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Hello America — J. G. Ballard

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Cover of Hello America


Hello America
J. G. Ballard
224 pages
published in 1981

I must’ve last read this sometime in the late eighties, back when I was dependent on my local library for my science fiction and fantasy. Said library had a rule that adult fiction could only be borrowed if you were at least fourteen years old; it also had a rule that you could only borrow four fiction books at a time. I however had found a hack for both rules: foreign language novels didn’t count for either. Which meant that once I could read English, I started reading every English language sci-fi book the library had, including this one. Not sure I finished it at the time, but I was reminded of it through Phil’s review, where he characterises it as “a minor Ballard” and going “completely off the boil” halfway through. That picked my interest enough to want to reread it and you know, he wasn’t wrong. In fact, I would go further and argue it never really got going as a story. There’s little of Ballard’s normal inventiveness or imagery here and it feels tired from the start. It doesn’t help that it was dated even at the time of publication by having Jerry Brown as the last president of the United States…

The core idea of the book, that America was abandoned rather than destroyed, is interesting. The oil crisis of the seventies here continued unabated into the 1980s and 1990s, leading to a de-industrialisation of the USA, with people migrating back to Europe and Asia not long after. By the turn of the millennium America is all but abandoned, a few decades later even the pretense of an American government in exile is also given up. The energy crisis is handled better in the old world, where giantic environmental engineering projects damn the Bering Strait to provide farm land in the Arctic circle, but condemning the American east coast to becoming a desert while the west becomes a jungle. All this is explained in chapter seven of the novel rather than more organically, in one big infodump. It’s a very seventies sort of apocalypse but it also reminds me of some of the paranoid rightwing fantasies of the eighties were America is either betrayed or given up on, without ever being explicitly conquered or destroyed, the fear that the world could continue on even without it. Ballard’s version of course only works if you don’t look at it too hard, which I feel goes for most of Hello America.

The story itself starts roughly a century after America was abandoned, when an expedition from Europe onboard the steamship Apollo (of course) sets foot on American soil for the first time in decades. They’re there to determine the cuase of the radiation leaking out from the continent. Decades old nuclear reactors may be leaking, as may some nuclear weapon storages, but it also looks suspiciously like an actual nuclear detonation. The handpicked crew of teh Apollo needs to answer this question, but Wayne, our protagonist isn’t one of them, as he stowed away, keen to visit the country his ancestors came from and his father disappeared in. Wayne is not, to be honest, a very active protagonist, mostly moved by what’s happening around him, rather than initiating his own actions. Which is not a problem as long as the expedition is on the move, but does mean, as Phil noted, that the second half of the book is much weakened when they reach Las Vegas and just stay there as things happen all around him.

The image of the United States Ballard presents in Hello America is very much rooted in 1950s & 60s pop culture: Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, the Kennedies, “Indian” tribes modeled after Chicago gangsters or stereotypical Divorcees, with the Executives tribe members all having brand names like Heinz or Xerox, etc. The villain of the piece is even called president Manson. Even for 1981 this seems a bit much. The first half of the book, with the expediotion trecking through an endless desert following the ancient highways, from motel oasis to motel oasis has almost an overdose of what you could call stereotypical Ballardian imagery: empty swimming pools, cracked concrete et all. The second half in Vegas, doubles down on the kitsch, with a musical performance by a small army of robot replicas of the various US presidents.

In the end, this was a failure. Entertaining enough on a chapter by chapter basis, it failed to form a coherent whole and its momentum completely disappeared in its second half, which indeed took me twice as long to read as the first. It just became a chore to finish, something you shouldn’t be able to say of any Ballard novel.

