Providence issue 4 - a review

Robert Black has a lovely chat with the Wheatley's (Waitleys) and learns though he does not understand how their son (and his brother) was conceived.  In the process we learn a lot more about geometry, the universe, and the redeemer...and Robert takes one country road too many.

The tenderness with which Warlock Wheatley (Wizard Waitley) interacts with his daughter, perhaps redeems their incestuous union, especially when he doesn't remember it - and was acting as a syringe for the cow - with Yog Sothoth as the globes/worlds of the tree of the Kalaballa (the universe itself) forming a halo around his head as he sires his grandchildren/children.

We learn that the redeemer narrative always has 'the crazy grandfather, the white faced mother and the ugly boy'  here Willard (Wilbur) is speaking of himself, but we recall that H P Lovecraft was always told by his mother that he was ugly, and we notice that the Stella Sapienta's 'redeemer' has been a plan in motion for just about as long as H P Lovecraft has been alive in 1919.

So, I think we are going to see, as discussed in my review of #3, the middle ground between the evil cultic 'others', and the evil racist 'normative humanity' in a child born to be a cult force, raised as a racist, who yet harms no one (as Lovecraft did not). If I'm right this is an incredibly hopeful, yet difficult  path for the story - but it's so much *better* than my feared third rater's version (Robert Black meets Lovecraft who rips off his stories and adds racism) that, even though I'm only imagining the through line I'm giving this 9/10.

It deserves 9/10 in its own right for the account in the commonplace book material at the back of how Lovecraft's/Leticia's 'vision' (new horror) is a masterful creation of art, and for the section where the hideous yet always compelling figure of Willard (Wilbur) demonstrates how easily he can manipulate hypergeometry as a child plays with bricks, and Black mishears his age.

[Added if the core of the Colour Out Of Space didn't 'really' evaporate, maybe this is the source of the 'shining trapezium' at the centre of the Starry Wisdom sect in the story 'The Haunter Of The Dark' in which Robert 'Blake' - dies.  Dies I now recall, *after* the death of the Lovecraft analogy in Robert Bloch's story, 'The Feaster From The Stars'. This potential thread perhaps contradicts my thoughts above, but then - redeemers have to die...don't they?]

As I say 9/10.

SOMEWHITHER - by John C. Wright - a review part 3

I've now finished the book.

At 87% through (sorry Kindle makes page number refs hard) - an explanation in the text altered my understanding of the Cainen aeon which is the birth-origin of the hero, so lets look at that first because the author's intent there shows up some wider issues.

The undying creatures of that aeon, whose world is a nightmare of perpetual immortal, rape, breeding,  war  etc - where the still living bodies of ones adversaries have to be buried so as to 'make room, make room' are the outcome both of eating the fruit of the tree of good and evil, and the fruit of the tree of life.  I was wrong in my theory it was just the later.

Unfortunately while the description of the world is graphic and effective - I can't believe in it, either in or outside of a biblical perspective. [I could have believed in it if the entities had no intelligence, hence my theory, but with it I can't accept the premise that there is no possible gain from co-operation.]

Non-biblically, I'm unconvinced by the author's 'given' that there's no reason for co-operation among immortals, and hence never an end to the every being for itself melee.

An obvious good resulting from mutal co-operation for instance is *not being raped* the most logical result I think would happen from an immortal set up 'as given', would be armies of women co-operating to bury the (rapist) men, and an immortal lesbian sisterhood ruling.  [I think it may be telling that immortal women have no 'agency' in the author's Cainan aeon.]

Another obvious good - where offspring are immortal competitiors for whom you feel no affection - after several generations of working that out - is contraception.

Now Wright as a Catholic of course hates this and considers it sinful, but that's not going to dissuade a race of sinful immortals, whose alternative is continual attempted murder/ enforced perpetual solitary confinement. [It's not clear what happens to an immortal buried beyond the compression point of flesh, as their mass and structure doesn't obey conservation of mass laws, but being crushed under the earth forever isn't very nice either.]

In short, this bit of the book fails for me because the consequences of a set of given rules are what the author wants rather than what I think logically can be shown to evolve from the rules he has set in place. This impacts belief. 

Biblically, my problem is - if you're writing a book that takes as its premise that the biblical account is at least mainly true (although the book doesn't imply a short geological age for the flood, nor explicitly does it have a worldwide flood- as it has chinese geomancers surviving it in their lands by deflecting it with dragon energies (reportedly)) - I think you have to cleave to the 'fundementalist'/biblical as much as possible, so when God drives Adam and Eve from the garden in Genesis and sets the angels with swords there to defend it (He only does this in one aeon incidently, ours) - he leaves a humanity which is - if not immortal -  biblically very long lived.  Long before it would fill the world sufficiently to approach the continuous warfare conditions of the Cainen aeon, it's discovered co-operation 'making nice things' (another obvious co-operative good, nice things > shelter and clothes) and set up the foundations of babel - so what stops that Cainen aeon running parallel to that only with immortals? [Co-operation being discovered long before the all vs all collapse point] Only so far as I can see authorial fiat.

This happens also as we head on, with the books' use of vampires (Those Who Quaff Blood Like Wine).  Wright wants to set the rule that the cross works [automatically] as a dynamic symbol of christ's power not of the belief of the wielder - this is let me stress absolutely fine as a given in a  vampire using novel, vampires are often glossed as having an origin in sin, and I can see why Wright doesn't want to go down the 'faith as energy' route [which for instance in Doctor Who sees vampires defeated by faith in the Russian Revolution, or the Doctor's faith in his companions] but there needs to be consistency both thematically for 'vampires are like demons' and for similar issues 'what you believe vs it's God's power/action' Wright's vampires however aren't vampires, they're people from an alchemic aeon who have replaced their blood in part with alchemic silver (?) and lost the part of the soul that makes moral judgements - this in itself is nice invention, but as a backstory, how does it justify the automatic curse of the cross upon them?  Is alchemy or soul-lessness inherently cross invoking, if its not trad vampireism?  We don't know.  Equally in the final battle of the book, Foster Hidden who it is revealed is a worshipper of Odin invokes Odin, and is seemingly as a result empowered in combat. Is that his faith?  Is that God choosing to empower a believer in a false god, because even though Odin is not a real God, the cause and the faith are good (but if so how is that not 'the faith' of the user).  Or is it Odin, but if so what does this do for the 'biblically true' backstory.  If X happens because God ? chooses that it should, how can you tell that your belief that God ? is God Y(the one you've been taught of) is true rather than God Z (Odin)? If a 'real' in the book God can empower an Odin worshipper, how do we know the only 'real' God in the book isn't Odin?  'empowering the Christ worshipper with the cross'.  Once opened this can of worms wiggles both ways.

The first book ends in a rush of quasi-actions and quasi-moral questions that seem only partly thought through (or to be fair, perhaps only partly addressed in this volume - others may follow.)  Is it always right to keep your word to monsters?  Does it matter if you keep your word to one monster and thus be responsible for its killing if you do not defeat it, when your facing a Dark Tower filled with lots of monsters and there's a whole world of ones like the one you've made the promise too?  [Does it particularly matter because you may have given that monster special superpowers when you got it to devour another different monster for you?]

And now we also come to two underlying threads/beliefs in the text which may make this a troubling book for many.  One is Mr Wright's position on abortion - he's against it (which as a Catholic may be expected, and respected) but he seems to regard it as 'so obviously' the telling sin of our world that its practically our *multiversal identifier*  "the world where they kill their children".  Leaving aside whether or not there *are* sins, or whether this *is* one - while I would be willing to read a book in which the angels sorrowfully consider this our problem and/or the actual ethics of the position were addressed, the ball is startlingly fumbled by placing the criticism in the mouths of the masters and lackies of the Dark Tower.  Reading a book in which our table manners are criticised by cannibals may be interesting and make a sly point - but it can also generate disbelief.  I don't find it believable that (if abortion is evil as a given) it would not be used by the Dark Tower rulers to remove predicted malcontents [it could be argued that if they aren't allowed to be born the evil yet working astrology can't predict that they ought to be killed...but the evil yet working astrology has the rules the author sets for it, and it could as easily work from a moment of conception, which moment could itself be predicted when it resulted from lower nature.]  What benefit do they have not to sin; would not the Evil Power pulling their strings want them to be Evil in that respect also?

