Review: Dreadnought

Dreadnought by April Daniels
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dreadnought is a combination superhero/coming of age/trans coming out story, and the final element is the best. Our protagonist Danny Tozer's struggles against the people who want to oppress her and deny the reality of who she is are poignant and well-drawn.

That story would have been interesting in and of itself, but it's set against the backdrop of an alternate history/world where superheroes and metahumans are a real thing (and this book excels in depicting the sheer rubble-creating, city-destroying chaos that trails in their wake; honestly, I got to thinking whether it might be better for the world to start nuking any superheroes, bad or good, they come across). Danny accidentally inherits the mantle of Dreadnought, the World's Greatest Superhero, one fine morning as she buys a bottle of polish to paint her toenails, the one expression of her true self she feels safe to display. Her taking the "mantle" of Dreadnought's power alters her body into the girl she has always known she was (although from the description, the mantle actually makes her intersex; she's told she doesn't have a uterus and won't be able to bear children). This completely upends her world, as she is drawn into superhero politics and machinations, and her family life as well, as her nasty father and useless mother try to force her into the mold and body of the son they want.

This is a pretty fast-paced story, taking place over the span of a few weeks as Danny struggles to master her powers, integrate herself with the local Legion of superheroes protecting her city, and reconcile herself to her new reality. Her best (male) friend makes a complete ass of himself over her transformation, wanting to date her now, and their friendship splinters; she discovers another young superhero, Calamity/Sarah, with whom she goes out "caping" at night (apparently superheroes can get by on little or no sleep) to hunt down criminals and stop robberies and such; and oh by the way, she also has to find and stop Utopia, the cyborg who killed the previous iteration of Dreadnought. All the while trying to figure out her powers and attempt to salvage her deteriorating relationship with her parents (who eventually kick her out, saying they "want their son back").

Needless to say, scientifically this entire concept is absurd (during the final battle, for example, Danny flies around downtown at speeds of "two thousand miles an hour"). But the author doesn't hold back, going all-in on their world with no apologies. This makes the reader get invested in Danny and all the characters. At the end, Danny is on the road to accepting herself, both as a girl and a superhero, and the reader is happy for her.

The only knock I have on this book is that sometimes the pacing is too fast and frenetic--I would have preferred a periodic slowing down and a bit of room to breathe. Nevertheless, this is very good, and I'm glad I took a chance on this unknown-to-me author.

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Review: The Fractured Dark

The Fractured Dark by Megan E. O'Keefe
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is the second volume in the Devoured Worlds space opera series, a sprawling saga of (possibly) intelligent fungi, body printing, mind-mapping, and two complicated, damaged characters who nevertheless manage to find each other.

In this future, Earth is being devoured by the shroud, an alien lichen. Desperate for a home for its people, the rulers of MERIT, the five families that control all future technology, are searching out habitable worlds. But these worlds, called Cradles, are being taken over by the shroud as well. In the first book, we discovered that the shroud is being used to combat a mind-controlling fungus called canus. Canus is used to purify relkatite, the mineral nearly all technology depends upon (including the pivotal technologies of body printing and mind uploading/downloading, which takes up a large portion of this book).

Our two protagonists, Naira Sharp and Tarquin Mercator, found out in the last book that canus is in nearly everyone's "pathways" (the relkatite-based body modifications present in printed bodies) and it is slowly, inexorably taking over the human race. Along the way Naira, a former highly trained bodyguard, and Tarquin, the heir to the Mercator family, fall in love. But at the end of the first book Naira sacrificed herself to prevent canus from spreading, and she was reprinted and uploaded without her last few months of memories, including her feelings for Tarquin.

In this book Naira and Tarquin take the fight to canus, trying either to eradicate it or find an uncorrupted new planet for humans to occupy. The story picks up months later as the fight continues and Naira struggles to adjust to her new body and the shadow of what she had with Tarquin. This book is pretty plot-heavy with plenty of twists. Here, however, the romance is ramped up a bit. The thing I really appreciated about the romance was that it is an adult relationship, with actual meaningful conversations:

This was different. This was deliberate. The start of something hopefully long-lasting, in an environment without the pressures of immediate peril. Once again, she was pushing him to reach for her fire, even if it might burn.

