2023/088: Salt on the Midnight Fire — Liz Williams

“All the people in the otherlands seem so marginalised. Scraping together bits and pieces of territory to live in.”
“Not just the otherlands,” Serena said. “If you walk along Regent’s Canal, bang smack in the middle of the city, you’ll see people living in benders and tents.” [loc. 2962]

Fourth and final novel in the Fallow Sisters quartet: this is very much a summer book, and I was pleased to be able to read it on a hot summer afternoon. Ideally, of course, I should have been on a beach somewhere in the West Country ... Salt on the Midnight Fire deals with the ongoing struggle for leadership of the Wild Hunt, and with the magical abduction of a child by a chilly, red-headed personage, and with wreckers and pirates on the Cornish coast: the Morlader, a supernatural figure who preys on souls, is making a play for hunting rights over the Hunt's ancestral territory. ('Rights we have held since the end of the ice,' retorts the Hunt's leader.) Meanwhile the Fallow sisters deal with disappearances, childbirth, and a fearsome Flea.

I preordered Salt on the Midnight Fire, read most of it on publication day, and broke off to reread the previous novels in the quartet before finishing this finale. I enjoyed it very much: I like the sisters and their various friends and acquaintances; I am constantly surprised and charmed that the author notices things that matter to me (the Southwark Cathedral cat!); the otherlands are reminiscent of other protomythic realms such as Mythago Wood, but rather less brutal; Williams' descriptions of landscape are magificent ('the light pouring down onto the land as if from an upturned cup, leaching the fields and hills into a sequence of faded green and tawny and mauve, with the sea silver in the distance') and her dialogue comfortable with colloquial rhythm. This is not, quite, our reality. Brexit is noted as something not to be mentioned in Cornwall; the Ever Given's sojourn in the Suez is namedropped, but there is no Covid pandemic. Pratchett's novels exist, but while there's a gender-swapped production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the 'blockbusting fantasy TV series' that the Titania-actress starred in is certainly not Game of Thrones.

While the main plot threads are nicely (if sometimes rapidly) resolved, there are a number of dangling plot threads that I hope the author will weave into further works: Nick Wratchell-Hynes' romantic relationship (though it may be hinted), Nan's baby, Bill's household... The quartet is a delightful creation, and I really hope Williams returns to this setting.

2023/087: Dinosaur Summer — Greg Bear

... the view closing into a tunnel of shock around the gaping mouth of the venator, still drawing back, back, legs splayed, all his muscles tensing like steel bands beneath his gleaming skin. The sun caught the animal’s eyes like twin arcs on a welding torch; he lowered his head and the eyes became pits of night. [p. 176]

Photographer Anthony Belzoni is down on his luck: it's 1947, he's estranged from his wife, and he and his teenaged son Peter are living in a run-down apartment in Brooklyn. Then the National Geographic commissions him to work with the owners of Circus Lothar, the last dinosaur circus. For this is a world in which Conan Doyle's The Lost World was fact, not fiction: dinosaurs were found on El Grande, an isolated mesa in South America, and have become almost mundane. But the dinosaurs aren't easy to keep in captivity, and there have been some spectacular disasters, such as a venator (a savage carnivore) getting loose at a circus in Havana and killing twenty people. The public is tired of 'dino disasters', and the owners of Circus Lothar, facing bankruptcy, have decided to return their remaining animals to El Grande. The expedition includes a number of real-life characters, including a youthful Ray Harryhausen (who, in his non-fictional persona, described Dinosaur Summer as “a vicarious and wonderful adventure into the unknown wilds of the Amazon”): Belzoni and his son join the expedition, and Peter learns a lot about courage, manhood and dinosaur biology.

This is very much a boys' own adventure, and not only because it's apparently aimed at young adults. (I did not know this when I bought it, and didn't find it juvenile in style or content.) Peter is of an age to fall in love (or something like it) with every female he encounters -- not that there are many, apart from the fearsome Catalina Mendez (representing the Venezuelan Office of Natural Resources) and an elderly ankylosaur named Sheila. The novel focuses on the bond between Belzoni and Peter, and Peter's growing independence: by the epilogue, he's reconciled with his absent mother, but keenly aware that she doesn't understand him or his father. Women, eh?

As a dinosaur adventure it's pretty good. Bear avoids the usual species -- tyrannosaurs, velociraptors, et cetera -- and features lesser-known dinosaurs such as the venator and the centrosaur. There's some interesting speculation about the progress of evolution on El Grande, and the fearsome 'death eagles' which may be bringing the age of the Lost World dinosaurs to a close. Bear also addresses the colonial legacy of Conan Doyle and his fictional Professor Challenger. Dagger, the fearsome venator, is identified as a Challenger by Billie, a Makritare Indian river guide. "You mean like the Professor," says one member of the expedition. "No," says Billie. "He is the one who challenges. He asks questions only ghosts can answer." Though Billie's spiritual quest isn't explored in detail, it's a good counterweight to the concerns of the expedition and of the Venezuelan military.

I enjoyed this much more than Crichton's The Lost World -- Bear was an excellent writer -- but I'm still looking for a really good novel about dinosaurs.