The other thing is 'female agency' and 'depiction' - all the things done by woman to advance the plot (and being fair there are many) are off stage and rendered secondary by the decision to run a male main character as the sole narrator.  The infatuation of the main character with the heroine isn't checked / amended by circumstances in the first book - I was rather hoping he might see a better prospect and companion and equal in the Monkey-masked thief, but as this book ends it is looking as if the infatuation is being foregrounded as the correct and obvious way to find a lover/mate/wife and indeed to interact with girls/women in general.  I am not sure of this.

[A further aside, both Mr Wright and I have written novels with a Captain No-One in, why not buy my (and co-writer Jonathan Dennis novel) - see page aside! and compare the two.  This is not a co-incidence as we both have Captain Nemo as a source!]

Final summary.  As the first book in a series I mark this as 6/10.  I'd probably read the next book, but I would be doing so in part in hope that some of my issues with arbetary worldbuilding in this would be addressed.  I'd rate it historically as a good 'second' level SF/fantasy - Philip Jose Farmer's world of tiers, rather than his Riverworld.  If it were Hugo nominated in 2016 on its own merits, I'd judge it against its peers but I would be surprised it had been considered Hugo level.  As part of a slate I would probably No Award it.

[Tidied up a bit, clarifications in square brackets.]

SOMEWHITHER by John C. Wright - a review part 2

So if you think for a moment of C.S.Lewis and H.P.Lovecraft (born in 1898 and 1890 respectively) as being the spearcarriers for fantastic fiction with, respectively the christian and atheist world views.  (And I love both their works) John C. Wright is positioning himself here to stand as to C.S.Lewis as Robert E. Howard was to Lovecraft.  (And I mean that as a compliment. There's plenty of room for a writer of 'muscular christianity' - lets see how he does.)

SPOILERS START HERE (note I'm only 85% through according to kindle so some of these thoughts may change yet.)

So, if you can imagine for a moment - a pro-Christian/pro-high Catholic, fantasy work with 'lots' of violence and fighting (all of which is well done, if perhaps rendered a bit passe by the protagonist's "worst superpower ever".  A fosterling from the aeon of Cainen (a timeline where so far as I can tell, the disobedience in the Garden of Eden consisted of eating the fruit of The Tree of Immortality and not The Fruit of The Knowledge of Good and Evil, leading to a race of immortal deathless blunderers, who have no family feelings (abandoning their invulnerable children as soon as they annoy, and no feelings of gratitude - because if you can't die why would be be grateful for someone saving your life) our hero Ilya Muromets, whose been raised on our world and doesn't initially know his heritage, can't die (though he can be injured, and boy can he feel pain). Ilya is sucked (semi-literally) into a war between biblical jonbar hinge timelines, when the universe of the Dark Tower, takes advantage of a mistake in the Super Large Hadron Collider, to seed our world with instructions which will open a gate (morbius loop) which in turn (though the opener won't know this) will give the Dark Tower a bridgehead to invade our world. He's trying to keep a promise and impress a girl.

The narrative voice of a confused home-schooled young man, who's been raised in what you might imagine a household to be like that was headed by a Heinlein patriarch, who's also secretly a Knights Templar tasked with watching where spacetime is a bit thin, and whose wife is trapped in another universe, is rendered fairly well. (One bit sending him out coatless to walk to school in the freezing cold because he won't hang his coat up, is seemingly added just to give JCW a chance to whale on Political Correctness Gone Mad, when the (swearly family hating/well meaning) school authorities turn up, but may also be a hint that IIya is basically invulnerable - I suspect though that JCW just thinks this good old fashioned forceful childrearin' - see biases later.)

IIya's background and youth limits Wright's tendancy to verbosity a bit in the narration, although Ilya is very well acquainted with all the archetectural terms and names for obscure gems a boy might need to describe a Tower three times the circumference of the Earth in height built with a Babylonican design sensibility.  He also seems surprisingly low on biblical accuracy, and high on sf pop-culture referrences, but this is a fine line to walk and if IIya had been too preachy he might well be offputting.

All this is good - I will have some critical points to make later, but given the biases of the author they are mainly about what readers will or won't find sympathetic in the worldview on display rather than the raw quality of the text.

The main philosphic conflict in this book is between astrological fatalism/determinism and free will.  The Dark Tower is run (presumably ultimately by demonic forces) by a system of predictions which, if avoided, redouble in ever more horrrible ways, leading eventually to even Evil Master Magicians basically playing their parts will awful worldweariness as they make the threats they have been predicted to make to the prisoners they have been predicted to catch. This works very well.

While I am an atheist, I share Wright's view that 'higher actions' - he would mean godly ones, I would mean 'rationally considered ones with what A E Van Vogt would have called a thalmic pause - a conscious break between impulse and action' are governed not by instinct or the lower self, but by the effect of the image we have of ourselves in our conscious model (I don't do x (any more) because I'm not (any longer) the sort of person who does x).  With Peter Watt elsewhere stepping up to the plate for aconsciousness, it's refreshing to see the free actions of free individuals depicted as valuable. [I'm willing to argue with people who think actions taken on the basis of a high order model are not free, I think they are so 'free' as to be theoretically unpredicatable by inuniverse computation, but that's a question for a different article.]

(Speaking of A. E. van Vogt, I haven't counted - but it wouldn't surprise me if Mr Wright were deliberately using Vogt's method of throwing in a surprising change or action every 800 words: as this book reads very like World Of Null-A in places, and each chapter has frequent subdivisions.)

Eventually having gathered a party of like-minded warriors and refugues and disaffected slaves and freemen (with their eyes in their chest and no heads) about him, Ilya battles his way to the rescue of the woman he was trying to help in the first place, only to find both she, her pet hawk, and his best friend from back home are also more than they seem.

This is where things break down a bit for me (aside from the biases issue which we'll come to) when everyone in a narrative is really 'a super special secret bearer with a super special secret' the unlikelyhood of the text begins for me to foreground itself, and there are hints in the narrative that some of this has been retrofitted into the text, as the author worked and not really smoothed down enough.  For instance is Professor Dreadful's name that because he was a stage magician or because its the same as what his real name means in his own aeon?

Both are of course possible, and they're not contradictory, but a person working in secret might be less likely to choose a nomdetheatre that means the same as his last name, specially if he's being secret from the Dark Tower whose servants speak the language before babel and can therefore understand every tongue. 

Incidently the language use is quite a good way to drop in exposition about the horrible culture of the Dark Tower.

to be continued....

PROVIDENCE - Issue 3 - a review

Robert Black continues his investigations, has deep dreams and finds his hosts kindly to 'this herald fella'.

Caution Spoilers

Robert sets off for the Bloggs' gold refinery in Salem - passing through the theatre strike and the start of prohibition, as background. All nicely done, and a bit of history (the clash between the theatre owners and the actors union's, of which I was unaware.) It's the 1st July 1919 as the issue starts.

Who are the woman and the child on the train, as he goes, I don't know, but they may be significant or they may be chorally raising a theme that is coming, fear of the unalike, racism in its weakest form, they're going to stay with grandma while the child's father whom we do not see, looks for  'somewhere where there are more people like us, wouldn't that be nice.'

The Oannes look (the Innsmouth look) of those who have cross-bred with the Deep Ones (Sunk 'ems) is prevalent in the folks he meets in Salem, who also include the old man from The Terrible Old Man - who keeps the souls of drowned sailors in bottles, and the unusually youthful giant, from The Picture In The House - who preserves himself by more straightforward cannibalism. He is treated with every courtesy and shown the tunnels from Alan Moore's neonomonicon which already have their orgone accumulation aspect and their obscene graffitti.  It seems obvious that when his hosts speak of him as 'the Herald' they arn't referring to his role as a newspaper man (formerly of the Daily Herald) but of a future role as a 'bringer of the (their) word' the John the Baptist (as it might be) of the Christ (Cthulhu).
[This is the role played by Johnny Carcosa in the Neonomicon, who is also in an earlier dream of Robert's reported in the text of the coomplace book at the back of the issue.]

