Sep 01 2023

The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

I like seeing writers stretching and trying new things. To date, and in addition to her short fiction which I have not read, Mary Robinette Kowal has published a completed series of five Regency romances with magical elements, an ongoing series of space exploration against the background of an Earth slipping into uninhabitability, a (so far) standalone novel set during the First World War in which spiritualism works, and a slightly spooky novella that’s a medium-future meditation on memory and authenticity. The Spare Man is an interplanetary mystery, set in a 2075 in which thousands of people can take a cruise from Earth to Mars for vacation. Permanent settlements on the moon and Mars are established enough that people can travel from one to another as tourists, but they remain in the background.

The Spare Man by Mary Robinette Kowal

All of the action takes place on the International Space Ship Lindgren, an interplanetary vessel that Kowal says in her afterword about the science “is bonkers” and that “no one would actually build. Except a cruise line.” Kowal takes as her main characters a newly married couple: Tesla Crane, traumatized inventor and rich-as-Croesus heiress, and her husband Shal (short for Shalmaneser) Steward, a recently retired detective of some renown. They’ve taken a luxury cabin for their honeymoon cruise, and they’re accompanied by Tesla’s service dog, Gimlet, who’s a Westie.

The Spare Man is an homage to the “Thin Man” movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Kowal works to present an updated version of black-and-white Hollywood glamour in space — banter and cocktails, yes; smoking and a lily-white cast of characters, no. The movies were billed as comedic mysteries, all in good fun with the occasional dead body, and so it is with The Spare Man. I haven’t seen any of the movies, so I can’t speak to how far the parallels go, or how well Kowal translates the style to another era and to interplanetary space. I could tell that she had fun writing this story, and that came across even when her leading couple were terribly inconvenienced, if not in too too much danger. There’s a cocktail recipe at the start of each chapter. Some are traditional, some were made up for the book; some are alcoholic, some are zero-proof; all appear drinkable. And on the Lindgren, practically every hour is cocktail hour, at least for the rich and investigative.

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Aug 31 2023

The Queen’s Favourite Witch #2: The Lost King by Benjamin Dickson & Rachael Smith

The first volume of The Queen’s Favorite Witch turned out to be an unexpected surprise, combining historical fact with an empowering tale of believing in yourself, and ending with a shocking twist. I’m genuinely impressed with how Benjamin Dickson and Rachael Smith have continued this series with a book that, while not as big on plot twists as the first — and in fairness there are still a lot of twists here! — is certainly as fresh, smart and delightful.

Which are all words that could also be used to describe our heroine Daisy, the court-witch-in-training in the retinue of Queen Elizabeth I. Under the supervision of court magician John Dee and his assistant Valentyne, she does her best to learn the skills she’ll need not only to serve her monarch but to help her survive in desperate circumstances. If only Lord Globbard would stop filling up all her free time by insisting she exorcise the East Wing of Richmond Palace to his satisfaction! She’s pretty sure the wing isn’t actually haunted, even if she has started having weird dreams of a ghost asking her to help find the person who murdered him.

Meanwhile, Queen Elizabeth herself is fending off her advisors’ insistence that she marry and provide an heir. The queen well knows that marrying will subjugate her to her king, who could very easily sideline her despite the excellent job she’s done running the country to date. But she finally concedes that there’s no harm in arranging for King Phillip of Spain to come visit, as a friendly gesture between nations whose relationship perhaps isn’t at its best.

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Aug 29 2023

Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain by Amy Jeffs

Long-time readers here will know that I’m a huge mythology aficionado, so when I say that this book taught me so much that I didn’t already know about the history and myth of Britain, that is no mean feat!

The book started out pretty roughly, for me, as I tried to settle into the somewhat unusual format. Each chapter begins with a quote, then tells a myth from the history of Britain, usually accompanied by a woodcut, followed by commentary from art historian and academic Amy Jeffs as she retraces the steps and locales of the story. The chapters begin with the very earliest known myths regarding the way the rocks of Stonehenge were brought from Africa to Ireland by giants, following Geoffrey of Monmouth’s 1136 assertion linking Merlin to the Bible. For those of us whose exposure to British myth pretty much begins and ends with King Arthur’s Court (with bits regarding Boudicca and Roman legions thrown in for spice,) this is a pretty wild tale. Given too that it mostly takes place in not Britain, its inclusion puzzled me. It would soon enough prove to be an essential building block for everything that comes after.

Storyland continues on from this time between Genesis and The Flood, going through pre-history, the birth of Christianity, and on through the Middle Ages, as warring nobles seek to reinforce the legitimacy of their claims by tying themselves to divine right a/o to civilizations even older than Christ. It is fascinating to see the tides of conquest flood and recede as Britons, Scots, Danes, Angles, Saxons and Normans — and other factions I’m definitely forgetting — battle over the island now known as Great Britain, spinning tales of righteousness and propaganda as they go, tales that survive to this day.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/08/29/storyland-a-new-mythology-of-britain-by-amy-jeffs/

Aug 28 2023

Dino Lab by Anson Montgomery

a Choose Your Own Adventure in the Dragonlark series for younger readers, so no death endings (tho the one pterodactyl ending was pretty ominous, IMO!)