2023/086: The Bass Rock — Evie Wyld

The smell is sweet and foul – when your nose first catches it, you think you’ve found a meadow lily, and then like a finger behind the eyeball, the smell scratches in. [loc. 668]

Three interlocked stories, with three protagonists, in three time periods: Sarah, fleeing accusations of witchcraft in the seventeenth century, and reliant on the kindness of a disgraced preacher and his son; Ruth, married to a controlling widower with two sons just after the Second World War, trying to make a place for herself in close-knit, secret-ridden North Berwick; and Viviane, self-exiled from London after a nervous breakdown, mourning her father's death and engaged to clear out the family's old home. This is a beautifully and rigorously structured novel -- seven chapters, each with a section for each of the three women, each with an interlude about the fate of an anonymous woman -- with a definite Gothic flavour, and with a relentless focus on misogynistic violence. We start with Viv, as a young child, discovering the body of a woman in a suitcase, washed up on the beach; later there are rapes, murders, child abuse (male violence manifesting as pedophilia in the absence of women) and infidelity. Viviane, Ruth and Sarah are all damaged and grieving (in fact, I think they're all grieving the death of a male relative) and all experience some kind of haunting, a sense of not being alone, a precarious grip on sanity. These are perhaps less obvious in Sarah's case, but they are there. And then there's Viv's new friend Maggie, a self-proclaimed witch and occasional sex worker, who is perhaps the most powerful character in the novel.

This wasn't exactly an enjoyable read, but Wyld's gift for description (especially evocative, often unpleasant smells) makes The Bass Rock compelling. It's interesting to work out the links between the three protagonists, and the backstory of Viv's family. And the atmosphere of the area, the coast around North Berwick with the Bass Rock looming on the eastern horizon ('she often found herself drifting if she stared at it for too long, unable to look away') is vivid and chilling.

I think I bought this book because of the setting: I think I might not have bought it if I'd understood that its focus was violence against women and children. ('You didn’t report these things. It was all part of life, we were led to believe.') The story repeats: but Maggie, who strikes terror into a violent man, offers some hope that the cycle can be broken, or at least disrupted.

2023/085: Fledgling — Octavia Butler

I think I’m an experiment. I think I can withstand the sun better than . . . others of my kind. I burn, but I don’t burn as fast as they do. It’s like an allergy we all have to the sun. I don’t know who the experimenters are, though, the ones who made me black.” [p. 37]

A small girl wakes in agony, injured and starving, with no idea of who she is. Or what she is: we learn, as she learns, that she is Shori, the only survivor of a massacre that killed her entire family and their Symbionts. Symbionts are humans, like the nice young man Wright who Shori meets on the road and whose blood she drinks. She is quickly reunited with others of her kind, the Ina -- an entirely separate species of humanoid, likely the source of all the vampire myths but somewhat more biologically credible. Their bite is addictive and confers benefits on the bitten human, but doesn't transform that human into Ina. The Ina cannot change shape, or become mist, and they are not immortal. Ina are typically very pale, and cannot stay awake after dawn, or go out in daylight without burning: but Shori, who is Black, can survive in daylight if she covers up. Fledgling is about her quest to recover her identity, discover who was responsible for the deaths of her family, and create a miniature family of Symbionts for herself.

Shori has to deal with racism from her own kind, as well as the ubiquitous casual racism from humans (of which there's remarkably little). She also has to deal with being treated like a child: to humans, she looks about ten years old, though she's actually over fifty -- which is the Ina equivalent of teenaged. I was uncomfortable with Shori having sex with Wright as part of the feeding process (and before she knew how old, or what, she was). I'm very uncomfortable about Wright being okay with it, too, though it's possible that he's already become addicted to her venom when she 'give(s) him pleasure'.

This is a short novel but there's a lot in it: racism, fear of miscegenation, issues of control and consent (Shori reflects at one point that the Ina-human arrangement 'sounded more like slavery than symbiosis'), as well as the more straightforward crimes of the massacre of Shori's family and a subsequent murder intended to affect her chances with the Council of Judgment.

According to one source: "Having indulged in reading every single one of the erotically charged Anita Blake vampire novels of Laurell K. Hamilton, Octavia wanted to write something similar, but a little different. A little more scientifically rigorous. A little more Black." Fledgling ends rather abruptly: Butler apparently intended this to be the first in a series, and there are certainly some undeveloped themes. I wish we'd got to see the rest of Shori's story, and how her Symbionts adjust to being part of a polycule. And I'd have loved more about the different Ina families, their religion, their hinted origins ...

Fulfils the ‘By Octavia Butler’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

2023/084: The Dutch House — Ann Patchett

There are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you’d been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you’re suspended, knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself. [p. 121]

Maeve and Danny's mother left when Maeve was ten and Danny was three: Maeve remembers her, Danny doesn't. After some years their father marries Andrea, who brings with her two daughters (one of whom is given Maeve's lovely room while Maeve's away at college: on returning, Maeve is banished to a garret. Then the father dies, and Andrea swiftly evicts Maeve and Danny from the Dutch House, their childhood home, which becomes a symbol of everything they've lost. Much of the next decade is told as the two sit in Maeve's car, parked across the road from the Dutch House, smoking cigarettes and reminiscing.