 The fellowship of Oannes stands in for the Order Of Dagon, as Athol to which he is travelling at the end stands in for Dunwich and Misery maybe stands for Devil's Reef.  The names of the characters echo Lovecraft's as before. This has the same problems as per previous issues, so I won't harp on that again.

The Robert Black = Robert Block(Bloch) link is made text rather than subtext in the hotel, and Robert has a many leveled dream, which conflates future history (the holocaust and the gas chambers) with 'fictional history' which is still in his fictional future (the FBI raids on Innsmouth, here on Salem - as Alan Moore confessed he misapplied the correspondance in the neonomicon, but continues with it here) and the fictional elements of his past (Chambers' 'gas chambers! and exit gardens).  The use of the fill-foot (swastica) as the symbol of those opposing the Oannes cultists reminds us also of the (real) horrors to come.

 I enjoyed this issue most of the three so far, and I liked the other two.  I'm giving this an 8 rather than a 7.

I still have concerns that the ah 'final solution' as to where good and evil lies 'under' Providence will be hard to depict without making a tonal mistep.  On the one hand cultists and bodies of men dedicated to esoteric works, who are clearly shown as being willing to sacrifice innocent victims, on the other hand a movement against them which is tainted with racism and ignorance and violence.  (For another take on this my own: The Temple of Dagon which covers some of the same ground is still available as an e-book from amazon, or for free elsewhere on the net.)  There are two evil extremes of danger here: (1) saying 'well say what you like about racism but it's okay against deep ones' before realising you're going to end up including Jews and Gypsies and Homosexuals as 'sinister cultists' or (2) saying 'well of course human sacrifice, cannibalism, rape-in-orgy, and childhood mutilation* [see the leaflet at the end] are fine if they're 'in the course of a magical/cultural tradition'.  I remain hopeful that as a humanist writer, Alan Moore will show a path through these two horrors and show that the path is 'love', but how he will do so, we will have to wait to see. The love between Zeke Hillman and Negathlia-Lou (and Alan Moore's coinages for Deep One names are marvellous) *could* have served such a purpose if it weren't undercut by Zeke's casual reduction of their interaction to a sexual one in his nudge-nudge comments about 'them island women' to Robert. [Which if it's intended to entice him into the cult is falling on deaf gay ears.]

*That leaflet at the end is a weakness in a supposedly mimetic text, to my mind, in as much as clearly it could never be safely handed to an ordinary human. Of course Black is thoroughly 'surrounded', but even so - it would if taken seriously invite exactly the kinds of reprisals against the Deep Ones mentioned at the end of The Shadow Over Innsmouth.  It's a joke in a metasense (and it is very funny), but it can almost only work in the context of the fiction itself as it its also a joke on Robert Black, specially printed for him, with the others being all 'normal' church business.  It's depiction of a baptism for infants at ten, at which the 'sex-stick is shed' could depict a instar change in the human/deep one hybrid stock - but as a ritual its hard to think Moore does not mean it to chime with the Jewish bar mitzvah at 13, and with more widespread ritual male and female circumcison. 

SOMEWHITHER by John C. Wright - an honest attempt to play the book not the man. Part 1

[Mr Wright has come back in my comments and made a point which I want to acknowledge, sorry I'm only just doing so now - but the comment didn't flag for some reason, or got lost in the hurley-burley.  In any event I literally saw it for the first time yesterday. (14th Feb 2017)

I acknowledge he doesn't just think muslims, atheists, and gay people are going to hell, he thinks everyone is who doesn't receive God's grace.  And I honestly don't mean that as a dig - it is a logically possible proposition that is not necessarily racist, sexist, or homophobic, in itself. 

I believe it to be untrue, because I do not believe in the God so predicated*, but it is not as bad a position as I feared. I have therefore amended the bits of my post below in [ ].
(*neither philosophically, nor biblically).


Edited post.

So what do you do when a writer who has expressed sentiments that strike you as [politically or philosphically wrong], also has an idea for a book that strikes you as having the potential to be brilliant? Do you ignore the book – thereby invisibly dissing the [wrongness]?  Do you buy the book because it looks brilliant?  How far can we disassociate the ‘author’ from the ‘authored’? 

In the case of authors who died before I was born like H.P. Lovecraft – my reasoning is simple, I can’t make him by any action of mine any less racist than he was (though I can note he was less racist by the end of his life than the early years) and I read and enjoyed his work before I knew anything about him. So the work in such cases has the primacy for me. Modern racists are generally not citing him as their inspiration.  He transposes something which is awful when it’s about people into something uniquely unnerving when its about the universe, whereas a lot of his contemporaries went ahead and wrote it about people, and sadly some people still are.  [Note I’m not going on here to talk about racism – that’s an example, its not a stick to beat the author I’m going to talk about with.]

In the case of a current author it’s a bit harder.  I first discovered John C. Wright as a writer, when I read his pastiches / further works set in the world of William Hope Hodgeson’s The Nightland: AWAKE IN THE NIGHTLAND.

Wow, I thought these are great, and the author is being refreshingly careful not to retrofit modern mores over the quasi-antique far far future, which Hodgeson describes through the prophetic dreams of a 17^th century man.  Then it turned out that Mr Wright’s world view was – I think he’ll take this as a back-handed compliment - closer to the 17^th century than mine, and this lead (for me) to a certain dissonance in the later stories. Particularly his last one (both written and chronologically in his sequence), where if I read it correctly the main character is saved because by faith he does the one thing that his whole society is convinced will utterly condemn his soul to ever-lasting destruction namely entering The House of Silence (or its visionary equivalent.)  [Added, which might not matter if absolute fidelity to rules wasn't a virtue in his other stories in the same setting.]

I noted his name anyway with a view to picking up other works in due course, I read a lot and I’m always looking for new writers to try.

At this point the recent row concerning the Hugo awards broke out, and reading backwards into that I found John C. Wright’s blog / journal where among other things the certain hellward trajectory of [much of humanity] is much discussed.  Now I am myself an ex-christian, so you know *I’m damned* but frankly I take responsibility for my own apostasy.

How then can a writer with very strong beliefs play fair with his characters and write well?  Well I’d argue that generally C.S.Lewis and G.K.Chesterton do – though people have raised issues with both, mostly they set out their worlds and depict people within them having the experiences those world’s bring, but they do not – if I may phrase it this way – stack the dice excessively, or require their characters to ‘happen’ to guess the right faith – rather their characters make the choices which are rational given their experiences of a world in which certain faith’s have real objects.  

I next read some of Mr Wright’s HUGO award nominated works (not all of them because I’m not down to vote and hence I’m paying for what I read) and found them more polemic and less helpful than Lewis or Chesterton, with a certain urgent hectoring stridency waiting to break in.  I downloaded the free-sample from Amazon of the beginning of his COUNTING TO A TRILLION series, and found the same issues there. I was about to sigh and conclude that like some other writers, we’d simply never see eye to eye, but:

Then I happened upon a recent post of his – which contained an idea for a book, that looked brilliant – this takes us back to my opening question.  It (looked to me like/was) a multiverse story where the jonbar hinges are not human moral action or every quantum variable, but the decisions taken by God as to whether or not miraculously intervene in space-time. [This might – I thought address such things as – what does it mean for an omniscient, omnicognate, omnibenevolent being to ‘choose’ between two courses of action, my theory is both must be ‘equally good’ or ‘good in different but equal modes’ or else God would being undeceivable, never careless, and incapable of Wrong always choose the ‘best’. Which would be interesting! ]

Around this framework Mr Wright had built and posted on his journal a schema of creatures from the medieval bestiaries refitted as races, each native to one of twenty or so ‘Aeons’ deriving from a different hinge event. I’m a sucker for this kind of complex schematised world-building. This I decided would be my fair test of whether or not I could find new common ground with his work.  The book’s SOMEWHITHER:  A TALE OF THE UNWITHERING REALM.  I’ll be reading it (I’ve bought the kindle version) and reviewing it here in due course.

 (I confess to a slight, very slight feeling that a title should not include both ‘whither’ and ‘wither’ as on saying it rather than reading it creates an aural confusion – but you could cast the same stone at my Brakespeare Voyage which I’ve seen referred to as Breakspear, Breakspeare, Brakespear, or Brakespeer.)

