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May 2, 2025

Late Novel

Whoops, I was supposed to post this on the first, wasn't I? My horde of followers must be so irate that they can't even post. In my defense, the last couple of weeks of April were crazy for me. But I still had this post mostly written up and I just have to finish a few bits and send it out.

Possible spoilers here for C.J. Cherryh's Morgaine series, Brandon Sanderson's Alcatraz series, and Joe Zieja's Epic Failure series, possibly among others.

C.J. Cherryh: Exile's Gate, completed April 3

The final book in the Morgaine cycle, which came out ten years after Fires of Azeroth and is at least twice the size. Morgaine and Vanye travel to yet another new world (which seems like it's the next one after Azeroth, though there's some weird snippets which seem to imply otherwise? not sure), and end up saving the life of a local, Chei. Chei was on the losing side of a battle/ambush and, along with several others, was staked out for wolves, and he's the only survivor. Now Morgaine and Vanye can't let him loose to spread news of their presence, but they can't always trust him either. Chei is pretty sure that this qhal-looking woman only wants him for purposes of body-swapping fodder. Because it turns out that in this world, the qual regularly use body-swapping for life prolongation, and anyone who's been a qhal captive is suspect as a result. Also, there is finally some consummation of Morgaine and Vanye's relationship.

Now, the original trilogy didn't really bring the entire story to a close. Which is fine, it seems like Morgaine's quest to close all the gates is a very long task, because there are many gates, and the odds of reaching the end in some particular world is pretty slim (though presumably it must happen eventually). It wrapped up Vanye's cousin Roh's plotline (even having a "years later" epilogue to make it clear), but that was about it. But this book, a ten-years-later sequel, could have conceivably been planned to wrap it up, right? Maybe this was the final gate world. It could have been a story that wasn't the next world, but skipped some intervening time to bring them to the end. But it is not.

It does have some different elements, as mentioned. A more dominant qhal, and not benevolent ones like in Fires of Azeroth. And their ruler (?) seemed to be a fellow named Skarrin who may have been a survivor from before the qhal gates. But nonetheless it is not The Big One.

And the ending? The final meeting with Skarrin comes very close to the end of the book. It's not clear how it's going to be resolved. And then, it is? No, it's not, there's one final complication which is going to happen when they go through the gate to the next world. So what happens with regards to that complication?

Surprise! We don't know. The book just ends. In just a few pages, Cherryh manages to make this the least satisfying resolution to a series since Chapterhouse: Dune, and that was mostly because the author died. No, they ride off through the gate, and what happens on the other side? Maybe it was supposed to be the subject of another book but the publisher nixed it and Cherryh shrugged and moved on. (Most likely.) By this point it's reasonably safe to say that it will never be canonically addressed. Maybe there's fanfic of it. Maybe there'll be an authorized sequel by someone else sometime, but I'm not holding my breath.

But anyways, this has been the Morgaine series. Some tight little novels, somewhat episodic but not quite as episodic as I remembered. (I remembered very little about the series, as I mentioned, but then it has been decades since I read them, and I may never have reread Exile's Gate in particular.) Just grit your teeth about the dangling plot threads at the end, or write your own ending.

Wole Talabi, Shigidi And The Brass Head of Obalufon, completed April 7

It's time once again for male diversity books, which (given how few of those I have in my collection that I haven't already read) means that it's time for either the next Wesley Chu book or for the library. As I've already given away, it's not Wesley Chu. (Vague ambition at the moment is to try to alternate between Asian and African authors, though maybe there's also some First Nations authors out there too? Not sure.) Wole Talabi was on my list from somewhere, so I put a hold on this one at the library and here it is. First impression from the title: some kind of fantasy? Not to say that we couldn't have a science-fiction brass head too, but for now I'm assuming magic.

It's an interesting and fast-paced book, as the titular Shigidi, a minor nightmare god from a Nigerian "spirit corporation", quits his job and starts teaming up with a succubus named Nneoma, and they get hired to retrieve the also titular brass head from (of course) the British Museum, with the aid of life-prolonged Aleister Crowley (for it is in 2017 that our scene lies). The reframing of pantheons of gods as corporations is clever, and hey, non-European religion for extra diversity points.

