A Cautionary Tale Applicable to Our Present World

The Year of Jublio! by Joseph T Major
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It's long been theorized that John Wilkes Booth and his convicted accomplices were in fact part of a much larger conspiracy aimed at wiping out as much of the Union government as possible. This novel of alternate history is based upon the idea that, not only was this true, but it succeeded almost completely.

However, the author does not immediately present us with this scenario. Instead he begins the novel some years later, when our protagonist is a youngster growing up in a United States that superficially looks like the Gilded Age US we know from history books. Except weird little things keep popping up, such as the references to Lincoln as "Father Abraham," and being spoken of as though he were still President, yet also being referred to as having been martyred. Only slowly do we learn how Lincoln's assassination was part of a decapitation strike that wiped out the entire Line of Succession, leaving the surviving senior Union government officials in a position where they had to somehow maintain the function of the Executive Branch, but none of them had any formal standing to assume the Presidency.

Much like Aleck in the author's Alternate World War II series, the protagonist of this novel is American-born but with strong ties to the UK aristocracy, being heir to a baronetcy. As he goes to England to receive an appropriate education and subsequently becomes an officer in the British Army in the Boer War and then their equivalent of World War I, he watches the land of his birth go deeper and deeper down a rabbit hole of obsession with seccesionism and slaveocracy.

I do not believe that the author intended this novel to be allegorical of any Primary World government (although certain actions are strongly reminiscent of the former USSR, particularly under Stalin, albeit with the Cult of Personality focused on a martyred President rather than a living Leader), but it is certainly a very applicable warning against the dangers of becoming obsessed with an enemy long after the defeat of the nation it represents. And most of all, the danger of erasing or rewriting history, as the alternate America does in reducing every leader from the Revolution to the 1860 election to nameless ciphers, as if Lincoln personally masterminded and led every success the US ever enjoyed.

Review copy provided by the author.

View all my reviews

Zilbrant the Traitor by Catherine Mintz
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I originally started reading this novel as the family was coming back home from Christmas Eve service at church, and intended to read it piecemeal over the next several days. However, when I got back to reading it the next day, I ended up spending pretty much all day on Christmas reading it, even when I'd intended to do some other projects. I just couldn't keep myself from reading "just a little bit more."

I originally met Zilbrant in Ms. Mintz's short story "Earth Ashes Dust" in the anthology Past Future Present 2011. When I read it, I initially assumed that the author was unthinkingly using the trope of the Medieval peasant village recreated In Space, since such things are not uncommon in space opera. But as I read further in the story and learned about the history of the Varr, of the initial hostility of many humans to their creation and the consequent wars with atrocities on both sides, I reinterpreted the crushing poverty of Zilbrant's family's village and the religion that seemed deliberately designed to keep them down as a case of vengeance being more valuable than economy.

When I found out that there was a novel about Zilbrant, I was immediately interested. The title intrigued me, since she didn't seem to be the sort of person who would willfully and maliciously betray anyone, but she was certainly in a situation in which conflicting loyalties could create one or more double-binds that would lead her to be condemned by one or another party (or maybe several) as a traitor. A situation sort of like "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."

The beginning does not simply copy the original short story, instead weaving in first person narrative threads by two apparently artificial entities, one a spaceship in orbit over Zilbrant's homeworld, which finally has a name and a place in a larger galactic setting that Zilbrant's brutally limited education gave her no way to know. There are also two other human characters' stories, both told in third-person limited POV, one a rebel against the Varr and the other one of their trusted servitors. All these POV's can be a little difficult to follow at times, but it gives us a far broader and more nuanced view of the situation. The Varr are not entirely vicious oppressive tyrants, although their rule is certainly not democratic even on the worlds where the elite has not become corrupt. It turns out that, while the Skalmar religion was indeed artificially created, it was not as a tool of oppression, but as a way of keeping the early settlers of newly terraformed worlds from self-sabotage when the scientific rationales for restrictions on their activities couldn't be culturally transmitted. The Skalmar faith was supposed to be something that their descendants outgrew when the world's ecology became sufficiently established to allow for luxuries, for interstellar travel, not a crab bucket ideology dragging everyone back down.

Perhaps it was too much to hope for our protagonist to break free of her conditioning and move beyond the stifling poverty of her upbringing to go out into the bright and unbounded universe. But it's quite possible that she was right in believing that this transformation, however delayed, still needed a number of generations before their people could view the Skalmar revelations as mere superstition (albeit supported by the judicious, if creepy, use of tech) and roll their eyes at what their ancestors once believed.