I spent much of this novel disliking Danny, who's the first-person narrator. Only after I'd finished reading did I reframe the story. It's not really about Danny at all. It's about Maeve, and what she loses and regains: in some ways it's a fairytale of a wicked stepmother, but it's also about Maeve's relationship with her mother, and her relationship with Danny, and other aspects of her life to which Danny is utterly oblivious. There are a lot of women in The Dutch House: Elna, brought to the Dutch House by Cyril Conroy who doesn't understand it's the epitome of everything she doesn't want; Maeve, who at ten has her portrait is painted when her mother refuses to sit for the artist; Andrea, who's something of a cipher; the housekeepers Sandy and Jocelyn; the dismissed nanny, 'Fluffy'; Danny's wife Celeste. I think it's fair to say that Danny doesn't really understand any of them, and that Maeve is the most important person in his life. It's a story about absent mothers and clinging to the past, about the stories people tell to make sense of their situation.

Patchett's prose is beautiful, and very quotable (I have over a hundred highlights on my Kindle), and even though for much of the novel nothing much happens -- at least from Danny's perspective -- it's never dull. I'm still thinking about The Dutch House, and about my own relationship to my childhood home.

“It’s like you’re Hansel and Gretel. You just keep walking through the dark woods holding hands no matter how old you get. Do you ever get tired of reminiscing?” [p. 237]

2023/083: Insomnia — Stephen King

... wasn’t it at least possible that the phenomenon was real? That his persistent insomnia, coupled with the stabilizing influence of his lucid, coherent dreams, had afforded him a glimpse of a fabulous dimension just beyond the reach of ordinary perception? [p. 175]

This is really ... very long (916 pages in print), and could have been half the length without much loss of plot. King's prose is generally enjoyable to read, though, and his expansive descriptions effectively conjure up the ambience of each scene.

The viewpoint character is Ralph Roberts, a 70-year-old widower, who after the death of his wife suffers from insomnia. He also starts seeing things that nobody else can see: auras, small bald men, ribbons of colour. He spends time with his friend Bill who lives in the apartment downstairs; with his neighbour Helen whose husband Ed's personality has abruptly changed for the worse, with his other neighbour Lois who is two years younger than him and who may be nursing a secret crush. He tries not to get involved in the increasingly belligerent anti-abortion movement, which Ed seems to support even while muttering darkly about eldritch forces. And he discovers that he and Lois are unwilling recruits in a cosmic battle...

Set in King's fictional Maine town of Derry, this novel takes place about eight years after the events of IT. Despite Ralph reminding himself more than once (it's a long, long book) that Derry is 'not precisely like other places', the small-town atmosphere is (at least superficially) idyllc and the characters vivid and mostly likeable. I'd actually have been happier without the supernatural elements, which for me were the least interesting aspect of the novel. I liked Ralph and Lois, and I appreciated Ralph's willingness to cast aside his (rather sexist) assumptions about her. The women in this novel are generally well-written and interesting, with relatable concerns and motivations, though I was vexed by the description of a female villain as 'Pasty complexion... lots of acne, glasses so thick they make her eyes look like poached eggs'.

Note that Insomnia was first published in 1994, and there is one scene near the climax of the novel that I don't think King would write now, post-9/11.

Fulfils the ‘Title starts with 'I'’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

2023/082: The Mountain in the Sea — Ray Nayler

I think what we fear most about finding a mind equal to our own, but of another species, is that they will truly see us — and find us lacking, and turn away from us in disgust. [p. 429]

Described on Amazon as a thriller, this is excellent SF: it's just won the Locus Best First Novel Award and has been shortlisted for the Nebula and for the Ray Bradbury Prize. It's a philosophical investigation into the nature of consciousness, a first-contact novel, a story about connections -- and yes, it is also a thriller. Three protagonists share the narrative. Foremost is Dr Ha Nguyen, a marine biologist who's fascinated by the concept of intelligence in octopuses. She arrives on an island in the Vietnamese Côn Đảo archipelago, where she is met by two unusual companions and informed that she cannot leave. The second narrator is hotshot hacker Rustem, who's been contracted by a woman in a identity-disguising digital mask to break into an extremely complex neural network. And the third is Eiko, a young Japanese man who is abducted from a brothel and forced to work on an AI fishing vessel, whimsically named the 'Sea Wolf'.

The primary focus is on Ha Nguyen, with her two companions: Altantsetseg, a Mongolian war veteran who provides security for the island, navigates a fleet of drones with her whole body, and prefers to use a malfunctioning translation device so that she doesn't have to talk to anyone; and Evrim, they/them, the world's only conscious android, whose existence has sparked a host of laws forbidding the creation of more androids. Together, they are investigating the rumours of a 'sea monster' which has been responsible for a number of deaths on the island. Ha is also negotiating her interactions with Evrim and Altantsetseg, neither of whom are straightforward characters. Oh, and there are automonks roaming the island, helping hatchling turtles find the sea, able to engage in conversation: each contains 'a neural mapping of the mind of a Tibetan monk'. They are not conscious or alive in any real sense, but they have agency.