He adored her for that, though he'd keep the depth of his feelings to himself.

"Are you certain?" He half expected her to vanish on the spot and for this to have all been yet another dream. "I'm not interested in something casual."

"I know. I'm not sure of anything these days, but I want to try."

After reading many so-called "romances" where the conflicts between the couple could be solved by just sitting down and talking, you don't know how refreshing this is.

The main technology used here, mind uploading and body printing, is quite thought-provoking, although the ramifications are not really dealt with in this story as the plot does not have the room. For this future, this is an accepted, everyday technology, just as the cell phone is to us. But I couldn't help but wonder: when a new body is printed, is it not conscious and aware until the mapped mind is uploaded? What happens if a newly printed body awakens before then? (This might come into play with the "misprints" of the previous book, which are similar to zombies, only they were controlled by the canus fungus.) This tech would also revolutionize society, as anyone can upload into any body they please (although your mind-mapping will take only so many prints and uploads) and in fact Tarquin is apparently trans--assigned female at birth and now printing into male bodies.

But if you are "double-printed" (another body printed and uploaded before the first one dies) your mind starts to fracture (hence the book's title). This happens to our protagonist Naira at the climax and the result is a race against time for her to save the day before she spirals into permanent insanity.

There's also an interesting plot thread being thrown down, in keeping with the series' running themes of identity and personhood, that I hope will be explored in the final book:

"What if the AIs, after they're infected with canus, what if they do understand?" she [Naira] asked. "What if they're not input-output machines after that? This is important, Kav, because if the AIs learn a sense of self from canus, then that means canus has a sense of self to teach the ship. That means we're not fighting something like a pathogen. We're eradicating an entire sentient species."

This book is a bit more convoluted than the first, as that volume was largely confined to one planet and this takes place on several stations and ships. The excellent characterization and pacing hold true for this book, however, and this series is rapidly becoming one of my favorites of recent years.

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Review: Damsel

Damsel is a Netflix fantasy film that takes the "damsel-in-distress" cliche and turns it inside out: Elodie, as portrayed by Stranger Things and Enola Holmes star Millie Bobby Brown, not only saves herself and brings about the downfall of those who tried to murder her, she does it without a romance in sight. She fights the dragon to save her sister, and in the memory of all the other innocent girls who have been sacrificed to the creature over the years. 

Needless to say, Brown is the best thing about this movie. She saves herself through intelligence, tenacity and planning, not so much physicality, even though she wields a sword at the end. (And her character has a fair amount of upper-body strength, as evidenced the first time we see her, when she is chopping up firewood and splitting fairly thick logs in half with an axe. This comes into play with the ordeals that follow, which include her pulling herself out of a cave via a dangling rope and using a crown abandoned by a previous sacrificial princess to climb a cliff face studded with crystals.)

Unfortunately, the plot has a fair amount of holes in it, of the kind which propel the action along fine while you are watching it, but make no sense at the end. For example, the island kingdom of Aurea sends out people each generation to find outland brides for its princes--three of them--because this is the price demanded by the island's resident dragon after a long-ago king slew her three infant dragonets just as they were hatching. This has been enabled by the kings and queens of Aurea for generations, and in fact the hapless Prince Henry, who our protagonist Elodie is unwittingly roped into marrying, protests when confronted that after he has worked his way through his three sacrificial lambs, he will be free to "marry who he wants." This is of course sick, and there is nothing at all redeeming about Henry or his mother the queen (played by a rather wasted, if suitably nasty, Robin Wright)--the viewer is happy to see them get their comeuppance at the end, when the dragon burns down the castle. But I wondered: why in the heck didn't the dragon do that in the first place? 

(The answer, of course, is if she had, we wouldn't have a story.) 