Analog One — John W. Campbell, Jr (editor)

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Cover of Analog One


Analog One
John W. Campbell, Jr (editor)
169 pages
published in 1963

There’s a version of the history of science fiction that goes a little bit like this. It was invented in the late nineteenth century by Jules Verne and H. G. Wells (in a slightly more progressive version, in the early nineteenth century, by Mary Shelly). Then, in 1926 Hugo Gernsback made it a genre, with the creation of Amazing Stories, the first ever science fiction magazine. Sadly however, the quality of science fiction published remained low, most of it being space opera, just more pulp fiction. All this would change when John W. Campbell, Jr became editor of Astounding Stories, one of the many Amazing Stories imitators. Together with authors like Isaac Asimov, A. E. van Vogt and especially Robert Heinlein Campbell would create the Golden Age of science fiction. Post World War II science fiction having gained even more popularity, finally got the respect it deserved. No longer dismissed as ‘that Buck Rogers stuff’ fit only for infants, now, as Campbell’s editorial here has it, it’s literature to truly challenge yourself, for people unafraid to use their brains. In a symbolic gesture, in 1960 Campbell changed the name of his magazine Astounding Stories to Analog Science Fact & Fiction, heralding the changed status of science fiction. This is the context in which Analog One was published.

It’s a beautiful myth, but no more than that. The reality is that science fiction became respectable the moment the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That staple of the American imagination, the weapon that can wipe out an entire city, had become reality. Nothing really to do with Campbell, who in any case was diving deep into pseudoscience like the Dean Drive and Dianetics at this point. The new Analog too was no longer the top science fiction magazine either, with newcomers Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction taking its place. The writers who had made the magazine had left it, either like Asimov, leaving science fiction entirely for a while, or moving on to other magazines. Analog‘s decline is clear when you look at this anthology’s table of content: the biggest writers listed are Lloyd Biggle and Gordon Dickson, not quite up to the standard of a Robert Heinlein or Theodore Sturgeon.

Which of course doesn’t mean the stories here are bad, but they are typical Analog stories, all but one having been published in 1961. Each at its heart is a puzzle story, where the protagonist — like the writers invariably a man — is presented with some problem or conundrum he has to solve and through some clever deduction, manages to do so at the end of the story. Some of the stories in this volume, like Teddy Keller’s The Plague are more straightforward than others. The best, like Lloyd Biggle’s Monument are a bit more elaborate in disguising the formula. Stylistically there’s little variation either: each story is told in a matter of fact, no-nonsense style with little room for any stylistic flourishes. Winston P. Sander’s Barnacle Bull was the exception to this, which is not a surprise as Sander is a pseudonym for Poul Anderson. Overall this is not a bad anthology, but very much of its time and type with no real surprises. There are of course no female authors included.

Monument (1961) • novelette — Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
For an Analog writer, Lloyd Biggle was a bit of a liberal, here writing a story you could call anti-colonialist. A lone astronaut crashes on an idyllic alien planet and as the end of his life nears, he’s gripped by the fear that once this planet is officially discovered, the inhabitants will be quickly assimilated and have their culture destroyed. So he hatches a plan. Decades later, once first contact has indeed been made, the inhabitants still follow the Plan to the letter, as seen through the eyes of a series of well intended but confused witnesses. Written at a time when tourism and cultural imperialism were indeed destroying native cultures all over the world, Monument‘s heart is in the right place, but this is still a very liberal sort of white saviour fantasy. It’s cynical about how developed countries deals with native interests but not cynical enough — no mass graves here. The best story in this anthology, despite this.

The Plague (1961) • short story — Teddy Keller
A new mysterious plague — or is it a poison attack — is sweeping America and it’s up to one tired non-com to solve the mystery. This seems to be Keller’s only science fiction story, judging from the ISFDB. Competent but very straight forward as said.

Remember the Alamo! (1961) • short story — T. R. Fehrenbach
Fehrenbach was actually a Texan historian rather than a science fiction author; this and one other story for a Texas themed anthology are his only sf stories. This one is a neat little story about a confused time traveller who comes back to a pivotal moment in American history which a lot different from what he remembered happening.

The Hunch (1961) • short story — Christopher Anvil
An interstellar scout is sent on a dangerous mission with all the experimental, high tech new gadgets he didn’t want nor trusted on his ship, to understand just why two equally high specced scout ships had disappeared. The answer turns out to have been a particular bit of technology that was a bit too helpful for its own good. Something that any computer user stymied by some equally helpful piece of software can appreciate. Christopher Anvil was the quintessential Analog writer, good at writing clever puzzle stories, delivered with a sense of humour. He also had a bit of a libertarian streak, as best shown in Pandora’s Planet.