The three protagonists are all connected to a powerful, shadowy corporation called DIANIMA, run by Dr. Arnkatla Minervudóttir-Chan: excerpts from her book Building Minds, about human brains and artificial intelligence, alternate with passages from Dr Nguyen's How Oceans Think as chapter headings. The DIANIMA corporation owns the island; it was where Eiko was due to start work before he became a slave; it created Evrim. And it has its own agenda regarding the possibility of intelligent, non-human life.

And at the heart of the novel, octopuses. Ha Nguyen's book posits the question: "The octopus is the “tribeless, lawless, hearthless one,” denounced by Homer. This solitude, along with her tragically short life span, presents an insurmountable barrier to the octopus’s emergence into culture. But this book asks the question: What if? What if a species of octopus emerged that attained longevity, intergenerational exchange, sociality?" [loc. 585] The Mountain in the Sea explores this, and the philosophical and practical issues of communicating with such a species. It's a very readable work, even when Ha and Evrim get into long discussions about the nature of consciousness and the biology of the octopus (distributed rather than centralised -- like a corporation, perhaps, or a neural network). The characterisation is vivid, the sense of otherness (from Evrim as well as the octopuses) is strong, and the lightly-sketched future seems credible. I liked it immensely, and shall be recommending it to all.

Incidentally, Dive magazine called it a 'tour de force': how many SF novels can quote that on the cover?

2023/081: Our Wives Under the Sea — Julia Arnfield

The problem isn’t that she went away, it’s that nothing about her going away felt normal. It isn’t that her being back is difficult, it’s that I’m not convinced she’s really back at all. [p. 53]

This was a literal beach read (I like a frisson with my sea-bathing) and a horribly timely one as it coincided with the Titan submersible incident. The premise is simple: a submersible vessel with a crew of three, on a mission to the uttermost depths of the ocean, the Hadal Zone. The submarine's power and communications cease to function during their descent, but life-support systems keep running, and the three spend an indeterminate period in the abyss. Leah, one of the crew, a marine biologist and Miri's wife, is away for six months rather than the expected three weeks, and when she comes back she has suffered a sea-change.

The novel opens after all this has happened, with Miri trying to make sense of the changes in Leah: a taste for salt water, a preference for lying in the bath all day, a silvering -- oystering -- of the skin. Miri rings the Centre daily, but although they funded the mission they never tell Miri anything about the recovery, the quarantine, or even the purpose of sending Leah, Jelka and Matteo into the abyss. There's nobody that Miri can really talk to. Her friend Carmen seems to think the problem is that Miri has to share her space again. Miri's parents are both dead, her mother after a prolonged decline into dementia, and that sense of somebody being present but simultaneously absent, of being changed, perfuses Our Wives Under the Sea. During Leah's absence, Miri joined an online group of women who pretend their husbands are on deep space missions: 'MHIS [my husband in space] was a common acronym, as was BS [before space], EB [earthbound] and CBW [came back wrong].' [p. 83] It's after this that she dreams about the Church of the Blessed Sacrament of Our Wives Under the Sea.

The novel is told in alternating chapters: Miri's unravelling as she tries to maintain a normal life while grieving Leah's absence, and Leah's (much shorter) account of her time under the sea, the smell of burning flesh, the sound of something tapping on the hull, the different ways in which her crewmates coped with the darkness and the hopelessness. I wish there'd been more of Leah: I don't mind the lack of explanation, of detail, of description, but the novel's focus is very much on Miri and her grief and anger.

Marvellous prose, an excellent exploration of mourning, and just enough body-horror to sharpen the softness of Miri's memories, of her love for someone who no longer exists.

2023/080: In the Unlikely Event — Judy Blume

Though, honestly, if she turned twenty-five and she still wasn’t engaged, she saw no point in saving it. She might as well enjoy it while she still could. She was pretty sure Aunt Alma had never enjoyed hers. [p. 37]

Purchased on a whim when it was part of Amazon's daily deal: I have vague but fond memories of reading Blume's Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret as an adolescent, and the premise of this novel -- written for an older readership -- seemed intriguing. It's based on real events: three planes crashed in Elizabeth, a small town in New Jersey, over a period of 8 weeks in the winter of 1951-52. Judy Blume grew up in Elizabeth and was in eighth grade that year, and she's writing from her own lived experience.

The protagonist of the novel is Miri Ammerman, who's 15 and lives with her mother Rusty, her Uncle Henry and her grandmother Irene. Her father abandoned her mother before Miri was born, and nobody will tell Miri anything about him. On Rusty's birthday (just before Hannukah and Christmas) she and Miri are walking home after seeing a film when the first plane crashes. Miri's best friend Natalie rushes to their house in floods of tears, afraid Miri has been hurt: Natalie's father, Dr Osner, has been called to help identify the bodies.

