2021 Hugo Possibilities

Not just a River in Egypt – Harrow the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir

~ stevejwright ~ 1 Comment

Harrow, former necromancer of the Ninth House, has just become a Lyctor in the service of the immortal Emperor – except that the devastating process of turning into a Lyctor has left Harrow traumatized and deeply confused. She retreats into a skewed re-telling of the events she’s just undergone, while plots arise in the Imperial household – and, in the background, a deadly threat comes closer and closer; a devastating resurrection beast, a by-product of the Emperor’s necromancy, capable of destroying worlds.

Tamsyn Muir’s novel Harrow the Ninth (Tor, 2020) is the second in the “Locked Tomb” trilogy, and a direct sequel to Gideon the Ninth, which I reviewed here. I’m probably not going to be able to avoid spoilers for the current book, and certainly won’t be able to avoid spoilers for Gideon, so, y’know, be warned.

The thing is, Harrow is an altogether trickier and more complicated beast than Gideon; the first book was comparatively easy to summarize, as an Agatha Christie style country house murder mystery, only with lesbian space necromancers. Harrow, on the other hand, goes off in some entirely different directions, particularly at the start, which features necromancer Harrow (more properly, Harrowhark Nonagesimus) deeply in denial about the final events of Gideon, so much so that she is retelling and reinventing the story in her mind, while also coming to grips with the tight-knit community of the Emperor and his Lyctors, and the challenges they face. So Harrow is an unreliable narrator, and even says as much – a reader’s reaction to the story will depend, to a large extent, on their tolerance for things like this (and also a second-person narrative, which at least gets to make sense, later on in the book.) In Gideon, Harrow was called to the Emperor’s home planet in company with her House’s cavalier – bodyguard and military advisor – and, when her cavalier responded to this by running away with his mother, Harrow had no choice but to take on Gideon Nav in his place, the one person with whom she had an intense (and almost entirely dysfunctional) relationship. The process of becoming a Lyctor involves the cavalier dying and being psychically absorbed by the House’s necromancer; Harrow does not want to deal with this, and consequently constructs a fantastic version of events where the cowardly cavalier Ortus Nigenad does not flee, but joins with her instead. Harrow’s self-deception here is so intense that it spills over into the real world, and even into the front matter of the book, so that another Lyctor, whose first name just happens to begin with G, is “ORTUS” in all caps in the cast list. Of course, being locked into a strategy of deliberate self-deception rather limits Harrow’s usefulness as a Lyctor….

We get a more informative look at the setting in this one – the Emperor has brought life to the sun Dominicus and its nine inhabited planets, but, in the process, also set loose the resurrection beasts, creatures of immense necromantic power. To avoid luring the beasts near the nine planets, the Emperor is therefore obliged to reside at a secure location, some forty-three billion light years away. And you thought your commute was bad. The resurrection beasts pose a threat on both a magical and a physical level – the Imperial military, which Gideon was planning to join in the first book, largely exists to fight off their minions. And the point of becoming a Lyctor is to provide double-barrelled protection – while the necromancer is off doing magic in the liminal space known as the River, the skills and abilities of the cavalier run the necromancer’s body on a sort of auto-pilot, defending against physical threats. It’s when Harrow’s Lyctor abilities finally kick in that a lot of things become clear – notably, that Harrow’s conversion to Lyctor-hood has not failed, but worked rather too well: instead of merely getting Gideon’s skills with a blade, she gets Gideon’s whole personality back, in full force. (Like a number of other reviewers, I was hugely entertained by the return of Gideon’s narrative voice, complete with snarky commentary on Harrow’s state of physical fitness.) The discovery that this sort of thing is even possible sets off quite some reaction amongst the other Lyctors – who have, of course, all sacrificed lovers or close friends to the process – especially when it turns out the Emperor may have the same sort of relationship with his Lyctoral partner. Relationships between the Emperor and his Lyctors have had thousands of years to get complicated, and jealousies and resentments can prove more of an immediate threat than any resurrection beast.

It’s a complicated and tricky book, but a rewarding one – and there are still questions which will (I hope) be answered in the final book of the trilogy; about the occupant of the Locked Tomb and the Emperor’s (and Harrow’s) relationship with her. After the wild ride that this volume has been, I will be very interested to see what direction the conclusion takes. In the meantime, Harrow the Ninth is a demanding read, but ultimately a rewarding one. Definitely one to think about.

