bloodygranuaile

I finished up Brandon Sanderson’s Wax and Wayne series by borrowing my girlfriend’s friend’s copy of The Lost Metal, a title that really doesn’t sound exciting at all unless you’re already familiar with the series. Which is fine, because the book would also make no sense if you hadn’t read the first three. There’s a lot going on! There is in fact enough new stuff introduced in this book that it’d probably be unreadably complicated if you didn’t already know all the stuff introduced in the first three books.

This book takes place a few years after the end of The Bands of Mourning and our heroes are approaching middle age. Wax has two children and spends most of his time doing senator stuff; Marasi and Wayne are now partners as constables. Marasi is dating the Malwish guy we met halfway through Book 3; he is apparently really into baking. Things seem to be in a pretty good groove except for the looming threat of war with the rest of the Basin, especially Bilming. The plot really gets cracking when MeLaan breaks up with Wayne because Harmony needs her to go do something off on another planet.

I do have to say I have sort of split feelings on where the plot goes in this book. The stuff that is related to our previous plots and characters about things that happen on this planet (apparently named Scadrial) were cool, and I feel like everyone’s arcs wrapped up fairly satisfyingly, although Marasi’s is teasing me with a desire for a future short story or novella about her later career. But the expansion into the rest of the Cosmere I was a little less excited about. Like the content itself was pretty cool but it hit upon my current exhaustion with the constant franchising of everything. I think me-ten-years-ago would still have thought the crossover stuff was cool but right now it just felt a little too “subscribe to Brandon Sanderson’s newsletter” and I will not be subscribing to any author’s newsletters unless I know them personally, and sometimes not even then, thanks. I might check out some of Sanderson’s other works at some point but I don’t think this made me want to read them more.

The two are not really separable, though, since the whole answer to the Set and its terrible behavior involves the other gods that exist throughout this universe–and the magic theology of Harmony as being one of several gods each made out of parts of a different, older dead god is extremely cool. It is actually cool that this results in different planets that all have different functioning, real religions and ways that magic works. I just apparently have no sense of fun anymore when it comes to crossovers and Easter eggs and shit.

Anyway, back on Scadrial, we have all the steampunk Wild West gunslinger shenanigans you could ask for, a lot of extremely goofy dialogue from Wayne, increasingly explodey weapons, and a truly D&D-like number of underground bunkers. I recommend searching Spotify for “Steampunk Instrumentals” before reading even though–or perhaps because–this isn’t a real genre of music and the main stuff you will find are the soundtracks to Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movies. They pair excellently.

Usually around this time of year I manage to read about 1,000 pages between Christmas and New Year’s, but this year I spent a bunch of that time playing games, so the first book of 2023 is Brandon Sanderson’s Shadows of Self, the second book in the Wax and Wayne series, which seems to be his only series where the books are regularly around 300-400 pages instead of 1,000.

In this one, the short version of the problem is that a mysterious killer named Bleeder is stoking the entirely justifiable grievances of the industrializing populace to foment the most destructively disruptive forms of civil unrest she can think of–and our intrepid heroes have to stretch their imaginations to match hers, because she’s got grievances that wouldn’t even occur to normal people. The cops keep trending toward defaulting toward mass repression despite everyone being aware that the rioting masses are, politically, entirely correct. Marasi has officially become a constable right now–basically the EA to the new head of her octant’s division–and is dealing with office politics. Wax mostly shoots things magnificently, sasses God, and has existential breakdowns. Wayne continues to be very funny. Steris is still my favorite character. This is a very plot-driven crime thriller type of book so it’s hard to talk much about anything without major spoilers, but let’s just say that, for all the obvious similarities to early industrial America, a world where religious stuff is unambiguously real and the cops are not the immediate descendants of runaway slave patrols means that some things go down a little differently than they would in real life. (Also, you know, magic.) However it is still quite fun and twisty and sets up the next book very effectively.

For plane reading on the way back from New York, I decided to settle into Cherie Priest’s steampunk doorstopper Boneshaker. It was a 45-minute flight but we did get to the airport stupid early, so it seemed necessary to start a 400-page novel. Fortunately, I enjoy big fat ridiculous steampunk novels here in the dark days of winter, and this one was pretty good!