To be continued...  

Faction Paradox - Head of State - Andrew Hickey

As a writer, it would be lovely if my work was reaching a wide audience - if it was part of some great popular series say, or I'd managed to make a name for myself (or a living!).

While that's not true (yet) I can take considerable solace in being one of the writers who's contributed to the Faction Paradox corpus, a line of books (audios and comics) which so far has produced work which has always been excellent, thought-provoking, humane, and jam-packed with ideas and marvels.  I've decided therefore - working backwards chronologically from the most recent, to review [excluding my own] all the FP novels and short stories here (I might do the audios, I no longer own copies of the 2 comics).  Naturally I'm potentially biased, I've written for this milieu since my contributions in The Book of the War (before if you count my and Mark Clapham's Doctor Who novel 'The Taking of Planet 5') and I know many of the writers, respect them as peers, and count some of them as friends as well as colleagues.  I'll try not to let that biase the reviews.

HEAD OF STATE - Andrew Hickey

" 'When the seventh head speaks, the War will end…’
In 11th century Arabia, Shahrazad tells her final story, on the thousand and second night.
In 19th century Britain, Sir Richard Burton is sent on the most important mission of his life.
In 21st century America, a serial killer is stalking a Presidential campaign.
And the hero has been written out of the novel.
‘”…and the true War will begin.’  "


The thousand and second night story of the Arabian Nights, told by the severed head of Shahrarad - recounted in a translation by Sir Richard Burton, is the story of three Wazirs, each of who tells a tale, and the three tales they tell are set to exert a dreadful influence on the lives of the protagonists - for they are a kind of trap, woven across time. 

In the present day (or perhaps slightly in the future) during a US presidential election, and after, a British female, left-wing journo-blogger, and an American right-winger who's receiving messages in the media that he's reluctantly concluded are probably from God, are circling about events they have no hope of understanding, while trapped within the fabric of the book - an entity who is no longer the hero of his own story (even though he considers it too meta to say so) desperately attempts to groom them to fill the gap he's left in the narrative.

Several strands weave, with sinuous grace towards an almost predetermined horror.

I really liked this, and while I've liked all the Faction Paradox books - I think there is a common problem to some of them that this avoids. (On the other hand I think it does have a problem of its own which I'll come to, but it's so minor that it would be churlish to mention it first.)

So strengths:  it's light, it's breezy, it's utterly without some of the 'portentiousness' that sometimes threatens to bogs down the FP books. The cutting between the main narrators, and the nested stories, doesn't impede the flow, as it could have done in less skilled hands and the narrators themselves are ably voiced and individually human.  All of them, even the odiously self-worshipping Sir Richard Burton are developed as real people and have desires and aims that ring true, even as they are manipulated by powers, both seen and unseen.  

You may be of a political persuasion that makes it unlikely you think you'd be able to sympathise with a poorly educated neolibertarian, with few prospects, planning to shoot the President because of the writing on his milk cartons (even if by then the bill-boards are all trying to tell him he's got the wrong end of the stick) but he's trying to do his best in an increasingly maddening world. 

You may be of a political persuasion that makes it unlikely you think you'll be able to sympathise with a less bright than she thinks she is UK blogger sticking her nose into US politics, but you will - even if the voice trying to speak through the narrative edits out her romance subplot - because she sees and understands her errors, and tries too to make the world better, as hard as a real person can.  If that isn't going to be hard enough, that isn't her fault.

It's a joy to read, even if it's not a joy for those trapped within it!

The problem?  It's a perhaps a shade too oblique on why exactly the eventual end should be so catastrophic - although in purely local political terms the speech involved does more than enough, it needs a wider grasp of the Faction Paradox lore to know exactly who is making it, and what an escalation this represents.  Equally the identity of the shift despite there being no explicit statement, and an embedded fall-back in the text (well it could be Sh'vay), risks over-exciting some readers in a way that could draw the attention from what the novel is doing towards a discussion of other things which are strictly peripheral to Faction Paradox.

It demands (I think) if not a sequel - a continuation!  

All in all, though this is an excellent novel - particularly when its both the author's first real extended narrative (though his short work has always been good), and has to stand against novels by Lawrence Miles, Philip Purser-Hallard, Kelly Hale and others. 

Let us welcome a new Cousin.  

PROVIDENCE - Issue - 2 - a review (updated)

Robert Black recovers partially from the death of Lily, and - makes two possible discoveries about things that might lie beneath.

Caution Spoilers

Robert takes leave from the Newspaper telling Prissy he'll be back, and still playing slightly on her affection for him, but - he may be taking his leave completely of journalism to try to seek something deeper, to write his book. In the light falling on him in the first illustration he seems older, perhaps greying at the temple. This is not true of any other depiction of him.

He meets Tom Malone, in Red Hook (the police detective and protagonist of H.P. Lovecraft's 'The Horror of Red Hook'  Thomas F. Malone - who if that story comes true within 'Povidence' is fated to be physically and mentally affected by what he finds under the 'several old red brick buildings after a raid' in Red Hook, when he investigates, more deeply, the case of Robert Suydam.) Here the detective is friendly, kindly, impressed by Robert's erudition, interested in esoteria, and perhaps also gay.  (This is the first concealed thing.)

He (Malone) shows RB the Church underneath which Robert Suydam conducts occult classes - in the background the man going into the church by the upper door may also be the man with the peacock feathers outside Suydam's house later, and the short squat woman with the two men by the lower entrance looks very like the bodyshape of Johnny Carcosa's mother from 'The Courtyard'/'The Neonomicon'. There is an issue about the depiction of the inhabitants of Red Hook to which I'll return in my comments at the end.

Malone describes himself as a 'dreamer' which agrees with his wide interests in Lovecraft's story, and also perhaps suggests a possible link with Randolph Carter and Lovecraft's dreamland cycle.

Re; the Horror in Red Hook - in Lovecraft Suydam, may be the victim at first becoming 'archfiend and adversary' only when corrupted by his contact with the strange cults, here he may already be victimising others, or no one - it all depends on the nature of the second concealed thing...

That is - what does RB see under the cellar of RS's basement flat?

A psychological vision brought on by 'gas' - foregrounded by RB and Malone's discussion of Jung and the subconsciousness as 'caverns' -

A real experience of something like a ghoul (although its skeletal face, hoon hoon cry, and luminous flesh is not a staightfowardly meeping ghoul of the type in Pickman's model, though there are human bones) -

A supernatural experience of a different kind, there is a black lake with a pier whose wooden pillars are carved with marine suggestive curves ? Lilith is mentioned and the guilty RB might still imagine himself chased by a dead vengeful Lily. RS is also self-confessedly interested in the fourth kind of the defeating of death, the revival of cadavaers - and the formula used by Herbert West glows with a phospher like the creatures, at least in the films.

RS seems sympathetic, keen to stress the gnostic rather than satanic nature of Yezidi belief, openly discusses the Book of The Wisdom of The Stars - and its author (who has attributes in common with Lovecraft's Abdul Al-Hazrad, and Bierce's Hali) which would make the book equivalent to the Necronomicon, and yet avuncularly smooth evil is an obvious possibility and the reference to 'more unripe fruit' having arrived in Parker Place with its suggestion of 'fresh innocent victims' made by Corneilia together with her hesitancy and RS's rapid whispering escorting of her away, casts a shadow that remains as yet.  (But it is not 'conclusive' and if we were not as readers, perhaps in a continnua already containing 'The Courtyard'/and the 'Neonomicon' in its future, we might be inclined to give Suydam the benefit of the doubt.)

Japeth Culwen is/suggests Joseph Cuwin from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.  Does RS drop these names to see what RB already knows? Heziakiah suggests the witch from The Dreams in the Witch House.

The statue to the left of RB (our right) in all the scenes where RB and RS talk, is never shown face on, and its head is always concealed, but its body could be that of the cellar creature again.

The scars on the face of the seller of peacock feathers at RS's door could have been made by claws with a spread like those of the cellar creature, and yet he seems happy.