As far as that goes, the dragon is not a terribly sympathetic character either, even though Elodie sort-of befriends her and exposes the deception she has labored under for all those generations. You see, she demanded sacrifices of "royal blood," and to fulfill that demand, the kings and queens of Aurea devised a workaround ritual at each wedding--the new bride's and groom's palms are cut and their blood minged, so when the brides are thrown down into the dragon's cave (and that fall alone, frankly, should have killed them, breaking their legs and/or backs, taking them out long before the dragon got to them) they smelled like royalty. Which is plausible enough, I suppose, but it doesn't change the fact that the dragon has been hunting those girls down and killing them for generations, exacting a revenge far beyond the original offense. (In fact, one scene has Elodie finding a cave chamber where all the previous girls have written their names on the wall, and there's at least thirty or so names there. The cave is also riddled with skeletons and charred bodies. The fact that the dragon is pretty much absolved of all this at the end left a bit of a sour taste in my mouth. The dragon also kills Elodie's father after he changes his mind about what he has done and lowers himself into the cave to rescue her, and Elodie says nothing to the dragon about this. I mean, really?)

Another thing that bugged me is when Elodie went back into the cave at the end to rescue her sister and picks up her father's sword to fight the dragon, the dragon doesn't, you know, stand back and flame her? Instead she allows Elodie to get close enough to do some damage with said sword? I kept thinking, for crying out loud, why are you letting this puny human run up to you? Especially when earlier in the film the dragon pursued Elodie down the cave tunnels and sent gouts of flame after her (which also should have killed her, sucking up all the oxygen). Of course, this was the third act final confrontation, and we had to have a bit of suspense here, but it seemed way too transparent and manipulative to me. 

(The dragon is voiced by the great Shohreh Agdashloo, late of The Expanse--which frankly you would be better off watching than this--and the creature CGI wasn't too bad, considering how much there was of it. The cat-and-mouse scenes in the cave with Elodie and the dragon are well paced and shot, and are the best scenes in the film.)

To the extent that this film impresses, Millie Bobby Brown carries it. Angela Bassett is completely wasted in a thankless role as Elodie's stepmother, which is another thing that bugged me--you've got Angela Fucking Bassett in your movie and don't use her? *headdesk* It was a pleasant enough way to pass a Saturday night, but I'm glad I didn't see it in the theater. It's already fading from my mind, and I'm not going to remember it at the end of the year (unlike, say, Dune: Part Two, which I saw on an IMAX screen and loved). 

If you subscribe to the "stars" ratings theory, this would come in at two. Barely. It was okay, nothing more. 

More Stories I Have Read (And You Should Too!)

 

Apparition Lit is a literary speculative fiction magazine that I did not know existed until a little while ago. Out of curiosity, I became one of their patrons to check them out. This is the first issue I received, guest edited by Brendan O'Brien, and I have to say I was rather impressed. The magazine features speculative fiction, poetry and non-fiction articles. 

In particular, the story "The Plague Collector" by Tom Okafor caught my attention. This story has an edge of horror, but it is beautifully written:

In that moment, the sky wears dusk. The garden freezes, unhearing the buzzes of wild insects with which it is swathed. You look into the garden, chills carve crisscrosses into your skin, and your eyes glint with a salient light as they behold Oke Ala standing fifteen meters away from you in the center of the garden. Your fingers clutch the stalk. She is mighty, tall, and thick; her skin is the black of rich loam; her hair is full, darker than the silence of the night, braided at both sides of her head; innumerable golden rings occupy her earlobes, gleaming with hues alien to your eyes; and her lips shine red like a bleeding dream.

It's also done in second person present tense POV, which is not easy to pull off (although I've been seeing that point of view more and more lately). 

"Everything, Nothing At All, and All That's In Between," by Rebecca E. Treasure, is another story hovering at the junction of fantasy and horror. I don't want to spoil it too much, but the further you get into it the more horrific it gets. But for all that, at the end the protagonist manages to break free from her jailers, and help her friends as well:

She gasps, hesitant, not quite believing. The fingertip of her pinky splits, a little black hair poking out. Fear comes into her eyes and I’m sorry for that, but now they won’t want her--she’s free to want for herself. Up and down the rows, we who would run are freeing the rest.

