bloodygranuaile | Entries tagged with sequels

The next installment in my Vorkosigan Saga reading project was Lois McMaster Bujold’s now-somewhat-unfortunately-titled The Vor Game, in which our precocious but physically fragile hero, Miles, having just graduated from the Service Academy, is now Ensign Vorkosigan. As his first assignment, Miles is given what, for Miles, is an impossible task: He’s got to stay somewhere boring for six whole months and keep his nose clean. To this end he winds up in the Arctic doing weather technician stuff, which he picks up pretty quickly, and things are comparatively uneventful for the first three months, minus one or two near-death experiences and the subtle hints of something being deeply and nefariously wrong with the commander.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, things at the Arctic base explode spectacularly after about three months, the commander is discharged for brutality (which is impressive in Barrayar, a notoriously pro-brutality society), and Miles is reassigned by his chagrined superiors to a suitably out-of-the-public-eye assignment with ImpSec, the military intelligence service. Here he is sent on a secret mission that is not to rescue the Emperor, it is about his band of mercenaries from the last book and the tense political situation among a bunch of planets that hold strategically important wormhole gates. All this goes absolutely tits up when the Emperor goes missing–something Miles is not informed about, and thus discovers only when he unexpectedly runs into his old childhood playmate and friend, Emperor Gregor Vorbarra.

From thence (actually starting significantly before this) the plot follows a satisfying structure of 1) Miles is in a Situation 2) Miles comes up with a brilliant plan to get out of the Situation 3) The brilliant plan doesn’t quite pan out and Miles is now merely stuck in a different and usually worse Situation. This goes on for about three-quarters of the book, when Miles amasses enough information to start turning the tables on at least some of his many, many adversaries and starts digging himself out of at least some of the situations. His main adversary for a number of the conflicts Miles finds himself embroiled in is the head of another mercenary company called Randall’s Rangers. This commander is a femme fatale type with a seemingly endless capacity for double- and triple-crossing people and a strategic mind that’s not necessarily always three steps ahead so much as always three steps in every direction, so that no matter what happens, she wins. She is also very short, but she’s pretty, making her an excellent and not particularly subtle foil for Miles. She has decided to “rescue” Gregor and set herself up as Empress of Barrayer. Miles does not like this idea, and even Elena, who hates Barrayar and left it on purpose, doesn’t seem to think Barrayar deserves such a fate as having Commander Cavilo for Empress.

Miles does eventually solve the mystery of why the Hegen Hub seems about to explode into warfare with nobody having any idea why, although he does not quite manage to prevent it from exploding into warfare. He does manage to figure out who should be on what side and get the information to the right places so that they actually do that, and then they win, which is nice. Gregor largely rescues himself. Miles is moved into a position where being an enfant terrible is less of a liability.

Honestly this is mostly just really fun military sci-fi. The characters occasionally pull out some Deep Thoughts that can sort of constitute Themes if you want, but mostly they are all little shits, and there is lots of intrigue and people getting beaten up and other things that it’s fun to see happen to little shits.

Next book just arrived at the library. I’m excited to see what situations our main little shit gets himself into this time.

The next book on my little adventure in reading all of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga books was The Warrior’s Apprentice, the first book about the series’ protagonist proper, Miles Vorkosigan. In this one Miles is in his teens, just old enough to be a protagonist in a book that is not a children’s book, but which might have been YA if it had been published more recently.

Miles is a very specific type of insufferably clever teenage protagonist, although he is saved from being too insufferably The Universe’s Specialist Clever Boy by having bones that are basically made of glass in a highly militaristic culture that usually puts disabled kids out for the wolves. Despite said militaristic culture’s belief that he ought to have been aborted, Miles’ dream is to be an officer in the Emperor’s Service, because this is a space adventures book and you’re not going to get very far being enlightened enough to eschew imperialist militarism. At the beginning of this book, Miles breaks both his legs during the physical tests to get into the Service Academy, and goes to visit his grandmother off-world for a bit to cool off.

Miles, having a serious case of Being A Protagonist, arrives at Beta Colony and after approximately 0.5 seconds gets himself entangled in somebody else’s problems and has to start improvising increasingly dangerous and insane lies to get himself out of it. To this end he winds up setting up a fake mercenary company. At first, it consists of himself, his bodyguard Sergeant Bothari, Bothari’s beautiful and athletic daughter Elena, and the depressed wormhole-jumping pilot that he just adopted as an armsman even though the pilot is not Barrayaran. His indulgent Betan grandmother also “invests” in it.