The commonplace book at the back maintained by RB is becoming like Lovecraft's a home for possible horror stories - and the notes as you might expect from Alan Moore are very interesting suggestions for stories - as well as a diary.  RB = protolovecraft?

The leaflet at the back will have to wait until I have a physical copy as comixology won't resolve the typeface for my eyesight. I'll return to this.

What do I think?  I love it - yet I doubt.  All the strengths and weaknesses of issue 1 are still here.
I'm interested in RB, but I'm less interested in him being 'lovecraft-lite' or worse a means of conveying to Lovecraft, material Lovecraft then is (in the world of the comic) given less credit for tranfiguring as art than he deserves. [A story in which, for example, RB eventually meets L, and L rips off his accounts and adds extra racism, would be profoundly unfair and unsatisfactory to me, and while I trust this isn't what Alan Moore is doing, in the hands of a lesser writer it would be a greater worry.]

I'm also still concerned that there is an issue with the pastiching of racism in background depictions of minorities of as grotesques, and of positioning the true defense of minority belief in people (Suydam) who are also 'framed' by the implicit story as perhaps villains/sacrificers of children (in Lovecraft the bones in the cellar as those of children, in the present art the sizes are less clear).  (It might be argued there's no more grotesqueness in their depictions than in the depictions or anyone or in real life, but
it creates a gap between what the narrative says and what the images depict which I am wary of.)
Nevertheless, the lightness, and the shading this casts on the world Lovecraft depicted on the one side, and the real world on the other is still good.
7/10  [I have adjusted this down from 8/10 on a re-read for the expanded reasons above.]

ECHOPRAXIA - Review

Oh hmm, this will be difficult.  ECHOPRAXIA (Second book in the BLINDSIGHT series, second half of the FIREFALL omnibus) is a well written book; its a thoughtful and astonishingly well researched book; it's a worthy sequel to Blindsight (except in one way which we will discuss), but....while it's well worth reading, I think its philosophical conclusions to the extent that I understand them, are about as wrong as any can be, and I can't deny I find this off-putting.

Now normally that wouldn't stop me liking a book but unfortunately the conclusions here are so antipathetic that to me it's not like reading about about the stupidity of reading books, it is reading a book about how stupid it is that we should imagine we are conscious, reading books, and that it is wrong to imagine that we gain any benefit from doing so - at which point, well really why bother?

Spoiler alert

To taken only one aspect, the text of BLINDSIGHT is a narrative voice, that is not only shown to be unreliable by ECHOPRAXIA - it's shown that it must not be reliable - because it is not a narrative - intended to convey infomation - but a hacking attempt on a human brain, consequently its surface accuracy as a depiction of what actually happened to the Thesius is as unlikely to be true as a message about how I used to own lots of money in a Nigerian account, but now need to transfer it to yours is as an account of actual conditions in Nigerian banking. It must be true to the extent that the recipient can not disprove it enough to avoid being hacked, but because we're repeatedly told how rubbish consciousness is at determining such things, that's what exactly - a 1% level of truth based on what can be deduced within the solar system about the Theseus?  A simulacrum of 2% of the narrator? 99% true but the 1% is everything crucial to conceal, because that's what you'd conceal?

[A commentator rightly remarks that we knew, in BLINDSIGHT that the narrator was unreliable, and this is so: but of the three known levels of unreliability (1) narrator is honestly mistaken but reports what he knows, (2) narrator is dishonestly motivated and tells truth as far as it goes and conceals detail later to be revealed outside of narration and (3) narrators entire message is a construct of an alien intelligence with a purpose other than its surface, whose surface may therefore contain any irrelevant level of truth commensurate with (i) verisimitude and (ii) effort expanded in construction (a lie is an energy intensive mechanism)  - I maintain that (3) is such a 'strong' level that where an analogy for it to be encountered in normal life the surface of the text would cease to be of interest (this message is a code, yes but what about the bit around it, well its basically noise or 'packing'.)]

If I'm reading a book the second half of which tells me that the book's account of the first half of the events it depicts [I read this as the two volume Omnibus] is at best a lie, I think it fair to expect that the second half should tell me what did happen.

ECHOPRAXIA doesn't, it shows me what's happening on Earth and latterly in near Sol space, but not anything about the people I thought I was reading about in BLINDSIGHT. [Except that one wasn't suffering from advanced anti-epilepsy surgery but advanced anti-deliberate-zombi-virus-attack surgery.]

Amusingly (I wasn't amused I was semi-angered, but I can see the case...) BLINDSIGHT is not now a novel about teaching us something by depicting characters and a world, it is a thing that teachs us something 'while disguised as a novel about characters and a world'. BLINDSIGHT is to a novel, what the message constituting the text of BLINDSIGHT (in ECHOPRAXIA) is to a truthful account of Siri of events on the Thesis, namely a simulacrum of that with a polemic / reprogramming intent, aimed at the recipients not as an entertainment, or a message, but as a weaponised lesson.

Again this hits the buffers of my problems with Peter Watt's critique of consciousness. When the main character makes [he thinks] a major choice at last, a choice the omniscient narrative - seems to tell me is free - how am I expected to evaluate this? When the entirety of the book is saying differently, that his choice can not be free nor unpredicted by an entity operating at the frankly ludicrous levels of intelligence (albeit unconscious intelligence) as the atomic slime mold that is seemingly (because as I will explain below, things are muddled) orchestrating things. Whether I am supposed to then be glad that he is prevented in his supposedly free aim, or not I can not tell - and therefore at the last I find it very hard to care.  Because, well, wtf.

On believability

Once you start writing God-like intelligences into a book, you need them at least to have an aim that if not understandable, can be mapped to the general reader-int as 'good' in some sense, otherwise you have an omnipotent evil following a bad aim - which can only be uselessly (but bravely) resisted, or an omnipotent irrelevance pushing a might-as-well-as-not destiny, at both of which we can only, finally, shrug, for if its that 'intelligent' and wants 'wot we no not wot' than chances are it will get it. While too powerful an actor makes all the cast irrelevant, it is still possible to cast a narrative where the interest is in the principle of parsimony - the subtle manner in which the overmind/god/AI/aliens move their pawn(s) to produce the end result X.  [Just as human level powerful actors in drama are dramatic in how they succeed, not in whether they succeed. A Holmes story, how will he solve it!]

But in ECHOPRAXIA what the Portia entity or the Angels of the Asteroids, or God 'wants' is so incomprehensible, and its/their plans to accomplish it - whatever it is - so at once 'omnicognisent and 'un-omnipotent'  - it's a mind that can (without being a mind) work out how to build its local agency backwards out of a quantum information channel depositing it atom by atom (in a way glossed over that I do not find remotely believeable) but it can't give its agency when its built any goal that could not have been carried out by something - less unbelievable but slightly slower (and what *is the fucking hurry God?*) or less humane but far faster (why is something that is not a consciousness concerned about the cost in suffering to human consciousnesses - if it even is?  Why not nova the Ort Cloud super-Jovian and fry every conscious entity in the Solar System? If consciousness is a threat?).

Assuming - my best reading on one read, that the atom pattern entity which is sent down the matter-stream from the Ort Cloud - which builds itself into the slime-mold Portia is backed up in its aims by the at-a-distance-reprogramming of Siri's father - what actual benefit for the expenditure does this gain the entities in the Ort Cloud?  The removal of consciousness from humanity - helps them how?  and this is the same issue I had with Blindsight. Simply, I think consciousness is useful - I don't care if Peter Watts thinks it shouldn't be: if it wasn't it wouldn't be selected for. Where is the natural real 'unconscious-species' of hive-humans, where is the zombi subspecies that mimics consciousness outside of its hermit shell houses (and once inside is either dormant or breeding for anything else is a waste of energy). We don't see these in reality, because the book's thesis is flawed. [I'm copyrighting 'hermit zombies' though I can get a story out of that.]  But even if consciousness was an evolutionary flaw in every respect, why would God / Aliens care?

The future depicted remains quasi-possible, right up to the bit with the back-engineered quantum teleportation -  but it is working hard to cease to interest me for it is self-evidently one in which humans of my subspecies - those that imagine they have conscious minds, and imagine that the health and well-being of conscious entities is the only point of action that has a value -  are stupid and quaint.  I can be told I'm worthless without paying for it.