I love the CYOA company’s kid’s line, which makes the classic game books that much more accessible, to both younger readers and the squeamish. I’m a big fan of interactive books, and Dragonlark allows kids to get into the subgenre without worrying about or being suddenly confronted by any bad endings. It amuses me how the slightly more advanced books actually do celebrate death endings on their covers, as their readers have most likely grown into that gruesome stage by then. My kids have certainly gotten there, clamoring for horror movies and other scary entertainment. Fortunately, books like this still serve as a welcome respite from the creepy stuff they consume otherwise.

My kids and I actually read this book together on a family trip this past weekend. Hilariously, my 12 year-old and I both got the same ending on our first, separate pass-throughs. My eldest 9 year-old twin was mostly interested in all the different dinosaur lore, as he is the most science-minded of my kids, so he really appreciated the section on dinosaur facts included in the back (my youngest is still not much of a reader, alas.)

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Aug 27 2023

Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 by Andy Horowitz

If you worked for a while in an oil refinery in Louisiana in, say, the mid-1980s (as I did), part of your orientation was hurricane training. The briefing I attended noted that there are two places on earth where the combination of low elevation, coastline shape, concentrated population, limited escape routes, location relative to wind circulation, and a broad stretch of shallow water combined to make a hurricane strike extraordinarily dangerous to human habitation. One is the coast of Bangladesh. The other is New Orleans. Which is why when then-President George W. Bush said that the effects of hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans couldn’t have been foreseen, everyone who knew the first thing about the city knew that that Connecticut Yankee was telling a Texas-sized lie.

Katrina: A History 1915–2015 by Andy Horowitz

Andy Horowitz knows far more than the first thing about New Orleans, and he uses that knowledge judiciously in Katrina: A History, 1915–2015 to tell not only the harrowing tale of the days in 2005 when the long-feared day finally arrived when a hurricane’s fury overpowered the city’s defenses, but also the long before of how those defenses came to be inadequate as well as a decade of partial reconstruction. He manages all of that in fewer than 200 pages of main text. Starting early gives him room to tell a story of construction as well as destruction, and how intimately both were tied to economic and political power.

He deals more kindly than I would have with people who asked, in the aftermath of Katrina, why the city of New Orleans even existed. The Mississippi River basin covers a vast swathe of the United States. As long as there is oceangoing trade, there will be a port at the first practical place where ships from the high seas can meet river traffic. That’s New Orleans. Such fundamental facts of geography open up basic questions that Horowitz examines in detail. And when disaster strikes, people “reckon with fundamental questions: what should they try to save, what should they try to leave behind, and who should decide? Who deserves help, why, what kind, and from whom? What caused the disaster in the first place? And what does this disaster mean for the next one?” (p. 12) As for distinguishing “natural” from “man-made” disasters, Horowitz takes the position that “there is no such thing as a natural disaster, because who is in harm’s way is the product of political decisions and social arrangements.” (p. 13) In other words, a product of history, and thus a proper subject for a historian.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/08/27/katrina-a-history-1915-2015-by-andy-horowitz/

Aug 25 2023

Der Zauberberg by Thomas Mann

Thirty years ago this spring I read half of Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) during travels in southern Europe and stopped when I was no longer spending long stretches of time on busses or ferries, waiting for same, or otherwise doing the things that young people do when they have plenty of time and little free cash. I also caught up with friends I had made somewhere in Greece who had taken their copy of Foucault’s Pendulum with them back to Hungary before I could finish it. So I traded Mann’s mountain for Eco’s erudition, and never really went back.

A thirty-year-old edition of Der Zauberberg by Thomas Mann

I did leave a nice crisp 100-drachma note (about 30¢) on page 516, so I would know exactly where to start again if I ever returned to Mann’s story of a Swiss sanatorium in the early years of the twentieth century. The page itself is nothing special: it’s not the end of a section, much less a chapter, of which the thousand-page book has only seven. It’s just where I happened to stop on the last day when I read any of The Magic Mountain for the next three decades.

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Aug 22 2023

Giantess by J.C. Deveney & Núria Tanarit

The Story of the Girl Who Traveled the World in Search of Freedom. Translated from the original French by Dan Christensen, with localization by Mike Kennedy.

This feminist fable follows the discovery a giant baby girl in a secluded mountain valley. The farmer who discovers her takes her in to be raised as the youngest child in a family that already consists of himself, his wife and their six sons. The farmer’s wife is thrilled to finally have a daughter and names her Celeste. Her six brothers, all with distinct personalities, grow just as fond of their sister as she does of them.

So she’s devastated when the years pass and each boy grows up and leaves their isolated home. Her father refuses to even think of her leaving to explore the wider world beyond their farmstead, in large part out of fear of how she’ll be treated by the rest of humanity: not merely because she’s a giant, but also because she’s a girl. When she comes across a smooth-talking peddler, she’s thus easy prey for his con artist ways, and embarks with him on a journey that sees her enduring the worst of her father’s fears, but also attaining greater heights than anyone in her family had ever dreamed.