Barnacle Bull (1960) • short story — Winston P. Sanders
If you didn’t know that Winston P. Sanders was a Poul Anderson pseudonym, you could’ve guessed from the protagonist being Norwegian. Serving on a Norwegian interplanetary expedition in fact, attempting to cross the Asteroid Belt when things start getting wrong. The radiation levels in the ship keep slowly rising, communication with Earth is lost and the crew has to make the decision to continue or turn around. Each option brings its own dangers and the fact that multiple expeditions before theirs never made it weights heavily on their minds. The cause of all this misery can be found in the title; the solution is obvious in hindsight but not when you’re reading.

Join Our Gang? (1961) • short story — Sterling E. Lanier
This is actually Lanier’s first story, a typical Analog ‘Earth men beating aliens by clever trickery. In this case a proud, caste bound alien species is on the brink of space travel but refuses to join the thousand worlds of Sirian Combine, the one thing that ensures peace in this part of the Galaxy. Through what’s basically biowarfare they are persuaded to change their minds and join the gang. More cynical than many such stories are, like the one straight after it in this anthology. Lanier was an interesting, if minor writer, friends with Tolkien; Hiero’s Journey is a minor post-apocalyptic classic.

Sleight of Wit (1961) • novelette — Gordon R. Dickson
A human scout lands on the same planet in the same part as an alien colleague. Now each has to find a way to take the other prisoner and take them home just in case the other is hostile. Naturally the Earthman comes up with a clever scheme. This is apparently the sort of story Campbell approved of. Dickson had written and would write much better stories. His Dorsai novels about a planet of superhuman mercenaries being his best.

Prologue to an Analogue (1961) • novelette — Leigh Richmond
The world keeps running into crisis after crisis that are miraculously resolved through inexplicit means. Could the Witch themed commercials for cleaning products shown after each news broadcast have anything to do with this? Weakest story in the whole anthology for me, as it’s all done so very plodding and in service of a mawkish point about the power of the common people. Might be forgiven because it looks this was Leigh Richmond’s first published story.

Save for Monument there are no essential stories in this anthology, but it is a good look at where the Campbell edited Analog was at at the start of the sixties. Campbell of course was a massive racist and (borderline) fascist, whose best days as an editor were long behind him, but the stories here are mostly harmless. Probably not of interest to anybody who didn’t inhale this sort of science fiction as a child like I did. You can see why the New Wave that would sweep this all way a few years later was so necessary. Speaking of which, there is still a certain innocence to these stories that you don’t see with similar stories post-New Wave, as those were written in the knowledge that they were obsolete.

Globalhead — Bruce Sterling

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Cover of Globalhead


Globalhead
Bruce Sterling
339 pages
published in 1992

Good science fiction doesn’t predict the future; it allows the future to recognise itself in it. Globalhead is drenched in the zeitgeist of Post-Reagan America, yet occasionally there’s a glimpse of the far flung future of 2021 to be recognised. AIDS virus based RNA wonder drugs as the gimmick in its very first story, foreshadowing the very real mRNA Covid-19 vaccine I got just weeks ago. A character called Sayyid Qutb in “We See Things Differently” provides another mild shock. These glimpses of a still to be born future are jarring considering the stories in here are barely if at all science fiction, more slipstream perhaps, a term Sterling popularised at the time these stories were written. The most recognisable sfnal story here is “The Unthinkable”, a Chtuthlu Mythos inspired Cold War riff on Poul Anderson’s Operation Chaos, itself an inspiration for Charlie Stross’ “A Colder War”.

What to make of the Bruce Sterling as seen in this collection? Best known at this time as the second half of “William Gibson andd…”, one of the “fathers of Cyberpunk”. As an editor he had created the anthology that would pin down and solidify the genre, as well as its main propaganda zine. As a writer, his version of cyberpunk took a very different road from the post-Gibson consensus he himself had helped establish. As a non-fiction author, his cyberpunk interests would lead him to write a book — published the same year as this collection — about the early hacker movement(s), the development of the early internet and how the law responded to it. But little is visible of this cyberpunk guru in this collection. No jamming with console cowboys in cyberspace; a bit of low tech phone phreaking for quarters is as cyber as it gets.

