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alfvaen · 3 months ago

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Novel Gate

February was cold here, until it suddenly became warm, melty and refreeze-icy. Good month to stay inside and do some reading, in other words. (I mean, all months are good for that, when it comes right down to it.) Anyway, it's time to write about the books I read in that particular month.

Possible spoilers herein for Mira Grant's "Newflesh" series, C.J. Cherryh's Morgaine series, and Josiah Bancroft's Tower of Babel series.

Mira Grant: Feedback, completed February 3

After the male-authored thick epic fantasy I read previously, it was time for a female-authored, probably not-epic-fantasy book. Somewhat unusually, I ended up having a dream where I was trying to pick my next book, and while not all the books on my shelf really existed, this one was there and that was the one I picked. Well, who am I to doubt the wisdom of my subconscious? I mean, it does seem like something I would do, but in this case it seemed as good an idea as any, so here it is.

Mira Grant is, of course, a Seanan McGuire pseudonym. I am so far behind on her (both of them, that is), especially compared to a lot of the other members of the household. I'm like six or seven books into the Toby Daye series, and haven't really read any of the other McGuire series at all, but I have read the Mira Grant Parasitology trilogy and the Newsflesh trilogy. This book is like a spinoff of Newsflesh, taking place in the same world but with different chracters.

Newsflesh is a zombie series, where two viruses combined accidentally in the wild to produce the "Kellis-Amberlee" zombie plague. You can get an active infection and get turned into a zombie, but every human (and many other mammals) contains a reservoir of the virus and so automatically turns into a zombie when they die. The CDC has become quite powerful, and blood tests checking for the virus are routinely required for entering buildings and vehicles. But, in the main, life goes on, and people accommodate. The main characters of Feedback, like those of the original trilogy, are based around bloggers, which, after their success in reporting the original zombie outbreaks, have become quite significant. The bloggers are divided into subtypes, like Irwins (named after Steve Irwin, these are the ones who take a lot of risks and capture it on video), Newsies (who report more factually), and Fictionals (who concentrate on fiction, of course). The original trilogy focused on stepsiblings Georgia (Newsie) and Shaun (Irwin) Mason, who are top of the heap among bloggers; in this book we follow Aislinn "Ash" North and Ben Ross, husband-and-wife-but-only-platonically-to-get-Ash-her-Green-Card. Ash is the Irwin in her group, and Ben is the Newsie (and Ash's girlfriend Audrey is a Fictional).

I originally planned to read this page in a leisurely seven days (70 pages a day, pretty light for me), but I ended up getting caught up in the action on day five, and shaved a day off of that. I think it has more action than the original trilogy, as attempted-assassination-by-zombie keeps happening, so it can get a little breathless, but in the end, I'm not quite sure it works for me. Our characters don't seem to find out anything that wasn't already revealed in the original trilogy, and I don't think we even got much past the end of the first book. The last hundred pages or so are occupied by a random subplot that comes out of nowhere and feels like it should practically have been its own book. The characters are fine, but I didn't get too attached. So it's exciting, but inessential.

C.J. Cherry: Gate of Ivrel, completed February 6

Starting a new series reread. This might have been my first C.J. Cherryh book, certainly the first one I heard of. The oldest Dragon Magazine I ever read (I think it may have been issue 57 or something) contained an entry in what was presumably a series of articles called "Giants In The Earth", where they gave game stats for various characters from fantasy novels. In issue 57, it was a special "all-women" installment, which featured Robert E. Howard's Belit, Lynn Abbey's Rifkind…and C.J. Cherryh's Morgaine. It may have noted that the Morgaine series is technically science fiction, but you could handwave that away. I got the original trilogy, and the fourth book when it came out (practically as long as the first three 200-pagers put together).

The books are about a "qhal" named Morgaine, who's on a quest to close down a number of Gates. These world-spanning Gates were created by her race (which the Dragon article encourages you to think of as "elves") and now need to be closed because of reasons. (The prologue says that this is because they were time-space gates and somebody screwed things up by going into the past, and closing these gates will limit the damage somehow.) But our POV character is a guy named Vanye, who is an outcast and not sci-fi-savvy, and gets picked up by Morgaine and soon becomes her loyal companion.