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Aug 18 2023

Ballet Bunnies #1: The New Class by Swapna Reddy & Binny Talib

I came home last night to discover that someone had stuffed my Little Free Library with ten assorted children’s books to go with the adult mysteries I usually carry. I wonder if I’m the only person who arranges strictly by size when it comes to their LFLs? I wasn’t a huge fan of how my otherwise generous benefactor shoved the books into my neatly arranged and curated shelf, but after sorting everything by size — which meant that kids book and adult books sat neatly next to one another; I’ve always read both and see no need to segregate them — I decided to keep this cutie for myself. And honestly it was the perfect book for me to wind down my day with, a cute story with even cuter illustrations, combining two of the cutest things in the world: children’s ballet and magical bunnies.

Millie is very excited to start ballet classes at Miss Luisa’s School Of Dance. Alas that she gets off on the wrong foot with her class’ queen bee, Amber, almost as soon as she walks in the front door. To make things even worse, she swiftly discovers that she’s woefully behind everyone else, and that neither her teacher nor most of her peers have a huge amount of patience for this.

After class ends and everyone else leaves, a distraught Millie wanders the studio while waiting for her mother. A noise from the curtained stage causes her to come across four magical bunnies in tutus. The Ballet Bunnies are not only very kind to Millie, but also offer to show her how to properly do the steps she was having trouble with in class. As Millie’s mother finally arrives to pick her up, they anxiously ask whether they’ll see Millie again next week. Given the rough time she’d had in class that day, Millie genuinely doesn’t know. The Ballet Bunnies will have to do their best to restore her confidence and remind her why she ever wanted to take dance lessons in the first place.

This is an extremely cute children’s chapter book that features diverse and adorable characters as a matter of course. Binny Talib’s expressive art perfectly compliments the text, with lots of pinks, purples and pastels to perfectly match a story about kid’s ballet. Swapna Reddy’s story is surprisingly realistic, with its depiction of mean kids, dance teachers who are definitely better at dancing than teaching, and tardy moms. I also loved Samira, the fellow student who 100% did the work Miss Luisa was supposed to.

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Aug 17 2023

Cla$$war (Vol 1) by Rob Williams, Trevor Hairsine & Travel Foreman

with, in my opinion, extremely important art continuity provided by colorist Len O’Grady. A transition between artists can feel really jarring, but Mr O’Grady did a spectacular job of keeping things consistent, such that I wouldn’t even have noticed a different artist on my first reading if I hadn’t already known that going in.

And while technically this is the first volume of Cla$$War, the rest has yet to be written. Will it ever be? Never say never, but I’m leaning towards no, given that the series first appeared in 2002, with the last three issues of six coming out a full two years after its debut.

That said, how do you top a book so sorrowfully prescient, that helped pave the way for not only monster cultural hits like The Boys but also demonstrated how the Internet would enable the world’s ongoing disillusionment with politics, particularly American? Sure this title seems like a natural bridge between relatively mainstream books that began to seriously question power in the real world, like Ultimate Avengers and The Authority (heck, even WildC.A.T.s), with more cynical explorations of how power is misused, a la The afore-mentioned Boys. More importantly it captures that turn of the 20th century era in American history when the public’s eyes were opened to the shocking overreach of our government. From the drug and illegal arms sales of the 80s, to the Wag The Dog expose of the 90s, onto Dubya’s copious missteps, this is a book that directs an unflinching eye at American politics in all its messiness and lies. It probably helps that this was written by a Welshman who had no illusions about this side of the Atlantic: it’s genuinely hard to think of any American in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 writing so honestly on these topics. It also probably helps that Britain has a much better history of skewering politics through comics than we do, as Alan Moore’s widely acclaimed V For Vendetta masterfully shows.

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/08/17/clawar-vol-1-by-rob-williams-trevor-hairsine-travel-foreman/

Aug 15 2023

The Ultimate RPG Campfire Card Deck by James D’Amato

subtitled 150 Cards for Sparking In-Game Conversation.

This is an interesting world- and character-building tool that, as with any tool meant to spark conversation, relies heavily on the participants to make it a success. I can see this kind of deck going over well with play groups that are interested more in collaborative acts of imagination than in hack-and-slash survival competitions or numbers-oriented dice chucking. You’d think that would be the majority of players, but the kind of openness and vulnerability involved with being honest and creative makes a lot of people’s skin itch. Things have definitely gotten better in recent years, especially with the rise of indie games, but lest we forget Dungeons & Dragons started as an intentionally deadly speed run of a war game. Why flesh out a back story and potentially grow attached to a character your Dungeon Master was almost certainly actively trying to murder?

But for playgroups that care more about telling a cool story together as opposed to scoring imaginary points against one another, this is a great way to explore and expand upon characters, relationships and setting, especially if you have the kind of gamemaster who actively listens to players and incorporates their desires into the overarching story. It’s also great for gamemasters who maybe need a filler session in the narrative, as well as for games that don’t require a gamemaster but whose players are interested in expanding on their backgrounds collaboratively.

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