Category Archives: Words

Fairest Vol. 3: The Return of the Maharaja

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I don’t even know the last time I read a Fables-adjacent book, nor what it was[1]. And I’m not even sure how many books are left. I think not many? I should probably zerg rush the ending, but that would make it still months away. Just not years.

In any event, this book was way way off in the periphery of the series. The land of Indus (think The Jungle Book) is no longer threatened by that one woodcutter’s evil empire, since it doesn’t really exist anymore. But all the villages and palaces and suchlike have been basically emptied of able-bodied men who went off to lose the war, leaving only the elderly, the infirm, the very young, the harems[2], and of course the [other] women.

Which brings us to the main character, Nalayani, protector of her village from roving packs of dhole, which are wolf-adjacent animals from the Indian subcontinent. (I had heard of them before, but not with any commonality.) Anyway, she must now quest to the new maharaja I mentioned to ask for help with the problem, only to find herself embroiled in a civil war and with a pretty unlikely ally, at least if you remember previous events in the series, which I must admit I did not very well.

I have no idea if I should know who Nalayani is as a fabled character? I definitely do not, which did not negatively impact my enjoyment of the story, and anyway there were other characters I did recognize. If the series wasn’t nearly over, I’d think big things were afoot in the main sequence as a result of this one. As it is… maybe this was a happy ending?

[1] I mean, now that I’ve searched it and linked it, I maybe know. But I did not before.
[2] If you happen to live in the maharaja’s palace, at least, and this I suppose explains the presence of the new maharaja, Shah Ah Ming.

Blind Fury

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As I probably mentioned the last time I read one of these, I bought a bunch of really cheap books, including really cheap series of books, on my Kindle over the past year and change. A fact about books that come in 6 to 8 volumes for $2-3 is that they’re likely, especially in the apocalyptic fiction subgenre, to be the kind of propulsive book that expects and nearly demands that you read the whole thing in about seventeen minutes without pausing for breath.

This unfortunately does not interact well with me using them as a “well, you only have your phone with you, this is your safety net” book and taking a good eight months to read one of them. What’s worse is, they’re really all just one long book, and the division markers are pretty arbitrary. Cliffhanger, maybe, but there’s no apparent thematic or character arc rationale for the splits between books. Of course, if I’d waited to read the whole thing before writing a review, that probably would have been a worse choice? Hard to know.

Anyway, Blind Fury starts out with the world (or at least Denmark’s slice of it) not quite collapsed and depopulated, but certainly on its way. The main tensions of the story are a) keeping the pregnant lady alive, while b) pushing the immune characters closer together so they can band up to [insert future plot here] but also c) dodging the shadowy and probably evil government agents who want to dissect them to save the world. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also a Renfield[1] who is either in contact with the precipitating force that put the crack in the sky that turns people into blind rage zombies, or is schizophrenic, or most likely both.

Yay, apocalypse!

[1] You know, the crazy dude who serves the bad guy(s)

Dust

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I have officially finished a series of books! That doesn’t happen much, mainly because of how I don’t read enough, but for other reasons too. In any case, noteworthy!

This time, it was the third book of the Silo series, Dust. And, you know what? It is definitely a conclusion to a story, with satisfying logical, logistical, and even emotional beats. But… it was also kind of overstuffed. I’m going to use an example from the story that is pretty much a spoiler, but if I disguise it by not naming any names or concrete details, I think it should mostly fly.

So, a bunch of people are escaping doom, like let’s say 1% of the people in the doomed location escape to somewhere else. Due to happenstance, some of them are religious nuts. So the first thing the religious nuts do is go all Handmaid’s Tale and forcibly select women for the men to marry (also forcibly), even women who qualify as underage, or wildly underage. And then someone shows up with a shotgun to resolve the situation. And it’s pretty realistic, both the horrific human behavior of people unhampered by rules and the part where those same people can be easily cowed under the correct circumstances. So it’s not that I disputed the realism of the vignette. But I dispute the utility of throwing in that kind of complication so late into a series that is about to end, and I paradoxically also dispute making it so easy to resolve, if you were going to monkeywrench it into the story like that in the first place.

