Short Book Reviews: A Woman Police Detective Across Dimensions

 Marked, by S. Andrew Swann (DAW)

Reminiscent of Roger Zelazny’s Amber series, this “portal to another world” fantasy begins as a police procedural with a twist. Detective Dana Rohan’s life is filled with secrets. One is the intricate, tattoo-like Mark across her back that has grown in complexity and extent since the time she was found as an orphaned child. The other is what the Mark does. By an act of will, she can travel across time and alternate worlds. She’s been using this ability to solve crimes, at the risk of attracting the suspicions of the police higher-ups, even the distrust of her partner when she almost gets caught hiding a revolver used in a crime in a parallel world when one exists in police custody in this reality. Her problems quickly fade to insignificance when a series of bizarre encounters, including near-fatal assaults by zombie-like, cannibal “Shadows,” propel her from her ordinary life into a multitude of different realities. From formless, roiling Chaos to a world in which Napoleon III rules the Western World, her only hope of survival is turning the tables on the culprit behind the assaults.

I’m a fan of stories that start in the everyday world, often with a character with a mysterious past, and end up in increasingly more fantastic settings. I mentioned Zelazny’s Amber series, also Anne McCaffrey’s Restoree, and let’s not forget all the magical-door stories like C. S. Lewis’s Narnia. This one has the added features of a woman detective who is more than capable of defending herself, a slow-simmer romance, and the usual quirks of alternate histories. It’s fast-paced and full of plot twists and drama. All in all, a quick but satisfying read.

 

Very Short Book Reviews: Murderbot, A Turtledove Collection, and More

The Best of Harry Turtledove, by Harry Turtledove (Subterranean)

This is a huge book, a rich feast of imagination and consummate story-telling. The stories feature a wide range of characters and situations, including the nine-foot-tall Sasquatch who serves as governor of the fictional state of Jefferson; the descendants of dinosaurs that never got wiped out by the asteroid, digging up their own ancestors’ bones in a Wild West Dinosaur Craze and re-visiting Moby Dick as a mosasaur; heart-breaking tales of Jewish survival of the Holocaust; a fictional confrontation between Galileo and a leader of the Holy Inquisition; Cthulhu as a university lecturer in genetics; and a thriller set in 1940s New Orleans in which defeated Southerners plot to distract the Loyal States from entering World War II. It’s an understatement to say there is something here for every taste, but the scope and effortlessness of Turtledove’s storytelling never falls short.

Fugitive Telemetry, by Martha Wells (Tordotcom)

A murder mystery set on a space station—Murderbot’s summoned to the investigation! Do I need to say anything more? If you don't know Murderbot, the SecurityUnit cyborg who has, by dint of tremendous determination and not a little crankiness, become autonomous, you're in for a treat! Run out and get the previous novellas and novel right away! And clear your calendar, because Murderbot is addictive.

The Dispatcher: Murder by Other Means, by John Scalzi (Subterranean)

Part noir detective story, part thriller, part inventive science fiction that examines a world in which death is not permanent (well, certain kinds of death and mostly), this is newest adventure in John Scalzi’s “The Dispatcher” series. I hadn’t read the first one but quickly found that didn’t matter. Scalzi skillfully weaves in all the necessary backstory with nary a plot hiccough.

In Scalzi’s world, a few years ago almost all folks who were murdered don’t die, they reappear in a place they feel safe, like a childhood home. Natural deaths are something else: you die, you stay dead. A new profession has arisen, that of “dispatcher,” a not-murderer for hire. If you’re about to die naturally, you hire them and get another chance at life. Most of the time. But business has been drying up, and Tony Valdez has been taking on cases that blur the shady line of what’s strictly legal. Like killing a Chinese executive so he can re-appear thousands of miles away in time for an important business meeting. At this point, Scalzi propels Valdez firmly into thriller territory, with plenty of dramatic tension, noir mystery, and danger. In Scalzi’s superlatively competent hands, it all comes together seamlessly for a can’t-put-it-down ride.

Short Book Reviews: Saving the Prince of the Holy Russian Empire

The Russian Cage, by Charlaine Harris (Gallery / Saga Press)

This is the third installment of the “Gunnie Rose” series, featuring hired gunslinger Lizbeth Rose in an alternate 1930s America in which the United States has fractured into different nations, the West Coast being the Holy Russian Empire. In previous stories (A Longer Fall is reviewed here), Lizbeth encountered, then partnered with and fell in love with, Eli, a gregori (wizard) and Prince of the aforementioned Holy Russian Empire. Their adventures took place in the Southern regions, but now he’s been arrested in San Diego, and Lizbeth sets out to rescue him. As resourceful as she is, and as keen a sharpshooter, nothing has prepared her for the dangerous intricacies of royal court politics, certainly not her previous life, which was poor in material goods but rich with love.

I loved Lizbeth’s first-person voice, a bit Southern-folksy in the manner of Sookie Stackhouse of the True Blood series, but not the same character. Lizbeth has little formal education but a good deal of common sense, kindness, and life experience. While the story moves right along, I most enjoyed the tiny details of Lizbeth’s life. No wonder Prince Eli fell in love with her!