Even so, I do want to read more stories set in this fascinating universe, even if Zilbrant has no more stories, just an ordinary life as an ordinary peasant woman.

View all my reviews

Short, but Has a Punch

The Chooser: A Tale of Modern Valkyrie by David L. Burkhead
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don't know whether this novella inspired the meme going around about the child who died fighting off his abuser showing up in Valhalla, or if the novella is a response to the meme, but it certainly digs into the idea, trying to understand what it would mean -- and what it would take for a child to grow into the reward for that moment of adrenaline-fueled courage.

I really like how the author dropped just enough details for us to figure out the ethnic background of young Kamil and his father, but never explicitly stated that they were immigrants (probably refugees) from the Middle East living in one of the Scandanavian countries. By doing this, he's able to keep the focus on the individuals and their choices, and avoids having a whole bunch of political stuff dragged into what is fundamentally a story about a person breaking free of a dysfunctional, abusive family situation and winning his freedom.

View all my reviews

The First Novel in a New Trilogy in a Beloved World

A Sword Named Truth by Sherwood Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I wanted to read this one slowly, because there's so much to savor, so much detail, so many things that link to other books in the same 'verse. But I'd borrowed it from the library, and there were two more people waiting to read it, so I had to hurry through it so it could go back for the next person in the hold queue.

I'm in an unusual position reading this, because I've read some parts of the overarching storyline in various stages from the earliest rough drafts through various rewrites over the years, including material that has yet to see print and may never. So I know some characters by other (nick)names than the ones used in this novel, and some backstory to certain characters and magical objects that I'm not sure I want to mention, lest I snerk something important in an upcoming book.

The book itself starts with a sudden and dramatic political shakeup, the removal of a rotten dark-magic king to the mysterious place outside of time known as Norsunder, a sort of artificial Hell created as a base and bolthole by the aggressors in a long-ago war known as the Fall of Old Sartor. Suddenly there's a power void in Chwahirsland, but nobody wants to move lest Wan-Edhe (literally, The King, reminiscent of several 20th-century dictators whose titles translated into The Leader) should return and be displeased. Jilo, formerly the heir-apparent to the bad king's brother Prince Kwenz, steps into the breach, trying to maintain some sort of forward motion in a land that has lain far too long under dark-magic spells.

Chwahirsland was not a well-liked country back in Banner of the Damned (events of which are referred to several times in this book), but now it has become a dark-magic horror. The comparison to North Korea is rather apt, although magic enables some horrors that even the worst Primary World police state can't manage (paralleling something I contemplated a couple of years ago when I was writing a story based on a bit of backstory and realized that my villain could hardly be distinguished from any of several Rotten Dictators of History, and I needed to think about just what a tyrant could do in a world with Functional Magic). Things like the energy-sucking spell and time-bindings cast over the palace, or the book that traces the movements of people whose names are written in it.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the world of Sartorias-deles, other leaders are responding to the sudden change in the balance of power as a result of Norsunder's decapitation strike on Chwahirsland. It's becoming obvious that, after millennia of waiting and occasionally playing cat-and-mouse games with various countries, Norsunder is on the move, sending its minions wholesale rather than retail. While the older rulers struggle with the concept that the status quo is being upended, a group of youngsters who came to thrones extraordinarily young are forming their own network to defend against these new threats.

And then Norsunder moves, and it's horrifying how fast carefully-laid light-magic defenses are swept away. It's a fight that leaps all over the world of Sartorais-deles, and even to its sister-world of Geth-deles (the two planets are in each other's L3 position relative to their primary, known as Erhal but generally just called "the sun"), where the Norsundrians are trying to steal a different type of transfer-magic after having their old methods forcibly blocked.

And this doesn't even get into the fascinating discussions of morals and ethics, and particularly the ethics of the use of power, or the hint that the original foundation of Norsunder was some kind of eldritch entity of pure hunger for life-energy that came from Outside, and that may have been why the Fall didn't get humanity kicked off Sartorias-deles by its mysterious indigenous inhabitants, who had been ready to do that for far less in the first centuries after humans first settled.

I'm hoping to get it back out once there's no longer a hold queue and read it more slowly and carefully, then write a longer and more analytical review on my book reviewing site.