“You cursed me,” she whispers, but her hand comes up to meet mine.

I nod, helping her from her holes. “Pass it on,” I say.

We are unrooted, cursed, the ruination of their plans. We need only ourselves.

"Bringing Down the Neighborhood," by Bernard McGhee, is more of an SF horror story, about a son returning to his childhood home to see a father who has fallen under the sway of a alien plant, woven with the background of a gentrified neighborhood where the people who have been there for years can't afford it any longer: 

“You haven’t been around much these last 15 years, so you don’t know what it’s been like,” James said. “They all say they want to make the neighborhood better. But they never seem to notice all the people they’re pushing out while they do it. Calling us a ‘blighted neighborhood’ as if that’s something that just happens and now we’re all a disease. Like the people who lived here chose to have the funding cut to the school and the police station; chose to have BunleeCorp close down the warehouse and move all those jobs to Wyoming. But it’s ok. It’s ok.” He pointed to the gray pyramid. “Our friend here came all the way from the Helix Nebula to help us turn it all around. Watch now. You’ll like this part.”

"This part" being at the end of the story, the neighborhood is "de-gentrified," all the other houses old and broken-down (a bit of delicious reversal of fortune, that) and the protagonist's house suddenly new and restored along with the protagonist now having enough money to help all the old neighbors rebuild. 

The final story in the issue, "The City and the Styrofoam Sea," by Mar Vincent, is a post-apocalyptic tale of a rather creepy future Earth:

The city had started it all.

She was hardly old enough to recall the world a different way. Blue sky had been commonplace then,

rather than the rarity it was now. If there weren’t others in the Bunker old enough to confirm this memory, she’d almost believe it a fancy of her own imagination. 

A time before black plumes spewed relentlessly into the sky, and with them the metastatic material—no longer organic or synthetic but a messy mix of the two—which infected the landscape in all directions, devouring what existed, natural and man-made, and repurposing everything into new and illogical growths. Fungal lampposts. Fields of waving copper-wire weeds. Once-suburban neighborhoods gnawed down to slumping cave mouths in a shingle-shale wasteland.

This story definitely has a Last of Us vibe to it, if a slightly happier ending. 

There's also four poems in this issue. I usually find SF poetry to be very hit-and-miss, but these poems weren't too bad. Finally, there is a non-fiction article, "Let There Be Blight," by A.J. Van Belle. In keeping with the issue's theme, this article talks about fungi--in particular "terrestrial decomposer fungi"--and makes what seems like a yucky topic pretty interesting. 

This is a pretty interesting little magazine, as well. You can subscribe here , join their Patreon, or buy the issue at Smashwords. (Just to be clear, nobody from the magazine contacted me and asked or paid me to sing their praises. I just enjoyed their magazine and think they deserve to be more widely known.)

Review: Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 209

Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 209 by Neil Clarke
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This issue isn't quite as good as the previous one, but it has a barn-burner of a story called "Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole," by Isabel J. Kim. She has written very good stories in the past, some of them within the pages of this very magazine, but I think this is the best one I've seen from her yet.

It's an answer to Ursula K. Le Guin's famous story "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas," which is less of a story and more of a thought experiment. The thought, in this case, is a variation on Spock's pronouncement from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan--"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one."

Because Omelas as a city, culture and civilization, you see, depends entirely on the misery of one small child locked away in a room at its base. Everyone in Omelas knows this and either makes an uneasy peace with it or, as the title refers to, "walks away." There have been many replies to/engagements with this story over the years (including an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ), but I don't think I've ever seen one like this. Kim's story pulsates with rage, as she takes Le Guin's original premise and turns it inside out, applying it to today's world and all the things governments, rich people and capitalism enable or overlook to ensure their systems remain running.

