I Never Expected to Like a Political Soap Opera

Emergence by C.J. Cherryh

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This novel is pretty much a direct continuation of Convergence, as Bren facilitates the arrival of Cajeiri's three human associates in Mospheria, the island set aside for humans on the atevi Earth. Meanwhile, things are getting interesting for Cajeiri at his great-uncle's estate as rival claimants of the Ajuri lordship make nuisances of themselves.

When I was waiting for the second meeting with the kyo, I remember how frustrated I was with what felt like book after book of political soap opera among the atevi. I even wondered if Ms. Cherryh had lost her way, if she literally had no idea how to deal with the kyo at the depth it would take, and was just spinning out all these books to try to hold off the inevitable.

But now, with the kyo having made it clear that they want to be good neighbors but no, they do not wish to make themselves fortunate three with humans and atevi, there's no longer that sense of frustrated anticipation. There is the possibility of an unpleasant encounter with the mysterious hostile fourth species (unfortunate four, which is ill-omened to the atevi, although perhaps not in the same way as it is in Japan, whose traditional culture they remind me of), but it's a dark cloud on the distant horizon, just menacing enough that we're happy to keep it far away. This series is a story of communication and learning about the Other, and I'm afraid that having those aliens actually come calling would make it something more on the order of a military science fiction story.

Not to say that CJ Cherryh can't write military sf, because she has done quite a good job with her Company Wars series in the Union-Alliance universe. But it's just too much of a change of tone from what has gone before for me to be really comfortable with the idea of her taking it in that direction.



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Books, Books and More Books

Better than water, water everywhere, which is what our plumbing is threatening to give us. While we're trying to nurse a failing drain along until we can get a plumber out here to work on it, here are some delightfully spooky reads for Halloween.



Rachel and the Many-Splendored Dreamland by L. Jagi Lamplighter

It’s Halloween at the Roanoke Academy for the Sorcerous Arts, and Rachel Griffin is stirring up the dead!

All her life, Rachel has wanted to visit Beaumont Castle in the kingdom of Transylvania, the last known location of her hero, librarian-adventurer “Daring” Northwest. Only falling out of the land of dreams onto her face was not how she had expected to arrive.

Now, the castle is right there, looming over her. Only her best friend, the Princess of Magical Australia does not want to go in, so as to avoid an international incident. But what if the castle holds some clue as to her hero’s final fate?

And who was that mysterious figure hanging by the neck she glimpsed in the dreamlands, just before she fell. Could the Dead Men’s Ball, where the spooks and ghosts of the Hudson Highland gather once a year on Halloween to dance to the music of some very unexpected musicians, be the key to discovering the hanged man’s identity?

(The third in the Rachel Griffin series, which began with The Unexpected Enlightenment of Rachel Griffith and continued in The Raven, the Elf, and Rachel, it will be on sale October 31 for Halloween.)



Cobweb Bride by Vera Nazarian

Many are called... She alone can save the world and become Death's bride.

COBWEB BRIDE (Cobweb Bride Trilogy, Book One) is a history-flavored fantasy novel with romantic elements of the Persephone myth, about Death's ultimatum to the world.

What if you killed someone and then fell in love with them?

In an alternate Renaissance world, somewhere in an imaginary "pocket" of Europe called the Kingdom of Lethe, Death comes, in the form of a grim Spaniard, to claim his Bride. Until she is found, in a single time-stopping moment all dying stops. There is no relief for the mortally wounded and the terminally ill....

Covered in white cobwebs of a thousand snow spiders she lies in the darkness... Her skin is cold as snow... Her eyes frozen... Her gaze, fiercely alive...

While kings and emperors send expeditions to search for a suitable Bride for Death, armies of the undead wage an endless war... A black knight roams the forest at the command of his undead father… Spies and political treacheries abound at the imperial Silver Court.... Murdered lovers find themselves locked in the realm of the living...

Look closer—through the cobweb filaments of her hair and along each strand shine stars...