View all my reviews

A Story of Magic and Peril

Banner of the Damned by Sherwood Smith
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This novel forms a bridge between the Inda tetralogy and the era of Crown Duel and the CJ Notebooks. In Crown Duel, there was a reference to the ties between Remalna and Marloven Hess, going back to when a Marloven princess married into the old royal family. There have also been references in the later books to Indevan's ride into Norsunder with his First Lancers. This is the story of those events.

In the Inda books we saw the Marlovens through their own eyes, but in this, we see them through the eyes of the Colendi, a cultured people reminiscent of Heian Japan or the court of the Sun King at Versailles, but with magic. And by this point magic has become far more common than it was in Inda's era, although not to the near-ubiquity of CJ's notebooks.

It is also the story of a woman on trial: Emras the Scribe, who became royal scribe to Princess Lasva, and who accompanied her to Marloven Hesea (as the country was known at the time) when she weds Prince Ivandred, who rescued her from the Chwair king. Officially, Emras went as a scribe, but the Queen gave her a secret mission: protect Princess Lasva from dark magic, which both the Chwair and the Marlovens had a reputation for using.

A very open-ended mission, with almost no instruction on how to go about it. So Emras does so as best she knows how, trying to learn how magic works. And her very diligence and determination lead her down a path she might not have, had she been given better instruction and been less easily led astray.

View all my reviews

Bittersweet and Poignant

Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It's nice to see a story with a happy, functional family -- a loving couple who've been happily married for decades, with children who've done well in life and bright-eyed grandchildren to spoil rotten. It seems like so many stories these days are about dysfunctional families and dysfunctional people, the more screwed up, the better.

But everything changes when a wonderful gift goes terribly wrong. Many years ago, Sarah solved the puzzle of an alien message -- it was in fact an ethics questionnaire for a thousand people to fill out, covering a wide range of topics about how intelligent beings ought to treat one another and their environment. Now the aliens have sent a new message -- but it's encrypted, and nobody can figure out how to translate the description of a decryption key into practice. It's hoped that Sarah can repeat her previous feat -- but she's now elderly and things aren't as easy as they once were for her.

But technology can fix that -- a rollback, a treatment that resets everything to about twenty-five years old. Yes, it's incredibly expensive, but SETI's biggest patron is a multi-billionaire for whom the cost is pocket change. Sarah accepts, but only under the condition that her husband Don also receive a rollback.

Except Sarah's doesn't work. It's thought that an experimental cancer treatment she took to beat breast cancer may have made fundamental changes in her biochemistry or microbiome that prevent the rollback from working on her. So now Don's biologically a young man while his wife remains elderly and in failing health.

Given that the central focus of the aliens' communication is ethics, it's not surprising that a lot of Don's story is his own struggles with impulses contrary to his own moral compass. I'm not entirely comfortable with how his relationship with one character was resolved -- it felt too much like he got the reward after failing the test -- but then I think of Andrew Greeley's novels, and how he so often wrote about flawed characters failing, then finding their way back to redemption, and how many of them still get to have happy endings.

The ending is happy, in a bittersweet way that's almost impossible to discuss without spoilers. I'd love to see another novel dealing with what comes next, but I could also live with the novel as it stands.

View all my reviews

A Light, Fun Read

Thunderlord by Marion Zimmer Bradley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In many ways I feel that this is more Deborah J Ross's book set in Marion Zimmer Bradley's fictional world rather than a true posthumous collaboration. Maybe that's why I feel less uneasy about reading it, if it doesn't have so much of a shadow cast over it by the very serious questions about MZB's personal life.

Also, it's much lighter than the novel to which it is a nominal sequel. All the time I've been reading it, I've been wrestling with just what I mean when I say that. Most obviously, it has a happy ending, whereas STORMQUEEN is fundamentally a tragedy, the story of spoiled young Dorylis whose Gift came upon her too young, who never learned wisdom or control as a child and thus could not learn it when she needed it.

By contrast, this story starts with adventures of derring-do as the two sisters Kyria and Alayna, travel from Rockraven to Scathfell, where Kyria is betrothed to its lord. But Kyria is kidnapped by bandits and taken to their stronghold, setting off a chain of events and misunderstandings that are only possible in a world where travel and communications are painfully slow. At times the turns of events take on an almost soap opera character, but everything is clearly moving toward a happy ending at the end, when the characters come to their senses and sort out an amicable solution to a longstanding feud. In fact, I could anticipate several major plot twists as soon as the critical elements were introduced.

Its a popcorn book, but not a bad book. Sometimes you want or even need something lightweight and nicely predictable, that you can read without being braced for horrible surprises thrown at you by the author.

View all my reviews