It takes place in an alternate version of Seattle where Seattle has been quite substantially destroyed, and a big wall has been built around it to contain a mysterious contagion called the Blight. The Blight was started after a wacky inventor named Leviticus Blue who built a big mining rig at the behest of the Russians to dig gold in the Yukon, and instead took it on a joyride underneath Seattle and robbed all the banks.

Our dual protagonists here are Briar, Leviticus’ widow, and her fifteen-year-old son, Zeke. Zeke is curious about his dead family members, mainly his dad and his grandfather, a policeman who heroically jailbroke a bunch of people who had been left to die in the evacuation of Seattle. Briar doesn’t tell Zeke much of anything, so he rather predictably runs away and sneaks into the walled-up ruins of Seattle to go find things out. Briar, of course, goes after him, and thus commences several hundred pages of foggy, zombie-filled post-apocalyptic steampunk adventures featuring many dodgy but colorful characters and lots of gas masks and airships.

First of all I must say that reading a whole book about people who have to keep their masks on except under very specific closed circumstances, otherwise they shall catch the blight and die, is much more nerve-wracking to read now than it was when the book was written in 2009. On the other hand, at least the masks we have to wear aren’t full-head gas masks with goggles and seals and stuff.

I have absolutely nothing deep or insightful to say about this book whatsoever. It was a steampunk adventure book, and steampunk adventures it certainly did provide! If you want 400 pages of steampunk adventuriness I recommend it highly.

 

Last weekend I did so many things that I ran out of willpower by the end and decided it was time to treat myself, by which I meant not check my email, go to Porter Square Books, and buy a fantasy new release and read it in the bath, to give my poor brain a break in between books about Nazis. So I put on my two masks and dipped in real fast to pick up a copy of C. L. Polk’s Soulstar, the third and final book in her Kingston Cycle, a political steampunk fantasy about an Englandish country that is, quite literally, powered by the oppression of witches and the desecration of the souls of the dead. My absolutely deaded brain had sort of been like “Oh yeah, the gay steampunk murder mystery series, I need more of that right now for escapism reasons” and then I started reading it and it was like, whoops, not as escapist as I had intended, I had sort of forgot the uhhh whole point of the series, with its very well done but not precisely subtle subject matter about climate change and capitalist exploitation and imperialism and all the things? Also the main character in Soulstar is Robin Thorpe, a grassroots organizer with the revolutionary democracy group the Solidarity Collective, and let me tell you, we were in some Very Familiar Territory here, only with a suspicious lack of Signal chats. But it had all the rest of it, from gossipy steering committees and tedious strategy meetings in church basements to having to give ~stirring speeches~ on the fly while being like “what the fuck, I’m only here because I’m the only nerd willing to make all the lists” and having the police riot unprovoked all over your public assembly. I occasionally felt like Robin was a bit uptight about direct action but I have also definitely been at plenty of street actions where I was like “if people could stop being DUMB and ADVENTURIST and THINK about their STRATEGY for a second before they ESCALATE, please” and I haven’t even seen half the shit Robin has seen in this series. The bit where they storm the palace reads a little weird after the events of this winter where we had actual fascists doing the “storm the seat of government” thing but that is not really the book’s fault, it is clearly drawing on a long history of people storming palaces because the government was further right and more oppressive than the people doing the storming (that’s even the more common instance, I think). 

There is a romantic plotline here but it is a little different from the previous ones in that it does not start at the beginning of the romance, but instead it already has a history. Robin, it turns out, has a spouse who was arrested and put into one of the power grid prisons twenty years earlier, and who, when khe gets out, promptly denounces kher shitty rich real-estate-mogul family and goes to live with Robin in the Thorpe clan house, which plays real nice for the press in a dramatic scene at the train station but which is then sort of awkward. It’s well done and Zelind is a pretty badass character in kher own right--an inventor of useful and creative gadgets--but I did find some of the obligatory marital strife boring (this is because I find marriage boring, not because of any weaknesses in the actual handling of the subject). But overall I just felt sort of at home in this series where everyone is queer and obsessed with politics in a way that is now normal to me and that makes all the books full of “normal” straight people whose lives don’t revolve around politics feel even more like they’re about aliens than they always did.

I was very surprised but I think kind of pleased that Polk did not have her characters magnanimously wuss out of one very important thing that happened at the end, which seems a bit of a departure from the usual rules of Good Revolutionaries in literature, and I really liked that choice. 