The fake mercenary company picks up its first contract delivering military supplies disguised as agricultural equipment to an out-of-the-way backwater planet under blockade in a nasty military conflict with the out-of-the-way backwater planet next door. This puts our couldn’t-get-into-the-Service-Academy-without-breaking-his-legs right in the middle of a live siege situation, as the commander of a supposed fleet of ships but actually just one ship, although through some clever ambushing and lying he is quickly able to make it two ships. From here there is a lot more ambushing and lying as Miles gets increasingly deep into the conflict between the two planets–and the much bigger, wealthier, and well-established mercenary company that the other team has hired. Over the course of the conflict a lot of personal history gets dug up, particularly around the mystery of Elena’s mother. As the actual conflict–or at least, the mercenaries’ involvement in it–starts to wind up, Barrayaran politics begin to re-emerge, in the form of Miles’ idiot cousin Ivan, somehow the sole messenger out of a ship full of messengers that was supposed to summon him home. The final batch of plot points take place squarely within the world of Barrayaran court intrigue, even if the physical manifestations of this intrigue had managed to reach out into other parts of space.

Overall this book is like 80% fun (to read about) space warrior shenanigans and 20% Miles discovering that space warrior shenanigans are actually terrible and suck ass to be part of. This is about the correct balance for enjoying reading a military adventure story while being a person who thinks war is basically bad. I’m excited for more horrible Barrayaran politics of death in the next book!

I have committed myself to reading one book each month of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan Saga, so that I can be prepared for Readercon 2026 when we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first publication in the series. Ordinary you’d think enthusiasm for this would be left to people who are already fans of the series, but I love a reading challenge and I do not love being left out of whatever the hot topic of discussion is at Readercon, so I’ve got a lot of books to read, only most of which are in my library’s network! I read Shards of Honor several years ago, which I remember was fun although I don’t really remember what happened in it other than that there was lots of escaping from hostage situations. The next installment–chronologically, though not in publication order–is Barrayar, which follows the adventures of Cordelia Vorkosigan, nee Naismith, as she arrives on the militaristic, feudal planet of Barrayar with her husband and her natural pregnancy, and is immediately besieged by the plot happening.

On Barrayar, the old emperor is dying and the new emperor is a four-year-old boy. Cordelia’s husband, Aral Vorkosigan, is chosen by the old dying emperor as Regent until Emperor Gregor reaches his majority at age twenty. This puts Cordelia, Aral, and the unborn heir to the Vorkosigan countship in the middle of a very volatile political situation, which Cordelia frankly has very little respect for, since she thinks the traditional Barrayan attitudes toward class and militarism are both thoroughly idiotic. Cordelia has to learn about Barrayar quickly whether she likes what she finds or not, though, both because she lives here now, and because plot keep happening to her that will require her to assume a variety of disguises, build alliances with people she didn’t already know, cut deals, execute plans on the fly, and other adventure shenanigans where cultural incompetence could prove very, very costly. A couple assassination attempts on Aral and Cordelia, an emergency surgery to transfer Cordelia’s unborn baby into an artificial uterus so that it can be subjected to emergency medical experiments, and a political coup by one of the douchey super-conservative counts sends Cordelia into a sequence of planetary wildernesses that she’s not used to–hills, caves, the poor neighborhoods of cities. Much of these shenanigans involve very young children–at one point Cordelia is responsible for hiding the young Emperor; at another point she has to rescue an also-pregnant friend and help her have her baby in the least convenient time and place Bujold could think of; late in the book she has to heist her own baby out of the city before the artificial uterus fails from lack of maintenance.

Despite the bad dreams it gave me about babies with fucked-up bones, this was overall a pretty fun set of “competence porn” action-adventure shenanigans. Cordelia is smart and resourceful and gathers up a ragtag band o’ misfits whose various competencies are either ignored or rejected due to Barrayar’s very narrow ideas of appropriate behavior, and together they survive various horrors and eventually show everybody who exactly it is they’re messing with, that sort of thing. Fun and satisfying, and I hope the rest of the series remains as enjoyable even though I understand we are ditching Cordelia as our main character and will be going most of the rest of the series with the medical experimentation baby as the protagonist. So we’ll see how that goes.

