Review: The Last Hour Between Worlds

The Last Hour Between Worlds by Melissa Caruso
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I've read several of Melissa Caruso's books, and in each case what has impressed me most is her worldbuilding. She creates well-thought-out fantasy worlds and cultures that feel lived-in and real, with a multitude of small details that add up to a fantasy universe you can believe in.

This book is no exception, but I think in this story she takes a welcome step forward in her characterizations. Just the fact of her making her protagonist, Kembral Thorne, a new mother with all the attendant issues (sleep deprivation, leaking breasts, and a body that is still recovering from the stresses of pregnancy and labor) is a breath of fresh air. As the story opens, Kembral is at a year's turning party, this world's equivalent of New Year's Eve, and the first time she has been away from her baby for two months. Strange things start happening, and before Kembral knows it, the house where the party is being held slips into an Echo--alternate reflections of the Prime world that get weirder and more dangerous with each layer. Kembral and the rest of the characters come to know this well, as over the course of the book they slip into the deep and deadly unknown Echoes, eleven layers down.

This is obviously the author's spin on Fae and Faerie, although in this book they are called Echoes and Empyreans. The turning of the year is a big deal for the all-powerful Empyreans, as whoever names the new year as the clock strikes midnight is set to gain a great deal of power. Because of this, various Echo factions are playing a dangerous game to see who can win the right to name the year-turning, and Kembral and the partygoers are dragged into this deadly game. Most of them end up dying over and over again as the house sinks deeper into the Echoes, and Kembral has to ally with her nemesis, professional thief and con artist Rika Nonesuch, to save the party attendees and her city. And she has to do it by midnight.

This structure of an hour steadily advancing with each successive Echo the characters fall into ratchets up the tension and suspense (which is cleverly marked by succeeding chapter headings advancing five minutes for each new Echo). Kembral and Rika become unwitting players in the Empyreans' game, and they have to prevent the factions from slaughtering the partygoers in each Echo and reaching the bottom layer with a winning blood sacrifice that will enable them to name the year. They succeed in knocking some factions out, but others still remain, down to the last and eleventh Echo. Along the way, Kembral and Rika, who have a complicated history that is gradually revealed, come to terms with what happened between them in the past and set the stage for a new, possibly romantic relationship going forward.

This is a very well paced book with some nearly unbearable tension in the later chapters. The worldbuilding is wonderful, and the characters have depth. I think this is the author's best book yet.

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Review: The Fourth Consort

The Fourth Consort by Edward Ashton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Edward Ashton writes fast-paced science fiction thrillers that tend to have a fair amount of psychological depth, and this book follows that pattern. We have what might be a bog-standard first contact story gone wrong, but then the author gets into themes of alien/human culture shock and a culture clash built around opposing concepts of honor and loyalty. It all serves to lift the story above what might have been cliches in another writer's hands.

Dalton Greaves is a bit similar to Ashton's breakout character, Mickey Barnes of Mickey 7, in that he is the designated "ground-pounder"--the muscle, in other words, protecting the two other crewmembers, one human, one alien, of the combination explorer/science vessel/first contact scout the Good Tidings. The Good Tidings is representing the Unity, an interstellar federation that is working to bring any sentient species it encounters into its fold. Unfortunately, the Unity has a rival, the Assembly, doing much the same thing (if with quite a bit more of almost religious fervor). On the newly discovered planet of the minarchs, the Unity and the Assembly clash, and Dalton is dragged into a mess of galactic and local politics.

Set in a near-future where representatives of the Unity have contacted Earth and take some specific people off-planet, signing them to contracts of exploration for a certain number of years in exchange for returning home very rich (if they survive) Dalton is a perfectly ordinary (if a bit unsettled and drifting) protagonist. He's very practical and pragmatic, and adapt himself to the increasingly weird situations he finds himself in. Just after contact is made with the minarchs, a ship of the Assembly arrives to try to steal the Unity's thunder. Boreau, the alien commanding the Good Tidings, attacks the Assembly warship, cripples and destroys it, and is himself vaporized, leaving behind Dalton Greaves, his crewmate Neera, and a "stickman," an alien warrior of the Assembly, seemingly abandoned on the planet. Dalton and the stickman, who later names himself Breaker, must band together to survive in a situation which escalates to scheming and murder. Dalton is pulled hither and thither between several conflicting sides, and must walk quite a tightrope to make it out alive.