Blume is so good at capturing the different layers of life. Yes, Miri is horrified by the crash, but she's also still thinking about the mysterious boy she danced with at Natalie's party. Natalie herself believes that one of the victims of the crash, a dancer named Ruby, is talking to her. The boys at school are talking about zombies, communists, space aliens. Uncle Henry is a newspaper reporter, filing copy from the scene of the crash... Blume handles multiple narrators (we meet Ruby early on, 'savouring a scrumptious strawberry ice cream soda topped with whipped cream, chopped nuts and a Maraschino cherry') with confidence, and though Miri is at the centre of the novel her story is fleshed out by the other narratives. The secondary characters don't always get more than a single scene to themselves, and don't necessarily reveal their innermost secrets, but they add context -- even Ruby's ice cream soda is relevant.

One crash would have been calamitous enough: three crashes, in such a short space of time, have a devastating effect on the people of Elizabeth. Everybody knows somebody who's died, either on the ground or in one of the planes. And everyone has to keep on keeping on, to work or go to school, to begin or maintain or terminate relationships, to keep or tell secrets or to have their secrets discovered. As much as anything else, this is a closely-observed and compassionate study of small-town life in Fifties America.

Despite the triple tragedy and the ongoing Korean War, despite the threat of the draft hanging over young men and the smaller heartbreaks of teenaged life (cheating boyfriends, pregnancy scares, eating disorders, handed-down clothes), this was an immensely uplifting novel. The framing narrative, of an older Miri attending a commemoration of the crashes, settles everything into perspective, but doesn't overshadow the clarity and honesty of that winter's events. I'm now quite tempted to reread Margaret, just to see if the warmth I remember from that is comparable to the emotional ambience of In The Unlikely Event.

2023/079: The Lost World — Michael Crichton

“This island,” Malcolm said, “is Hammond’s dirty little secret. It’s the dark side of his park.” [p. 143]

I actually wanted to read the first novel in the series, Jurassic Park, but it's unaccountably unavailable as an ebook. Instead, I went with The Lost World, the second in the series: I only vaguely recall the film.

I find I have very little to say about The Lost World. It's competently written, with occasional flashes of lyricism (mostly in the dialogue of rock-star chaotician Ian Malcolm); it discusses some of the arguments about the ethics of bringing extinct animals back to life; it has two 'adorable' children, who stow away on a super-dangerous expedition but prove their worth; it is quite cinematic whilst still being oddly boring about dinosaurs. One of the high points was the characters' realisation that the genetically-engineered dinosaurs don't behave like their fossilised counterparts because they don't have the instincts or the social environment. There must be better novels about dinosaurs out there: recommendations welcome!

Fulfils the ‘Chapters have cliffhangers’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

2023/078: Satellite Street — Eleanor Lerman

He felt like the bright world outside was moving away from him and he wanted it back. He wanted it so badly he could feel rage growing inside him, a terrible, overwhelming rage about what was being taken from him and how deeply he already felt its loss. He felt like he was growing weak, like all the strength and will he had left were being drained away while he was allowed one last glimpse of life before he was shoved into darkness where he would remain forever, lost and broken and alone. [loc. 1706]

Paul Marden is 62 years old: he endures chronic pain after an unidentified infection, and -- no longer able to work as a lecturer in media and communications -- he lives in a Long Island beachside development called Skyview, a product of the 1950s when being able to view rocket launches a thousand miles away at Cape Canaverel was deemed a selling point. Hurricane Sandy devastated the area, and Paul's house is one of the few remaining inhabited dwellings on Satellite Street. One night, stomping back (like Godzilla, he thinks) from a movie showing, he's offered a lift by a woman he almost recognises. She's Lelee, formerly Paul's schoolmate Arthur Connors, and a side-effect of her transition has been the ability to tune into the voices of the dead.

That would be an awesome novel if it went no further: but Satellite Street, while remaining focussed on the friendship between Paul and Lelee, also explores Paul's relationship with his dementia-afflicted father, and Lelee's quest for justice on behalf of the ghost of a popular DJ, Happy Howie, who was hounded out of his job by accusations of pedophilia. His accuser, a former stage magician and professional sceptic known as the Great Osvaldo, threatens to ruin Lelee in a similar way. But, acting on information received via Lelee, Paul finds himself uniquely positioned to redeem Howie's reputation and muster some serious legal firepower.

This was an absolute delight: kindness, hope, friendship, love -- and the dark sides of all of those, too. Lerman is an award-winning poet and can make the simplest sentence into something arresting. I especially liked her depiction of Paul's hopelessness in the face of his disability, and the ways in which Lelee and her (very real) mediumship broaden his horizons and show him that there is more to life than a slow painful descent to death. Past and present, death and the afterlife, despair and survival: and near the end of the novel they sit in Paul's back yard, watching a rocket go up from Cape Canaverel, and I felt as though I was sharing their perfect, transitory happiness.

