewritten ending had worked where the original had not: it directly addressed the conflict which started in the first paragraph and was developed through the middle of the story.

This was the main point I gained from the book: the beginning, middle and end form a unity. However, there's also useful material on characterisation, motivation, promises, climaxes, and a structured approach to revision.

The author helpfully points out some differences between short stories and novels along the way. She also makes clear something that had been vague to me: how non-plotted or "literary" stories are supposed to work, and how to signal that you're writing one of those, and not a plotted story. I believe I'll now approach the non-plotted stories I read with more appreciation for what the author is doing.

This is the second book I've read in the Elements of Fiction Writing series (the first being the highly useful Scene and Structure ), but I'll be searching out the others, given the excellent quality of both the ones I've read so far.

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Review: The Martian

The Martian by Andy Weir
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Nothing could be more old-school, as far as writing a science fiction novel is concerned, than taking "clever engineer solves problems" as your premise. It wasn't new when Hugo Gernsback did it (very boringly) with Ralph 124C41+ in 1911, and it remained a staple well into the 1960s and beyond.

And if you're going to go old-school, you need to do it really well.

The Martian is a "clever engineer solves problems" story, and it's done really well.

I didn't just have to take other people's word that this would be the case. Thanks to David Morgan-Mar and his Irregular Webcomic, I knew about Andy Weir and his Casey and Andy webcomic, so I knew he was funny. I'd also read the webcomic he did after that one, so I knew that he could tell a story as well as pull off a gag. I therefore went in thinking, "He might just be able to pull 'clever engineer' off and still make it a good story with plenty of humour."

At one point, it put me in mind of Arthur C. Clark's A Fall of Moondust , which (judging by the back matter) the author has almost certainly read. Both involve people trapped off Earth after an accident, having to contend with the physics (etc.) of an unfamiliar environment in order to survive and be rescued. Both stories manage to make it at least as much about the people as about the science, which for me, and for most people, is important in a hard-SF story. I don't just want a tour of the clever engineering science museum.

I did occasionally find the science a touch dull, but the voice of Mark Watney, the wisecracking, indomitable narrator of most of the book, rescues it with laugh-out-loud moments. There's also genuine tension and suspense; it's an emotional journey, which I'm sure is the key to the book's popularity.

It misses out on my rare "well-edited" accolade for one reason: the author's habit of combining a question mark and an exclamation mark at the end of the same sentence. Other than that, few and minor errors meant a smooth, enjoyable reading experience.

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Review: Hot Lead, Cold Iron

Hot Lead, Cold Iron by Ari Marmell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A while ago now, I read (or tried to read) a book that shall remain nameless, which had the premise of a fantasy being acting as a detective in a this-world noir setting. I abandoned it because it lacked the wonderfully punchy language that, to me, is one of the best things about noir. (In fact, I was so frustrated that, in reaction, I wrote a short story set in a sword-and-sorcery city, but told in the style of Damon Runyon.)

Lacking in noir-ness is happily not a fault of this excellent book, in which a member of the Aes Sidhe, working as a private eye in 1930s Chicago, struggles against mobsters, technology, the politics of his own people, and inimical Italian witchcraft.

He struggles well, determinedly, and in a good cause, which is how I like my heroes. The prose, besides being suitably noirish, is competent, fluent and well-edited. There's plenty in place for a rousing sequel, while this story is wrapped up satisfyingly.

Recommended, and I will be buying more in this series.

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