Along the way, we explore the psychology and culture of both Breaker and the minarchs, and follow Dalton's sometimes deft, sometimes clumsy, and mostly desperate attempts to thread the needle. He is forced into becoming the titular "Fourth Consort" of a minarch queen, First-Among-Equals. Needless to say, he has no idea exactly what this entails, and gets ever more embroiled in court politics. Along the way, Breaker (who is a bit of a philosopher) has repeated discussions with Dalton to try to understand humans (Breaker calls humans "prey animals," and thinks Dalton does not have the slightest understanding of how a sapient apex predator--the minarchs--think, and he's right). The book's climax comes down to a fight to the death between Dalton and a minarch he names Scarface, and Dalton saves himself by hurling a spear through said minarch's throat.

(I think this is the first book I've ever read which asserts that what sets humans apart is not their warlike tendencies, or opposable thumbs, but their shoulder joints:

"You see that?" Stonebreaker said, and swung his shoulder around in an easy circle. "That is why we own this world, my friends. That is what we have that no other animal on this planet has. Your shoulder is the most complex large joint that evolution has ever produced, and it allows us to do something that no other creature we have yet encountered has figured out how to do: throw, with power and accuracy. When a lion decides to take down a wildebeest, she has to do it with teeth and claws, and she has to brave the horns. Do that enough times, and you're likely to wind up dead. Us, though? Ever since we figured out how an atlatl works, we've been able to kill at a distance. That means we can kill literally anything, from a rabbit to a mastodon, with minimal risk to ourselves. If you're looking for the one thing that sets us apart from everything else, well, that's it.")

This book doesn't give the aliens the depth and complexity of, say, an Adrian Tchaikovsky, and it's written in a lightweight, breezy style. Still, it has a plucky narrator and enough of a philosophical edge to hold the reader's interest.

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Review: The Martian Contingency

The Martian Contingency by Mary Robinette Kowal
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The first book in this series, The Calculating Stars, won the Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novel. I loved it, and thought it was one of the best books I read that year. There have been two more books since, The Fated Sky and The Relentless Moon, and I rated both of them highly. Now this fourth book in the series focuses on the Second Mars Expedition, twenty years after the events of the first book.

This alternate history takes place in a world where an asteroid strike in 1952 wipes out much of the east coast of the U.S. and sets the world on a path of accelerated climate change (although many of the little news stories at the beginning of each chapter, with their various natural disasters, sound like they were ripped from today's headlines, which is a horribly depressing thought). After a brief change of protagonists in the last book--The Relentless Moon focused on Nicole Wargin, one of the best friends of Elma York, the hero of the first two books; Nicole is now the US President--we are back with Elma and her husband Nathaniel, twenty years older. They are on Mars, trying to build the settlement that will allow as many people as possible to live offworld, and having to solve a nasty mystery that strikes at the heart of the racism and sexism still prevalent in this alternate timeline, as it is in our own.

Elma and Nathaniel's mature relationship takes center stage here, as it did in the first two books featuring them. They are older and perhaps more fragile than they once were, attempting to reconcile themselves to making Mars their home. For a time, Elma becomes the commander of the Goddard, the spaceship orbiting Mars, and has to wrestle with her own feelings of inadequacy regarding leadership, even as she makes a momentous decision to allow one of the Martian crewmembers to obtain an abortion after an unplanned pregnancy. (The idea of Earth, hundreds of millions of miles away, trying to control this woman's body and life, is even more enraging, if possible, than our current US politicians doing it.) She also has to face the fact of Nathaniel's health problems, which causes a strain on their relationship that has to be worked through.

As always, the amount of research the author puts into these stories is incredible (just wait till you get to the "fruit pull-up repair"). The contrasts between the Earth and Martian calendars, and the Earth day and Martian sol, also play a big part in the plot. At the end, both Elma and Nathaniel realize Mars is their home.

This series brings back the "sensawunda" of classic science fiction, while providing a stark warning of what we're doing to our planet in this timeline. It is one of the best ongoing series of recent years and well worth reading.

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Ten More Bodies Than You Actually Need--Mickey 17

 

I've read the book this film is based on, and while I realize print and film are two very different mediums and what works in the former won't necessarily translate to the latter, there is something to be said for trying to preserve the coherence of the original book if possible. That didn't happen with this film, I don't think. 