The kid was the drop of blood in the bowl of milk whose slight bitterness would make the sweetness of the rest of Omelas richer. Without the kid in the hole, Omelas was just paradise. With the load-bearing, suffering child, Omelas meant something.

And of course, it was true that the whole city literally ran on the load-bearing suffering child in a very real physical way that was not a metaphor. And everyone really liked having running power and no blackouts and good schools and low crime and community-oriented government and safe sidewalks and public transit that worked.

This story hits you like a gut punch. So far, it's the best story I've read this year.

There are two other excellent stories in this issue. "Kardashev's Palimpsest," by David Goodman, is a tragedy/love story that spans literally billions of years in the narrative of Dee and Vee, who were once human and now are "computational matter, wrapped in the hardest, densest materials any species ever created." We follow these two as humans evolve past their biological bodies and are uploaded into a virtual universe, and graduate to self-contained mindships exploring the galaxy. Earth is destroyed and Dee thinks they lose Vee in its destruction; but eons later, the two find each other again, just in time to see the universe winding down...or perhaps being reborn. It's a timeless love story, and proof that for a narrative to succeed, you need characters, not just high-concept ideas.

Finally, we have "Lonely Ghosts," by Meghan Feldman, which tackles the need for companionship and connection, even between machines. Sini is an exploration android apparently abandoned on an alien planet--its last contact with its human minders was thousands of years before. Now, the only being it can reach is CRABB, a megacity construction droid on one of the planet's moons. But Sini has been seeing the ghosts of its previous handlers for centuries and is basically afraid that it is going insane. So it reaches out to CRABB for reassurance, and the construction droid ends up using its last long-range warp packet to bring Sini to its moon, where it has been building a city all by itself for eons. This is a fairly short story, but it has some lovely characters.

On Bluesky, the editor Neil Clarke has this to say about the state of his magazine:

"Round two of the Amazon magazine subscriptions nightmare is shaping up to be far worse than round one. I'll have more to say when I've finished reviewing my math (and maybe looking at Feb. data), but it's not good. Always a good time to subscribe."

Please, think about subscribing to this excellent magazine. I would hate to lose it.

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Stories I Have Read (And You Should Too!)

 Now that we're in a new year and things have settled down a bit in my life (if not the wider world, lolsob), I thought I would start a new series consisting of just what the title says: Stories I have enjoyed that deserve a wider audience. I subscribe and/or am a patron to several genre SFF magazines, and also find links to other stories in my internet travels, so I thought I would lump several of them together every so often and recommend to my readers (*waves*). 

With that in mind, let's look at the January/February issue of Uncanny Magazine.

There are three stories in this issue I really enjoyed. The first, "Do Houses Dream of Scraping the Sky?" by Jana Bianchi, deals with a subject I have had to wrestle with of late in my own life: grief. The protagonist is cleaning out her grandmother's house after her grandmother's death, and both she and the house are struggling:

I put the plastic bags on the sideboard before opening my arms and resting my face against her feverish wall, and House blew her nose by flushing the toilet of the hallway bathroom.

“Hush, now. I’m here. I’m so sorry,” I remember saying, caressing her. The tap started dripping faster, and I strove to keep my own tears at bay. “Yeah, I know, I know. I’ll miss her too.”

As the protagonist goes through the minutiae of her grandmother's life, discarding and sorting and fighting with House over what to keep and what to give away, both of them slowly work through the stages of grief and come to an acceptance, and a remembrance of love for the person who has left them. 

At the end of the story, House--who is a well-drawn and layered character--seems to vanish. But the protagonist picks up one of her grandmother's plants to take with her:

“Goodbye, House,” I said, and closed my eyes. “I love you.”

That night, when I arrived here, I put the snake plant vase in the balcony. I took a shower, I ate something, I played some video game. Then I decided I’d go to bed earlier, and as I soon as I got my head in the pillow—

Precisely. I hear the noise in the balcony, and when I arrived there the snake plant was somehow planted amongst my herbs. When I came back to this very same room, I felt my bed hugging me back for the very first time. 