Anyway. Murder! Police kettles! Old hotels! I enjoyed this book and this series very much. I hope once all the turbines are up and running Zelind invents Signal, it will make Robin’s life easier.

Who’s got two thumbs and finally read a fiction book? This girl! And all it took was having a combined physical and emotional (and motor vehicle) breakdown, getting sick as a dog and way too cranky to do anything else.

 After we did The Dispossessed for BSpec book club I wanted to do another Very Political book but perhaps one that was not 90% philosophical discussions, so I suggested one that I'd been intending to read ever since I first heard of it at a convention a few years ago before it was published: Nishi Shawl's Everfair, a steampunk novel about the Belgian Congo.

A whole bunch of people told me that Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus would be right up my alley. They have been telling me this for a good couple of years now. I have finally gotten around to reading it and am pleased to report that my friends know me very well. Or perhaps I should be less pleased to report that I am apparently very, very predictable?

The Night Circus is a lush, vaguely steampunky-Gothic, dark-romantic Victorian fantasy. It is ostensibly about two young magicians forced into a bizarre competition of skill by their teachers—both entirely dislikeable characters in their own ways—in the arena of a mysterious, magical black-and-white circus. Mostly it is about the circus, really, and although obviously the challenge that started it is quite important and provides the plot, the circus becomes a lot more than that—which I think is the point. There are many people involved in the circus besides the two magicians and their insufferable teachers, and the circus is very, very important to them. There are, therefore, a lot of vignettes and subplots and backstories and whatnot. A lot of readers, even ones who like that it takes place in the Victorian era and is full of pretty Victorian things, may not be as OK with the structure and pacing of the novel, which also tends to resemble a lot of Victorian lit in that it begins quite at the beginning and rolls along slowly and descriptively like a big sluggish river of words until it washes gently up upon the plot. The regular parts of the story are interspersed with little second-person interludes simply exploring the circus, which will probably strike some readers as pretentious and bore them, but which I enjoyed as pure one-thousand percent escapism, probably because the Night Circus is the type of place that I would love to attend. (Its fans, the rêveurs, have a dress code that just so happens to be what I wear half the time anyway. Like, it is my kinda place.)

I think my biggest complaint is that some of the magical stuff was a bit vague—I don’t know if actually explaining the mechanics of it any more would have made it better (actually, I’m 99% sure it would have ruined the atmosphere) but sometimes it didn’t have enough emotional force to really keep it all together—there’s a number of mentions at the end of how much effort it is for Celia to keep the circus running but I think if that’s the case—and if it’s been a longstanding case—the Celia POV parts of the book needed a bigger infusion of sensation-novel-ness, a stronger sense of the weight and strain of maintaining control.

This book does, however, go firmly on my “I want a movie/miniseries” list, even though it is not particularly action-packed, because it is so hugely visual and I want to see all these illusions animated! I also want an excuse for a more social experience of it, like going to a midnight showing in full rêveur wear or having a premiere party with all black-and-white food. Please tell me I can get this! Marketing to Goths is like, so hot right now, right?

The upside of the current combination of T-shattering weather and my own personal broke-ness has had one excellent upside: I’m finally getting around to reading a bunch of the books that have been up near the top of my Have To Read ASAP list for months. This includes The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison (apparently an alias for Sarah Monette), which I bought way back in July with every intent of getting on it as soon as I could. It came highly recommend by a lot of people whose tastes often run similar to mine, and the basic premise of “court intrigue with steampunk elves” definitely piqued my interest! There are many more fun things than that, though.

FUN THING #1: There are no humans in this book. It takes place in the Elflands, where the inhabitants are elves—a white-skinned (paper-white, it sounds like, not just Caucasian-white), white-haired, big-pointy-eared people with kind of a big stick up their collective butt about how imperial their empire is. Their most important neighboring land in this book is inhabited by goblins, who seem to be sort of a subspecies or maybe just a separate ethnic group rather than an entirely different species, since they can (and do) marry and have kids with elves, most often along the border. The elven higher-ups are predictably snobbish about this. Our protagonist is a half-elf half-goblin named Maia, the fourth and youngest—and least-favored—son of the elven emperor, who has grown up in a shabby sort of country estate far away from court. When the emperor and his three older sons are all killed in an airship crash, Maia suddenly finds himself Emperor. He is not really prepared for this, and neither is anyone else.