That may have something to do with the director, Bong Joon-Ho, and his instincts for social satire, which were ramped waaaaaaayyyy up in this movie. Well, he did pay for the rights, and he can write his film however he wishes. The question is, is this a good movie in and of itself, or in comparison with the book? 

I'm not sure it is, by either metric. 

First, to enumerate the good things: Robert Pattinson is excellent in this film. He plays against himself in portraying both characters--the sweet, earnest, dimbulb Mickey 17 and the murderous, assholish Mickey 18--and pulls off both characterizations. (The director added ten more clone-deaths to the total, for no reason that I could see, given the book is called Mickey 7.) Steven Yeun is also good as Mickey's "best friend" Berto--Timo here (although I wish Mickey's punching Berto out at the end had been kept from the book). Naomi Ackles was okay as Nasha, even if she wasn't given all that much to do, and the director definitely pulled his punches with the three-way sex scene.

And then there's Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette. 

Look, those are two fine actors, especially Toni Collette. The problem, for me at least, is why they're there. Kenneth Marshall was the commander in the book, but he definitely wasn't this failed former Senator and thinly disguised Trump clone (which maybe isn't fair, as this movie was obviously filmed long before the election). Their whole over-the-top storyline of husband-and-wife cult leaders colonizing a "pure white" planet (which made me wonder how the African Nasha and the Asian Timo even made it on board the ship in the first place) was a very ill-fitting and clumsy slather over a straightforward sci-fi first contact story. 

Which would be fine if the satire was worth the extra slather. However, I don't think it was. Toni Colette's character is obsessed with making "sauce" for her dinners, and ends up chopping an alien appendage to do so. This is not only disgusting, it's dangerous--I mean, let's chow down some alien DNA without investigating what it's going to do to the human body, why don't we! Meanwhile, Senator Marshall is trying to con sweet-talk his colonists into starving themselves and practicing abstinence to make the colony work (a bit of business that had way more play in the book, but which is pretty much glossed over here). In the final confrontation with the alien pillbugs called the Creepers, Marshall leaves the colony ship to meet the leader and gets blown to smithereens by Mickey 18, attempting to stop the imminent war between the species. Again, this is not what happened in the book--Marshall is alive at the end of the novel, and Mickey pulled off the con of making him think the Creepers had taken the nuclear bomb that was supposed to end them, to force a detente between humans and Creepers. And in the book, there was nary a chopped-off Creeper tentacle to be found. 

So it sounds like I'm saying "read the book, don't bother with the movie."  Well, from a science-fiction viewpoint I am saying that. I think this would have been a far better film if the original plot points of the two Mickeys struggling to hide themselves and both suffering from starvation, and the escalating tensions between humans and Creepers, had been more closely adhered to. At the same time, I know many people love Boon Jong-ho's commentary on classism and capitalism in his films and his instinct for social satire. 

In this case, this makes the book and movie Mickey 7 (and again, the extra 10 Mickey deaths were simply unnecessary) two very different animals. Overall, this is probably something that Snowpiercer did better (while spawning a very good TV series to boot). Robert Pattinson's excellence in the title role notwithstanding, this film fell a little flat for me. But if you like black comedy and your satire very over-the-top, you probably will enjoy this.

Review: Future's Edge

Future's Edge by Gareth L. Powell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've read quite a few of Gareth Powell's books over the years, including the excellent Embers of War trilogy. This book is a standalone, and a satisfying one at that--everything is wrapped up quite nicely. Not that I have anything against series as long as the author can sustain the worldbuilding and characters, but there's also something to be said for a book that makes its point and brings the story to a natural, concise end. POwell's books tend to run on the lean side; this one is only three hundred pages. But it has his typical grand canvas of a space opera, reaching billions of years into the past and hundreds into the future, with an ordinary protagonist--an archaeology student--who finds she is holding the future of the human race in her hands.