Besides my ego : the real problem of that is where do you stop? Human characters, human hives vampires, the Ort Cloud Angels, the Slime Mold entity, de, dum, de, dum, de, dum, God  If intelligence is a bug in entropy, isn't it even more likely that universes are a glitch in nothingness.  Why should any level of the chain of being care for any other. Why should it matter that God be reconciled to Man, if neither the actions of God, nor those of Man are meaningful. What does it matter if there *is* a God that builds *universes* if nothing in or off universes matters?  Why is a universe of ants, better than a universe of not-ants?  Why is a universe better than a not-universe?  

I know why I think a universe with a model of itself is better than one with not - it's because *I* am a model of myself in a model of the universe, and its nice.

An infuriating book that's head and shoulders over a lot of sf - but which I'm finding it very hard to recommend and which I'll probably only read once more myself - as a fairness check on this review.

[Added material in brackets after online discussion.  The discussion also made me realise I do still want to read anything else set in this world, in the hope that the unclear becomes clear, and the mechanistic becomes conscious.]

THE LOCKSLEY EXPLOIT - a review

This is the second book in a trilogy – if you haven’t read the first, there are going to be spoilers as I set the scene for and review the second.  If that’s a problem go read:

The Pendragon Protocol first – (I recommend it, I did recommend it here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Pendragon-Protocol-Devices-Trilogy/dp/1909679178 )

  

So – as we begin, Jory has left the Knights of the Round Table and is now Robin Hood – and it’s 2015.  This is a history of now, but not our now, but not an aenemic alternative history sketched in with familiar tropes either, nor is this Chivralpunk (if such a beast existed, this would transcend it.)  This is – absolutely – a historical novel, with a wide, enticing, entwining perspective.

Ahead lies history.  The Great Schism, the Battle of Trafalgar, the Seige of Jerusalem – the new Civil War.  The Two Pretenders (Or are they).  The Return of the Pendragon (Or is he).  And there is much death, some unexpected and heart-rending.

Okay, I may have lost the people who infuriatingly still haven’t read the first book.

What do you call a man who thinks he’s Sir Lancelot?   A nutter, right?  What do call an entire society who think they're the Knights of the Round Table?  And if they have the history and social standing and political clout, and martial prowess to back it up?  Well, you may say they’re psychosomatically boosted by socially encoded memecomplexes – and many an expert would agree with you – but if the experts are the new Merlin, and the former Lady of the Lake, can you be certain that’s the whole story?

As open conflict, guarded truce around a miracle, and then civil war, spread across the fields of Britain between the Circle (the Knights) and the Green Chapel (Robin Hood, and his Merry Men) with many an obscurer set of devical memes waiting in the wings, and the other world powers standing back: the book unfolds a history at once marvellous and terrible.  Would I prefer it to this world? - ask me when I know how the trilogy ends, but the world in these books has HOPE, as well as DESPAIR. 

Let me be succinct : ‘this is the biz’.  If you read my review of the first book on Amazon, I said there, I was going for 4/5 because I reconned there was a 5 following – well this is a good 4.7

Why not a 5 – well it’s a trilogy and I want to know how it ends, and I’m making certain assumptions and plots and counter plots in my own head – as all readers who are also writers do – if somethings I’m only guessing at aren’t right I might slip back to a 4.5 – if they are I’ll be whooping at a 5.  Think of 4.7 as a schrodinger’s review until I can see clearly the horizon's fires.

Also, there’s always something – the strength of the Narrator’s voice is a genuine strength, but very occasionally he (not perhaps the author) missteps – and when the opinion of the narrator clashes with the opinion of the reader there’s a mild disconnect, as the reader recalls the narrator is also a character.  This may be unavoidable, it may even be intentional – but its timing didn’t always work for me.  The Narrator criticising the person carrying the device of Lancelot because of / via something the Lancelot in Tennyson’s Lady of Shallott says seemed unfair to me, both because only half of the line(s) were quoted, and because – as the Narrator – ought to know – Launcelot in Tennyson doesn’t have the least idea who she was, or why she died – how can he be expected to give her a eulogy.  What he says is more than the Narrator reports:

But Lancelot mused a little space

He said, "She has a lovely face;

God in his mercy lend her grace,

The Lady of Shalott."

This isn’t (quite) Lancelot being shallow and smitten by beauty, its Lancelot musing on death which ‘timor mortis conturbat me’ takes even the beautiful, and then extending to the dead, the best he can offer, the commending of her soul to the grace of God’s mercy.  Clipping the latter made (me) feel the Narrator was being mean-spirited, and *if* that wasn’t intended then,I think its a slight ‘shading’ error.  But hey – I can find *one* thing to criticise in a whole novel.  Buy this, it’s great.

And the author is a remarkable scholar and a gentleman, and he'll probably tell me I'm wrong about Tennyson, or that there's a good reason Alan/Talisan is. 

  

(My friend Finn Clark, who's also reviewed this book here: 

http://finnclark.thiswaydown.org/Review/TheLocksleyExploit.html

puts a little info block into his reviews, I like that idea so much I've nicked it:)

The Locksley Exploit (2015)

Written by Philip Purser-Hallard

Publisher: Snowbooks Ltd

ISBN 9-781909-679429

BLINDSIGHT - On the Conscious Fallacy as an Issue In Fiction

I've been reading Peter Watt's FIREFALL (which collects BLINDSIGHT and ECHOPRAXIA:  I'm (I think, kindles make judging progress through omnibuses non-self evident) nearly through BLINDSIGHT.  [I was right, I was literally 10 pages from the end, and have now finished the first book].

I enjoyed it, it's good - I'm very interested to read the next one, but....

I find the existential angst about the fallacy/utility of consciousness theme: to be too weak to bear the load the author places on it.  Unfortunately this seems to be what the books 'about' - in the sense that its not about a first contact team from an interesting future earth, lead by a vampire.

In our world a lot of people seem to have got het up just because some/the/majority all of their actual 'conscious' decision making can be demonstrably traced to nerve impluses sent, before 'the decision' is taken by the conscious mind.

But I *am* my neurology, my glands, my history.  My 'higher' brain observes and models and turns all that into *I*.  *I*m good with that.  What does it matter if my hand starts reaching for cake, before I *know* I've decided to want it?  Some people act as if they've  never worked anywhere that needs fact checking.  Consciousness lets us second guess our neurology, by modelling at a higher level.  It is built-in extelligence. It's the *route* to exterior add-ons (look something up, ask around, research!).

I can second guess.  Some  people don't believe in free will, but I do.  My body wants to do X, (buy chocolate) in fact I'm actually walking to the sweet shop, its only slightly out of my way.  Modelling what I will do, because of what I already *want* I have time to weight the immediate want CHOCOLATE against non-immediate wants which are not the concern of the 'lower' brain NOT BEING FATTER.  The freedom to 'weigh' wants in a modelled observable area ('the mind') rather than by a blind process assigning different values to them (instinct will always favour the quick fix that doesn't carry an evolutionary downside.  CHOCOLATE doesn't kill you quickly enough not to breed) seems to me the evolutionary benefit of consciousness. A fairly clear one.

And that's before we get to whether the mind might exert a non-temporal causal effect on the lower brain - we *know* now than non-contradictory causation can elide in time.  It's not absolutely, certainly, wishful thinking to think that my body may start to do, what my brain hasn't decided yet (but will) *and* still leave the causation with the brain.  Imagine the evolutionary advantage of being able to retro-plan! even if it just shaved 'reaction' times. {And no one seems to have considered the 'conscious choice' creates 'habit-subroutines', 'habit-sub-routines' exceed speed of but do not generally contradict consciousness' route, which doesn't need time travel but still gives 'in model' decison making primacy.]

The Consciousness vs Non-Consciousness issues skew other problems with the set up
- in my view.

In the same way the vampire argues Consciousness is an energy intensive mistake loop in evolutionary neurology, any human could argue the same about [supposed] vampire intelligence.  More cogently - *they* were extinct.