In Cherryh's latest book the series seems to be listed among those that are part of the Alliance-Union continuity. One section of the prologue quotes the Union Science Bureau, but this might be some qhal institution? It's not clear. I'm dubious about this; even if the author supports it, I don't know if I buy that the Union would have nobly decided to close the gates rather than try to leverage this for their own benefit. Maybe there is more supporting evidence later in the series, I dunno.

Since this first book is set on Vanye's world, he has a lot of pre-existing knowledge of the social situation, about clan alliances and the like, and recent history; Morgaine, who stepped into a gate a hundred years earlier and has been in limbo that whole time, knows more about that era but less about the current state of things. And she acquired a reputation on her previous visit, for being a cold-hearted witch who sacrificed an entire army to no avail.

For such a short book, it is intricately plotted, with several sides trying to tug at Vanye's loyalties for a chance at the power of the gate. I was a little confused a couple of times in the last few chapters, but that is one drawback of fewer pages--easier to miss some small detail that will change things. And it finishes with a bit of a "bad guy gets away" cliffhanger, but of course Vanye decides to follow Morgaine to the next world.

Mur Lafferty: Six Wakes, completed February 11

The post-reread slot alternates between the diversity books and the new authors. For a while the latter were strictly the "untried" authors, the ones where I'd picked up one book by them once without knowing anything about them; and even excluding the authors where I bought a second book, or that I'd heard of beforehand, that's still a substantial list. But at some point I decided to also start putting in the other kinds of new-to-me authors as well, while still giving myself some of the same freedom to give up on the book if it doesn't grab me in a day or two. But in many cases it seems almost like a waste, because I'm pretty sure I'm going to like the book and am looking forward to it anyway. But, as they say, a foolish mind is the consistency of small hobgoblins, so I can break my own "rules" if I want to.

Six Wakes may well have been a book that I picked up on sight at the bookstore without knowing anything about the author, but then maybe I had heard some buzz about it before too. The idea of the amnesiac clone having to solve a murder mystery on a spaceship sounded interesting, for sure. Amnesia stories are often fun.

But there's a lot more to it than just that. There's the whole backdrop of a society that has introduced cloning, and had to deal with abuses of it. On the very first page it spell out the "Codicils" that limit legitimate uses of cloning. You can't have more than one clone of a person active at the same time, for instance; only the most recent is considered a legal person. You can't "hack" the clone's body or its mindmap to fix or change things. (This book uses the version of cloning technology which leads to an actual adult clone body--unless you're cloning a child, I suppose--3-D printing it from Lyfe-brand organic matter, and then initializing the mind with a "mindmap" of its progenitor.) You also can't put someone else's mindmap into a clone, and you can't kill yourself just to be recloned. One expects to see cases where each of these has been broken by the end of the book.

Anyway, we start on board a ship full of cryofrozen human (non-clone) bodies, run by a crew of six clones for the long trip to their destination planet. The clones find themselves all being awakened into a ship in chaos--gravity off, dead (and years-older) copies of their bodies floating around, the ship's AI barely functional, and mindmaps that don't have any memories after the launch of the ship. One of them seems to have committed suicide; one of them is actually not dead but in a coma. Decades have passed, and they can't find any logs or data files to tell them what happened since they launched. Oh, and all or most of the crew are criminals of some sort or another, who have taken this one-way trip off Earth in exchange for their slates being wiped clean.

So it's not just one clone having to solve all the deaths; it's more like Clue, perhaps, the movie version, where one or more of them is the murderer. It's also kind of like Hyperion, or maybe "Reservoir Dogs", as we periodically get flashbacks to the earlier lives of each of the clones, what crimes they may have committed, if any, and how they ended up on the ship. These backstories paint in large swaths of a society where the introduction of clones was not a smooth process, and they are still opposed by many. And many of them are linked.

And as for the "six wakes" of the title…well, you'd think that it would talk about the six clones being awakened at the beginning, but you'd be wrong. That's just the first wake. The second wake is when the AI is brought back online (only a minor spoilers). I'm expecting another wake to be the survivor waking up from their coma. And maybe one or more of the frozen humans being revived? Hard to say. And of course it is still a murder mystery, so they have to find clues, and fill in the story, and, like the boardgame Clue, any one of them could discover that they themselves were the murderer.