This is Ursula Morrow, and the book opens two years after the near-extinction of humans, caused by a extradimensional alien species called the Cutters who appeared on Earth two years before and laid waste to the planet. The Cutters, for unknown reasons, hunt down sentient spacefaring species and wipe them out (thus providing a nasty answer to Fermi's paradox). Ursula, along with other surviving humans, have taken refuge on a planet called Void's Edge, at the furthest end of the "tramline network," the pathways through underspace that this universe uses to travel faster than light. But everyone knows this is only temporary, as the Cutters are coming. New tramline ships are being constructed and sent out, loaded with refugees, to traverse the massive interstellar void close to the system and hopefully out of the Cutters' reach. But those ships are only available to those who can afford them, and Ursula, running a makeshift bar in the refugee camp, cannot.

As we find out in the very first chapter, just before the Cutters decimated Earth Ursula was on a xenoarchaelogical dig with her boyfriend, Jack. This was a new relationship, and Ursula being young (she was somewhere in her mid-twenties), she was distracted by thoughts of Jack at a crucial moment. The dig had found an alien artifact, and Ursula took off her glove and touched it--and was infected with an alien parasite. This parasite didn't seem to harm her; in fact, it gave her superstrength and made her well-nigh invulnerable. After weeks of tests, she was released from isolation--just as the Cutters came to Earth. Jack got her on one of the last transports out and joined the Interstellar Navy. For the past two years he has been conducting a guerrilla war in Earth's solar system against the Cutters, on his sentient warship the Crisis Actor.

Now, two years later, Jack has come in search of Ursula, because he believes the object she touched is a weapon and might hold the key to saving humanity. In a very Gareth L. Powell twist (he does love his sentient AIs) the Crisis Actor has a humanlike avatar to interact with the rest of the crew, known as Cris, and Jack has married her.

These three characters spend a not-inconsiderable amount of time working out their relationships and how they feel about each other. However, this does not overwhelm the overarching plot, as Ursula and Jack return to the dig where the object was found, and Ursula discovers exactly what it is and why the Cutters have destroyed every species that advances to the technological point of using the undervoid tramlines. (Short version: the Precursors, an ancient extinct alien species, believes there are entities in the undervoid, Lovecraftian-style monsters from the sound of it, and they want to avoid disturbing them at all costs. That this made the Cutters, which the Precursors created, every bit as monstrous as those entities no one has seen is glossed over a bit, but there's no time to delve further into it. Also, the Cutters apparently caused the asteroid extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs? That's a fascinating tidbit that is sadly not explored, as it implies that some dinosaurs were intelligent and had created a spacefaring civilization.)

At the end, Ursula uses Precursor tech to ferry the refugees of many species across the interstellar void from Void's Edge, where they will build a new society of cooperation and using the tramlines as little as possible.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, although I wish it had been a little longer, so what the Precursors did could have been further discussed. Nevertheless, this is a satisfying standalone story.

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Review: Among Serpents

Among Serpents by Marc J. Gregson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Trilogies are very much a YA thing (although a bit of a recent trend has been a move to duologies--a two-book series--which is most likely a move to reduce costs). Since I am definitely a completist reader, if I enjoy the first of a series I will almost always buy the succeeding books. Even so, a good part of the time second books in a series suffer by comparision, as they have to keep the momentum going without giving too much of the game away for the concluding book.

Thankfully, that isn't a problem with this second book in the Above the Black series, which advances the plot in breathtaking fashion, with some truly magnificent battle scenes that had me clutching the book in fear, racing through the final chapters to see what would happen and who would live.

This is a secondary fantasy world with a strong SF feel--there isn't any "magic" as such, or wizards and/or sorcerers. Indeed, the implication is that many of the huge beasts that inhabit the Skylands are genetically engineered. There is a clash of societies and philosophies, the Skylands with their brutal Meritocracy system and their insistence on gaining power by "rising," which pretty much means stomping on everyone else; and the Below, with their demands for sacrifices for the "greater good" (although the Below Council, what little we see of them, seems as corrupt as any Archduke of the Skylands). The worldbuilding sometimes stretches credulity--the monster our protagonist Conrad of Elise has to kill is called a "gigataun," which is a mile-long sky-floating dragon without wings, and we also have "gorgantauns," which are hundreds of feet long in their own right, and various other kaiju-like beasties that end in "-lon"--but for the most part it is internally consistent. We also find out more about how the Skylands were created, hundreds of years ago when the "Eagle Empire" broke away and used their antigrav crystals to literally lift cities and tear huge hunks of the countryside right out of the ground and float them into the sky, creating islands that the people of the Skylands now live on. Then the black acid clouds were created to keep the Lantians of the Below confined to a wrecked planet and forcing them to live underground in deprivation and poverty, while those of the Skylands hoard all the resources.