A Sovereign Antidote to Melancholy

~ stevejwright ~ 2 Comments

A Hugo eligibility post? All right, it’s both futile and presumptuous… but it is, perhaps, an excuse for me to look back over 2020 and consider what I’ve accomplished. And just finding out there’s something to consider is enough to cheer one up a bit. It’s a remedy for impostor syndrome, anyway (although it’s perfectly legitimate to decide that I don’t suffer from impostor syndrome at all, I’m just really not any good.)

First off, the big one – I self-published two novels. So, OK, the big two, then. P.G. Wodehouse once said “It has been well said that an author who expects results from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona and listens for the echo,” and believe me, the man knew whereof he spoke. It’s getting to the point where I’d welcome any sort of feedback. “Cheap and mercifully short” – A. Punter: that’d look good on the back cover.

But anyway. At least (unlike Basil Copper’s Lovecraftian horror The Great White Space, which recently annoyed me by not being about writer’s block) there’s no false advertising in my titles: fantasy The Ninth Knight involves eight knights being shadowed by another knight, while space opera Felons in the Eyes of God features people breaking God’s laws (of physics). So there we are. Books. Two of. Seriously, they are out there, you can read them.

On to fan writing, I suppose. Round about the Puppy invasion of 2015, when I actually started out getting involved in fandom, I began reading and reviewing everything that was shortlisted for a Hugo (or related), and I’ve kept that up faithfully ever since. And I started reviewing stuff that might get a Hugo nod, too. So, well, there’s a lot of reviews on this blog (which sort of span off my old LiveJournal, where many reviews and rude comments about Puppies may yet be found.) Last year, the Retro Hugos became something of a project, so if you start at the archives in January, you will find lots of exciting reviews of things that came out in 1944. While a lot of it is based in the pulps of that era, I did cast my net a bit wider, looking for novel and related work recs, and I found some interesting things along the way. There were things like Robert Graves’s The Golden Fleece, or the more obscure Worlds Beginning by Robert Ardrey; you can watch me warm up gradually to series characters like Mandrake the Magician or Manly Wade Wellman’s detective John Thunstone; you can see me commenting on period graphic stories (Plastic Man good, Buck Rogers… rather less good); there is my repeated rant about how Retro Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) should concentrate on radio programmes; there was my attempt (wisely vetoed by ConZealand’s eligibility committee) to get Aleister Crowley onto the Retro ballot for Best Related Work….

In the event, the Retros came in for a fair amount of stick, when people got (quite legitimately) upset about the reactionary tendency in SF fandom… which led me to consider why I still thought it was worth doing, and also to put together a short but (I think) accurate summary of the pros and cons of one of the period’s most contentious figures. And I embarked on the ongoing project (beginning here) to read and review every issue of Unknown – which is still ongoing, even though I have reached the point where a condition of raging existential despair can be invoked by the sight of one simple phrase: “… by L. Ron Hubbard”.

Occasional other things have crept in: this little Lovecraft pastiche is an idea that was kicking around in my head for ages before I finally nailed it down and typed it up last year; then there’s a brief outburst of Star Trek Online fanfic, which originally appeared on that game’s message boards but was promptly added to my STO fanfic archive here. (Because the message board software frowns on names that are too close to your real name or email, I appear there using the pseudonym of a very, very minor character from Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.)

So there we are. That’s some stuff, then. Not a patch on the output of some of your actual fanwriters, of course, but… not too shabby. For an amateur, anyway.

Pat-a-cake, Pat-a-cake – A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, by T. Kingfisher

~ stevejwright ~ 3 Comments
Cover for T. Kingfisher's "A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking"

Fourteen year old Mona works as a baker in the city of Riverbraid; her work is enhanced by her minor magical talent. When she opens up the shop one day to find another minor mage dead on her floor, her life starts to get complicated. Magickers have always been a little suspect in Riverbraid, and now someone seems to be deliberately targeting them. Mona barely survives an encounter with the murderous Spring Green Man, but subsequent events show that the city’s magical population is facing a conspiracy that goes a lot further than one lone killer….