I don’t like having series split up on my shelves and yet for some reason I read Walter Macken’s Seek the Fair Land back in 2015 and have had the two sequels sitting around separated from their fellow for nine years now. Anyway I decided that was enough of that nonsense and it was time to continue the trilogy; while I didn’t get around to it during Sad Irish Literature Month or my first foray to Maine this year, this weekend it was time! I was determined to at least start on the very depressing-looking The Silent People, and next year I will read The Scorching Wind, for reals.

The Silent People follows the life of a Connemara man named Dualta Duane, starting when he is in his late teens in the 1820s. Duane’s parents died in a famine and he has been raised by his uncle, the schoolmaster, so he can read and write and speaks English pretty well. Trouble begins when the landlord’s son hits him with a whip for not getting out of the way fast enough at a market fair, and Dualta, in the manner of strong young men who have just been physically assaulted for no reason at all, knocks the rich asshole off his horse. This obviously is the morally correct and badass thing to do, but tactically was not so smart. Both Dualta and his uncle have to flee the village, going in separate directions. The novel then follows Dualta’s adventures and misadventures as he makes his way from the Connemara hills to the valleys of Clare, where he meets up with various people who all have various opinions and theories of change about how Ireland will win its freedom–when to fight and when to endure, what sacrifices are worth it and what isn’t, what type of fighting is noble and honorable and what is cowardly and base. The conversations don’t sound at all like the “dialogue lifted from Twitter” type of conversation about politics written by modern writers who are all on Twitter, probably because Macken was writing in the 1960s; I cannot say if the conversations however are particularly authentic to the 1820s or if they are too 1960s to be good historical fiction. All I can say is that they are just as frustrating and stupid as listening to real ordinary people talk about their theories of change in politics, especially the type of ordinary people who don’t know terms like “theory of change” and are only just starting to examine their own assumptions enough to articulate them. Daniel O’Connell (here “O Connell”) makes a set of cameos as the man who basically introduced the theory of nonviolent mass pressure to Ireland singlehandedly; we see his theory, like so many others, work up until the point where it doesn’t.

Dualta crosses paths occasionally with a young lady named Una, whose mother was a McMahon who converted to Protestantism upon marriage, and whose father is a wealthy Protestant landlord. Dualta meets her when he gets hired into the man’s household as a “Trojan horse” from his previous job, which was ostensibly helping a local shopkeeper run her shop but actually using his rare bilingual literacy (the literacy was rare; the bilingualism wasn’t) to write threatening letters on behalf of the local agroterrorist organization. Una converts to Catholicism and is kicked out of the house; later, Dualta runs into her again when she sets up as a day school teacher in a random valley in Clare. Dualta manages to snag a ten-year lease on a bit of property no one else wants in the same valley, and, being both newcomers and the best-educated people in the valley, they eventually join forces, first wrangling the weans at the school and then getting married. They adopt some other misfits over the course of their time in the valley as various political happenings come and go, such as the election of Daniel O Connell to Parliament–a massive event that involves thousands of people all walking to Ennis, because apparently in the 1820s a county would only have one polling station–until the famine hits in 1845 and their painstakingly scraped-together life falls apart.

The book is sad but also dryly funny at times, which is a common enough combination in Irish literature. The writing style has something very midcentury about it that I can’t quite put my finger on, where it includes a lot of small details but they are all in very plain, unflowery language. There is a wealth of information about rural life in 19th-century Ireland woven into the story, a way of life that’s not only lost to time but also which none of us who grew up with running water would put up with for a single second. These people were poor as dirt, did backbreaking labor, owned nothing, and had no security. They rented land, but not houses; they had to build their own houses on the land they rented, and when they were evicted the houses were torn down or set on fire. This meant that what passed for a house for tenant farmers then wouldn’t pass muster as a garage now.

Overall this was, I wouldn’t say a fun time exactly, but a very immersive one.

It’s a long weekend and that means I had time to sit around and reread Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Sword, the second book in the Imperial Radch trilogy. In this one, the cast of characters expands dramatically, as our lone wolf AI heroine Breq gets put in charge of a ship, Mercy of Kalr, which is a little awkward given that Breq used to be a ship. On orders from one of the factions of Anaander Mianaai, Fleet Captain Breq goes to Athoek System–which consists mostly of the tea-growing planet Athoek and the associated Athoek Station–to secure it, and Lieutenant Awn’s sister, from the depredations of the civil war that’s broken out. Having been given a big pile of resources–military authority, the house name Mianaai, a ship, officers, a crew, and a bunch of access codes–Breq descends upon Athoek Station and starts aggressively inserting herself into a fixing everyone’s problems, to the great consternation of the people who liked it when those other people had problems. A lot of station politics happen, sometimes violently, and new factions come into play–or, more often, are uncovered as having already been in play. The lieutenants all have personal problems, two of them with each other. It’s all very fun.