One quibble is that the timeline is a little nonlinear. We start in medias res at a high-tension moment being pursued through the streets of Spirit London, which we don't get back to until like 3/4 of the way through the book. This is fine in and of itself, though it creates an odd tension drop through the rest of the book…because we're told that this is the first time that Nneoma tells Shigidi she loves him. Which means that every earlier-in-the-timeline scene where he's angsting about how she won't tell him if she loves him or not, we're reminded that Oh yeah she's going to tell him so we don't have to worry about it. But I guess it's fine. Also we get some flashback scenes involving other characters that we're not sure how they're relevant (though the Aleister Crowley thing does pay off), and some scenes that felt unnecessary because we had already been told what happened in them and so somehow showing them felt redundant. But all in all, I thought it worked, and I'd be interested to see if there will be more with these characters. (The title has sequel potential, after all.)

Brandon Sanderson: The Dark Talent, completed April 10

I have been kind of off Brandon Sanderson for a few years now. I went through a period of reading a lot of him--the original Mistborn trilogy and most of the followup one, the Stormlight Archives, Warbreaker, etc., and there's still quite a few I haven't read. But somehow The Bands of Mourning and Rhythm of War put me off, and Legion was kind of meh, so I decided to take a break. I did leave The Dark Talent on my to-read shelf, though. As middle-grade books, they're less Sandersony than some. Unfortunately, they are more middle-grade. They are determinedly wacky, which is to say they are probably trying too hard…but maybe if I were 10 years old I'd appreciate it more, I dunno.

I did kind of like some of the ideas of the series--like the Smedry family all having talents that all sound like bad things (breaking things, arriving late, dancing badly) but actually being useful in weird ways. I was less sanguine about the ideas of librarians being evil, and that there's all these places that exist that aren't on the maps. I almost went with a longer read (like Neal Stephenson's Seveneves) instead, but I was vaguely thinking I should read the new Stormlight book sometime, and reading this one would open that up (because you can't have two books by the same author both on your to-read shelf at the same time, that's just wrong). (Note: besides Seveneves I also have The Confusion on my shelf because I am internally self-consistent.)

And then, as the author (Alcatraz) has been repeatedly warning us, in between distracting us with attempts to keep the tone light, the tone gets dark right near the end as the bad guys (apparently) win, and Alcatraz, ashamed of how he cracked at the end, says he's done writing now. Then after the extensive "reading guide" section at the end, there's a little flap that says not to lift it until you've finished the book. Underneath that, we get a little hopeful addition onto that ending, and Bastille, who spend this entire book in a coma, promising that she will finish the story. I already knew that there was a Bastille Vs. The Evil Librarians book that came next so this was not a total surprise. But I guess I will plan to read Wind And Truth, the next Stormlight Archives book, as my next Sanderson (though not until next year sometime, probably), and see what "finishing the first half of the series" looks like.

Sara Douglass: The Wayfarer Redemption, completed April 17

By this point it's been several books since my last real epic fantasy (which I guess would be Mother of Winter, since Exile's Gate is really science fiction), and the Alcatraz book was such a quick read that I am now ahead on my reduced Goodreads challenge (not that that should matter), it's clearly time for another epic fantasy. And I'm feeling up to tackling the book which has been sitting on my to-read shelf for the longest: The Wayfarer Redemption by Sara Douglass. I read her weird, vaguely Egyptian book Threshold some time ago, but that one seemed to be a standalone. Still, that means this isn't my first book by her and so I didn't have to wait for a "new author" slot to open up.

The book's real name is actually not The Wayfarer Redemption, that's just the American retitling of it; the original title was Battleaxe. The overall series is called The Wayfarer Redemption, or possible just the last half (books 4-6) of the series is called that (the first three books being the Axis Trilogy). It's all rather confusing, really. But at least this is actually the first book of the series, as far as Wikipedia will tell me. (Although it says that (1) Threshold is a prequel to the "Darkglass Mountain" trilogy, and (2) "Darkglass Mountain" is a sequel to the "Wayfarer Redemption", so I guess maybe it is in the same world after all?)