And one small village girl, Percy—an unwanted, ungainly middle daughter—is faced with the responsibility of granting her dying grandmother the desperate release she needs.

As a result, Percy joins the crowds of other young women of the land in a desperate quest to Death's own mysterious holding in the deepest forests of the North…

And everyone is trying to stop her.



Blood Spirits by Sherwood Smith

Everyone's favorite sword-wielding California girl returns-from the author of Coronets and Steel.

With the man she loves set to marry a look-alike princess, Kim Murray returns to California from the magical country of Dobrenica to heal her broken heart. But family politics soon have her leaving for London, where she is forced into a duel with a Dobrenican nobleman. He reveals that her great sacrifice, leaving Alec, was a disaster. To fix her mistake, Kim returns to Dobrenica, but what she finds there is far more shocking and dangerous than she ever imagined. Not just politics and personalities but ghosts and magic, murder and mystery, await her as she struggles to understand the many faces of love. Once again Kim has to take sword in hand as she tries to make peace and learn the truth. Only, whose truth?

(The sequel to Coronets and Steel, it delves deeper into the supernatural elements of Sherwood Smith's Ruritanian kingdom of Dobrenica).



Steampunk Cthulhu by Brian Sammons and Glynn Owen Barrass, editors

"We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

So said H.P. Lovecraft in the first chapter of his most famous story, "The Call of Cthulhu" (1926). This is also the perfect introduction to Steampunk Cthulhu, for within these stories mankind has indeed voyaged too far, and scientific innovations have opened terrifying vistas of reality, with insanity and worse as the only reward.

The Steampunk genre has always incorporated elements of science fiction, fantasy, horror and alternative history, and certainly the Cthulhu Mythos has not been a stranger to Steampunk. But until now there has never been a Steampunk Cthulhu collection, so here are 18 tales unbound from the tethers of mere airships, goggles, clockwork, and tightly bound corsets; stories of horror, sci-fi, fantasy and alternative realities tainted with the Lovecraftian and the Cthulhu Mythos. Here you will discover Victorian Britain, the Wild West era United States, and many other varied locations filled with anachronistic and sometimes alien technology, airships, submersibles and Babbage engines. But the Victorian era here is not only one of innovation and exploration, but of destruction and dread.

(This anthology includes my own short story "The Baying of the Hounds," which features Gilded Age heroes Nikola Tesla and Thomas Alva Edison).



The Shadow over Leningrad by Leigh Kimmel

In Stalin's Soviet Union, Tikhon Grigoriev lives a precarious life. He knows too much. He's seen too much. A single misstep could destroy him, and if he stumbles, he will take his family down with him. With Leningrad besieged by Nazi armies, the danger has only increased.

He's not a man who wants to come to the notice of those in high places. But when he solved a murder that seemed supernatural, impossible, he attracted the attention of Leningrad's First Party Secretary.

So when a plot of land grows vegetables of unusual size and vigor, and anyone who eats them goes mad, who should be called upon to solve the mystery but Tikhon Grigoriev. However, these secrets could get him far worse than a bullet in the head. For during the White Nights the boundaries between worlds grow thin, and in some of those worlds humanity can have no place.

(The sequel to "Gnawing the Bones of the City," which was published in Fiction Vortex).

If you'd like to have your works included in future promo posts, let me know at leighkimmel@yahoo.com

Crossposted at The Starship Cat Blog and Through the Worldgate.

When They Don't Know Their Own History

I've written before of the problems that happen when writers don't read the foundational works of their own genre in reference to the breathless praise being heaped upon certain recent works by reviewers who seem to never have read Ursula K LeGuin's award-winning The Left Hand of Darkness. But that's not the only area in which it's becoming abundantly clear that the new generation of writers are failing to read the works of the great masters of the genre, and as a result are re-inventing the wheel and making fools of themselves in the process of chattering about how wonderfully forward-thinking they are.