There were some points where one or more of the characters was annoying monomaniacal (like a Connie Willis character or something), but all in all I found it a satisfying read. It looks we also have one of her other books, Infinity Station, so I'll put that on my to-read shelf now.

Josiah Bancroft: The Hod King, completed February 18

This is the third book in the series, the second of which I read in December 2023, so I already blogged about that. I might have had to special order this one but it was still in print, which is probably a good thing. The series generally follows a schoolmaster named Thomas Senlin, who is visiting the Tower of Babel with his wife. They become separated, and he tries to retrieve her, going through the lower levels of the Tower, learning a few things and acquiring a few friends. He finds out about the Sphinx, the mysterious person at the heart of the Tower, and the hods, the slave class of whom many are dedicated to the Tower's downfall.

The second book, The Arm of The Sphinx, is more of an ensemble book. This one starts out with several chapters of Senlin on his own, but returns to his friends in later chapters. I'm not sure it's necessarily served by doing things in that order, since we double back in time to cover the same period from different points of view, often leaving the previous character in jeopardy. But in the end it's reasonably satisfying, even if it takes a while to really get to the titular subject, the Hod King. Plus there is a bonus sapphic romance, if you like that sort of thing.

One thing I find interesting/puzzling about the worldbuilding is how many of the characters seem to be, well, mainly British in name and outlook, although many of the place names in the world outside the Tower (which are mostly just mentioned in passing) are more Babylonian in nature.

Now I guess it's time to look into ordering the last book, The Fall of Babel. Presumably this will end up with everybody speaking different languages or losing common knowledge or something. Who knows.

Edward Willett: Worldshaper, completed February 22

I've met Ed Willett, a science fiction and fantasy author from Saskatchewan, several times by now, at various SF conventions, and it's possible he could pick me out of a lineup; I've read a number of his books. A few years ago, to help promote this series, he started a podcast called "Worldshapers", where he interviewed a number of SF and fantasy writers from all over the world, mostly talking about their particular writing process, and I listened to a number of them. Of course, he also spent a few minutes in almost every episode talking about this series, so the basic idea of it was familiar to me long before I started reading it. Which is not necessarily a good thing, because that means a lot of the book almost feels like rehash to me, like reading a book after seeing the movie trailer or something.

So we have Shawna Keys, living a happy life with her own pottery studio ("Worldshaper", ha), a hot boyfriend and great friends. Until she finds herself being stalked by a stranger, then assaulted by other strangers, her best friend killed--and then rolls time back, though she can't bring back her friend. Mysterious stranger is Karl Yatsar, who tells her she actually shaped this whole world, even if she can't remember that for some reason. (It's just a little off from our world, with things like Eagle City, Montana, the HiPhone, the ebook publisher Orinoco Direct, and the National Bureau of Investigation. And Canadian Prime Minister Sawyer.) The Adversary has copied her link to this world, so she has to flee, and try to gather up other worlds' knowledge to bring to Ygrair, creater of the Labyrinth of Shaped Worlds. Karl and Ygrair are unknown quantities, but the Adversary is clearly a bad guy, so Shawna goes along with Karl, trying to escape and learn to actually use her Shaping powers consciously.

Throughout, Shawna has what one might consider normal human reactions to learning that she practically created everyone she's ever known, and to whenever her attempts to Shape things end up killing people or driving them insane. She also keeps making pop culture references that go over Karl's head, implying that he hasn't been up on the mainstream since approximately 1900.

Mostly the book feels by-the-numbers, but things do tend to go a little differently towards the end, as they head for the portal to the next world, and things there are a little weird. I already have the next book, Master of The World, and I know it's about a world inspired by Jules Verne, so I guess I'll see how that works out.

C.J. Cherryh: Well of Shiuan, completed February 25

If you're a normal person, when you think "well" you probably think "water". If you're a Wheel of Time fan, when you think "Shiuan" you'll probably think of Siuan Sanche, and you may recall that before she was the Amyrlin Seat she fished a lot, and so you might also think of water. So when you think of Well of Shiuan, you may think of water. And you'd be right. Because this book is very, very wet.