But one of the central tenets of eighties cyberpunk does shape the stories here though, the idea of America as a tired, broken country, clapped out and overtaken by others. William Gibson’s Neuromancer famously contained no American brand names, while so much of its imitators were obsessed by the idea that the future was Japanese, not American. By the late eighties the false dawn of Reagan’s morning in America had faded, as had the very real fear of an imminent nuclear dawn. What remained was the feeling that America was tired, shagged out and left to rot by its friends and enemies alike. “Jim and Irene”, The Moral Bullet”, “We See Things Differently”, “Are You for 86?”, even “Dori Bangs” are all set against this backdrop, either with future explicitly collapsed America or in a present that just feels that way.

The other two major obsessions in Globalhead are Islam and the collapsing Soviet Union, sometimes together as in “Hollywood Kremlin”. Both make sense in context. While Iraq was still a faithful ally, Lybia and Iran were the great bogeymen of the eighties, every Arab a terrorist. Sterling has a much more positive view of Islam. In “The Compassionate, the Digital”, the Union of Islamic Republics has created AIs that have mastered teleportation, while “We See Things Differently” has a reporter from another united Islamic Middle East coming to America to interview a new firebrand rock star. “The Gulf Wars” opens with a familiar image of burning oil smoke over a Middle Eastern city, only to pull back and reveal its set during the Late Bronze Age Assyrian/Elamite Wars. The contemporary Gulf War it refers to is the Iraq-Iran War, rather than the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.

“Storming the Cosmos” is a collaboration with Rudy Rucker, a romp set in the high tide of Soviet space exploration, with a KGB stooge being forced to go on an expedition to the Tunguska Impact site in Siberia and finding ….something. “Hollywood Kremlin” has the first appearance of Leggy Starlitz, a sort of hapless trickster figure here involved in black market smuggling of Afghanistan sourced consumer goods into the Soviet Union by way of Azerbaijan, at time of writing still a Soviet Republic, barely. It and the second Starlitz story, “Are You for 86?”, in which he is involved with a feminist gang smuggling abortion drugs into the American South are clearly not science fiction. Neither are “Jim and Irene” or “Dori Bangs” even if they have a sfnal gimmick embedded in their story of lonely outcasts finding some measure of happiness in each other. The latter story is somewhat infamous as it stars actual, if already dead at the time characters, rock critic Lester Bangs and underground cartoonist Dori Seda.

The most ‘proper’ science fiction stories here are the opening story, “Our Neural Chernobyl”, about what happens when you mix d.i.y. genetci engineering with the hacking ethos, written in the form of a book review, always a chad move. The other one is “The Shores of Bohemia”, which doesn’t look like it’s science fiction until one cunning detail reveals its hand. This story in some ways looks forwards to Holy Fire, Sterling’s 1996 post-singularity post-cyberpunk novel set in a world ruled by a gerontocracy. The disruption that easily available immortality could bring is also a theme of “The Moral Bullet”.

Not every story in Globalhead worked for me. As a whole though it is an interesting look into what Sterling was thinking about at the cusp of the nineties, reacting to a world that was quickly moving out of its comfortable Cold War straitjacket. I can’t help but feel that he look slightly further than his contemporaries when using these events as inspiration for his stories.

Contents, taken from the isfdb:

  • 1 • Our Neural Chernobyl • (1988) • short story by Bruce Sterling
  • 11 • Storming the Cosmos • (1985) • novelette by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling
  • 65 • The Compassionate, the Digital • (1985) • short story by Bruce Sterling
  • 73 • Jim and Irene • (1991) • novelette by Bruce Sterling
  • 119 • The Sword of Damocles • (1990) • short story by Bruce Sterling
  • 131 • The Gulf Wars • (1988) • short story by Bruce Sterling
  • 152 • The Shores of Bohemia • (1990) • novelette by Bruce Sterling
  • 188 • The Moral Bullet • (1991) • novelette by John Kessel and Bruce Sterling
  • 216 • The Unthinkable • [Cthulhu Mythos] • (1991) • short story by Bruce Sterling
  • 224 • We See Things Differently • (1989) • novelette by Bruce Sterling
  • 249 • Hollywood Kremlin • [Leggy Starlitz] • (1990) • novelette by Bruce Sterling
  • 285 • Are You for 86? • [Leggy Starlitz] • (1992) • novelette by Bruce Sterling
  • 322 • Dori Bangs • (1989) • short story by Bruce Sterling

My Real Children — Jo Walton

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Cover of My Real Children


My Real Children
Jo Walton
320 pages
published in 2014

It’s 2015 and Patricia Cowan is “very confused”, according to the notes in her dossier, eighty-eight or eightynine years old and suffering from dementia. Maybe that’s why sometimes she remembers marrying Mark and giving birth to five children, with four still births in between and sometimes remembers not marrying him and raising a family with Bee, giving birth to two children with a third child not of her body. She remembers her childhood well enough, anything up to that faithful moment when Mark asked her to marry him, but afterwards her memories are doubled.