This did not ruin the book for me, but… it kind of felt like someone trying to write their way out of a corner and stalling for time, and then not having an editor to correctly excise those bits once the corner had been escaped. But that’s the important part. The corner was escaped, and the story ended on a satisfying note, with a clear indication that there’s a lot more story left, even if it will never be (and should never be) written. Is this how all stories should end? Nah, lots of times “and they lived happily ever after” or “and he surveyed the lands he had destroyed with no small satisfaction” is the way to go. But I like stories that can pull off the “lived in, living world that you can imagine what’s next however you like” endings quite a lot.

This Is How You Lose the Time War

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Supposing you were on one side or the other of a war being fought throughout the whole of time, with realities popping into existence and being ruthlessly erased, each side trying to bend reality to their preferred outcome for humanity. And supposing you were a time spy… agent… enforcer… thing, tasked with carrying out those small missions that turn into large effects, pushing things in your direction and away from your opponent’s. And supposing further that a different agent, not on your side, had made themselves known to you, by talent and results, and you likewise had made yourself known to them.

And supposing they decided to start a correspondence. This, I think, is how you might lose the time war.

They’re calling it a novella, which probably has a precise publishing definition, but it seems to me more like a short book. It’s romantic and eloquent and thrilling, and honestly it’s only the third of those that falls a little flat for me. I wish I had a better understanding of, well, the time war itself. But doing that would have made for a much longer book that would have ultimately outweighed the eloquence and romance of the central relationship. So I get it. But I wish I could, I don’t know, have the authors’ knowledge of all the underlying backstory just downloaded into my brain, as I think following along better could only have enriched the experience.

Still and all, recommended. I can understand how it won a Hugo, five years ago.[1]

[1] Don’t let that number fool you; this is probably one of the most recent science fiction books I’ve read in ages. Go, um, me.

Amazing Tales: A Game for Children Who Love Adventures Revised Edition

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Fastest I’ve read a book in about forever, but also it’s short. Honestly, I was surprised by quite how fast I managed it all the same, since Amazing Tales is a role-playing game sourcebook. See, I had this idea to play D&D with the kids, and then Mary had the idea that maybe we start with something a little lower key and kid-focused, and this is what she found.

And I have to say, it fits the bill. Honestly, it’s pretty clever. First, you pick a genre, which is to say The Deep Dark Woods (animal/fairy fantasy), Magical Kingdoms Long Ago (generic fantasy), The Pirate Seas (swashbuckling, but also probably fantasy) and Among the Stars (sci-fi, obvs). But also it would be pretty easy to take what you wanted from the former two settings and include them in the latter two settings. Or for that matter to make them space pirates.

Then your kid makes a character, which is to say, something that fits the setting. Is it a pirate captain? A robo-dinosaur with jetpack legs? A fairy who is also a princess? Then they get four skills that they’re good at, like Being Brave, Doing Science, Marksmanship, etc, and one of them they’re best at, second best, third best, and last best, and each skill gets a descending die, from d12 to d6. Then, anytime they want to do something that seems hard, they pick a skill, say what they’re doing, and roll. 3 or higher succeeds! And you either tell them how they succeeded and what next, or how things got worse and now what will they do?

It’s a kid game, obviously nothing irrevocably bad happens, but I suppose it could get hairy now and then, and mostly you’re trying to tell a story with them about how things went great. RPG 101, or so? I suppose someday soon I’ll find out how it goes.

Never Flinch

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Stephen King keeps writing murder mystery novels, possibly because he likes the genre but I think mostly because he likes his mystery solver character Holly Gibney. Never Flinch actually has two such mysteries. In the first one, there’s a serial killer who is targeting random people but naming them as proxies for the jury pool of a man who was innocent, but sent to jail and then murdered there. In the second one, one of those religious nuts that likes to blow up abortion clinics is hunting a lady who is going around the country encouraging people to vote for better state representatives to expand abortion access on a state by state basis.

As I know I’ve said before, King with an axe to grind is simply not as good of an author as King with his imagination flowing freely. I agree with all of his politics, and I nevertheless continue to wish they would not infect his books. It’s just too… apparent. Takes me out of the narrative, it does. And in this case, it’s half the plot. So, y’know. There’s that.