Our protagonist Conrad is now captain of his own skyship, the Gladian, and is struggling to balance the brutal way he was raised by his father and the compassion his mother tried to teach him. He is forced into the war with the Below by his uncle, King Ulrich, who had his father murdered and banished Conrad and his mother to the "Lows," the poverty-ridden and downtrodden section of the Skylands. The first book, Sky's End, was a good character study of Conrad, as he found a family in his crew aboard the Gladian and began learning to love and trust others.

With the world and characters established, this book has the opportunity to ramp up the plot and raise the stakes--and wow, does the author deliver. The battle scenes in this book are absolutely stunning, and the pacing is excellent. There aren't quite as many character moments in this book, but Conrad does manage to repair his relationship with his estranged sister Ella and even has a bit of romance (although that element isn't foregrounded, thank goodness--Fourth Wing this is not) with one of his crewmembers, Bryce. Conrad hates his Uncle Ulrich but is forced to work with him to save the Skylands. In the end, the monstrous gigataun is defeated, but Ulrich works a bit of treachery and kills nearly all of his rival Archdukes and Highs--the leaders of the various aristocratic families of the Skylands--thus setting himself up as perhaps a worse monster than the just-defeated gigataun.

This is a breathtaking rocket ride of a book that will definitely whet your appetite for the concluding volume. I for one am not going to miss it.

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Review: Into the Sunken City

Into the Sunken City by Dinesh Thiru
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There's one strike against this book that you should be aware of before going in--most likely people who are strict about the "science" in their science fiction won't like this book at all. That is the initial premise: five hundred years from now, in a post-climate-change environmental-disaster scenario, the Earth is shrouded in permanent cloud cover that dumps constant rain on the world, to the tune of thirty feet a year, with concomitant sea level rise (the climax comes with the characters making a deepwater dive into "Vegas-Drowned," twenty-five-hundred feet down). When you logically ask how a weather pattern could hold like that, the only vague handwaved answer is that the clouds were somehow "fused," in an event called the Stitching.

To put it bluntly, this is ridiculous. I'm sure when some readers hit this so-called "explanation," they threw the book against the wall. I didn't, and I think the reason why is that this story reminded me of the Kevin Costner movie Waterworld, which is equally ridiculous but one of my guilty pleasures. Also, the characters--our narrator Jin Haldar, her sister Thara, and her ex-boyfriend Taim Mazatlan--were much better written than the worldbuilding, and succeeded in holding my interest. Jin in particular works through a lot of grief in this story, over her father's death in a diving accident, and her coming out from under this shadow was sensitively done. Jin's love for her sister, and her willingness to do almost anything to keep Thara safe, made her a moving character to root for.

The dangers and terrors of deepwater diving, and the often-monstrous sea creatures encountered at those depths, were also well depicted. I'm certainly not an expert in that area, and real experts may have considerable bones to pick, but the author seemed to have done enough research to make that part of the story sound believable. I just wish he had put more thought into his worldbuilding and had come up with a scenario that felt halfway plausible. Still, if you can get past that initial hurdle, this is an engrossing story.

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"We're All Stories, In the End"--Recent Notable Short Fiction

                                                                                                 

The first story I read this year made me cry.  That is "Not Lost (Never Lost)" by Premee Mohamed. This is a beautiful story about Voyager, the probe launched from Earth nearly fifty years ago, and the various alien beings it has encountered along the way--including one that lifted it to sentience. But its nuclear power pack is finally running down, and it is facing its own death. Would that we mere human beings could come to terms with our end as nobly as this fictional artificial intelligence. 

I picked up the anthology Alternative Liberties after reading about it on Facebook. The publisher, B Cubed Press, put out a few "alternative" anthologies (named after Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway's infamous crack about "alternative facts") during Trump's first term, and now they have started up again. This book was thrown together hastily following the election, and it shows: to be honest, most of the stories are just so-so, and one has a severe typo/formatting issue that resulted in not only misplaced words, but entire lines.  