There is a new Craft Wars book out! I was a bad girlfriend and pinched my ladylove’s copy of Max Gladstone’s Wicked Problems before she had a chance to read it, and then I didn’t finish it quite as fast as I’d intended to. But I did finish it so now I can give it back and begin being a bad girlfriend in a different way (impatiently bugging her to read it already).

Taking place shortly after the events of Dead Country, the problems we had at the end of that novel have burst their quiet little Edgemont-adjacent bounds and are now everyone’s problem, all over the world. Thus Wicked Problems is no longer just about Tara Abernathy’s family issues, no matter how much Tara Abernathy tends toward denial about her ability to single-handedly fix everything without bothering anybody else. Instead we get a big, complex, multi-faction epic where all our friends from previous books show up again whether they like it or not (usually not), including people I forgot about because I read the first five books of the Craft Sequence like ten years ago at this point. The journey takes us all over the world and involves dead gods, a prison break, creepy razor wire monsters, a trip to definitely-not-Paris to almost get murdered at the opera, the phrase “prophet-and-loss statement,” a somewhat self-indulgent appearance of the Tiffany Paradox (this was the one bit that took me out of the story a little too much, because I too have read the viral Tumblr post about the Tiffany Paradox, Max), and a lot of gay feelings that neither Kai nor Tara actually have time for (since they keep almost getting murdered at the opera by squids and razor wire monsters and, at one point, a vampire, which I had forgotten existed in this universe).

In the necromancy-flavored late capitalist hellscape that is the world after the God Wars, how to save the world from being eaten by the skazzerai from beyond the stars is not just a complicated question, but several complicated questions–questions like, is the world really worth “saving” given how incredibly fucked up it is? Can the brutally rational secularist power-hungry assholes of the Craft set aside their differences with the fanatically religious power-hungry assholes of various faiths for long enough to do anything useful? Is Dawn, Tara’s former student now semi-integrated with a god-esque creature made of sentient Craft, going to stop the skazzerai, or is her plan very bad and does she have to be stopped before we can stop the skazzerai? What are the skazzerai actually (since they aren’t literally giant space spiders), and where do they come from, and as the King in Red points out, how would you know you were facing one?

The immediate problem facing most of our several protagonists here is a little shard of what appears to be iron and it is so, so hungry. It seems to be a relic from last time the skazzerai tried to eat the world (they got run off but in the process the world broke and a functionally new one had to be reborn). Due to a series of mishaps the shard breaks out of its little holding container and winds up in a new holding container, which is the dying nature goddess Ajaia in the form of a rose, who is then contained in Dawn’s hand, which is then contained in a heavily warded glove. This multilayered battlefield of power in her hand, combined with her earlier merging with the new god-thing of Craft (now dubbed Sybil and manifesting as a serpent to maintain some separateness from Dawn), gives Dawn some truly terrifying power at her disposal, if she can figure out how to use it without getting eaten.

This was funny, scary, action-packed, and generally pretty good at holding my attention during the parts of this past week or so when I simply could not pay any attention to anything, so well done. Can’t wait to see how all these overpowered dickheads get themselves into and out of their next set of world-ending scrapes.

I have finished the first book of the year! It’s later than I intended and later than usual even for a 700-page book (usually I read the first 600 pages in December and then I can finish it on January 1 or 2), but I’ve done it! The honors this year go to Nicola Griffith’s Menewood, the long-awaited sequel to Hild, which further follows the fictional adventures of the early life of the renowned seventh-century abbess Hild of Whitby.

Menewood kicks off a few months or so after the end of Hild (if I recall correctly) and things seem to be going well for the now 18-year-old Hild. She is the Lady of Elmet alongside her husband and secret half-brother Cian Boldcloak, sworn gesith to King Edwin and Lord of Elmet, and she is pregnant. Elmet is small and under-defended but they are building it up, and Hild and Cian are also secretly supplying a refuge in a hidden valley within the boglands of Elmet: the titular Menewood.