All the same, one of the things at which he excels is weaving disparate pieces of a narrative toward each other like three freight trains that seem to be on different tracks but it turns out they’re all headed for the same place, and if you think only two trains can crash into each other because of the way that train tracks work, well, that’s sort of my point, innit? So that’s the part of the story that was great. (And also, I share his enjoyment of his character.)

The only remaining downside of this book is that, the pieces of the plot woven together, the crescendo reached… the weaving was great, you see, but the crescendo was… fine. It was fine. It was not great. All in all, it was a mid book, which still means I followed it breathlessly and wanted to know how it turned out the whole time, because you see it was a mid book on a Stephen King scale. And I do love me some King. Ask anyone.

But I can also be honest with myself in the aftermath of that aforementioned trainwreck.

Shift

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Not especially long ago, I read Wool, in which Juliette Nichols finds, and then exceeds, her limits[1]. The second book of the trilogy, Shift, goes back to the very beginning to provide several hundred years’ worth of context about Juliette’s silo and everything that surrounds it.

It’s hard to say anything more, due to massive spoilers. But I can think of a few things. First, the elephant in the room. I am on record for believing that the story I watched on TV and [mostly believing, at least] that I read in that first book did not require a specific apocalyptic backstory. It was enough to know that an apocalypse had occurred, and all that was necessary was to look forward. Having read the second book, with precisely the apocalyptic backstory under discussion… I 95% stand by my original assessment. I firmly believe a good, compelling story could have been told with nothing more than a handwaved “and then we nuked each other”, for example.

However, I would be remiss if I did not say that the apocalyptic backstory that has been provided is pretty damn compelling itself. Yes, there’s a little too much love triangle subplot that I’m not wholly sure added anything emotionally, and could structurally have been solved via different means, but that’s not really the point. The point is, necessary or not, the story of how Juliette found herself, wool in pocket, at the precipice of a much wider world than she could have imagined and yet so much narrower than the reader might have? It’s a good story, and I’m glad to know it.

[1] In most of the potential ways that could be taken.

 

Wool

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There’s this show on Apple+[1] called Silo. The year it came out (2023 maybe?), I called it the best sci-fi on TV, and I stand by that assessment. A long time later, albeit by my standards pretty rapidly, I’ve picked up and read the first book in that trilogy (which covers the first two seasons of the show).

Wool tells the story of a, well, a silo. It is underground, some 140 or so levels into the earth as measured from the up top, through the mids, and into the down deep. It contains a large but necessarily limited number of people. They all have jobs (porters who run things up and down the silo, mechanical who keeps the generator running, farmers, doctors, a sheriff, IT, even a mayor), and eventually everyone in every job has a shadow, learning to do that job from the previous generation. It is a perfect closed system, and nobody ever leaves.

Well, that isn’t quite true. There’s an exit, right next to the jail cells in the sheriff’s office on the top level. The exit leads up a ways to the surface, where there’s a door to outside, and cameras in all directions surround the door. Those cameras show an utterly destroyed landscape in greys and browns, with constant windblown particles, constant rushing clouds in what might otherwise be called a sky, a decayed city full of what are no longer skyscrapers in any useful sense off in the distance, but with a ridge that prevents view of anything nearby. The silo is in a depression, is what I mean. The view from these cameras is shown in the nearby top-level cafeteria, a warning of what leaving the silo would mean. And yet, if anyone asks to leave, they are not only allowed to do so, but by law must. The only caveat is that they are asked to clean the cameras when they go out, since the view is forever being worsened by the blowing dust. For this, they are given a square of wool. Anyone who goes out does clean, even those who swear they will not, and anyone who goes out dies within minutes, soon enough to become a part of that pre-ridge landscape, a warning that it is not yet and may never be safe to go out.

I’ve already said rather a lot, so I’ll stop here. Either that description grabs you and makes you want to know where a story would go in this setting, or it does not. But I have a few pieces of additional commentary relative to the show. The main one is, for better or worse, the voice of Juliette and the voice of Deputy Marnes are just irrevocably overwritten into the voice of their characters in the book. I think probably for better, in both cases. The second is that most of the changes made for the show were probably improvements, even if they stretched out the story a bit. (Plus, some of them might turn out to be due to retcons for future books I’ve yet to read.)