The trouble with Ursula Vernon – the mastermind behind the masquerade of “T. Kingfisher” – is that she’s a terribly more-ish sort of writer. You start out with the murder mystery and the false accusation, then you want to know what happens next, so you read on through the next attempted murder, the flight through the city, the climb up the inside of the three-storey privy… you get to the uncovering of the conspiracy, the sudden reversal of fortunes… you read on to see how the bread golems and the commando squad of poisoned gingerbread men turn out… and before you know it, it’s the end of the book. And half an hour later you’re hungry for another one, and Ursula Vernon doesn’t write that fast. Dammit.

Anyway. A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking is told from the first-person viewpoint of Mona, an orphan living with her (nice) aunt, who is happy enough in her own little niche, with her own peculiar magical talent for controlling, well, baking and baked goods. (As someone whose AD&D campaign background included a guy called Gegnifulm the Pabulumator, the world’s only porridge elementalist, I approve of this sort of thing.) Of course, circumstances conspire to make Mona step up into a heroic role, and of course she has to expend considerable ingenuity to apply her very specific magic to the job. When all you have is a rolling pin, it takes cunning to turn all your problems into dough. The plot is pretty straightforward – too straightforward for a cynic like me, I wasted a lot of time keeping a weather eye on a character who turned out to be just as nice as they seemed – but it’s engaging none the less, with plenty of action, hair’s-breadth escapes, dramatic battle scenes, all the good stuff in fact.

Straightforwardness is a virtue in a lot of Kingfisher protagonists – they tend to be very practical people, who will look at a situation, decide what’s the most sensible thing to do, and then go and do it (and, mostly, this works.) It’s a rather optimistic view of the world, and I find I like it. It wouldn’t work in every genre of writing, of course – I would never employ Ursula Vernon to write TV soap opera; shorn of all the miscommunication, misunderstandings, mixed motives and plain bloody-mindedness that drive most of their plots, the average months-long soap opera arc would be wrapped up in about five minutes if Vernon wrote it. But, in the slightly whimsical fantasy lands which so many Vernon stories inhabit, straightforwardness is a virtue, and Mona, a level-headed young woman, has it in spades.

This one’s been talked about for the 2021 Hugos or the Lodestar – I think it’d be a pretty good fit for the Lodestar; kids don’t mind the occasional gory detail like the murders or the zombie horses or the semi-sentient sourdough starter that tries to eat people’s faces. In this connection, I should mention, then, that it was published in 2020 (paperback by Argyll Productions, ebook from Red Wombat Studio) and is therefore eligible. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it made the ballot. It charmed a five-star rating out of me, and I don’t give those out easily, and I’m not even the target audience.

Anyway. This is a fun book. It has an endearing heroine, a lively host of supporting characters (some human, some baked goods), good things to say about kindness and decency, bad things to say about scheming politicians whipping up prejudice for their own ends, lots of exciting adventures, and plenty of gingerbread. Thoroughly recommended.

Socially Accomplished – A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J.B.S. Haldane by Samanth Subramanian

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John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892-1964) is a name that used to be better known in SF circles – these days, he’s probably overshadowed by his sister, the redoubtable Naomi Mitchison. However, although his SF output was fairly slight – one book of futurological speculation, Daedalus, one posthumously published novel, and the well-loved children’s fantasy My Friend Mr. Leakey comprise most of it – his influence on the field was rather more extensive than that suggests. Haldane was a significant figure in the lives of some noted SF writers, such as Arthur C. Clarke; he was a personal friend of Aldous Huxley and his scientific ideas informed Brave New World; more generally, perhaps, his career reflected a perennial interest not just in science, but in how its ideas worked out in relation to life – which, some critics hold, is the purpose of SF (the literature of ideas.)

Samanth Subramanian’s intriguing biography concerns itself not just with Haldane, but with the science and politics of his time – though Haldane clearly dominates; he was one of those larger-than-life people who dominate everything within the blast radius of their personality. He was born into an upper-class Scottish family; his father was the scientist J.S. Haldane (the book makes some mention of a moustache, but it is clear from the photographs that Haldane Senior just had a Yorkshire terrier living on his upper lip), and J.B.S. lost no time in following in father’s footsteps. Although he never took a degree in any science (he read classics at Oxford), Haldane happily pitched in with practical experiments, including some very alarming ones realated to respiration – in the aftermath of mining disasters, poison gas attacks in World War 1, and later the HMS Thetis sinking, Haldane gained direct experience of carbon dioxide poisoning, pressure effects, chlorine gas, and assorted other assaults on breathing, accumulating a fair set of personal injuries along the way. An imperfectly healed perforated eardrum left him able to blow tobacco smoke out of his ear, “which is a social accomplishment”, he noted wryly.