Book Reviews: The Lady Astronaut Series

 Mary Robinette’s Lady Astronaut Series: Three Novels and A Novella

 

The Lady Astronaut (novella)

This was the tale that began it all. The Lady Astronaut has the shape and emotional clarity of short fiction while evoking a larger story both in time and space. Thirty years ago, in the early 1950s, a meteorite strike on the Eastern United States ignited a space race. The central character, Elma York, was once a pioneering astronaut, world-famous as The Lady Astronaut of Mars. Now in her 60s, she still yearns to return to space, but the upcoming mission is a one-way trip and her beloved husband has only a short time left to live. Elma’s dilemma is the centerpiece of a beautifully crafted, perfectly balanced story.

 

The Calculating Stars

A concept like The Lady Astronaut cries out for development, and here we journey backward

in time to the origin story. In 1952, history took a different turn when a meteorite obliterated most of the East Coast of the United States. Elma and Nathanael York were among the survivors, eventually making their way to the new capitol and the newly formed International Aerospace Coalition. Here he becomes the lead engineer and she, a computer. They understand all too well the danger that the dust and water vapor thrown into the atmosphere will lead first to a prolonged drop in Earth’s temperatures, and then a runaway greenhouse effect. It’s entirely likely that the world will become uninhabitable. If humanity is to survive, it must be on another planet. They have time, but only if they devote all their resources to it. Thus, the Space Race of the 1960s begins a decade earlier, and with a very different mission.

Elma’s experience as a wartime pilot, along with her genius for mathematical computations, makes her a prime candidate for astronaut training. But this is the 1950s, when sexism as well as racism run rampant and the head of the program is determined to find any excuse to exclude women. A few white women might stand a chance but minorities are out of the running, which is a terrible loss because many of the superb women pilots trained in World War II are Black or Asian.

At this point, the story shifts focus from an alternate history disaster thriller to an examination of how an earlier space race would have run up against the social institutions and prejudices of the day. Racism, attitudes towards women, and antisemitism, are pervasive. Characters range from those, like Elma, who forge alliances and friendships, to rabidly pro-apartheid South African astronaut trainees. Elma’s personal experiences as a Jew and a woman in a male-dominated field make her not only sympathetic in herself but believable in her advocacy of equality. Elma witnesses the struggles of her Black colleagues and friends from the outside, never truly able to understand but willing to acknowledge her limitations. She is all too aware of when she blunders into thinking she understands the lives of her Black friends, even as she is willing to use her white privilege to open doors for them.

As a note: The alliance between Blacks and Jews dates back at least to the 1950s, when both were targets of white supremacist groups like the KKK. In 1958, the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation Temple in Atlanta, Georgia, was bombed by a group calling itself the Confederate Underground. The bombing was in retaliation for the outspoken activism of the senior rabbi, who criticized segregation and advocated for racial equality.

Elma is anything but a cardboard soapbox character. She suffers from a crippling anxiety disorder. I love flawed characters and I cheer them on as they struggle to overcome their challenges. Elma’s social anxiety is severe enough that the physical symptoms threaten to overwhelm her, yet she never gives up. She uses mathematics as a mantra to calm herself. Despite her attempts to avoid being in the spotlight, she’s catapulted into fame with an appearance on “Ask Mr. Wizard” and subsequently became the public face of the space program as “The Lady Astronaut.” When the stresses of public appearances become too much, she seeks medical help and receives a prescription for Miltown (meprobamate), an early anxiolytic drug. The medication is of tremendous help, even though Elma feels obliged to keep it a secret or risk losing her chance at actually going into space.

Guest Blog: Tim Susman on Alternate History

Today I'm delighted to present Tim Susman, whose queer furry alternate history novel, The Revolution and the Fox, released on January 15, 2021. Here are his thoughts on alternate history.

When writing alternate history stories, I think sometimes about Dean Koontz’s Lightning, in which a character uses time travel to prevent a horrible accident. But every time they stop it, it happens again in different circumstances at a different time, so they end up jumping around and preventing it over and over. “Destiny,” we are told, “struggles to reassert the pattern that was meant to be.”

Stephen King also personifies history in 11-22-63. The main character, traveling in time to attempt to prevent President Kennedy’s assassination, is told that he will be fighting “the past,” which “doesn’t want to be changed” (disclaimer: I have seen the mini-series but not read the book). Kennedy’s assassination is viewed as a lynchpin that will change history beyond its ability to “push back,” but the implication from both of these books is that it is very hard to change history (to be fair, these are more generally time travel books than alternate history books).