Take for instance the current push to write post-colonial narratives. As I was re-reading David Brin's Sundiver to get a review up, I realized that here we have a post-colonial narrative. It's a world in which humanity went blithely out to the stars, fully expecting to carry out the taming-of-the-west narrative that had been replayed In Space in so many science fiction stories -- and then thumping their noses hard against the discovery that the galaxy is occupied by a civilization of incredible antiquity, that even seemingly empty planets are in fact owned, and the penalties for trespass on fallow planets can be horrific. And it was published in 1980, before most of the current crop of Bright Young Things were born, or at least before most of them were doing much reading of grown-up books that are all words and no pictures.

And he's not even the first classic science fiction writer to posit a future in which humanity doesn't get to just go taking over every planet that takes their fancy. All the way back in the 1950's, Robert A. Heinlein was writing Red Planet, in which humanity has a presence on the Red Planet -- but it is very clearly at the sufferance of the ancient indigenous sapient Martians. And when crooked bureaucrats forget that, the Martian Old Ones are quite ready to kick every last human off the planet and kill those who won't evacuate.

I wonder what they'd say if you pointed these little facts out to them. Wiggle and squirm and try to find reasons that those books Don't Count -- because they're written by white males, because the indigenous populations aren't marginalized and weaker, whatever? I'd like to think that maybe someone out there would have the courage to actually read those books and appreciate them in the context of the time in which they were written -- but that would require work, not to mention an actual historical perspective, when it seems a lot of the current crop of Bright Young Things are adamantly presentist and don't want to hear it pointed out to them.

Which is a pity, really. Yes, old science fiction can be Zeerusty to the point of embarrassment at times -- but it can also be chock full of sense of wonder, not to mention ideas some people would claim have been absent from science fiction until just now.

When at First You Don't Succeed

One thing I really enjoy is watching writers grow. I am far quicker to forgive a failed first story or novel than a clunker by an established author, especially if the beginning writer then follows that problematic first work with pieces that show learning and development.

Recently, I blogged about my frustration with serious structural problems in Pierre Comtois's short story "Alan Shepard's Golf Ball." It had so much promise that I felt really frustrated to see it fall short of the mark.

Thus I was happy to discover that his latest science fiction story, The Future that Used to Be. It has much of the same flavor of nostalgia for the futures imagined by classic science fiction such as the early short stories of Robert A. Heinlein, but this time the setting is firmly here on Earth, in American suburbia.

Joey Ixbee is hanging out at a friend's place, watching classic science fiction movies, specifically an alien invasion story. They're watching it on an old-fashioned CRT TV, the kind that doesn't go dark instantly when you turn it off, but instead leaves a little glowing dot in the middle of the screen for a moment before the electron guns cool down entirely. The kind of TV I spent many hours watching when I was a child.

And the friend's mom shoos both of them outside, where they get to play unsupervised -- yet another suggestion that their TV isn't an older model they're still using because it still runs, but that the story is in fact set some decades in the past, when CRT's were still current technology, when most TV's still had vacuum tubes for all the electronics and transistors were still new and rare. No wonder the kids can play around the neighborhood until it's time to head home for supper, if it's set in a time before fear of kidnapping led to a severe restriction on children's freedom to roam and play outside adult-organized activities.

When Joey gets home, his parents have news -- they are expecting a visitor, and want the kids to be on their best behavior. And then we discover that Joey's family aren't ordinary suburban Americans -- they're in fact refugees from another world, one which is more advanced than our own, and which is troubled, such that his parents decided to come to Earth, to the US. They are literally aliens -- Joey was just old enough to remember a little of the technology they used, the flying cars, the crystal dome house, the total-immersion entertainment cap. But Earth has become home for him, so he's not exactly happy about having a family member from the old world, one who may not share their attitudes about coming to Earth and America.

The rest of the story is about how Joey deals with the  prospect of a visitor from a world he left behind, and how bringing back the old memories affects his relationship with his Earth-native friend, who has no idea he is anything but the all-American kid he appears to be. And the ending does suggest that there could be more to the story, although it works as an ending where it is.