Hild hopes they won’t have to use it, but the winds of war are blowing, and this promising beginning–all the things Hild has won for herself by the end of the first book–are set up pretty much just to be brutally knocked down, so Hild has to start building all over, and that’s what makes up most of the book. King Edwin is threatened by a Southern king named Cadwallon, who loathes the Yffings and wants to burn them and everything they have ever touched (which is… most of northern England) to the ground and kill them all and steal their gold. He has essentially no interest in ruling Northumbria; he just wants to loot it and make sure nobody else within six degrees of separation from the Yffings gets to rule it either. Cadwallon has allied with another southern king named Penda, who is slimier if less psychotic, and taking out Penda is shaping up to the subject of Book 3, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Cadwallon and Penda manage to pincer a desperate and pretending-to-be-confident Edwin Yffing and decapitate him, killing off a good half of the cast we’ve met so far in the process, including Cian Boldcloak. Hild is grievously injured in the battle that she wasn’t able to avoid being caught in, despite being literally nine whole months pregnant, and as you can probably imagine that doesn’t go well for baby. With the help of her former slave Gwladus and her young runner Morud, Hild manages not to die, but she’s pretty severely injured, both physically and emotionally. I must say that Griffith does an excellent job of building up the dread and sense of claustrophobic inevitability leading up to Hild’s darkest hour, and having read nothing at all about the book beforehand I was definitely caught up in the oh no how are they going to get out of this one, I don’t see how they’re going to get out of this type of anticipatory dread and it is because, broadly speaking, most of them don’t get out of this. The first third of the book is some of the bleakest shit I’ve read in a while, and it was hard to read more than a couple dozen pages at a time. It was very good January reading after all.

Menewood, however, serves its purpose, and after Hild spends a couple months recuperating with a bunch of poor fisherfolk who live on the very edges of what passed for civilization even in seventh-century Britain, a bit of tough-love therapy from Gwladus, and a surprise visit from some of Hild’s former group of mutilated spearmen–the Fearsomes, technically sworn to King Edwin when he was still alive–Hild and co. make their way to Menewood and start slowly and carefully rebuilding, gathering allies and news and resources as Hild starts to put together a plan to take down Cadwallon Reaver and install a suitably sensible, non-psychotic king of Northumbre. This involves a lot of fun intrigue and heists and letter-writing and diplomacy and teaching a bunch of traditional gesith types how to do things like “sneak” and “steal” and “ambush very quietly” instead of always charging honorably into battle face-first with your flag flying. After the bleak and brutal first part of the book, it’s incredibly satisfying to watch a complex plot come together, with all sorts of characters and resources and stuff, and all go off magnificently, as Hild takes the offensive back and pulls all the squabbling factions of People Cadwallon Has Fucked Over into one big, complicated, sneakily implacable instrument of revenge. I feel like I just ran a marathon and can’t wait to see them take on Penda (although I am hoping this campaign does not necessitate the total destruction of everything Hild built over the course of this book, both because we’ve already done that and because I’m not sure I could take it).

The texture of this series is great if you like really immersive historical fiction; it is less great if you don’t like reading about bees and sausage-making and tonsures and sealing-wax and 500 different people all named Os-something and basically every detail of life in seventh-century Northumbria that a character could possibly run across while interacting with every level of society. I personally love this shit, although there were a couple nits I had to pick with some of the words Griffith chose to not modernize–is it really necessary to say “middaeg” instead of “midday”? I don’t think “midday” would have hit me as sounding too modern, just that I expect the novel to be translated into modern English and not actually be written in “Anglisc” (Old English/Anglo-Saxon). If I want to read stuff in seventh-century languages I have a copy of the dual-text Seamus Heaney translation of Beowulf (which is shouted out in Menewood as both new and a favorite of Edwin’s). But overall I love the language; the book contains not only a map and a cast of characters but also family trees and a glossary, to help those of us modern dumb-dumbs who don’t know our names for the different ages of sheep but still want to be able to follow what’s going on when the characters talk about sheep (Griffith isn’t going to insult us by pretending that nobles in the 7th century weren’t concerned about sheep. This was a pre-industrial society. You were never too rich to stop caring about sheep, certainly not if you wanted to stay rich).

I hope it doesn’t take a full 10 years for the third book to come out, but if it has to take that long to be as good as the first two, then Nicola Griffith should take her time and I will pick up that third book as soon as it’s published, likely no matter what else I have in the hopper.