We start with a lone woman preparing to give birth in the frozen north, which was also how the J.V. Jones series started, but I guess that's fine. (It's not a land with a big northern desert like the last two Australian fantasy series I read, at least.) The scene takes a much different twist, though, and I wasn't quite sure where that, or the other prologue scene (with a woman who had just suffered a miscarriage, so completely different), was going. Because we head back south and meet characters from the church (who really hate forests because that's where the Forbidden Ones live), a young noblewoman named Faraday, and Axis, the titular BattleAxe (because apparently when your religion hates trees, axes are a good symbol of that). We also meet a cat who turns out to be significant.

It's not too long before it's revealed that, surprise, trees, and the Forbidden Ones, aren't all bad, that's just a church thing! There's a real enemy, though, and there's a prophecy.

I don't really like the writing in this book. There is a ton of headhopping, repeatedly flitting between the thoughts of different characters on the same page (though maybe not in the same paragraph). I feel like you could get away with this maybe a decade or two earlier, but this book came out in 1995, and I feel like we were already expecting better by then. Also, the central romance in the book just did not convince me. And maybe I'm a little tired of characters being opposed by intolerant churches and those who believe in them, however often they existed in the real world.

Amazingly, there seem to be a lot of people out there who love this book, and I can't really understand why. (I also saw a few, on Goodreads, who apparently returned to it years later and realized it was bad. So maybe this is just more like how I used to love all those Piers Anthony and Jack L. Chalker books.) I will not be continuing in the series and I don't really care what happens. I assume that Axis and Faraday (which I have trouble seeing as a girl's name, btw) get together in the end, probably a bunch of other people die, and from the titles of the second trilogy (Sinner, Pilgrim, and Crusader), which seems to be about the second generation, there'll be more church stuff, and I am just not there for it.

Barry Longyear: Sea of Glass, completed April 22

As I may have mentioned previously, when I do my big series rereads, I always like to include a few other rereads in the cycle too. At the moment that looks like: one book from the Discworld series, one of my old Star Trek novels, one Dick Francis book, and one miscellaneous standalone. Originally these would be done at the end of one series and before the next one, but more recently (perhaps with the Deryni reread, which had four trilogies) I started interspersing them throughout the series instead. With this reread cycle I'm doing three separate series, so I've been doing them between those shorter series.

Picking the standalone has been kind of random, like just whatever occurred to me at the time. This time, nothing had occurred to me, so I went looking back at my spreadsheet where I kept track of when books were added to my reading list, which I call "creed" because…it rhymes with "read", I guess? (I had a fondness for giving files "interesting" names when I was younger, and I keep them because I remember what they mean.) With new books, this was mostly just the date I acquired them, but I also had a list of rereads, and then the date would be when I decided to reread them (or, at least, when I thought of making a note of that fact). And that's where I found Sea of Glass.

I probably first ran across him when I saw his short story collection It Came From Schenectady at the drugstore/newsstand ("Al's News") where I bought my comics. It had a paperback rack where I discovered several writers, and I was into short stories at the time. Later the "Enemy Mine" movie and its novel adaptation came out, and I enjoyed those. Sea of Glass came out in paperback in 1988, and I bought it second-hand but reasonably new. I liked it a lot at the time and apparently, in April of 1996, I decided I wanted to reread it sometime.

Has it aged well? Let's start with the fact that by the beginning of the book, in 2012, the Compact of Nations (which at least includes the U.S. and Canada) has apparently outlawed having children without a license. This is because of a powerful computer system which has apparently determined exactly the right things to do to avoid a horrible death by overpopulation, not to mention also avoiding a nuclear war with the Societs. Because by this point computers would totally be able to calculate all of that, yep. Even though, by the 2020s, computers are still somewhat rare and certainly not something everybody has in their home.

