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?