Lastly… well, this one is complicated. I must say first of all that Wool is a complete story in itself. If nothing else had been written, I would be completely satisfied by its ending. That said, in discussions online about the TV show, I was lambasted for not really caring what was the source of the disaster that led to these people being trapped in this silo. Like zombies in that flavor of apocalypse, the blasted landscape is setting. Who cares why there are zombies? There just are, the story is influenced by the setting, the setting is not a part of the story. And honestly, I stand by that assessment. This book being a complete story in itself just proves to me that I was right.

However.

I will say that the book managed something the TV show did not, which is to make me interested in finding out how we got here after all. Cleverly, therefore, book two is all about that, and I suppose I’ll read it pretty soon.

[1] the streaming service whose name I may or may not have correct

Blind Rage

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Since October, I have been buying cheap (or often free) Kindle books. Like, 99c for seven books kind of thing. I’ve spent maybe $30, and increased my digital library by hundreds of titles. Are most of them garbage? Okay, probably. But it gives me something to read when I don’t have anything but my phone handy.

The first of these books that I’ve actually read is Blind Rage, the first volume of an eight book series called Under the Breaking Sky. It steals heavily from Cell, and is otherwise about what you’d expect out of a not quite zombified airport thriller. Set in Denmark and with maybe five or so main characters, it tells the story of the day a weird hole appeared in the sky that causes anyone who looks at it to go blind and enraged, such that they hunt down anyone they can hear, to rip them apart or bash them to pieces. (But not each other.) Then the thing in the sky goes away, until it comes back again 12 hours later. And again. And again.

So, I lied earlier though. A small percentage of the population is unaffected. Most of the main characters are this type, and the book (and probably the series) is entirely about them trying to stay alive, and maybe eventually trying to figure out how this is even happening? Beats me, and I’m not holding my breath. It’s an apocalypse, I’m just a long for the ride.

The Curator

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A book has been sitting on my nightstand instead of my to-read shelf, for somewhere between one and a half to two years. Long enough that the top part of the pages are yellowed from the sunlight through the window behind my nightstand. I got it from someone for my birthday or Christmas, and I honestly don’t know who or why. Did I put it on a wishlist? I cannot rule this out, but I don’t know why I would have. And yet I cannot think of another reason it would have appeared, and nobody has asked me about it in the meantime.

But appear, it did.

The Curator, by Owen King[1], tells the story of a fictionalized probably European, probably 19th Century independent city[2] in the throes of revolution. See, the rich but liberal students at the University, after an inciting event, have taken it into their heads to free the extremely poor people in “the Lees” from their oppressors among the nobility, and the attempt is astonishingly successful, except… now what?

In the midst of these happenings, a maid lately employed by the university named Dora finds an opportunity to look into her older brother’s mysterious final moments, from when he died during her childhood, by becoming the owner of the newly vacated Society for Psykical Research, in which he had spent some time before that death and the complete failure of her family’s fortunes. Alas for her plans, it has burned completely to the ground, one odd doorframe in the middle notwithstanding, and so she becomes the Curator of the National Museum of the Worker next door, instead.

The remainder of the book, in a meandering style that the jacket copy accurately yet somehow non-pejoratively calls Dickensian, explores her new museum, and a city and its inhabitants in rudderless transition, and the mostly poor folk religion surrounding the many, many cats in the city, and the strange disappearances that are beginning to mount up, and the Morgue Ship that used to reside in the harbor as a penny dreadful curiosity until it got swept up in the inciting event I mentioned earlier, whereupon it disappeared, except rumor has it all those disappeared people are being abducted onto the ship as a part of their disappearance. Which is ridiculous, of course.

By way of recommendation, I must say that it’s been a while since I’ve been so invested in the fate of a new-to-me character, and almost all of the characters had something endearing to offer. I’m somewhat surprised I haven’t seen more noise around this one.

[1] of the Maine Kings. You might know him from his collaboration on Sleeping Beauties.
[2] Or I suppose it’s the capital of a fictionalized country? On the one hand, it never seems like more than a city and surrounding estates, but on the other, it has a king. Those kinds of details hover in the no-man’s land between sparse and irrelevant.