Not every Predator has to out-think its prey, Predators only have to be more intelligent that the average-of their prey species *and* keep the lead,  WATT's vampires
(recreated from prehistoric DNA) would need a bell-curve ahead of human intelligence, but that wouldn't mean you couldn't find human experts who could out perform any specific vampire - particularly if you have a human population by definition 10x the maximum predator population:  so appart from being a nice conceit for the novel, why would you put a vampire in charge of humans - why not just an intelligent human?

Watt's vampires' intelligence is a given, but sadly, not especially believable  (unlike their biology which is a lovely fictional working-put by the author!). It's like that of Niven's Protectors - more in the 'told about' than the showing - with what they *actually* do in plots written for non-Protectors involving non-Protectors often being, well, stupid.  [The vampire in this stupidly gets [SPOILERED]]

Maybe the reason for vampire excess intelligence is the same as the reason for conscious rather than unconscious 'entities'.  Pretty good, but not absolute. 

I don't believe a Non-Conscious builder entity would be 'threatened' by Conscious language - I think it would ignore it, tag it with a 'low interest to productive methodology' tag.  If a potential competitor does wildly wasteful thing, that's good.  Don't waste energy investigating wildly wasteful thing.

Of course there's a whole book to go,  and the author may be BLINDSIGHTing me on his intentions. I'll let you know.  It's worth reading though.

- In fact why isn't the ships AI running the mission better, it ought to be the intellect on board? Why does something 50x a human, need a 10x a human intermediary?  (The answer U DISLIKE TAKING ORDERS FROM A MACHINE isn't a brilliant one when the other option is a literal
vampire!]

Redshirts - A review

Disclaimers and notes: this is the second book by John Scalzi, I've read - I didn't especially enjoy his first novel OLD MAN'S WAR - in particular because of the lack of believability and 'urgency' in some of the secondary characters who seemed to exist solely to depict a single vision of a - rather stupid - viewpoint and to be proved wrong violently by circumstances.  I bought REDSHIRTS to support "Tor day" - as I don't agree with the calls from some sf fans for the boycotting of Tor books.

REDSHIRTS was nominated for the Hugo for best novel in 2013 and won.

Apparently this is one of the many (quasi-imaginary) injustices to have raised the hackles on the backs of the loony right-wing 'sad-puppies', and the even  loonier neo-fascist 'rabid puppies' .

So my expectations were, I might not like REDSHIRTS that much, but I would be disliking it for reasons that had nothing to do with it being 'left-wing'  given that my reading of OLD MAN'S WAR with its 'conflict = honour aliens' and its 'annoying earth diplomat' being killed mercilessly for disagreeing that the only interaction with the aforsaid aliens could be a fight' elements - hadn't positioned the author in my mind as namby-pambly social justice seeking left-winger, just as a rather plodding writer with US right-wing views on the uselessness of pacifism.

However I liked REDSHIRTS a lot - I think it deserved its nomination in 2013.  I think its win, was a shade due to playing on the good feeling around Galaxy Quest (Hugo award winner 2000) which itself played on the massive fan, and normal human knowledge of and affection for Star Trek, but that's what we call KNOWING YOUR AUDIENCE.  Writing a book people are likely to like isn't cheating.

So - REDSHIRTS, if you haven't read it CAUTION SPOILERS but you can probably deduce from the title alone that its the story of a group of the lesser crewmen on a Star Trek like starship, the ones who in the fan jokes go on the away missions and get killed, whereas the bridge crew often nearly die but always miraculously survive.  And you'd be right - but John Scalzi takes it two levels further than that.

Our heroes (the Redshirts) aren't just the underdogs of a Star Trek like ship, they're the underdogs of a Star Trek like ship which is what it is entirely because of a low-budget star trek rip-off TV series being filmed in our time, *and* for when that starts to create very very awkward metaphysical problems -

- illustration of perhaps the biggest awkward metaphysical problem, I was concerned with:

[ If an author like me, in "The Redshirt Universe" hereafter TRU, wrote a story as below:

"Next weekend I win the lottery, and then spent my lottery winnings developing a time machine to go back to me now and give myself (secretly in an envelope I didn't notice being put in my bag yesterday, the lottery numbers I will find in my bag when I look in a minute...."

What stops him infallibly finding the data?   Why is it only one specific fiction (with time travel) that becomes real?  Wouldn't it be likelier that the REDSHIRTS should travel back in time not to the real past in which their show was being made, but only to their fictional past in which "The Chronicles of The Intrepid" wasn't on TV but "Star Trek" was? 

If this were not so : Every-time someone in "TRU" (Trumans?) wrote a story LIKE the above which is not an unlikely story, they WOULD win the lottery AND time travel would be discovered.  As this would probably have occurred prior to 2010 - probably soon after H.G. Wells - how is this a timeline stable enough to give us a 'normal' 2010 in the first place?]

- Scalzi has a solution in the second further, nicely unstated twist - that sorts all that out, and without it needing to be said, ends the book - except for a series of touching and marvellous codas which deal with the effects in 2010 on three of the people who become involved in the REDSHIRTS attempts to alter their past, so that their future isn't so confusingly and unfairly violent at their expense.

The books still has some weaknesses, but its positioning as a humourous adventure, and its utilisation of some stereotypic characterisation deflects some criticism.  Even so: I found some of the jokes particularly about how the grunt 'infantry' express gratitude (only verbally, but even so!) in terms of offered sex acts, purile and unhelpful to character development, and until the final twist I was annoyed that the 'bridge crew' in the future seemed to have no introspection whereas the REDSHIRTS had somehow developed it.  But the former is a minor quibble of taste, and the latter essentially a clue that the author pays off on.  There is also a single annoying moment of authoral smugness "Then they all died. Nah only fucking with you" - which seemed to me ill judged (but I accept humour is the hardest thing with which to please everyone, and I was genuinely amused and entertained by most of the book.)

So RECAP - 8/10 Funny, worth Nominee in 2013.  Probably wafted to its win on a wave of ST and GQ feeling, but that isn't horrible left-wing block voting.

I'll be reading more of Mr Scalzi I think.

THE ADVENTURE OF THE CORNICHE PASTICHE - A REVIEW OF THE ALBINO'S TREASURE

Imagine a road running up the side of a mountain (a cornishe).  It is a well travelled road, that passes many things of note that people love, but maybe its a little too familiar to thrill as much as it once did?

A new road maker wishing to arouse the same emotions, pass the same sites, but from a newer angle - has to avoid three flaws.

If his (or her) road is just the same - there is no point, the old road can be retravelled.

If his (or her) road darts wildly hither and yon, dragging in sights that are far too out of keeping or too distant in location, it will not climb the mountain safely and it may plunge off into the depths.

If his (or her) road leads too steeply upward, it may lose the people climbing for nostagia, as well as their health.

***

Stuart Douglas' SHERLOCK HOLMES (and the) ALBINO'S TREASURE is brilliant.

It has all the great moments of one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes stories
- the strange event, to whose contemplation Holmes is entreated,
- Holmes in disguise, and Watson's concern
- The attempts on Holmes' life, and their narrow avoidance
- The proof of how much Watson means to Holmes
- Watson's eye for the Ladies.
- The historical background - that historical novelist Doyle brought to the backstories of his mysteries.

Yet it's not just the same:

- It has politics
- It has mysteries in pictures
- It has a hidden secret
- It has the Lord of Strange Deaths
- It has, a certain, Albino master criminal

It's not my favourite *novel* about Holmes by someone who isn't Conan Doyle - that's still Kelly Hale's "Erasing Sherlock", but THE ALBINO TREASURE, is first and foremost a work of adventure and excitement, and for a Holmes book of that kind it is the very best of the ones coming out of the Titan Books' THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES range - which considering they reprinted some sterling works is saying something.

How this can be a first book is genuinely hard to fathom, it's that good!

[A shorter version of this review has been posted on Amazon.co.uk]

A helpful graphic comparing religious symbolism in C.S.Lewis and John C. Wright

I've read the Hugo nominee novella 'One Bright Star To Guide Them'  - as a non-voter in the Hugos I bought it and read it on my kindle.  It strives to be a work that builds on the numinous in children's religious fiction (Narnia, Susan Cooper's Dark Is Rising, etc) and bring it to an adult and satisfying conclusion.