Since this is a science fiction novel, this doubling is of course not a symptom of her dementia, but instead her ability to recall the life she led in two alternate timelines, the Jonbar point being that faithful call Mark made to propose to her. What sets it apart from most other alternate history stories is that it’s neither concerned with the differences with our timeline, nor with the big political events, but rather with Patricia’s life in both histories. The resulting book reminds me of nothing so much of the sort of novel the Virago Modern Classics line specialised in reprinting: domestically orientated novels by 20th century women writers highlighting the struggles of everyday women.

After the introduction My Real Children starts with telling Patricia’s childhood and student years in Oxford, where she meets Mark. It ends when he calls her at her teaching job after he fails to get the first he needed to continue his studies and proposes to her. Patricia at this point is a naive and provincial young woman, who in the WWII Oxford kept herself to circles fitting to her background as the daughter of non-conformists, joining the Christian Union and not being much involved in the social life otherwise. Her romance and engagement with Mark are very much chaste and it’s therefore not surprising that she doesn’t realise Mark is gay, something I suspected from the start and which was confirmed after the timeline forked.

At first that forking seems relatively innocent, with only Patricia’s own situation changed, but the changes mount up over time. A bit disappointingly, the changes in the wider world were much more negative in the timeline in which Pat’s own situation was much better in comparison with Tricia’s timeline, which was much more utopian compared to Pat’s. I’d have rather seen both timelines to be the sort of muddling through timeline that we ourselves are living in, where things are a mixture of bad and good. Instead there’s one line in which the Cold War ends much earlier and much more pleasantly than in reality and one in which the Cuban Crisis goes hot and leads to a limited nuclear exchange, setting a precedent for more (limited) nuclear wars.

But this is a minor quibble. The focus after all is on Pat/Tricia, with alternating chapters telling the stories of their lives, a few years at a time, not always matching up. In both of her lives Pat/Tricia is queer and bi, though in one life she discovers this much earlier than in the other. There’s a quietly feminist tone to the book as the both of them struggle against the expectations cast on them because of their gender and later, sexuality. Because we know how Pat/Trica’s story end so to speak, reading it is a bittersweet sort of pleasure.

This is not as upbeat and triumphal as her previous novel, Among Others, but it’s the more impressive for it. Among Others was grounded in Jo Walton’s own life, a celebration of how science fiction and fandom can overturn your life for the better. My Real Children is written in a much more sober mood, more ‘realistic’ I’m almost tempted to say. Science fiction does not tend to produce many books like this, firmly fixed on the domestic, the everyday lives that go on among even in an sf setting. It’s what makes My Real Children unique.

Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance — Lois McMaster Bujold

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Cover of Vorpatril's Alliance


Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance
Lois McMaster Bujold
573 pages
published in 2012

It was only a last minute impulse that made me grab Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance from my bookshelves when I went to visit my parents last Friday, but the end result was that I started reading it when I’d arrived and finished it the same night, at 2:30 AM. Some novels just grab you like that and Bujold is more likely than most writers to write them. Her Vorkosigan saga has long been comfort reading for me, but as I’ve noticed time and again, especially on rereads, her novels always have more depth than you first realise.

Post A Civil Campaign, the Vorkosigan series has been a bit disappointing to me however, as Bujold seemed content just to coast. Both Diplomatic Immunity and Cryoburn were fairly conventional adventures, where Miles gets himself into trouble and has to get himself out of it again, lacking some of the with and sparkle of the earlier books. Worse, these completely sideline Ekaterin, Miles’ wife, who had proven herself to be a worthy co-protagonist in Komarr and the aforementioned A Civil Campaign. Worse, Miles himself had become a bit boring, having overcome most of the challenges life had thrown at him.

But Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance doesn’t star Miles, but rather Miles idiotic cousin, Ivan. And Ivan is an inspired choice. Whereas Miles is smug and glib, able to just power through adversary through sheer force of personality if nothing else, Ivan starts off out of his depth and remains that way to the end. At times, he’s more a concerned bystander than an actual participant in his own adventures. What he does have in common with his hyperactive cousin is that both are able to make incredibly bad choices that tend to work out incredibly well for them. Most of the time.

For Ivan, it all starts when Byerly Vorrutyer rings his doorbell one evening after work. Byerly you may remember from earlier books in the series, on the surface a wastrel and minor, somewhat dodgy aristocrat who in truth works for the Imperial Security services. While Ivan is on Komarr because he’s on the staff of the admiral holding inspections there , Byerly is there to investigate some conspiracy. And lucky Ivan, now Byerly needs him to seduce the girl who seems to be the main target of the conspiracy. Having protested in vain, the next day Ivan visits the girl at her work, buys a hideous gift for Miles as a cover, attempts to flirt, then follows her home where he’s promptly stun gunned by her unsuspected, blue skinned companion…

The only thing Ivan succeeds in is convincing them not to dispose of him out of hand and it’s fortunate indeed for Tej — the girl in question– and Rish — her blue companion — that he did so. Because later that night the real assassins they were worried about appeared, Ivan manages to successfully stall them even when tied to a chair for Tej and Rish to take action and one phone call to the local Kommarian police later they manage to safely flee to Ivan’s apartment. Because of that phone call though the police arrives to question Ivan about what happened that night and because they show up at his work and because he’s of course rather important in his own way (by accident of birth, rather than merit) ImpSec also gets involved.

All of which he could probably deal with on his own, but he’s loath to deliver Tej to the Kommarian authorities when there are still people after her and Rish’s lives. When things come to a head the police is at his door with a search warrant, he makes the sort of desparate gamble he normally condemns Miles for and persuades Tej to marry him using an old Barrayan ritual, with Byerly as witness. And it works. Up to a point. All his immediate problems disappear and he, Tej and Rish get to hitch a ride with Ivan’s boss to Barrayar. There, Ivan had explained to Tej, it will be easy to get a divorce and it’s unlikely the assassins will be able to reach them. Everything’s coming up roses, but he’ll still have to explain everything to his family…

And with this Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance shifts into something like a comedy of manners, reminiscent of A Civil Campaign. Because of course it’s not that simple. For a start, while both are completely oblivious to it, it’s clear to the reader and Ivan’s circle of friends & family that he and Tej are attracted to each other, do make a good couple. Not in the least because within their respective families they sort of hold the same reputation of nice, but useless and share the experience of having their contributions overlooked, of being ignored. Tej is the youngest daughter of the head of one of the great houses on Jackson’s Whole, who had to flee for her life during a coup against the House, not knowing whether the rest of her family was still alive. Before that, she was always the baby of the family, loved but seen as little more than a pawn to be married off to another House when convenient.

Ivan of course is “that Idiot, Ivan”, always stuck in the shadow of not only Miles, but also his mother and aunt and content to remain there for the most part, his response to being quite high up in the line of succession to the Barrayaran throne. Now we’ve seen much of this only from Miles’ point of view, so it’s great to see Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance taking the time to flesh this out a bit more, as Ivan has to deal with the burgeoning relationship between his mother and Simon Illyan, the retired ImpSec head that was started a few books earlier. It’s nice to see Ivan as more than just a foil for Miles’ schemes, with some genuinely touching scenes with him and his mother.

Then, in the final third of the novel we switch gears again as it turns out Tej’s family is still alive and is on Barrayar. Now we get Ivan and Tej caught between a rock and a hard place, as the patriarch of the family makes some sort of bet with Simon Illyan about some sort of treasure dating back to the Cetengandan occupation of Barrayar some fifty years ago. Now it’s more of a comedic crime caper as Ivan has to find out just hat is going on while Tej’s assassins are also closing again…

After two minor novels in the series, Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance comes as a relief. It shows there’s still life in this series, even if only when the focus is taken away from Miles. Best read if you’ve already read the rest of the series, though you can skip the two novels between it and A Cvil Campaign.