We start the book with local native Jhirun, a girl who lives in the increasingly flooded area of Hiuaj (south of Shiuan). They tend to subsist as fishers and gatherers, but sometimes they also go a bunch of barrow-raiding, since there are a bunch of barrows around from the time after human kings took over from the khal (this world's name for the qhal, apparently). On her way back from a spectacular find, she encounters a mysterious horseman, who forces his way into her clan household with his axe and his horse; she helps him out, which does not endear her to her family, and she ends up running away. Then she encounters another mysterious horseman, and his white-haired friend, which is when I realized that the first one was actually Vanye's possessed cousin Roh. We then switch to Vanye POV, because apparently we do get both of them. (No Morgaine, though, I imagine.)

Then things happen: There's a lot more water, rain and flood; Vanye and Morgaine get separated, and Vanye has to deal with Roh and the local qhal-descended nobility; there's family squabble and parricide. Then Vanye and Morgaine get reunited, the barrow-folk rise up, castle fall and animals die (sorry), they wait for floodwaters to recede, then they try to follow. This is all still from Vanye's POV, and I got a little frustrated by it, because I feel like there could have been opportunities for Jhirun POV.

At first I thought, okay, Vanye and Morgaine will get separated, but Jhirun will end up with Morgaine and we'll get Jhirun POV for whatever happens with Morgaine. But no, Jhirun ends up with Vanye. (For a little while it seems like they're going to sleep together, but they don't.) One of the barrow-folk who has been helping Morgaine is a guy named Fwar, who, from Jhirun's POV, we know is her presumed husband-to-be, and a right bastard about it. Do we get any Jhirun POV to show her reaction to this, to show her hiding from the guy or having to confront him? No, we don't. I don't think Vanye or Morgaine ever even find out about it, though Fwar certainly seems to get his comeuppance for unrelated right bastardry. Then a bunch of people cross through the Gate/Well to the next world, so I think maybe Jhirun will continue into the next book. But no, Jhirun is one of two named characters who don't go through the gate, stay behind and presumably perish with their flood-(and-earthquake-)riddled world. We do her POV in the extraordinarily brief "Part Three" as she resolves this. So I feel like this book has some weird structural flaws. Perhaps it would have been better as a longer book with more room for those extra scenes. But I guess at the time it wasn't an option.

Leaving that aside, though, the plot is decent. Roh remains unresolved (as is the question of why he still seems to retain a lot of Vanye's cousin's personality, despite the mind swapping), refugees from this world are going to end up in the next one to complicate things, and there is the beginning of some sexual tension between Vanye and Morgaine. (There was only one bed! And a horribly destructive sword between them!) I don't know if Morgaine even got to close the actual Gate or if that is going to have to wait for Fires of Azeroth. (And I was thinking…this book is very wet…next book says fire…are we covering all four elements here? Was the first book earth or air? Probably nothing to it.)

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I had received the latest Yuval Noah Hahari book, Nexus, for Christmas. I've enjoyed the previous books of his that I read, so this one seemed like it might also be worthwhile. It said it's a history of "information systems", which sounds interesting to me. And the first half was pretty good--talking about information technology like stories, and books, and newspapers and radios. But… In the second half of the book, Hahari starts talking about AI, and computers, and he seems to have some severe misconceptions. He's granting them intelligence, even without consciousness, and decision-making abilities. I really think he's got the wrong end of the stick about the whole thing, blithely confusing computers, algorithms, and "AI". I mean…he talks about the bloodshed in Myanmar as a result of the Facebook algorithm. Sure, fine…but saying that the algorithm "decided" to show inflammatory posts is a case of extreme anthropomorphism. Someone at Facebook coded that algorithm, and it makes decisions using heuristics they built into it; someone designed it, someone deployed it…those people can all be responsible for what the algorithm has wrought. But "the algorithm" itself has no independent existence and no volition. AI can be a threat, but it's a threat because of the people who use it, the people who choose where it gets used, the people who decide to trust it (and/or the people who mislead others about how trustworthy it is). He's worried about Generalized AI when all we have is Generative AI. He does have some points about people misusing AI tools, but it's people misusing them. Not AI starting to develop their own society, AIs running countries and discriminating against humans. As an AI pundit, he makes a decent historian.

#Mira Grant #Newsflesh #C.J. Cherryh #Morgaine #Mur Lafferty #Josiah Bancroft #The Tower of Babel #Edward Willett #Worldshaper #Yuval Noah Harari #books #reading

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