While his experiments make for entertaining reading, Haldane’s real genius was for interpreting and systematizing data, and his high-powered analyses did a lot to put the nascent field of genetics on a firm footing. In addition, he was a tireless organizer – though frequently in conflict with higher authorities as he tried to set his own stamp on institutions – and a popularizer of science, along the lines of Lancelot Hogben or J.D. Bernal. (His essay “On Being the Right Size” is probably the best remembered of his many pop-science works.) Of course, as a popular writer and a spokesman in his field – and, as previously noted, a colourful character – Haldane wound up giving voice to his personal opinions, as well.

Possibly as a reaction to his aristocratic upbringing, Haldane became committed to progressive politics and left-wing causes; his first wife Charlotte Franken was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, and Haldane himself would join the Party in 1942. He was a vocal supporter of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (although, according to the accounts in the book, something of a liability when he ventured into the front lines), and he was an active opponent of the theories of eugenics and “scientific racism” that were already springing up around the science of genetics. Haldane had no truck with the notion of “orthogenesis” – the belief, founded upon essentially nothing, that evolution is a teleological process that creates “progress” towards “higher forms” – and was a firm opponent of right-wing “theories” of racial superiority.

Unfortunately, pressure on the sciences didn’t only come from the right. As news gradually seeped out of Soviet Russia as to what was really going on under the Stalinist regime, a lot of the (mostly well-meaning) intellectuals of the British Left had to make some hard moral choices as to where they stood on the matter. Some (like Charlotte Franken) left the Party as a result; socialist pundits like H.G. Wells and George Orwell had no problem condemning totalitarianism; others, however, opted to ignore the evidence of Stalin’s atrocities, or to excuse them on the grounds that they were “necessary” in order to protect the great experiment of Soviet society. The derogatory term “tankies” is sometimes directed at these sorts of apologists – the sort of people who later supported Soviet action in the Hungarian counter-revolution or the Prague Spring.

Science was under the Stalinist thumb as much as any other field of human endeavour; all science was supposed to be analysed through the intellectual lens of “diamat” – dialectical materialism. (I attended the 1990 Joint International Conference on Proof Theory at Leeds University – an occasion where I spent most of my time playing croquet or sitting quietly in the lecture hall while transfinite ordinals passed way, way over my head – and was privileged to attend a lecture by Professor Grigori Mints of the Estonian Academy of Sciences, who showed how diamat could be applied to proof theory, and could do away with outmoded bourgeois ideas like the principle of the excluded middle… or, in other words, could be made to twist logic any way you like.) In practice, diamat was always most successfully applied by whoever happened to have Stalin’s ear – and, in the field of genetics, that was the reprehensible Trofim Lysenko, a semi-educated agronomist who didn’t even believe in genes. It’s hard to underestimate the damage done by Lysenko – besides his role in condemning his scientific opponents to death or slavery in the gulags, the adoption of his defective schemes led to mass famines in the USSR and, later, Mao’s China.

When Lysenko’s ideas were discussed in the West, Haldane was inevitably invited to comment – which brought his political loyalties directly into conflict with his sense of duty to science (and his personal loyalties, too, since a friend of his, Nikolai Vavilov, was one of Lysenko’s most prominent victims.) While scientists unencumbered with Party membership had no problem rubbishing Lysenko’s ideas, Haldane, unfortunately, rather bottled it – he didn’t go so far as to actually endorse Lysenko, but he was willing to give him the benefit of whatever doubt might have existed.

It’s not a very creditable episode in Haldane’s career, but it’s an example of where Subramanian’s lively biography really shines – the intersection of the scientific, the political, and the personal, which was where Haldane lived, and wielded his influence by the force of his impressive intellect and redoubtable personality. Flawed but brilliant, expansive, effervescent and ebullient, Haldane was a remarkable character, and Subramanian manages to paint a picture of him, and of the intellectually and politically turbulent times he lived in. It’s an engaging biography of a fascinating man.