Hurrah, new Murderbot! Yes, I did preorder Martha Wells’ System Collapse as an early birthday present for myself and I did finish it within two days.

This one picks up after the events of Network Effect, and we’re still on the alien-contaminated planet, “we” in this case being Murderbot, ART, some Preservation folks, and some of ART’s crew. The task at hand is to try to wrangle the various disputing factions of colonists, who have been cut off from the rest of Corporation Rim “civilization” for four decades, and convince/help them not be sold into slave labor by the Barish-Estranza Corporation, which is trying to claim the planet as salvage. The plot thickens when the colonists reveal the existence of another faction of colonists who headed out to establish a second base near the terraforming engines halfway across the planet a few decades ago. Murderbot and co. must venture into the comms blackout zone where the terraforming engines are to try to make contact with this other group of colonists–and hope Barish-Estranza hasn’t gotten there first.

That’s the plot, more or less. Now, what the book is about, is Murderbot having PTSD, mostly.

In typical Murderbot fashion, it spends like the first third or so of the book redacting any discussion of its worst symptoms, until it really can’t avoid it anymore. This provides some fun structure even though it’s reasonably easy to see where it’s going.

The prose style is rambling and parenthetical even by Murderbot standards, which is saved from feeling like poor editing by instead being an absolutely dead-on portrayal of what obsessive, unhelpful rumination looks like when your emotional problems are interfering with your executive function, or if you’re a security cyborg, your performance reliability. Murderbot keeps its crown of Most Hashtag-Relatable Robot In Sci-Fi by outsourcing most of its self-awareness about its emotions to its therapist (“Dr. Bharadwaj says…”) and grumbling about how it knows it needs the trauma protocol, it just doesn’t want it and will totally do it later, OK? (Hey, Murderbot, remember how much you hated it when Dr. Mensah was doing the same thing a few books back?) This is saved from devolving into pretentious didacticism the same way it usually is–lots of arguing with robots, ridiculous gunfights, trying to understand humans enough to outwit them and then usually shooting them anyway, and goofy fake TV shows. (I still want to know what show Cruel Romance Personage is making fun of. I’m guessing Crazy Ex-Girlfriend?) Anyway, I enjoy these books immensely, they are my favorite comfort read.

For some reason Max Gladstone’s Ruin of Angels has been sitting on my shelf since it came out. I liked the first Craft quintet, so I think my completist brain just felt weird about another Craft book with different cover art and title convention and all that? Anyway, I was missing out, because Ruin of Angels is just as much of a fun time as the others, combining the hellscape of finance capitalism with the hellscape of necromantic god-war blood magic fantasy stuff. A train heist is also involved, as we know how I feel about heists.

Our protagonist, mostly, here is Kai Pohala, a priestess/idol-maker/investment banker from Kavekana, who scores a whirlwind business trip to the Iskari colonial city of Agdel Lex, which does not go according to plan. Agdel Lex is built on top of a place just known as “the dead city,” which is the former civilization of Alikand in its last moments, eternally being torn apart in the death throes of a major Craftsman in the Gods War. There are also, secretly, pockets of Alikand, remembered into being by the descendants of the old ruling families, before the Iskari showed up to impose their very specific and top-down version of order and good governance on the place, which at the moment is unfortunately just about the only thing preventing the dead city and all the creepy monsters in it from breaking through. The Iskari are some sort of squid-based parasitic religion with impressive mind- and reality-control powers, and also they are smarmy dickwads–really excellent villains all around.

Another thing Agdel Lex has is Kai’s estranged sister Ley, a preternaturally charismatic human who lots of people wind up loving and wanting to work with and generally taking paths other than “avoid at all costs” around, which usually seems to be ill-advised. Ley redeems herself at the end by working with a bunch of other people to help de-upfuck the situation that she got them all into by always trying to do big ambitious projects without telling any of the people she dragged into what the fuck was going on. Fortunately we don’t have to spend a lot of time in Ley’s head because for the first 90% of the book she truly just sucks as a person. Instead, we spend time with Kai, obviously, and with Ley’s ex-girlfriend and delving partner Zeddig, and Zeddig’s other delving partner Raymet, and a mysterious lone Camlaander knight errant named Gal, and a street urchin prophet named Izza, and our old buddy Tara Abernathy. These people do not all necessarily work as a team, and frequently find themselves at apparent cross purposes with each other, largely due to the fact that they are all operating on extremely limited information (a situation that is frequently at least partly Ley’s fault). Everyone tries to pick apart what the fuck is happening and protect, to the best of their ability, Ley as she flees from the cops and the squiddy Rectification Authority agents, who are after her for a murder that she absolutely, 100% committed. (She had reasons, but was she going to tell anyone what they were? No, she was going to demand help because Just Trust Me.)

