This dichotomy was at the front of my mind while reading Raven Stratagem, the second part of Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire series, which began with Ninefox Gambit. I am a big fan of Lee’s writing and thoroughly enjoyed Ninefox Gambit, but I never felt quite satisfied. My main beef was the complexity. Lee has created a deeply complex universe, one that in the most fundamental ways is completely alien to us. Not quite parallel, more parabolic. It reminds me, in a good way, of Iain M Banks’s Culture in its scope, its pleasing disfunction and the humorous uses Lee makes of the technological and social quirks that rise emergent from the system. But for a lot of Ninefox Gambit, it wasn’t particularly clear what was going on beyond the immediate action.
Lee, much to his credit, never info-dumps and never engages in a Telladonna (to steal a phrase from the West Wing Weekly podcast) by having one character explain everything to another. The book would’ve been immensely weakened by either of those techniques, and a writer should never give more information than is strictly necessarily, but I couldn’t help coming out of Ninefox Gambit feeling a little lost. The critic in me wanted Lee to slow down, to let his creation breathe.
Raven Stratagem, in this sense, is a huge leap forward.
In the first book 400-year-old mass murderer Shuos Jedao was grafted onto the mind of Kel Cheris, creating a deadly duo easily capable of defeating the heretics at the Fortress of Scattered Needles. Raven Stratagem picks things up almost immediately. Cheris’s mind is dead and Jedao has hijacked her body, using it to take control of a Kel ship in which he goes haring across the galaxy repelling Hafn invaders and antagonising the ruling Hexarchate, all the while clearly up to something. Jedao is a wonderful fictional creation, a total psychotic bastard you can’t help but root for. The sense of pleasure Lee clearly takes in writing about Jedao’s villainy again puts me in mind of Iain M Banks. If you like your universes with a dark sense of humour and a wonky moral compass, Lee may be the best thing to happen to Space Opera since Banks’s untimely passing.
The novel opens the Hexarchate out, following multiple strands that expand and delineate our understanding while complicating the plot and adding levels that will undoubtedly be explored in later volumes. (Lee’s website says ‘trilogy’ - I hope it’s a trilogy in the Douglas Adams sense of the word).
Raven Stratagem is that rare thing – a sequel that betters the original – and is also the most frustrating thing for a reviewer: a book with a plot that cannot be discussed without massive spoilers. But like all great novels, it starts at the end of things. The ruling order that has controlled the galaxy for centuries is on its way out, and something is going to replace it. It could be freedom. It could be chaos. It could be a disaster. From Shoreline of Infinity’s base in Scotland, we ask what could be more timely?
Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth (Gods and Monsters: Rupert Wong Book 2)
Cassandra Khaw
Abaddon Books, 155 Pages
Review: Benjamin Thomas
Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth is the second part of the saga of Rupert Wong, our favorite cannibal chef. While Ends of the Earth is technically a novella, it packs more in its pages than most mammoth tomes we find on the shelves. The tremendous difficulty with novellas for writers is the fact that there are a lot more darlings that have to be killed in order to get the desired word count. Khaw’s blade, like the one belonging to her protagonist, is sharp and bloodied. There is nothing in this powerful punch of a story that shouldn’t be there and, surprisingly, I was not left holding the frayed strings of a dozen loose ends.
Ends of the Earth picks up after the end of the first novella in the series, Rupert Wong Cannibal Chef. If you haven’t read the first part, don’t worry, Khaw seamlessly weaves in just enough backstory at just the right moments to give an understanding without dragging the story down.
We follow Rupert from a bloody Beat Bobby Flay / Iron Chef competition where the main ingredients are sautéed eyeballs and browned entrails. Upon completing the contest, Rupert finds himself on the run, driven from where he lives to London where, against both his will and better judgement, he is press-ganged into the Greek pantheon. And, while guts and gore may be his specialty when he’s serving them, there’s a hint of compassion when he realises not all delicacies start as willing sources of food. But this humane revelation doesn’t come without a price. Gods are at war and Rupert must quickly find out if he’s 100% smart-ass or if he has some courage buried in his spinal cord.