One Good Man

About a year ago an editor at a major publishing house spoke at some length against portal fantasy (the subgenre of fantasy in which a character from a fictional version of the Primary World travels to a magical world, has adventures there, and at the end of the story returns to their own world), claiming that it generally didn't have strong enough stakes to carry the story. This pronouncement led to considerable debate on several online fora, with various people offering titles of successful portal fantasies both classic and recent, from Narnia and Thomas Covenant to Harry Potter and Spirited Away.

Although I was busy at the time with other projects and didn't have time to contribute to the discussion, it made me think of how many portal fantasies I'd read when I was younger, and that yes, a big part of the appeal of them was the element of "you too might get to travel to a wonderful magical world and have Adventures." And remembering some of the ones I'd read in those days made me realize how long it had been since I'd read any.

Even more, I noticed how the real thrust of the discussion was the way in which the current fiction markets did not welcome portal fantasy, or several other genres that involved characters going "too far" from the fields we know. The unspoken subtext was pretty clearly, "write it if you must, to get it out of your system, but be ready to put it in the dresser drawer and move on to something more publishable."

And of course the assumption was that traditional publishing and its gatekeepers were the Only Game In Town -- an assumption that is rapidly being smashed to pieces by the rapid growth of indie publishing. Even just a few years ago, self-publishing a novel was still pretty much an admission that it was unpublishable, and you were a loser as a writer. But within the last few years it has really taken off, to the point that several newcomers have rocketed into success that most traditionally-published writers would envy.

Indie publishing has meant the traditional gatekeepers no longer have the power to say that an entire subgenre is declasse or beyond the pale. If you the writer believe in your story, you can find a platform to publish it on and if readers find it and are interested in it, you will get read. And you'll have real metrics of your writerly success, rather than the often-questionable sales figures of the major publishers with their reserves for returns and the like.

Right  now one of the top serials on JukePop Serials is Kevin Boyer's Dread Lord Bob. With over 2000 +votes, it appears on the first page of stories sorted by most +votes.

Dread Lord Bob is the story of Robert Goodman, an ordinary teenager in Kansas who goes to the library one day, intending to study but ending up messing around, when a mysterious stranger appears to him, giving him a strange glowing orb and claiming to be his steward in some mysterious realm. Bob is skeptical, and Harrak's talk of power, wealth and beautiful women only makes him more dubious. But then Harrak tells him "your people need you" in a tone of such urgency that Bob can no longer refuse. Off he goes to a world where the moon is a huge many-colored disk hanging fixed in the sky and the sun creeps so slowly that a single day is a week of Earth time. (Readers familiar with astronomy will soon realize that the "moon" is in fact a gas giant planet similar to Jupiter and the world to which Harrak has brought Bob is in fact a habitable moon).

Almost from the beginning Bob is struggling to sort out the world on which he's landed and the people he's supposed to lead. It doesn't help that he feels like his so-called adviser is holding out on him, not telling him things he needs to know. Harrak claims he's never lied -- but again and again his answers to Bob's questions are so full of presuppositions that they confuse as much as inform.

Just as he's beginning to get his bearings, the promised day is up and back Bob goes to his familiar life on Earth, with all its conflicts between the football team and his own baseball buddies, and the roses and thorns of the dating scene. And of course the tension at home between his parents and his efforts to shield his younger sister from them.

And then the call comes again, and back he goes to that world of goblins, hobgoblins and elves, of war with the Empire and the peril of the Bound. Since this is a serial still in progress, it appears that he's going to have at least a few more trips back and forth between worlds before the story is resolved.