However, there is one shining diamond in this mediocre rough, and that is "Diminished Horizons," by Adam-Troy Castro. This story is a powerful exploration of fascism that takes two different paths. At the end, the story turns into outright eldritch Lovecraftian horror, as the protagonist emerges from his prolonged house arrest to find that his front yard, and seemingly the entire Earth, has disappeared into a "thick pea-soup fog." The narrator has no idea if there is anything left, but he has had his fill of "learned helplessness," and steps out his front door anyway. The story ends there with his final benediction: "Fuck them all, I thought, and stepped into the abyss." 

But how he gets there is arguably the most horrifying thing of all, as this story lays out in precise terms how fascism operates, how people are oppressed, dehumanized and everything is stripped away from them, one step, one humiliation and one removal at a time. First it is his freedom, then his books and his movies; then his physical house starts narrowing, ending up as a first-floor hallway with a portrait of Dear Leader hanging at the end, replacing the picture of the protagonist's deceased wife. It's one of the most frightening things I've ever read, even without the fantastical aspects. 

The January issue of Clarkesworld Magazine has two outstanding stories: "The Temporary Murder of Thomas Monroe," by Tia Tashiro (one of my favorite new authors) and "Autonomy," by Meg Elison.

The MacGuffin of Tia Tashiro's story is the "medtag," an implanted device that will resurrect someone from the dead by using nanobots to restore brain neurons. But what this story is really about is the relationship between parents and children, and the smothering and manipulation of the protagonist Thomas Monroe by his mother and father, who are trying to force him down a career track he is totally unsuited for. Finaly, he essentially takes out a mob hit on himself in his attempt to break free. Despite the burst of violence at the beginning, this is a gentle story that has a lot to say about the limits of love.

"Autonomy," on the other hand, is a short, sharp, bloody feminist howl of rage, against men who catcall, stalk and sexually assault women. It involves a code that can turn a self-driving car into a weapon, and it references, among other things, the trans woman Christine Jorgensen and an almost forgotten 80's horror movie, Christine, about a demon-possessed '55 Plymouth Fury (based on, what else, a Stephen King novel, and also one of the first times I ever heard George Thorogood's "Bad To the Bone"). This story is definitely in-your-face with its message, but hell, we need that sometimes.

These stories are all worth your time and consideration, and in Adam-Troy Castro's case, requesting your library order Alternative Liberties so you can read his story (if you don't want to pay for the entire anthology). Hopefully any subsequent printings will correct the errors. 

Not the Dragon of Your Dreams: The Sky on Fire, by Jenn Lyons

The Sky on Fire by Jenn Lyons
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I usually have an uneasy relationship with fat fantasy books that could double as bricks, as in, I actively avoid them for the most part. (Sorry, I don't think I could lift one of Brandon Sanderson's concrete blocks off the ground, much less read it.) But occasionally the concept of a book catches my eye and I have to check it out. That happened with this book, and I'm glad I cranked up my weightlifting and took a chance on it.

First and foremost, if you're into dragons, this is the book for you. They are most definitely not the benevolent mind-linked children of Pern that most of us grew up with; they're telepathic all right, but they're some of the nastiest non-human characters you'll ever meet. In this world, dragons are regarded as (and nearly are) gods, albeit gods with one huge flaw; in their overuse of magic, they have a tendency to go berserk--here called "going rampant"--and need humans to keep them relatively sane. This does not engender a, shall we say, warm and fuzzy feeling between the two species. Specifically, the dragons consider themselves superior to the pesky humans, and resent the necessity of pairing with a rider. Humans are for the most part confined to settlements on seven mountain peaks, called the Seven Crests. Every year children from the Seven Crests with potential for bonding with a dragon are forced to come to the dragon city, Yagra'hai, where they are trained and tested--and in the case of our protagonist Anahrod Amnead, thrown over the side of a floating skyboat when she refuses bonding with the dragon queen of Yagra'hai, Neveranimas.

Anahrod has a powerful psychic talent with animals, and manages to use a flock of "blood crows" to cushion her fall (although she breaks nearly every bone in her body). She ends up living in the Deep, the jungle below Yagra'hai and the Seven Crests, and makes a life for herself far far away from dragons. But seventeen years later, both humans and dragons are hunting for Anahrod Amnead--humans because they have heard rumors that Anahrod stole something from Neveranimas' hoard (although she really didn't); and dragons because Anahrod's magical talent might interfere with Neveranimas' tyranny. There is a revolution brewing, and both sides think Anahrod might be the key to overthrowing the dragon queen.