2023/077: Witch King — Martha Wells

“Do you have to do that to people to live?”
“No,” Kai told her. “I did it because I wanted to. And bad people taste better than good ones.”[loc. 199]

I think this might have been a case of 'right book, wrong time': I loved the preview but just didn't connect with the full novel. Kai, the eponymous protagonist, has been dead, but now someone is sniffing around his tomb -- an elaborate construction designed to prevent him from resurrecting -- in the hope of harnessing Kai's power for himself. Kai and his dear friend Ziede deal with the incursion, re-enter the world, and try to work out just who was responsible for Kai's death, and what can be done about the depradations of the Hierarchs.

I liked the characters and the worldbuilding; was constantly tantalised by the chapters focussed on Kai's past (he's a demon, an immortal chthonic serpentine being from the underearth, who's inhabited -- by invitation -- a number of mortal bodies); found myself losing track of who was who and why Kai or Ziede cared about them... The problem, I suspect, was my inability to concentrate rather than the book itself. I'll certainly give it another try at some point.

I note that the long list of dramatis personae appears at the front of the novel, which must be super-vexing for audiobook listeners: I'm not sure that it adds much value, since I didn't find myself referring to it very often. The important relationships were clear in the text, and the plethora of minor characters and allegiances had little relevance for much of the story.

Fulfils the ‘Chapters have cliffhangers’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

2023/076: Ghostbird — Carol Lovekin

The undergrowth began to draw in the light, making the air feel heavy. The sense of being observed deepened: something or someone wanted to be noticed. Nothing felt familiar. [loc. 334]

Cadi lives in a Welsh village with her mother Violet and her aunt Lili. In the village, in August, it rains every day. In the village, nobody will tell Cadi about her dead father or her dead sister. ('Who knew whether or not Lilwen Hopkins, daughter of a witch woman, hadn’t bound their mouths with threads of silence?') But her sister's coming to haunt her, owls and flowers, and Cadi can't stay away from the lake at the end of the lane.

This is a claustrophobic and sometimes unnerving tale of the bonds, and the grievances, between the three women. Violet is still mourning her lost daughter Dora (who her husband Teilo insisted on naming Blodeuwedd) and won't talk to Cadi about any of it. Lili, Teilo's sister, has 'an eye for the girls' and tends to side with Cadi against Violet. And Cadi, who's fourteen, is caught in the middle of it all, feathers and leaves on her bedroom floor, the choking scent of meadowsweet, and a stranger named Owen Penry who's come to the village and set the gossips' tongues wagging.

This novel has something of the atmosphere of Garner's The Owl Service, though it's a much gentler book, and the protagonists are all female. Indeed, there are few male characters in Ghostbird: Violet the widow who doesn't remember her father; Lili the woman who will never marry but perhaps has a hope, by the end, of love; Cadi, who grew up fatherless and doesn't seem to have any male friends, though she is very close to her schoolmate Cerys. The village is shaped by women: the gossips, and the rainmaker, whose vengeance against 'naysayers' was to make it rain every day in August. And there is the ghost of a small girl, who 'has stopped wanting to eat chocolate and forgotten what pasta tastes like. Instead, she hunts mice until dawn.' I'd have liked more about the rainmaker, who was a shadowy presence at the edges of the novel, but that vague presence adds to the atmosphere: often eerie, sometimes magical, seldom explained. Ghostbird is dreamy and hypnotic, and I found myself falling easily into its rhythms and language: I'll look out for more of Lovekin's fiction.

Fulfils the ‘Title beginning with G’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.

2023/075: Red Smoking Mirror — Nick Hunt

And what is there left to say about this walk through Tenochtitlan? Only that dogs are everywhere and that the sun is dark ... Only that the smoky sky is teeming with frightened birds, that the temple steps are wet, that body after body rolls down the angled, steep decline, their torsos blue ... [loc. 2013]

Eli Ben Abram is a Jewish merchant, born in the Caliphate of Andalus and now trading in the New Maghreb. He came across the Sea of Darkness to Mexica, in the first fleet of traders: now he lives in the great city of Tenochtitlan, in the shadow of the Smoking Mountain, with his Nahua wife Malinala. The traders from Andalus have prospered among the Mexica, but there are rumours of a great Moorish army bound for the city, there to root out the impurities of tubaq and xocolatl. And there is dissent among the elders of the Moorish quarter; and Malinala tells her husband tales of the Thirteen Heavens and the Nine Hells, the Five Suns, the Smoking Mirror, the Feathered Serpent...

This is a world in which, as Hunt says in his afterword, "the Reconquest never happened. The Islamic Golden Age .. continued into the Age of Exploration; and Spain, as we know it today, never came into existence. ... the first ships that crossed the Atlantic were crewed by seafaring Moors rather than by Spaniards." [loc. 2362] Hunt depicts a more peaceful (and less disease-ridden) meeting of the two cultures, though the seeds of bloody conquest have already been sown. There are some familiar historical figures (the emperor Moctezuma, La Malinche, and a Genoan named Christoforo) and, as the novel progresses, a sense of historical inevitability. Eli is an intriguing narrator, with his helpless love for his young wife, and the secret he's carried with him since he met a man from Genoa in a tavern in Cadiz. He sometimes seems wilfully blind to the undercurrents of what's happening around him, and he is sometimes less than kind to those he encounters: but his admiration for Mexica culture (evocatively described) runs through this novel.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the advance review copy, in exchange for this full honest review. UK publication date is 06 JUL 2023.