FUN THING #2: All of the court intrigue and politicking and mannersy stuff. I will admit, I am easy to please on this front because I adore the crap out of fussy court stuff I have no hope of understanding, especially when outsiders are dropped into it and don’t understand it either and are all like “oh my god this is ridiculous how do people live like this,” and this book does not stint on that front at all. But it’s also done really, really well, with a sensitivity towards how it is that people actually do live like that, and it shows our protagonist slowly and painfully learning to master it and to introduce changes to try to make things less toxic. It also gives enough history to paint a picture of not just “courts” and “empire stuff” but specifically of what a court looks like when it starts to go stagnant—there’s a real sense that the court may not have always been quite this fussy and ridiculous but that it has sort of ossified somewhere in the last couple of rulers, particularly under Maia’s dad, who sounds like not really the most innovative ruler. The reader has to learn how the court and its faction function along with Maia, under the guidance of his fantastic secretary Csevet. It is a delight, and probably not an unrealistic one, that not everybody is actually terrible, but many people are hiding their lights under the bushels of convention.

FUN THING #3: Language. OK, I might just be being a huge dork about this, but apparently the elven language has a more complex system of pronouns than we do. There’s a formal and an informal second person, represented, respectively, by “you” and “thou,” as English used to. There’s also a formal first person, represented by “we,” as has also sometimes been done in English—although in the elven language the first-person plural and formal are clearly two distinct pronouns, and sometimes have to be explicitly differentiated in the text. There’s also a wonderfully complex system of titles and prefixes and suffixes, where family names are roots that take masculine, feminine, and collective endings. There are basic titles that translate to “Mr.,” “Mrs.,” and “Miss,” essentially, and grander and grander forms of address are built up by piling on prefixes. Maia has to pick a new name to be his emperor name, and he’s always addressed as “Serenity,” and it’s a super big deal for him to let anyone call him by his real name, and it’s all SO FUN if you are a big dork about that sort of thing. It does occasionally make it a little confusing to keep the already-large cast of characters straight, but there is a character list at the back, or you can try to slow down and read things more carefully than I usually do these days.

FUN THING #4: Ladies. Our protagonist, Maia, is a dude, because that is how it works in the elven language. The elven society has a pretty patriarchal system in place, but that does not stop the book from having a lot of awesome elf ladies in it, and a few awesome goblin ladies, and Maia is not a jerk at all about it, hooray! I particularly liked the plotline about the elf lady who he picks to be his Empress—an excruciatingly awkward situation in every conceivable way, and one that could easily have gone terribly wrong.

FUN THING #5: Steampunky goodness. The steampunk element of this book is actually fairly understated compared to my other experiences with steampunk writing, which, to be fair, are basically just Gail Carriger and Scott Westerfeld. There are airships and there is an awesome plotline with the Clockmaker’s Guild who wish to build a politically important bridge in a place where it’s been the accepted wisdom that you can’t build a bridge, and Maia is all over bridges, which becomes a nice motif by the end of the story. There’s also a message system of “pneumatic tubes” in the castle which I’m imagining as being like a cross between an old-school phone switchboard and the little tubes you used to have at drive-through banks before you had ATMs. (I always found those super fun when I was a kid.)

FUN THING #6: Ears. Most of the facial expressions, body language, etc. that the elves and goblins engage in is described in terms the same as those of humans—they smile, they frown, they pout, they flinch and stiffen and blush and blanche and all those things. BUT. Also their ears move, like they droop when they’re sad or go flat when they’re angry, and part of putting on your expressionless court face is making sure they don’t do any of those things. It’s just woven in there like it’s the most normal thing in the world and it’s ADORABLE.

The main plotline mostly has to do with investigating who killed Maia’s family, because it’s obvious that that person is after Maia next. Since we don’t know who did that for most of the book, the main antagonist for a lot of it is the Lord Chancellor, a pompous man who had been extremely loyal to Maia’s father and seems to find it his duty to continue his reign in every possibly, including ignoring and hating Maia. This doesn’t work very well, now that Maia is emperor, but that doesn’t stop the Lord Chancellor in the slightest.

Overall this book is a bit more serious and dense than I would have expected from “steampunk elves,” but not in a bad way—it’s very engaging, and it does have enough touches of humor and general charmingness to not be a downer, but it also has enough weight to get me really invested in the plot and in caring about what happens to this realm and wanting Maia’s reign to be a success. I highly recommend it to anyone who likes court intrigues of any sort.