Once I started this book, the worldbuilding sucked me right in, followed by the characters. This book is told from Anahrod's POV for the most part, thus avoiding another trope of fat fantasy bricks I dislike--a cast of thousands and a chapter seemingly from every one of them. We follow our core group of characters, Anahrod among them, on a quest to steal an artefact from Neveranimas' hoard (for real this time) which turns out to be a dragon "memory stone" that Neveranimas has been using to deliberately make dragons go rampant and consolidate her power. There's a lot more to it, of course, including a key draconic character from a hundred years ago, the former ruler of Yagra'hai, Ivarion, who went rampant and has been sleeping on an island in the middle of a lava lake ever since. The climax involves Anahod flying the dragon of her lover, Ris, to the Cauldron where Ivarion sleeps and attempting to awaken him--and awaken him to sanity, reversing his rampancy, so he can reveal what Neveranimas has done.

(One interesting thing about the author's worldbuilding is that her dragons have the typical four legs and two wings--but other creatures of this world, including the fifty-foot titan drake that Anahrod is bonded to in the opening chapters, are also six-legged. It's a seemingly small detail that definitely increased my appreciation for the story.)

This book is not all heists and dragon fire--there is also a bit of philosophical discussion about the stories both dragons and humans tell themselves, stories about gods that are revealed to have never really existed. At the end, Anahrod and her two partners Ris and Sicaryon (polyamory is an accepted thing in this world as well, apparently) set out to break down the centures of draconic rule over humans, and create a society where the latter is viewed as equal to the former. This leads to another welcome feature of this book, a storyline that is wrapped up in one volume--although the story could continue if the author wished it, perhaps with the next generation.

In any event, I'm glad I gave my arms a workout and read this book. If you like dragons, I think you'll appreciate it as well.

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Review: The Naturalist Society

The Naturalist Society by Carrie Vaughn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was a breath of fresh air as far as I was concerned. This fantasy/alternate history structured around science and birds, complete with relatable characters that outgrow the limits of their former selves while making you root for them every step of the way, rates as one of the best books I've read recently, and one of the best three books I've read that were published last year.

In this alternate history, magic is wielded by people who follow the discipline of Arcane Taxonomy. This is the art and science of identifying new species of birds and animals and giving them official Latin names, and in the process tapping into the magic of what makes those animals what they are. (For instance, a major plot point is trying to determine how to navigate in the Arctic and Antarctic, by using the abilities of the arctic tern, who migrates between the two every year.) The setting and time period also plays into the story as a whole, as it is set in America in 1880, long before women had any rights. One of our main protagonists is Beth Stanley, an ornithologist, naturalist and arcanist who has developed Arcanic Taxonomy abilities entirely on her own, as women are not allowed to enter the titular Naturalist Society. Beth married renowned naturalist Harold Stanley, who has been passing off her work and research as his. But as the book opens, Harry Stanley dies, and Beth has to completely remake her life.

The other two protagonists are Brandon West and Anton Torrance, another naturalist and expert cold-weather explorer respectively, who are trying to finance an expedition to the Antarctic. They are also lovers, and Anton is of mixed race. All three of these characters are well-drawn and interesting people. Bran and Anton worked with Harry Stanley, not knowing that Beth was really doing the work, and after Harry's death they are drawn into Beth's orbit and realize that she was the one behind Harry's discoveries. The three of them become professionally and personally involved (in fact, they end the book as a polyamorous triad), as Beth struggles to escape both the general constraints placed on women at the time and the specific horrors of her own family. Beth's mother and brother disapprove of virtually everything she does and resent her growing independence, and end up trying to commit her to an asylum. This doesn't last very long as Beth is able to use her Arcanist abilities to break free, but that is the impetus for her to move West to Colorado Springs and leave her old life behind (and also Bran and Anton, briefly, before they track her down).

This entire book is suffused with a love of birds, science, exploration, and discovery, with more fascinating details about birds and other animals than you could ever imagine. (As you may have suspected, the author is a birder herself.) It also is an encouragement for any woman who wants to become her own person and pursue her own dreams. It doesn't have world-shattering stakes as such--the Naturalist Society still exists at the end of the book, even if I rather wanted Beth, Bran and Anton to burn it all down--but our three characters still triumph. It's just a lovely book.

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