One of the things I've really enjoyed in this novel is the element of moral struggle, and particularly the ethics of power. Unlike JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, and rather like Orson Scott Card's Seventh Son, it has a strong element of learning to use extraordinary powers in godly ways, for godly purposes. Bob Goodman is older than young Alvin Miller, his character stronger and more fully formed, but he still notes with considerable discomfort the rush that comes with exercising the power of the Dread Lord. Yet he is also aware that he is operating in a world where evil has a real and powerful presence, where whole communities of the people he's sworn to protect are being destroyed in a war he barely understands.

I also find it fascinating to see the underpinnings of science in the worldbuidling. Not only does it take place on an exomoon (a moon of a planet in another star system), but there are also repeated hints that the magic has a technological base that may well involve sophisticated computers and energy weapons, all of which are viewed entirely in magical terms by the locals. For readers who find regular fantasy magic uncomfortably close to occultism, the technological element may make the story more palatable.

And there is the wonderful characterization, right down to the interaction between various minor characters. Some readers may find it challenging to keep track of so many characters, but in a story of this scope (apparently we're not quite to the halfway point of the projected complete novel) the cast is going to be big.

Full disclosure: Kevin is my brother, and the person who introduced me to publishing on JukePop Serials. If you feel this affects my judgment of his work, you are free to discount it accordingly.

First Contact as You've Never Seen It

Michael Z. Williamson has announced that he will begin regular snippeting of his new novel Contact with Chaos on his topic at Baen's Bar, Mike's Madhouse.

I've seen a few early-draft snippets of Contact with Chaos, and it looks to be setting several cherished tropes of the first-contact story on their ears. Not to mention that he's showing a dark side of the Freehold of Grainne, to which he introduced readers in his debut novel, Freehold. Since it's clear in his earlier works that he deeply admires the ideals of the society he has portrayed (minimal government, self-reliance and the development of community on the personal level rather than as a top-down mandate, etc), it takes a considerable amount of artistic courage to show it as having flawed people who can use its strengths in flawed ways, and let the consequences of those flaws play out in a logical manner.

It Doesn't Work Because It Hasn't Really Been Tried

Today is the 91st anniversary of the Great October Revolution (which occurred on October 25, 1917 in the Julian Calendar, which Russia was still using at the time). It ushered in a time of high hopes and utopian dreams that were based upon a system doomed to fail for the simple reason that it runs counter to the fundamentals of human nature.

However, at the same time we live in the midst of millions of successful communistic societies -- ask any exterminator about the resilience of an ant or termite colony. And not all of these are harmful pests, for many familiar fruits and vegetables depend upon bees to pollinate them.

The eusocial insects' societies work because of their reproductive strategy, in which there is only one reproductive, while the others are sterile children or siblings of the current reproductive. As a result, kin selection leads them all to pull together when a society in which all are reproductives would pull apart.

The phenomenon of kin selection also helps explain why what Marx called "primitive communism" can actually work -- the societies involved are small enough that the community is effectively coterminous with the kin group. Since everybody is family, there is a strong incentive to help one another out without worrying about one's own benefit accrued -- a benefit to a close relative is essentially a benefit to one's own posterity.

As a result, science fiction writers have often tried to imagine a society where different reproductive strategies enable communism to actually work on a large scale for intelligent beings. For instance Eric Flint, an avowed Trotskyist in his politics, populated the world of Mother of Demons with the owoc and gukuy, eusocial mollusks who are just beginning to develop cities and a roughly Bronze Age civilization.

But the possibility of eusocial strategies doesn't have to be limited to weird aliens in a universe that includes the ability to modify human beings at will. The Borg of Star Trek have used cybernetic technology to turn themselves into a hive society with a single Queen who seems to serve as much as a controlling brain as a mother of all living. Less grotesquely but still rather disturbing, the First Family of Patrick Tilley's Cloud Warrior and its various sequels are portrayed as being the genetic source of mass of the populace of the Amtrak Federation, who are apparently sterile.

And Charles Stross in his fascinating, almost surrealistic Missile Gap
suggests that the Communists, faced with the enmity of eusocial insectoid races, may well have resorted to transhumanism to realize their own ideals in one or more iterations of human history found on the giant disk.