2023/074: The Gender Games: The Problem With Men and Women, From Someone Who Has Been Both — Juno Dawson

Gender is a total paedo. Gender fucks kids. I was fucked by Gender as a kid. You were fucked by Gender, and this happened in childhood. [loc. 345]

As James Dawson, the author 'was given access to the ultimate prize: white male privilege', but was always aware that there was something out of alignment: traditionally-masculine pastimes were unpleasant, traditionally-feminine pastimes were much more appealing. As Juno Dawson, she writes 'My transition isn’t a rejection of masculinity, it’s embracing a state I feel far more attuned to.'

This is an interesting, and very personal, account of transition. There's a lot about Dawson's youth -- the ambition to be famous ('Fame is Diet Love. It tastes like love and looks like love, but there’s zero per cent real love in it'), the experiences in reality TV, the adventures on the gay scene in Brighton -- and how their perception of and relation to gender changed over the years. Where I found the book most interesting, though, was in its discussion of how gender affects us all from birth onwards, and how it perpetuates inequality. Dawson also argues that misogyny is a pillar of transphobia, which I can well believe regarding trans women but am less sure how it relates to trans men. (We see a plethora of TERF-style transphobia directed at trans women: is there an equivalent experienced by trans men? Or is there the reductionist absurdity of 'used to be a woman, so always inferior and scary'?)

Dawson's tone is colloquial and often very funny (commenting on Red Riding Hood and her hope of being rescued by the 'hunky woodcutter', Dawson remarks that 'a girl who can’t recognise a fucking wolf in a nightie probably isn’t the best role model'), and she isn't afraid to laugh at herself. Some apt similes, too, including gender as a Pullmanesque dæmon: 'for most it’s a fluffy sidekick they carry on their shoulders, hardly aware of it for much of their lives'. An engaging read, though I don't think I learnt anything new. I do, however, feel more inclined to read Dawson's historical fantasy novels, starting with Her Majesty's Royal Coven -- not least because, even as James, the author preferred to write female protagonists.

Fulfils the ‘Current Issues’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

2023/073: The Last Days of the Dinosaurs: An Asteroid, Extinction and the Beginning of Our World — Riley Black

My goal is to offer an ecological, fleshed-out view of these organisms and their biology during a time of terrible stress, and I’ve done my best to envision these species as living organisms rather than permineralized, distorted fossils. That’s the goal of paleontology, after all—to start with the offerings of death and work back toward life. [p. 15]

Excellent and very readable science writing, focussing on the asteroid impact that marked the end of the Cretaceous period and 'the worst single day in the history of life on Earth': Black focusses on the area that is now Hell Creek, Montana (because the fossil record there is unsurpassed), and the activities of various species of animal -- birds, fish and protomammals as well as dinosaurs -- before, during and after the catastrophe. After a brief sketch of Cretaceous life (parasite-plagued T Rex, the corpse of a triceratops, a Quetzalcoatlus soaring over the ocean) the book deals with the after-effects of the impact, which was effectively instantaneous: the asteroid was travelling at about 20 km per second, so there wouldn't have been a slow fireball streaking across the sky. There are chapters on 'Impact', 'The First Hour', 'The First Day', and so on, up to 'One Million Years After Impact'. And from Black's account it's clear that very little life, anywhere on the planet, was unaffected. First the earth tremors, then the firestorms: the tsunamis, the infrared pulse that raised the air temperature to 500^o Fahrenheit, the acid rain, the three-year darkness of the impact winter. Those creatures that survived -- by burrowing, or beneath the water -- had to adjust rapidly to a world that had utterly changed, with a different ecology and a much lower temperature. Black is good at explaining the multiple factors affecting the survival of particular species, and at describing 'case studies'. She presents arguments for why beaked birds survived when toothed birds didn't; how the dinosaurs' demise led to the rise of the mammals; how other phenomena, such as volcanic eruptions in the Deccan traps, mitigated some of the impact aftereffects.

This is my favourite kind of science writing: lyrical and informal, not reliant on specialist knowledge or terminology (but with abundant references in the appendix, citing sources and indicating how much is speculation), and with a personal touch. ('My love was unconditional. You can’t be hurt by a friend who’s extinct.' [p. 195]). The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is at least as readable as a novel (more so than some!) and I found it utterly fascinating.

Fulfils the ‘Science’ rubric of the Annual Non-Fiction Reading Challenge.

2023/072: The Grief of Stones — Katherine Addison

It was probably the emperor who had saved my life, by giving me a purpose, a task, a question to answer. And then Ulis had spoken to me in a dream, and I had known that my calling had not been taken from me. After that there was no question of suicide, not if my god still needed my work. But I remembered what it had felt like. [loc. 808]

In which Thana Celehar acquires an apprentice (the widow Tomasaran, untrained and ignorant, whose first experience of communing with the recently-departed was over her husband's bier), faces a fearsome revenant, and investigates a case of child pornography. I didn't like this one quite as much as The Witness for the Dead, but that may simply be because I read it immediately after finishing Witness, and the edges got blurred. Or it may be that the story is darker, with its focus on female foundlings and the dearth of options for them. Or it may be that, at the end of this novel, Celehar is not the person he was at the beginning -- and while there is talk of 'an assignment that is uniquely suited to your abilities', no further detail is available at this time. (The author says she's hoping for a summer 2024 release for the concluding volume of the trilogy.)