This is a gentle little story of love, loss, and recovery. It hit home for me due to my own life circumstances, but I know others will appreciate it also. 

"A Recipe for Hope and Honeycake," by Jordan Taylor, takes a different emotional tack: this is the story of Bramblewilde, an outcast fairy who has adopted a human village and is trying their best to fit in with the people around them. But the villagers are uneasy around her, and she is not really trusted:

The villagers heard Bramblewilde’s cart before they saw it. Bramblewilde’s husky voice and the chiming of the cart’s fairy bells wove between the market stalls, which were set up in one of Squire Rothchild’s empty fields. The scent of lavender, likewise, drifted in on the cool spring breeze, twining among the scents of freshly baked bread, livestock and beer, cured meat. 

The villagers turned their heads at Bramblewilde’s approach, and Bramblewilde’s voice dimmed under their stares.

As a harsh winter sets in, and various catastrophes including a fever overtake the village, Bramblewilde struggles with how to help them, since she knows the people would likely not extend their hand in return:

They regretted offering no help to their neighbor with a sickly cow.

They regretted not feeding the children at the gate from their meagre stores.

And yet, had the shoe been on the other foot, what would the villagers have done? No one, they thought, would have helped Bramblewilde.

Surely the villagers deserved whatever hardships they got.

Or did they?

So Bramblewilde consults the sentient bees of her hive (this story, like the last, has great non-human characters) and receives an answer. They whip up the titular honeycake, infused with the magical hope of Faerieland, and start taking slices of it to the villagers. At the end, they visit the nearby Wood, on the border of their outcast Faerie, and discover the god Pan, who gets the last slice of their cake. 

“But look!” Bramblewilde gazed up at the sky. “The sun is shining. And I have brought you something, my lord.” They folded back the green cloth covering the last slice of honeycake. “Perhaps you would like to try a bite?”

“What is it, little one?” Pan asked.

“Hope,” said Bramblewilde.

This is a story of pulling together in the face of adversity and helping one another. I'm sure it was written as a post-pandemic story, as so many are nowadays. It's definitely a comfort read. 

"A Contract of Ink and Skin," by Angela Liu, is the polar opposite of these: it's a short, eerie horror story of death, tattoos, and ghosts, and packs quite a punch. It's also told in second person present tense, which is usually a dicey POV, but this one works:

The earliest versions included uglier things: ground up insect eggs and corroded bronze, but the ink you receive is pure, made only from blood of the Cursed.

They inject it into your eyes first because that’s the easiest way to tell you’re different. The black ink mixed with blue and red, a purplish nebula pooling into the whites of your eyes.

It takes three months for your body to fully heal, but you’ll be able to see the dark patterns within just a few days. The ink aches in their presence, sweating through the pores in your skin, but that ink is your shield, your bridge, your right to a Contract.

As the protagonist is injected more and more with the magical ink, the blood of the Cursed, she begins to separate from the people around her, and see and experience more magical things. The imagery in this story is fantastic and haunting:

The warm threads of ink envelope your throat, tracing the soft line of your shoulders and hips. The black globes of your eyes see them before you feel them. A hurricane of dark light. A taste like cinnamon and electricity fills your mouth. 

No one tells you that the longest night is the night when you are finally offered your Contract.

It’s been three months, and your body has healed, but it no longer belongs to you. The Inked are here to serve, and you will, just like all those before you. This is the Contract of your ancestors, the way they chose to survive the hunger, the love of the Cursed. The cost of peace paid by the ink on the skin.

This story is just under 1500 words, but wow. It's worth the price of admission all by itself. 

Finally, from the Sunday Morning Transport, comes "Rude Litterbox Space," by Mary Robinette Kowal, an SF tale of an intelligent physics-teaching cat who talks via a communications mat. Elsie is aboard a ship approaching an FTL jump gate when she realizes things are going wrong:

Elsie pushed off from the window and went to her communication board, which was laid out on the floor. It was a flexible mat with touch sensors mapped to different words and phrases. Yucky. How could she explain to her valet that the approach to the jumpsite was all wrong? She toggled the board to her science words and phrases, hoping the predictive text could follow this higher level of thought. She pressed: Velocity. Angle. No. Gravity. Strain. Ship. Litterbox.