Khaw hooked me from the beginning with her writing and I feel compelled to inject a paragraph of her descriptive power because it is just that good:
Orpheus is a literal head on the seat of his wheelchair, the stump of his throat putrid, purple-blotched. A tangle of nerves worm from beneath the flaps of his skin, knotting in the wheels, crawling over the armrests. I suspect that’s how he moves around but I’m not going to ask because frankly, I think I’ve hit my daily foot-in-mouth quota.
Khaw covers the better side of the Greek Pantheon in her story and expands on a world she introduced in the first Rupert Wong novella. Some of the gods and goddesses I remembered from history class, but not knowing all of them didn’t detract from the story at all. The characters are written in such a way that everyone belongs and nothing is out of place or feels forced in order to crowbar in a particular deity’s name.
As I said before: there is nothing in this story that shouldn’t be here and I strongly recommend picking it up to bring some color to the morning or afternoon commute. Of course, as with all cannibal cook-offs, that color’s going to be red.
Ancestral Machines, A Humanity’s Fire Novel
Michael Cobley
Orbit, 504 pages
Review: Duncan Lunan
I enjoyed the Humanity’s Fire trilogy which preceded this novel, but I was concerned that the opening of the Well into vast sub-layers of alternative realities and ancient technologies would submerge the emphasis on human values which had characterised the early parts of the trilogy. When I found that Ancestral Machines begins down there, I feared that my misgivings would be justified – intriguing though it was to find events in “a cavernous opening half a million miles wide and about three million long, its floor a vast plain littered with the cracked, smashed and split ruins of entire worlds”, like Slartibardfast’s workshop in the film version of Hitchhiker... if the antigravity failed. I was also put off by starting with a conversation between two artificial intelligences, of which I have been reading rather a lot in recent SF. However, the action moves from there up to our level of reality, the prime continuum, and though the drone which is dispatched to it has a major part to play towards the end, it’s out of action for much of the novel.
It’s sent to counter the emergence near ‘Earthsphere’ of a truly nasty construct called the Warcage, which was once an artificial solar system called the Great Harbour of Benevolent Harmony. It has long since been taken over by dissidents with a lust for war and conquest, who pit the inhabitants of its planets against one another, breeding ever more savage warriors, and replacing each world as it becomes ruined with a fresh one stolen from elsewhere. Such planet-collecting has featured in SF before, in the BBC’s long-forgotten serial The Big Pull, in a story by the late Lesley Hatch called ‘Asset-strippers’ in the Daily Record’s ‘Lance McLane strip’, and in Doctor Who. Until recently the general view in astrodynamics was that such collections of habitable worlds were dynamically impossible, and it’s described here as “a massive macro-engineering achievement”, although the late Prof. Archie Roy wasn’t so sure – simulations at Glasgow University had suggested that up to 60 earthlike worlds could be added to the inner Solar System without drastic effect. The recent discovery of seven earthlike planets tightly clustered around the star TRAPPIST-1 suggests that maybe planetary collection could work without super-technology to hold the system together. In that literal sense, the late Chris Boyce may not have been right when he said, “Interstellar chequers is not a viable mode of existence”.
The TV/film comparisons are appropriate because in his Acknowledgements Michael Cobley makes a second dedication, to the writers and actors of Firefly. Here the freelance starship captain is called Pyke (try not to think of the Star Trek pilot episode or of Dad’s Army, and when he meets up with a woman officer of Earthspace intelligence called Sam, try not to think of Stargate). We meet him when he’s just been robbed of a cargo and two of his crew have (apparently) been killed. Setting off in pursuit, he rescues another, stranded crew who take over the ship. To regain it and crew members being held hostage, he must penetrate the Warcage and assassinate a local overlord, to give rebellion against them time to find its feet.