Thomas Windom is an illegal child, kept hidden in an an attic by his parents and raised on a diet of old TV shows and movies. When he is inevitably discovered, he is taken away (and his parents presumably executed) and put into a horrible orphanage system for such illegal children. Horrible things happen there, because legally these kids have no rights, so they have to band together for their protection. Thomas manages to survive, and educate himself, and learn about the computer projections which lead to the omnipresent display of the "Wardate" which the optimal date and time for the future war to occur. But has the computer been orchestrating his entire life?

All in all, I'd have to say that…it hasn't aged well. A lot of the book, this stuff is just in the background, and Thomas's struggles are more important. But near the end it gets a lot more explicit with its Malthusian message, and that part is just problematic. I mean…I get it. In the 80s I was a teenager and I embraced Malthusian beliefs. I refused to watch frickin' Live Aid because I concluded that if we were surging into an overcrowded nightmare, every death by starvation was only a good thing, and sending aid to Ethiopia was therefore wrongheaded. This book even refers to the Ethiopian famine, and mentions "We Are The World" (if not LiveAid), though I can't understand if it's angry at trying to feed the hungry or angry at the government who kept food from them in the first place. Given that we're currently at a world population that was considered scary at the time, and there isn't widespread starvation everywhere, it's clearer that it's wealth inequity and resource hoarding which is the real cause of starvation today. And it's not that many years since I read a book called Empty Planet about the worldwide decline in population growth (even in traditional high-growth areas in Africa and South Asia), which asserts that this is a problem because it will result in a smaller population of young people having to support a larger population of old people. It's possible that some of the population growth decline will be reversed if we manage to undo some of the wealth inequity, so more young people will be financially able to have children if they want to, but I still know plenty of people who just decided having kids was not for them and so they didn't. Anyway. Overpopulation is not likely to be a problem anywhere near as soon as naive projections from the late 20th century may have painted it.

And also, the idea of a computer, in the early 21st century, that is so smart that it can predict what individual people will do, even with constant monitoring, just strikes me as absurd. Leaving aside the fact that the author never even considered that computers might become more common or more portable, just the idea of infallible computing devices that can take everything into account has aged poorly as well.

So as I finished this reread, my headcanon is not that the computer saw a real problem with overpopulation that could only be solved through drastic action, and Thomas ended up believing in it; my headcanon is that a devoted Malthusian programmed a computer with his own assumptions about overpopulation, and then managed to get it to oversee large chunks of the operation of Compact of Nations. By the end of the book the "Consolidationist" views are becoming dominant, and the computer is being removed, and Thomas thinks that there's only one way to save humanity. In the end, he's wrong, but he can't allow himself to believe that. What does the author believe? Doesn't matter. I believe that Malthusianism is wrong, so even if the author thought Thomas was the hero, I'm free to believe that he was wrong, and an unreliable narrator, not the only clear-thinker in the world or something.

Before this reread I would probably have thought of this book as a five-star. Now it's maybe three. I doubt I'll hang on to it to reread it again. Sorry, Barry.

Gemma Files: A Book of Tongues, completed April 26

Time to try another new author, a new female author, and this time from my list of authors I know little or nothing about. Often I call this list the "pool-table books" because, well, currently they're being stored on the pool table in the middle of our library, a leftover from the previous owners that has not been used for pool in some time because it's covered in books because of bookshelf space shortage. You know how it goes.

It's not quite fair to use this book, perhaps, because I believe I had heard Gemma Files's name bruited about in Canadian speculative fiction circles. I don't remember how exactly we got this particular book--did we buy it at a convention (it's a ChiZine Publications book, so unlikely to be in the bookstores we frequent), or get it as a freebie, or what? I would've maybe thought it was one of the batch of books my wife got the year she was a juror for the Sunburst Award, but it's the wrong year. Anyway, I had no other female author candidates in mind, so I decided I might as well grab it. My initial impression is that it's "weird west", a.k.a. a western with magic and/or horror elements.

