More on LiteraTecs, JurisFiction, and other booknerdy things

Last weekend I went on a splurge I couldn't quite afford and bought, among other things, the fourth and fifth Thursday Next books. They are several kinds of awesome.

The fourth book, Something Rotten, has a lot to do with politics, and it's really depressing how much of it seems to come off as satire on current American politics, despite the explanations for it being completely absurd. The plot revolves around Yorrick Kaine, a fictional character escaped into the real world, and his peculiar powers of mind-control, which allow him to get the British Parliament to pass all sorts of crazy measures, like “instituting a tertiary health-care system where we only treat people who are already sick, instead of having universal preventive care.” Because when you are a British author like Jasper Fforde, not having the government provide universal preventive health care is THE WACKIEST AND MOST HORRIBLE THING YOU CAN THINK OF. I kind of wish the US's current barbaric political actions were the result of something so simple, and that we could fix it by sending some of our politicians to whatever dystopian novel they escaped from (The Handmaid's Tale, probably).

Depressing political allegory aside, Something Rotten is hysterical. Thursday has to take Hamlet out into the Outland (what the book people call the real world), where he watches several adaptations of Hamlet and frets a lot about readers thinking he's an indecisive twit. Yorrick Kaine is in the middle of whipping up some serious anti-Danish sentiment in England, which causes assorted hilarious things to happen about Hamlet being Danish, and Thursday gets put in charge of confiscating Danish literature (which she, like all the other LiteraTecs who take this sort of thing seriously, try to smuggle into the Socialist Republic of Wales instead of actually handing over for burning). Thursday's dad, the time-traveling rogue ChronoGuard agent, keeps dumping historical houseguests at Thursday's mom's house while he tries to stop Admiral Nelson from getting killed back in eighteen something. A thirteenth-century prophet reactualizes, and Thursday ends up in charge of Swindon's croquet team because one of said prophet's predictions is that if Swindon doesn't win the croquet championship, there will be a nuclear war, but if they DO win, the Goliath Corporation will be destroyed. Landen gets uneradicated (yaaaaaaay!), and continues to be really dorky and awesome. I don't even remember the other twelve plotlines, but Thursday kicks ass in all of them, usually holding a two-year-old baby. (His name is Friday.) I still do not know what happened to Landen's books when he was eradicated. Also, there are Shakespeare clones, which is important because a lot of weird crap is happening to Shakespeare's works in the Bookworld, because the Bookworld is so unnecessarily complicated that books can change after they're written, which is why there is Jurisfiction. Sometimes Jurisfiction doesn't fix things; for example, they apparently didn't ever fix the unexplained departure of comedy from the once-hilarious Thomas Hardy novels. (Being a big Thomas Hardy fan and sort of a nerd for depressing rural England novels in general, I laughed my ass off at this.)

First Among Sequels takes place fifteen years later. Thursday is in her fifties; she and Landen have three kids (or possibly only two), the oldest of whom is sixteen and being too lazy to join the Chronoguard (as is his destiny); several terrible books have been written about her previous adventures, but her celebrity status has been reduced to Z; and she is working at a carpet store as a cover for continuing to work for SpecOps, which is also a cover for still being a Jurisfiction agent. Also she smuggles cheese, sometimes. In this version of 2002 at large, there is such a sensible government that the nation is suffering a stupidity surplus; people's attention spans are becoming too short for them to read very much; and the Goliath Corporation is starting to become a nuisance again. I cannot even begin to describe the plots, but I will tell you that there are three Thursdays (the regular one, an evil one and a hippie one), several Fridays of various ages and from various timelines, and some special guest hauntings by Uncle Mycroft. One of the plots involves the Chronoguard and Friday's destiny and something about time travel not being invented yet; another is about classic works of literature going “interactive” and basically being turned into reality TV, but in the actual books, meaning the originals would change. (Making reality TV shows based on works of classic literature could actually be fucking hilarious and if I were in charge of a TV network I would totally do it. But that is not what was happening.) There is also a lot of crazy crap about Bookworld geography, which left me with lots of unanswered questions. Like, do the books physically move their place in the Nothing if they are reclassified? Where do books that are classified under multiple genres go? How do you get from one language's Bookworld to another's? I am very curious here!

I really cannot recommend this series highly enough, especially to people who are big literature nerds and who like absurdist pseudo-technology and textual innuendo.

The sixth book, One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing, has just come out in hardcover, but alas, I cannot afford hardcover right now. This is sad, because Jasper Fforde leaves a mega-shit-ton of loose ends untied up at the end of First Among Sequels, and I want to know what happens with the Minotaur and the serial killer (it kills characters from series!) and Aornis' mindworm and the plot device Thursday bought for Landen's novel and and and...

This ain't your grandfather's World War One

Fun fact: I own two books entitled Leviathan, and neither of them is Thomas Hobbes'Leviathan. One is Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, which I bought at the New Bedford Whaling Museum on a field trip last year, and haven't yet read because I got sick of whales.

The second is Scott Westerfield's YA steampunk WWI novel Leviathan, with spiffy illustrations by Keith Thompson. This book isn't about whaling. It is about an alternate version of World War One where the Germanic powers, called "Clankers," have all sorts of ridiculously advanced big metal machines, and the British and their allies, called the "Darwininsts," have even MORE ridiculous bio-engineered... thingies. The main British character calls them "beasties," but she is actually Scottish so she says a lot of weird shit. For example, the "Leviathan" that is the titular character-slash-setting is an airship made out of A WHALE and some other stuff. It is basically an entire ecosystem made out of whale, birds, bees, bats, glowworms, lizards, and machine parts. The Darwinists also fly giant hydrogen-filled jellyfish called Huxleys to do surveillance work.

There are two main characters. The first is Alek, the son of assassinated Hapsburg archduke Franz Ferdinand, who is on the run from the Germans, and also whatever family drama resulted in somebody murdering his parents, which actually had nothing to do with Serbian anarchists and everything to do with Alek's claim to the throne and a bunch of jingoistic bastards' desire for war. The second is Deryn Sharp, a girl who disguises herself as a boy to join the British Air Service, and who gets in the wackiest scrapes ever, even by cross-dressing-adventure-girl standards (and the cross-dressing-adventure-girl genre is HUGE on wacky scrapes, as a general rule). There is political intrigue and drama and battles and some getting stranded in barren wastelands, as you do in this sort of story, and there is a badass lady scientist, who wears a bowler hat, because apparently in this version of history all scientists have to wear bowler hats. Or something.

Deryn (now known as Dylan) and Alek appear to have an Obligatory Romance brewing, but I shall have to read the sequel to see if it goes anywhere. Or Deryn seems to be having a bit of a thing for Alek, at any rate; Alek mostly seems to just be really envious of Deryn/Dylan that he gets to be a regular guy and have wacky hijinks. Alek also thinks that Dylan is surprisingly rowdy and swaggery and competitive and things, which is funny, because Deryn is doing all that on purpose to fit in with the other British Air Service guys and finds being continually swaggery to be "barking" exhausting. Almost as amusing is the fact that Alek speaks more proper English than Deryn, despite being Austrian, because Alek had posh English tutors and Deryn grew up in the UK but not particularly posh.

This book is actually much less silly than I thought it would be, considering it is basically about a flying whale. It's very engaging in both silly and non-silly ways, and I cannot wait to get my hands on Behemoth.