That’s only a partial summary and there are numerous complicating elements, particularly a military leader on the other side who’s haunted by the personalities of his ancestors – at first an irritation but later to prove crucial. It’s all good rollicking stuff, and the few reservations I have concern characterisation and plot. I think Michael relies too much on reader knowledge of Firefly to let us link to his characters. The series is not that well known – it was just a word to me until Serenity was televised, amd not having the background, it meant little to me then. I wouldn’t have seen it now, but that my wife is a fan of Nathan Fillion in Castle. And while I can see him as ‘Mal’ Reynolds haring off after his missing cargo and revenge, for dramatic reasons within an episode, it’s at least possible (especially at movie length) that he would cut his losses, bide his time, and position himself for a more satisfying retribution. Like the one in Tom Toner’s The Promise of the Child, which I reviewed here in Issue No. 2, the whole assassination plot rests on similar shaky assumptions throughout. In particular, I can’t see Reynolds letting Firefly be taken over by strangers with such laughable ease: all it takes is for the last two crew members aboard Pyke’s ship to be given a false message that they’re wanted at the base of the ramp.
Starting a story in medias res is a powerful device, but it’s not always effective. Pyke loses two of his crew at the outset, more are taken hostage as he loses his ship, and on his way into the Warcage still another has to be left behind at a location which proves crucial later. I regret to say that I began to find this funny rather than sharing Pyke’s anger and grief, let alone the feelings of the other crew members, and when they’re reunited at the end I didn’t rejoice as I should, because I’d never seen them working together as a team in the first place. But now they are all back together and have their ship back, no doubt there will be more fun to come.
The List
Patricia Forde
Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, 368 pages
Review: Katie Gray
In the city of Ark, food, water and words are tightly rationed. The world as we know it has ended, the sea levels have risen, and in the last known bastion of civilisation the people must speak the new language, List, or be expelled into the forest. Care of the List, some five hundred words and falling, is in the hands of the city wordsmith, Benjamin, and his apprentice Letta.
One day Benjamin sets out into the wilderness on a routine word-finding expedition – and never returns. Left alone, Letta takes in an injured boy, Marlo, who she soon realises is one of the Desecrators, a mysterious band of terrorists who seek to take down Ark and List. And of course, through Marlo Letta begins the process of unlearning the truths she’s been taught her whole life.
Billed as Fahrenheit 451 meets The Giver, The List (first published as The Wordsmith in 2015) doesn’t quite live up to that pedigree, but it’s an enjoyable read with a strong, simple message: language is vital, art is vital, and their destruction is the destruction of humanity itself. There’s something to be said for this clarity of moral purpose, especially in the current political climate – sadly, The List’s central anti-authoritarian, anti-propaganda themes resonate more strongly now that on its initial publication.
The city of Ark and the daily lives of its residents are sketched very well, its infrastructure and logistics, and in particular the work of the wordsmiths. They collect and compile words, recording them in a card catalogue for preservation. Special lists are produced for people in technical professions; ‘pumped’ is reserved for those who work with water. When a citizen of Ark grows old, they sometimes ‘donate’ their words to the wordsmith. Speaking non-List words is illegal: fifteen infractions and you’ll be exiled.
Unfortunately, the wider world of The List is less convincing. There’s just enough information given about the history of Ark to make it implausible. A little less, and one could accept this new status quo at face value, but as it is I struggled to believe that anyone would really go along with List. Ark’s founder, John Noa, believed that language was the root of humanity’s evil. This is, to put it bluntly, patently bonkers. Do the people of Ark really believe him? Are they playing along out of fear? Some combination of the two? It’s never properly explained, and Letta’s faith in Noa, so central to the novel, isn’t fully convincing.
There are also hints throughout the novel of a romance brewing between Letta and Marlo, which I found somewhat unnecessary. They have little in the way of genuine, person-to-person interaction, and I didn’t feel much chemistry. If the romance was intended, it isn’t convincing, and it feels – as is too often the case – that as male and female leads of course they must be paired up. Also, must we really be reminded every time he appears that Marlo smells like sage?
Those issues aside, The List is an enjoyable novel with an intriguing premise, a solid moral message, and some great world-building. I don’t know if Patricia Forde has plans for a sequel, but I would absolutely read one – it would be great to see this world and its characters developed further.
Stranger of Tempest
Tom Lloyd
Gollancz, 472 pages