We follow Elsie's attempts to save the ship and her battles with a ship's captain who views her just as an upstart pet:

“For crying out loud . . . You’re one of them.” The captain’s voice dripped with condescension. “There’s nothing an animal can do better than a person.”

“With all due respect, sir.” Her valet’s voice was chilly with the script she’d had to deploy multiple times. “The Confederation of United Planets recognizes that personhood is not limited to humans. Elsie is a person.”

“It’s a cat.”

But the bridge crew recognizes that Elsie just saved their lives, and bring her tidbits at the end. 

This sounds pretty fantastical, to be sure, but it's based on the real-life exploits of the author's communication-mat-using cat. At Kowal's Instagram, there are regular video snippets of Elsie talking by pressing buttons on her mat. Apparently she has a vocabulary of around 120 words. 

So that's it for this installment. Others will be forthcoming, as I read stories I think should be shared. Thanks! 

Review: Sky's End

Sky's End by Marc J. Gregson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is about a society with stark class divides (the Highs and Middles are the rulers and elite respectively, and the Lows are the serfs) on an environmentally ravaged planet with floating sky cities and islands above a surface hidden by black acid clouds, with survivors Below who construct cyborg monsters and dream of getting their revenge on those Above.

It's a first novel, and as a consequence the opening chapters are a bit rough. The protagonist, Conrad, was born Conrad Urwin and is trying to get revenge on his uncle for casting him and his mother out to the Lows. After he joins the Selection and is picked to join the Hunter Trade--the elite sky-faring monster-hunters--and finishes his training and starts serving on a skyship, the narrative smooths out a bit.

Unfortunately, the worldbuilding is just as rough: it makes superficial sense as you're reading, but you can't think about it too much. (For example: if the people Below can't really grow crops, why haven't they starved to death long before now? And how can they have enough of an industrial society to create the massive metallic/organic Gorgantuan skyserpents and other cyborg critters that bedevil the Skylands? Furthermore, how can a sky serpent hundreds of feet along--and at the climax, one called a Gigataun appears that is a mile long--even move, much less function? And how can floating sky islands have rivers and waterfalls on them? Wouldn't the water just gush over the edge and run dry?)

Ultimately, what saves this story is the characters. Conrad is a sullen sixteen-year-old grieving the loss of his mother, nurturing hate for his uncle, and trying to rescue his younger sister Ella from his uncle's clutches. He is obsessed with "rising," the process of working through one's selected Trade to a higher position in society. He has an absorbing inner conflict--the contrast between his frankly right bastard of a father, who whipped this kid repeatedly in an attempt to show him he has to be selfish and ruthless, and his mother, who tried to teach him caring and compassion. Over the course of the book, he learns to trust in and work with others, and gradually discovers a new family in the crew of his skyship, the Gladian. Another character, Conrad's nemesis Pound, changes from a bully who hates Conrad's family and all they stand for, to a more humble crewmember who knows his limits and is willing to serve on the Gladian alongside his former mortal enemy. The entire crew of the Gladian consists of well-drawn, fleshed-out characters who each have their own journeys, and the characters carry the book through its rough spots.

Along the way, Conrad, Pound and crew discover the existence of those Below, and realize the Skylands are in mortal danger (their capitol, the sky island of Ironside, is destroyed by the aforementioned Gigataun by ripping out its "heart," the apparent anti-grav mechanism that keeps the islands afloat). This portion of the storyline is wrapped up fairly well, but obviously there's a lot more to come.

This book needs better, more thought-out worldbuilding, but it wasn't a deal-breaker, at least for me. I can usually forgive a lot of first novels. Hopefully the next two books in the trilogy will straighten out these issues, as this world has a lot of potential here.

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