My second impression is that it makes me think of William S. Burroughs's The Place of Dead Roads. Which I admit I have only read once, and that long ago, but I have listened to the album "You're The Guy I Want To Share My Money With" many more times. That album has four sides, one each for Laurie Anderson, William S. Burroughs, and John Giorno, and one shared one (multi-grooved on vinyl, so you didn't know whose track you were getting when you put the needle down). Burroughs's side was almost entirely made up of excerpts from The Place of Dead Roads, and so those are probably his pieces that I'm most familiar with. Anyway, Dead Roads's protagonist is Kim Carson, a gay gunfighter who in one scene kills a couple of homophobes in a saloon. The first chapter here feels almost like an homage to that, as Chess Pargeter (not our starting protagonist, but a major character who gets POV later) does just that. And in fact, the "Place of Dead Roads" is referenced multiple times in the book. Is that a Burroughs homage or was Burroughs referencing something else? (It sounds like The Place of Dead Roads is considered a minor work in Burroughs's oeuvre, apart from its appearance on that record.) In fact, that phrase appears more times in the book than its actual title, which only comes up once and I'm not sure what it has to do with anything. But then, you know, titles, am I right?

There's a lot of Aztec mythology references, which is interesting (I'm always like, "I recognize that god!" when all I mean is that they were in the AD&D Deities & Demigods). There's a whole lot of gay sex, frankly more than I'm comfortable with but that's just a me problem; Tumblr might like it. There is a certain amount of "nobody's a nice guy" syndrome where it's hard to know who, if anyone, to cheer for. I read the book all the way to the end, but I didn't always enjoy it, and I didn't always understand what was going on. I suspect that I won't be seeking out other books in the series.

Joe Zieja: Communication Failure, completed April 30

Humour is hard, particularly when combined with another genre. I mean, there's classics like the Hitchhiker's Guide series, which showed a remarkable adaptability from radio show into book into TV show into movie, and Red Dwarf, which somehow went from something more like a sitcom in space to some darkly satirical novel adaptations. I remember reading John DeChancie's The Kruton Interface, adaptation of an apparently funny stage play, but kind of meh as a book. And I wasn't 100% sold on Steven Erikson's Star Trek pastiche Willful Child. So when I picked up the first Joe Zieja book, Mechanical Failure, it looked like it might be funny. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it also had a certain amount of heart to it, so there was something behind the gags and the cast of kooky characters, and I wanted to go on in the series.

So in the first book, our hero, Rogers, (who I can't help picturing as Ed Mercer from "The Orville", except with a beard), a former smuggler now in the space navy, is on a ship with a roster of colourful crewmates as well as a number of, well, mechanical failures, including the ships' droids who end up going on a killing spree. As a result of surviving that, he's ended up more or less in charge. Unfortunately, now there's a large fleet from the nearby Thelicosans, who send the message "We're invading," then immediately suppress all communication. The whole thing is a ghastly misunderstanding, but gung-ho subordinates on both sides are all too eager to end the Two Hundred Years (And Counting) Peace because of it. Rogers and his opposite number in the Thelicosans have to try to overcome the incompetence of their subordinates (and themselves) and maybe try not to start a war. Except it turns out that the Thelicosan captain has a huge crush on Rogers.

The book seems to work effectively as both a science fiction and a humour book, with plots and skulduggery and culture clashes as well as ludicrous situations. Plus it's got an overarching plot leading into the third book, which I should totally see if I can buy from somewhere now.

I finished another month of Marvel Comics, but I haven't really started a new nonfiction yet; instead, I ended up pulling The Internet Is A Playground by David Thorne off my shelf for a reread. I mostly remember him from his passive-aggressive torment of his coworker who wanted him to make up "missing cat" posters for her cat Missy, but I guess he had a whole website of stuff which turned into this book. Rereading it now, though, it seems like he's mostly just being random at real people who are bugging him through email, often for money that he owes them, and about half the time it works and they decide it's not worth it. I'm not finding it particularly funny this time, and maybe I should stop, but I keep wondering if there are some funny bits in it somewhere. I'm beginning to suspect not, though.

#books #reading #C.J. Cherryh #Morgaine #Barry Longyear #Gemma Files #Joe Zieja #Epic Failure #Sara Douglass #The Wayfarer Redemption #Brandon Sanderson #Alcatraz Vs. The Evil Librarians #Wole Talabi #Shigidi

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