It’s hard to discuss this book without spoilers, but I will do my best. The story revolves around the title character, who is a warrior of mysterious origin in a far future, ancient society where power and influence are based on necromantic abilities, and as events unfold it’s not hard to see why, as the greatest adepts of the Nine Houses are gathered together in a locked and decaying palace and challenged to unravel the secrets of death in order to achieve immortality, performing feats of magic and sorcery. As the cast assembled I found it hard to keep track of who was who, and Gideon is a perhaps reliable but certainly sarcastic narrator, but as time went on there was a positively Darwinian reduction in the ensemble. Towards the end shocking revelation is heaped on deus ex machina (no spoilers!) to reach…the perfect point for the sequel to begin.

The novel is a strange combination of space opera, sword and sorcery, action and adventure, sound and fury, but in the end I felt as if I was left hanging, with a large number of the characters I had trouble keeping straight now extinct, with all the red herrings thrown against the wall left unsettled, and no recourse but to wait until the library can send me the next volume in the series. It was certainly a page-turner in the best sense, with plenty of twists and turns (perhaps too many, as I often felt a bit lost), but I was unhappy in the end (no spoilers!)

Recommendation pending until I read the next volume.

“You already know the plot of Twelfth Night, right?” asks the narrator of this strange, dream-like, enchanting book, which is aimed directly at readers of fantasy who are also readers of Shakespeare, and in particular the romances, and even more specifically Twelfth Night and The Tempest. [Disclosure: I am that reader.] There are no fairies here, and only one explicit reference to the midsummer’s dream; the book is about fantasy, but the dreams are those of the writer, dreaming up the characters who populate her work, and the “real world” life of that same writer, who dreams of love and acceptance despite a lifetime of neglect and abuse from those closest to her, and the consequences of loss and mortality. There are mysteries and plots, characters who do terrible things for the wrong reasons, rebirths and self-sacrifices which change both those character’s fates and the fates of the worlds they live in. These themes are common in good fantasy novels, and this one is highly self-referential.

The writer herself is Sylvia, not to be confused with the daughter of the Duke of Milan in Two Gents, also not to be confused with Jo Walton; both are residents of Montreal who wrote novels during a visit to Florence. Or perhaps we are supposed to confuse them, as much of the story concerns the relationship between the author and the characters and worlds which the writer creates, the blurry boundary between the author and her characters, who often struggle to break free and define their own personalities. We also explore how the injection of magic and the fantastic into a work opens up strange and different places and people, and how despite those elements fantasy stories are still rooted in the life experience of the creator. In a way this book is a melding of magical realism and high fantasy, showing them as two sides of the same coin, following the two divergent paths but still meeting itself in the end.

Highly recommended.

I read the author’s Lovecraft Country some time ago (and the HBO series based on that novel starts next week), so I was interested to see this take on online gaming culture in a society only slightly more technologically advanced than our own. The stakes are much lower (beating an online dungeon raid rather overcoming the combined forces of racism and eldritch horror), and even when the action spills over into real life gunplay the characters don’t really seem to have their hearts in the game; it seems like just another raid. I found the protagonist too self centered, a privileged gamer who makes a living by violating terms of service for profit and doesn’t always treat his fellow “sherpas” with the respect they deserve; because the entire story is told from his first person viewpoint I felt that the secondary characters were not given enough screen time, making them feel more like stereotype NPC’s rather than real people.

I also felt shortchanged by the plot’s meandering path to semi-resolution; I never did figure out the significance of the title (perhaps if I was a gamer myself it would be obvious?) and I have never liked an almost literal deus ex machina ending. On the other hand the action sequences kept me turning the pages, and although the style echoes William Gibson slightly it does so with a different voice. Despite having mixed feelings about this particular outing I will be adding more the author’s books to my reading list.

If you are a follower of the Murderbot Diaries then you have already read the latest addition to the canon. If not, I suggest that you sample the original novella length installments, beginning with All Systems Red et cetera. Those bagatelles are comfort reading for the jaded SF aficionado, abounding with self referential genre tropes, and this newest entry is more of the same, the novel length allowing more of what makes Murderbot so endearing: the humans are ciphers, the artificial intelligences are heroes, and there is a great deal of action, gunplay, and binging on interstellar telenovelas.

Along the way we reflect on what it means to be human, the importance of found families, and how an artificial person (and Murderbot is most certainly people) who lacks the basic social skills of a toddler can still be so profoundly connected to basic anthropomorphic emotions. And yet I have to wonder if the longer format really adds to the mythos more than another novella would have done, and I wonder if we could perhaps have been just as satisfied, if not more, with a shorter format. And perhaps Ms. Wells would agree, as a prequel novella is planned for next year.

I still recommend the book, but then you’ve already read it, haven’t you?

Spoiler alert, this is perhaps not a book one should read during the present emergency, as major elements of the plot are perhaps a little too relevant to our current situation. But I had seen several recommendations, and I was able to borrow the ebook from my local (currently closed) library via the Libby app, so I checked it out and started reading before I really knew any details of the plot. And by the time the story revealed itself it was too late, I was hooked.

As with other books I’ve read recently the central theme is the family, starting with a scattering of literal families disrupted by the central event of the wandering, but quickly consolidating into two opposed found families, that of the wanderers and the opposing forces of, well, we can only call it evil. In fact, the opposition seems almost too evil, with no redeeming features, identifying the forces of death and destruction with right-wing gun-worshipping racist bigots.

By contrast the wanderers and their companion shepherds are a set of interesting and engaging characters, thrown together by events beyond anybody’s ability to explain or comprehend, with various strengths and weaknesses. This is the main strength of the book, following the point of views of several of these people, seeing how they change and evolve as the world is convulsed around them. That convulsion is much more extreme than what is happening out here in the “real world” (we hope) and keeps adding new layers all the way to the apocolyptic end.

Next up, The Stand.

This first novel is a story of far future travel, found families, love, and loss. Although set on an interstellar stage, much of the subtext is drawn from current woes: environmental disaster, corporate greed, and the tyranny of valuing central authority over individual aspirations. The main focus is on the variety and interactions of the characters who enter and exit as time passes and major events reshape the narrative, often in disastrous ways; be warned that bad things happen, both to good people and bad.

The writing is excellent and the plot intricate, jumping through time both literally (as characters incur time debt due to interstellar travel) and in shifts between narrative threads following the various characters. The central relationship is between Nia, captain of of an independant trading ship, and the boy she rescues, adopts and raises, a boy who in the end transforms both her life and the entire interstellar culture through which she moves. There are echoes of Samuel R. Delaney’s Nova in the portrayal of the ship and its crew, but the treasures they are seeking are not transuranic elements but latent human abilities which are mysterious and transcendent.

Highly recommended.