I don't object to such a plan for a novella in any way, and in theory there's no reason why it should not have been a good or even great story.  [A good novel that does this is The Magician King, btw - and maybe it needs a novel length, and to be a sequal to work?]

However there are substantial difficulties with the novella as written - because its built on evocation, by naming things we haven't seen (but which are like things we have read of) a lot of the back story and naming comes off as derivative, and the reason why things are like X rather than Y is quite simply presented on a take it or leave it 'because the author says so' basis.  This extends to the action of the story itself - whole sections of which occur off stage and are then recounted. Thus it demands a 'buying in' by the reader that it hasn't earned.  A charitable reading would say this might be intended to be representative of faith, but a comparison with Narnia suggests how C.S.Lewis generates acceptance by appropriate choice of symbols, whereas John C. Wright here - to my mind does not.

For these reasons I think the novella a failure.
[Note, I know Jesus didn't ask the Disciples to Crucify him, that's why the resemblence is negative in the graphic. Yes, I know - the old testiment story of Abraham and Isaac, but to parallel that God would have needed to appear and offer an alternative to Tybalt's death, once it was clear Tommy would obey orders.]

Here's a graphic I hope will explain this:

PROVIDENCE - Issue 1 - a review

Providence: Issue 1

THE YELLOW SIGN

Issue #1 covers the events of 5^th June 1919.  Robert Black interviews a Doctor Alvarez for his newspaper, and later learns that a Jonathan Russell has committed suicide. 

Underneath these surface events lies a hidden world. In Alvarez words: ‘it lurks behind our pretences. This truth, it is a land sunken beneath many fathoms. Were it one day to rise and confront us all, what would (we) do?’ 

In terms of the Mythos, Doctor Alvarez’s hidden secrets stand for the sunken city of R’lyeh, which rises to make men mad, and madness is already signposted by the train of ‘imaginary destroying books’ – The King In Yellow – mentioned explicitly and attributed to Robert Chambers (hence the ‘short stories', and not 'the play’), and its predecessor Sous le Monde attributed to Claude Guillot which Black interviews Alvarez about (and which seems to be fictional, in our world, although Alan Moore’s knowledge of French sensational literature may be greater than my googling skills) and the Kitab Al-Hikmah Al-Najmiyya mentioned by Alvarez which translates as The Book of The Wisdom of the Stars.  The Starry Wisdom is of course the heretical church investigated by Robert Blake in H P Lovecraft’s story The Haunter of the Dark (written November 1935), as well as the (real) anthology title in which Alan Moore’s Lovecraftian short story ‘The Courtyard’ appeared.

Robert Blake is a form of Robert Bloch, a writer and friend of Lovecraft, but perhaps we are supposed to think him also a form of Robert Black – our protagonist. Doctor Alvarez, is obviously Doctor Munoz from Lovecraft’s Cool Air (written March 1926) with his body slightly better regulated at this time, and his housekeeper differently named and portrayed sympathetically and without Lovecraft’s racism.  Is Lovecraft then, later to be channelling (or reporting / writing up) Robert Black’s account of Alvarez, Robert Black’s own death?  If so this seems a little reductionist (like those bad Doctor Who stories where H G Wells is too stupid to invent (the idea of) a time machine unless he’s had an adventure with the Doctor). However this would be to prejudge, perhaps Alvarez is 7 years ahead of Munoz’s researches, perhaps something else is going on. (Most simply perhaps he changes his name and moves after Seniora Ortega's death, which as he says would 'see him go to pieces' - Doctor Munoz in Cool Air claims to have been preserved for 18 years, which would mean - if he is the same man Alvarez has been 11 years dead.)

The footpints of the Jersey Devil, just mentioned in passing, are not unlike the footprints of the Mi-Go, hooves or claws.

In terms of emotions : what is hidden is that Robert Black is both Jewish and Gay (both of which become apparent in issue #1) – his name may be a pseudonym to conceal the former.  We learn the latter from his reaction to Jonathan’s death. That the letter written to Jonathan (12^th April 1919) is in Robert’s handwriting we learn from the commonplace book entry at the end.  That Robert is ‘cold’ we learn in Jonathan/Lily’s own words, in Robert's memories – but I think we would know it from the letter ‘it was the most wonderful fun yet’ is not a sentiment that befits a letter of deep love, but is rather a shallow, rather distancing response to love making. That it already meant more for Jonathan we can I think safely deduce.  12^th April to 5^th June is less than two months to get from ‘wonderful fun’ to ‘suicide’.  Even so Robert is shaken by Jonathan’s death.

That Jonathan is also a transvestite (or a gay man who prefers to present as a woman or perhaps as we would say now a non-cis woman, or 'a woman') which enables us to ‘see’ him/her obliquely as ‘Lily’ in Robert’s memories – and reminds us that, much was/is hidden even in the hidden world.  (Is Charles' 'Vera' the same? Perhaps.)

In terms of society: what is hidden is, perhaps mostly visible to us, by the power of history: we (the readers) know, that prohibition will come, we can see how patronising the newspaper men are to their typist/secretary ‘Prissy’ Hunter.  We can see that she holds a torch for Robert, and that – perhaps Mr Freddy Dix, who seems to fail to impress her, holds one for her. 

In terms of departures from our world: there are suicide chambers in New York parks were the lonely and the depressed and the heart-broken can go and be gassed while listening to music.  These, as Robert Black notes were predicted in Robert Chambers King In Yellow (specifically in the future set story: The Repairer of Reputations which is set in 1920) – one wonders if, in less than a year’s time Robert Black will need to apply to Wilde for the Repair of his Reputation.  Have others of Chambers' weird predictions come true? The history of the war and prohibition seem to be as per our world - rather than the German/US War Chamber's wrote of in which German troops are beaten in New Jersey - but we see no black faces on the streets – have they all been moved to Chamber's great Negro Free State, of Suanee?  Or is this a flaw in Burrow's art (or part of a long plan of Alan's - Lovecraft's unfortunate racism is part of his fear of the Other, which makes his horror effective and disquieting, and may be up for discussion, as it was in part in Alan's other Lovecraftesques). [Note: my friend Philip Purser-Hallard suggests to me that, part of the absence of 'black' faces (see above) might be addressed if Freddy Dix is a black man, 'passing' as white. This is historically quite possible and might explain the stress that makes him so on edge.]

So: Issue #1 has much potential, and a few possible pit-falls. The art is clean and Jacen Burrow’s standard work with Alan Moore, which is to say the faces are sometimes less expressive than they might be for the subtlety of the text, and parts of the background are occasionally so understated as to make it seem like a possible subtext (the shop windows having neither reflections nor visible contents, make the town streets seem like movie scenery). [It's only fair to say that Jacen's depiction of Robert's growing grief is very very well done.]

I did really enjoy this – but if I am wary it is because the main pitfall is precisely that into which Moore’s earlier The Courtyard (which I liked a lot) and Neonomicon (which I didn't like as much) - both of which may or may not be set in the same world - fell, namely making a setting so allusive that it overpowers the audiences’ mimetic identification with the narrative by drawing attention to artificiality.  (Why *are* people either named after a Lovecraft character or playing a specific role from a Lovecraft story, why not write a 'new' story set in the same world? When a character called Warren dies and another is told, "You fool, Warren is dead" in Neonomicon - yes it echoes Lovecraft's Statement of Randolph Carter, but what does it add to the current narrative, or does it distort it?).

Neonomicom had other problems also, that so far the stress on ‘love’ is doing much to address here!   Doctor Alvarez is not (yet) in a horror story because he is loved, Doctor Munoz is (will be) because he is not.

As a first issue :  8/10,  as a series so far 7/10 because that flaw is still built in and if its not foregrounded in some way later it may reduce the overall effect.

Oh, and it's not yet set in Providence, despite the end-papers but New York, so when Black says 'If Providence permits' he really is referring to God / Fate, and not the city's readers: and yet of course H P Lovecraft, is in 1919, in Providence - whatever that may imply!

Note: amended review slightly on a second reading, and to include Philip Purser-Hallard's insight.

I will also make a prediction:  Robert Black has not yet realised that he has met a man, who claims to be aware of a technique of "reviving cadavers", just as his lover dies.  When he does...