Fantastika

Ethan of Athos — Lois McMaster Bujold

Published on November 11, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Ethan of Athos

Ethan of Athos
Lois McMaster Bujold
237 pages
published in 1986

Ethan of Athos is the third published book in Bujold’s Vorkosigan series and the third published in 1986. Whereas Shards of Honor told the story of how Miles Vorkosigan’s parents met and The Warrior’s Apprentice showed his first adventure, this is a spinoff not featuring any of the main characters in the series. In fact, at first it barely seems to take place in the same universe.

It all starts on the all male planet of Athos (named after the all-male Greek monastry on mount Athos, natch) where Ethan’s greatest worry is how to take his relationship a stage further and get his boyfriend to be more responsible. His dayjob is as a obstetrician. On a planet full of men natural child birth is of course impossible so uterine replicators using female gene cultures taken along by the original colonists are used instead. Recently these cultures have started to deteriorate however, showing their age and new cultures have been ordered from Jackson’s Whole. Unfortunately, once they show up, these turn out to be unusable thrash. Despite their desire to remain cut off from the rest of the Galaxy, the people of Athos have no choice but to send somebody out into the darkness, somebody pure who can handle the temptations of women, somebody like, well, Ethan.

The Dreamblood Duology — N. K. Jemisin

Published on November 9, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of The Killing Moon

The Killing Moon & The Shadowed Sun
N. K. Jemisin
415/504 pages
published in 2012

Have you ever reached that point where you’ve read twothirds of a fantasy trilogy, quite like the writer but don’t want to read the last novel because it would mean rereading the first two? Yeah, that happened to me with N. K. Jemisin’s The Inheritance Trilogy, so instead I read her new series, The Dreamblood duology. Both The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun were published in 2012 and can be read as standalones, though you’ll miss a lot of the background if you only read The Shadowed Sun.

One of my ongoing frustrations with fantasy in general is how few novels take their inspiration from anything but medieval Europe. Medievaloid worlds as filtered through Tolkien and his imitators — where you can find pipe smoking peasants eating potoes with their turkey but few people of colour –are a dime a dozen, but books with Egypt as a source of worldbuilding are rare. In fact, The Dreamblood duology is the first series I can remember reading with Egypt as the inspiration for its setting, polytheism, annual flooding river surrounded by desert, powersharing between the priesthood and nominal god-king and all. What’s more, Jemisin was also inspired by Egypt’s historical relationship with Kush, the kingdom to the south of it in what’s now Sudan, who shared its culture and at times actually ruled it. In short, this is one fantasy in which pale Northern European heroes are in short supply.

Styx — Bavo Dhooge

Published on November 8, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Styx

Styx
Bavo Dhooge
295 pages
published in 2014

I hadn’t heard of Bavo Dhooge before I saw this book spotlighted in the Amsterdam public Library in their new additions section, near to where you hand in your borrowed books. It was the cover blurb saying that this was going to published in America that drew me to it and the back cover blurb that sold me on it. Raphaël Styx, a corrupt and aggressive chief inspector in the Oostende police, is chasing a notorious serial killer, the Stuffer, who murders young women, takes out their organs and stuffs the bodies full of sand. So far, so predictable, but then it comes to a confrontation between Styx and the Stuffer and Styx is killed … only to raise the next day as a zombie cop. Now he has to trust his successor, the Congolese-Belgium dandy Joachim Delacroix, to help him bring the Stuffer to justice.

Zombie cop taking revenge on his killer is not a concept I’d seen before, though John Meaney’s Bone Song is set up along similar lines. That on it’s own was good enough to take a punt on, with the icing on the cake being the setting. Oostende is one of Belgium’s grand old seaside resorts, being the favourite haunts of its first two kings, but having declined a lot in the second half of the 20th century. It also was the centre of Belgian surrealism, something that turns out to be important in Styx.

Ter Ziele — Esther Scherpenisse

Published on November 6, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Ter Ziele

Ter Ziele
Esther Scherpenisse
93 pages
published in 2014

Esther Scherpenisse is an up and coming Dutch fantasy writer, whose debut “Het prismaproject” in 2005 won the Paul Harland Prize in the best new writer category. Last year she managed to win the Paul Harland Prize again, but now for overall best story with “Ter Ziele”. For those unfamiliar with it, the Paul Harland Prize is an annual open competition for Dutch language science fiction, fantasy and horror stories; past winners include Thomas Olde Heuvelt, who went on to get two Hugo nominations this year and last. That last story is now available electronically as a chapbook, together with another of her short stories, “In de Mist”. That’s one of the advantages of ebooks, that you can publish chapbooks for a reasonable price rather than as expensive collectables, ideal to sample a new author.

Which is why I bought it yesterday after Esther tweeted that it was available. I’m still finding my way through the Dutch fantastika landscape after decades of not paying anything that didn’t come out in English. When I started investigating, Esther was one of the writers who had a critical buzz going for them and judging by the two stories here, that buzz is justified. These are well written stories that are as good as any published in English and I hope these will be translated sooner rather than later.

Doctor Who cares

Published on November 4, 20141 Comment

So I’ve not been too impressed with the latest Doctor Who series. None of the episodes have been great and a great many have been actively bad with shoddy characterisation and nonsensical plots. Throughout the series there have been the usual hints at thr big mystery waiting in the season final, with the irritating Missy popping up at the end of various episodes to vex recently killed extras. I wasn’t that confident that it would all add in the end and the trailer, which already gave away that the Cybermen would be involved, didn’t help. Giving away the big reveal like that took away much of the tension in the episode.

Now my pet theory had been that Missy somehow was the spirit of the TARDIS, revealed to a) exist and b) be female a few series ago, but this fortunately turned out to be wrong. Instead she’s a gender changed master, not even another Time Lord like the Rani, for a revival of that camp flirting between the Doctor and the Master that we saw in his previous appearance as well. There really are no new ideas in NuWho.

And then there was the plot catalyst that set the whole story in motion, as Clara’s boyfriend Danny Pink gets killed off screen in a car accident, she turns eevil and threatens the Doctor with losing the TARDIS if he doesn’t find a way to bring him back. Danny meanwhile finds himself in the Afterlife being interviewed by Chris Addison in which a Mysterious and Awful Secret from his Soldiering Past is revealed. So that’s a fridging, a Danger Room scenario and a troubled past in one sequence, which is impressive with its cliche denseness.

Things did get better as details of this afterlife and its implications became known, reminding me somewhat of Iain M. Bank’s Surface Detail, but this seems to get lost once Missy starts chewing the scenery, the Cybermen are revealed and all this afterlife business turns out to be a way to get recruits for their army: the dead outnumber the living.

It does feel as if two different stories have been smashed together, to the detriment of both. Why go through this whole charade if the whole intention is just to reprogram dead people as Cybermen? Why go for a tedious Cybermen invasion (again) if you have the whole idea of an artificial afterlife to play with?

As for the revelation that Missy is the Master, this both seems about the least interesting thing to be done with her and a deliberate snub of those who had been wanting a female Doctor for this series. I can’t even find it halfway progressive, as some seem to find it.

So yeah, of course I’ll be watching the second part to see if there’s any improvement, but I’m not hopeful.