There is a great deal to enjoy here, though. The underside of polite Amaro society, with louche photographers and a plethora of tea-houses; the fact that many of the characters live in some degree of poverty; the opera (the title of the novel comes from Pel-Thenhior's latest composition, 'based on a Barizheise novel about a lighthouse keeper and his family and the tragedies that befall them after the wreck of the Grief of Stones on their rocks'); the coexistence of elves and goblins, and their cultural idiosyncrasies (ear-position is a frequent indicator of mood or opinion); the cats that Celehar feeds but won't claim as his own ... The plot, with its several entwined mysteries, is interesting and well-paced, but the world-building and the characterisation is what kept me reading, and inclines me to preorder the next book as soon as it's available.

2023/071: The Witness for the Dead — Katherine Addison

...we were taught to listen, and that once you had learned to listen to the dead, the living posed no challenge. [p. 78]

Thara Celehar played a small but pivotal role in Addison's The Goblin Emperor. He is a prelate of the god Ulis and can communicate with the spirits of the recently deceased: in The Goblin Emperor he communed with Maia's murdered relatives, but in The Witness for the Dead he's the focal character (and the narrator), recounting his investigation in the murder of an opera singer in the city of Amalo. He lives alone, in poverty (he's been granted a 'small stipend') and mourns his long-dead lover, a married man. He buys tins of sardines to feed the feral neighbourhood cats, but does not give them names, or let them into his home. He has few friends, and is engaged in political manoeuvring with other religious factions. Though melancholy, he is a fascinating narrator and a thoroughly decent individual.

This was an immensely pleasurable read: the worldbuilding, though sometimes confusing (Addison does not stoop to explain terminology or culture) is splendidly detailed, and Celehar's exercise of his vocation is not sensationalised. I especially enjoyed the scenes at the opera house, where Celehar attempts to discover who might (or indeed who didn't) have a grudge against the dead soprano Arveneän Shelsin, whilst making the acquaintance of producer and composer Pel-Thenhior (who's just written an opera set in a factory, with a goblin mezzo-soprano in the principal role -- something that has never been done before). Celehar's investigations (there is also a plot thread about a dead woman whose husband cut her off from her family, and a plot thread about Celehar's probity being questioned and tested by ordeal) are well-constructed, and the slow subtle changes in his life are beautifully conveyed. I liked this book (bought a couple of years ago) so much that, on finishing, I immediately bought and began to read the sequel, The Grief of Stones. Review soon!

2023/070: The Last Astronaut — David Wellington

After NASA went bankrupt in the forties, they had to break up the second International Space Station and drop its pieces in the Pacific Ocean. After that, commercial spaceflight seemed like the only game in town. [loc. 301]

Sally Jansen is the eponymous last astronaut. In 2034, on a mission to Mars, she dealt with a critical failure but caused the death of a fellow astronaut. That was pretty much the end for NASA in terms of crewed missions: but now, years later, a mysterious object has entered the solar system and is slowing down. NASA needs an astronaut, and McAllister nominates Jensen, who's fifty-six and publicity-averse. NASA's misison isn't the only one heading for the object, which is known as 2I: there's also a mission run by a private company, KSpace. (Nothing at all like SpaceX, honest.) When Jansen, with her small crew -- military pilot Hawkins, zenobiologist Parminder Rao, and astrophysicist Sunny Stevens, late of KSpace, who first spotted 2I -- reaches the incomer, it's to find that the KSpace team have already entered the huge cylinder. (Echoes here of Rendezvous with Rama.) Hansen is determined to save them, but neither she nor any of her crew are prepared for what lies within 2I.

The premise is that 2I is an object of the same kind as 'Oumuamua, though rather larger. It's a massive cylinder with an interior that brings to mind films such as Alien: the second half of The Last Astronaut is very much horror-coded. They travel a long way, in the dark, in an utterly alien environment. Only the bright orange ropes, flags and memory sticks of the KSpace crew guide them. (The memory sticks are a handy way of telling a different side of the story, but they felt rather clunky, in plot terms.)

This was fast-paced and yet overlong. Wellington's prose is readable and flows well (he's also capable of great lyricism, as evidenced by one passage near the end of the novel) and he focusses on the two female crew members. There's some humour, too, in the juvenile antics of the KSpace mission. Despite that, I didn't really engage with any of the characters or their predicament. Good solid hard SF, with mention of Ann Leckie as well as Clarke and Asimov; an interesting premise; a woman in her fifties as protagonist; an unexpectedly upbeat ending: but maybe I am just not as much of a hard SF reader as once I was.

Still not sure why it was shortlisted for the Arthur C Clarke Award in 2020 ...