After the embarrassing escapade where I wasn’t sure if Snuff existed for a while, I started paying much closer attention to Discworld book releases, and so I was aware of the release of Raising Steam well in advance. However, so were several dozen other people in the Boston metro area, so I had to wait several weeks for the ebook to become available at the library.

My two main thoughts on Raising Steam are one, that it is hilarious and great and I adored it and at one point it almost made me cry, and two, that it is not quite as good as most of the other Discworld books and it’s really sad to see that Terry Pratchett does appear to be losing some of his touch. I mean, Terry Pratchett at his most mediocre is still funnier than most other people at their funniest. But I was still unreasonably disappointed that they didn’t come up with any wacky Discworldian name for a railway, and just called it the railway—sure, there were cute names for the individual engines and stations and lines, but remember when they invented rock’n’roll and called it “Music With Rocks In”? That was awesome.

Anyway, Raising Steam follows pretty much immediately after the events of Snuff, and the events that aren’t directly to do with the railway are mostly sequelae to the more recent Vimes books—mainly Snuff and Thud!—and yet, Raising Steam would more properly be set in the Moist von Lipwig subseries. This is a bit confusing at Moist is not actually the man behind the railway.

The man behind the railway is Dick Simnel, a blacksmith’s son from Sto Lat who somehow manages to invent mechanical engineering properly and builds a steam engine. He takes it to Ankh-Morpork, which is, after all, where stuff happens, and presents it to Harry King, the sewage tycoon. Moist gets involved when a stern Vetinari tells him to make sure this locomotive business isn’t going to be bad for the city, which Moist manages to do by making the Bank of Ankh-Morpork, of which he is the head, a ten-percent owner in the company, thus solidifying Moist as a not completely random choice of protagonist.

The plot mostly involves a bunch of dwarf religious extremists, known colloquially as “the grags” even though a “grag” is a particular type of religious official and not all the grags are extremists, who are still annoyed about the Koom Valley Accord where they stopped fighting the trolls, and are deeply committed to returning to a sort of fundamentalist dwarfdom where they don’t interact with anybody else and they shun all inventions that other people have come up with as being intrusive abominations. The first big target of this is the clacks towers, the Discworld version of the telegram, but soon their wrath is turned to the locomotive, especially since Lord Vetinari now seems very keen on using the locomotive to connect Ankh-Morpork and Uberwald. There was also an odd subplot about the Low King and gender that I wanted to like but didn’t really, because we’ve done dwarves and gender already and it also popped up kind of weirdly late in the book.

There is still a great deal of delightful Discworldian absurdity and punning (and footnotes), featuring place-names such as the Effing Forest and Downsized Abbey and The Netherglades. I feel that Discworld might be tipping ever so into that self-referential sort of point where the humor gets dependent upon previous stuff in the series—like, my first Discworld book was The Truth, which is late enough in the series that I was fairly confused not having any prior knowledge, but funny enough to keep reading anyway, but here I think someone who hadn’t read all the other books would just be utterly lost and not entertained at all. As someone who has read all the other Discworld, I don’t mind so much, because it really is good to see characters like Otto Chriek and Sacharissa Crispslock randomly showing up a lot, and it’s definitely worth it to have Vimes and Moist both featuring fairly largely in the same book and having to interact with each other more than just in passing.

The end of the book was a lot tamer than I’m used to from Discworld; I was pretty sure things from the Dungeon Dimensions were going to show up at the end since that’s a common recurring theme in the A Powerful Thing Gets Invented On Discworld formula (sadly, it is a bit of a formula by now), but they didn’t, there was just cleverness and dwarf politicking.

I do love seeing Discworld getting increasingly steampunky, even as I’m not a huge fan of it getting more serious. I also think the later books could stand getting edited somewhat more tightly, but this is a complaint that seems to be inevitable when any author gets successful, the editors start getting all wary of messing with the golden goose and possibly pissing them off, so the books get not just longer but also more full of rambly extraneous stuff. I often like extraneous stuff, but sometimes it really is just… extraneous. In this case, I think the same footnote occurred more than once, but not in a way where the repetition was the joke; that sort of thing.

Anyway, it is what it is, and what it is is still a highly entertaining Discworld book, which is pretty much what I wanted, so I’m pretty happy.