I realize this grumping may make it seem like I dislike Ley as a character. I assure you the opposite is true. Ley is a great character. She is just a great character of a fucked-up, infuriating, utterly insufferable person. I enjoyed being all like “What is this bitch’s problem” very much.

This novel is longer than any of the other ones in the Craft series so far but I feel like that’s perfectly acceptable as we get to explore not just a new city, but a new three-cities-in-one, and also how laboriously difficult it is for our gang of fucked-up weirdos to get on the same page about anything is a pretty integral theme here, so stuff takes a while. The pace is fairly frenetic, as everyone is continually scrambling to stay ahead of the Rectification Authority, the cops, zombie gangsters, Ley, and sometimes each other.

Anyway, there’s been another book released in this series that I totally missed hearing about, so I’m hoping it’ll take me less than another five years to read Dead Country.

After finishing my reread of The Lies of Locke Lamora I was compelled to then reread its sequel, Red Seas Under Red Skies. This one combines two very fun settings: the first half is casino shenanigans and the second half is pirate shenanigans. It makes for a rather convolutedly structured book as our heroes, Locke and Jean, find themselves buried under an increasingly convoluted set of interlocking scams.

I find myself a little of two minds about this. On the one hand, it was fun! I thoroughly enjoyed about the first 700+ of the 760 pages, including the jarring shifts from one scam to the other. But I feel like it didn’t quite stick the landing, and it’s one of those situations where I feel sort of bad about criticizing it because I certainly can’t think of a better way to stick the landing either, but the fact is that stories that have multiple plot threads that all look like they’re about to kill our heroes generally function as setup for the conclusion, and much of what’s fun about them is going “I have no idea how our heroes are going to pull this off!” and then watching our heroes pull it off in an unlikely fashion. And I know that some stuff has gotta be left open for sequels, but also… it feels like they didn’t pull off everything they were supposed to pull off? They escaped with their lives, for now, which I suppose is very impressive given how fucked they were, but it didn’t quite get that satisfaction of having everything snap together at the end, which is a pretty significant part of the fun of these kinds of complicated heist/con/scheme sorts of stories. Anyway it was still a lot of fun for most of it.

Despite being told that it was nowhere near as good as its prequels, my completist ass picked up Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone, the third book in the Gormenghast trilogy. It’s a lot shorter than the other two, which is probably just as well, because truly, it isn’t as good! Like, it wasn’t bad, and it was certainly just as weird, but it wasn’t as rich, and the atmosphere was very different–less Gothic and more a sort of absurdist sci-fi, Ozian flavor, but not for children (i.e. it’s got too many tiddies in it for Oz).

Having run away from Gormenghast, Titus finds himself in a strange and unnamed city, where he is promptly arrested for vagrancy and meets a variety of very strange people, one of whom is a nice lady named Juno who saves him from the Kafkaesque mercies of the court. The other most important figure who winds up on Team Titus (more or less) is Muzzlehatch, a weird old guy with a car and a zoo full of wild animals, who is also coincidentally Juno’s ex. Muzzlehatch provides Titus with the information needed to escape some scrape or other through a demimonde called the Under-River, where we meet, you guessed it, a bunch more weird absurd characters. Upon resurfacing from the Under-River a fevered Titus gets rescued by a young lady named Cheeta, the daughter of a renowned scientist who runs a factory where he does some kind of unspecified death ray science. Cheeta is mostly characterized as being very smart and very small. She falls in love with Titus, and when an un-fevered Titus turns out to not really like her but he does want to bang her, she is very insulted and her love turns to hatred and she embarks upon a complicated revenge plot to drive him mad, which I admit I have some sympathy for (I realize it is perfectly morally neutral to find someone hot even if you don’t like them that much, but for God’s sake, don’t tell them that). Nobody in the book talks or behaves remotely like a normal human being. Inexplicably it is still compelling. Honestly I really just don’t know what to make of this one.