Most people who might believe in destiny would attribute that force to a guiding intelligence behind it, a religious belief. Absent that force, or at least the focused interest of that force, there is a temptation when writing alternate history to err too far in the other direction. The famously named “butterfly effect” encourages us to believe that a small change in one place can spawn massive changes around the world. It may be true that a single person making a different decision at a specific, important time can change the course of the world—one is reminded of Lieutenant Colonel Petrov, who may have prevented a nuclear exchange in the Soviet False Alarm incident of 1983—and events like those are prime fodder for alternate history writers. But when looking at larger world trends, movements built by dozens or hundreds of people, it is harder to divert them with a single decision, and the fictional force of “destiny” does not seem quite so strange to imagine. Rather than being a supernatural force, it is more obviously the result of the collective thinking of a group of people, dozens to thousands or more.

History is, at its core, the story of people. This seems like an obvious statement, but when most of us learn history in school, we learn names and dates and very little about the people behind those names. So when building an alternate history around a specific event, I research the people who shaped and were shaped by that event, and how they might have reacted had the event turned out differently. People are stubborn and tend to cling to their beliefs. So even if, say, the British Empire had access to sorcerers that helped them quell the 1776 rebellion before it properly got started, that wouldn’t change the minds of a generation of American colonists—or their children—who felt that their proper place was as an equal on the world stage.

Short Book Reviews: A Train Robbery, a Russian Wizard, and a Hired Gun

A Longer Fall, by Charlaine Harris (Saga)

An alternate 1920s American South, complete with racial tensions, railroad travel, and conventional roles for women, forms the backdrop for this delicious mystery/thriller/urban-fantasy/romance in true Charlaine Harris style.

Lizbeth Rose is a gunnie, a hired gun, and she’s part of a crew who have been employed to transport a mysterious, crated object and in the process prevent anyone from stealing it. Their method of transportation is railroad, and it comes as no surprise that the train is sabotaged, resulting in much bloodshed, and in the wreckage that follows, the leader of the crew, badly wounded but holding on to the box, is murdered. 

Lizbeth teams up with an old flame, Eli Savarov, a magic-wielding “grigori” wizard otherwise in service to the Holy Russian Empire. They’re forced to remain in the town of Sally, Louisiana, until the box is recovered and the mystery solved. Step by step, they are drawn deeper into the layers of oppression, from the social pressure on Lizbeth to dress and behave like a submissive woman to the casual lynching of blacks.

The first person narrative echoes the “Sookie Stackhouse” novels in tone and diction, but that is part of their charm. Both Lizbeth and Sookie convey savvy, sass, and depth of emotion in deceptively simple language. They’re not the same character, however, and neither are they the author, who demonstrates her deep understanding of Southern American culture with all its shadows and strengths.

A fast-paced, engaging read with quirky world-building and compelling characters that left me hungry for the next installment.

Guest Interview: Heather Albano, Author of the Keeping Time Trilogy

Welcome Heather Albano, author of the wonderful steampunk time-travel novel, Timepiece, and its sequels. I reviewed it here. She's graciously agreed to give us a peek behind the scenes.

What inspired your novel?

(I love telling this story.) It started when afriend of mine told me about a dream she’d had, in which a package arrived in the mail for her then-infant son. Inside the package addressed to him was a package addressed to me (how odd, she thought) and inside that was a velvet bag containing a pocket watch. Opening the pocket watch, my friend discovered the period casing contained a futuristic-looking screen cycling through images of different historical times and places. “I think I had your dream, Heather.”

I tried to write a story about her son and me and the pocket watch, including a reason for the nested packages, but I couldn’t get it to gel. A pocket watch seemed to belong to an older era anyway…so maybe this wanted to be a Victorian time travel story. Maybe steampunk—huge mechanical monsters stomping down a gaslit street? Yeah. Stomping after what? What would mechanical Victorian monsters hunt? Something natural run amuck, of course. The Victorians would totally build monstrous scientific artificial things to constrain monstrous natural things.

Okay, so where did the run-amuck natural things come from? And when? It would have to be long enough before the Victorian era for the organic monsters to become a problem, for a solution to be generated, and for the solution to become its own problem. Seventy to eighty years, say? The “Victorian era” spanned a long time, of course, but I meant the Sherlock Holmes / Jack the Ripper / Dracula / H.G. Wells part of it—so call it 1880 to 1895. What was going on in England seventy to eighty years before, say, 1885?

Five seconds later, I was scrambling for Wikipedia to look up the dates of the Battles of Trafalgar and Waterloo. Five seconds after that, I knew exactly what the story was about.



What was your favorite part of writing the Keeping Time trilogy?

My favorite type of reading experience is the one in which I suddenly realize the story I thought I was reading is not the story I am actually reading—the moment when the addition of a perspective or a backstory changes the context entirely. So it’s not entirely true that I wrote the first two books just so I could rewrite the scenes from a different character’s perspective in the third…but it was my favorite part of writing the third. Other people were in the middle of their lives when Elizabeth’s exuberant bildungsroman intersected with them, after all, and their stories have a different shape than hers…

Short Book Reviews: Jane Austen Heroine, Time Travel, and Frankenstein's Monsters Win the Battle of Waterloo

Timepiece (Book 1 of the Keeping Time Trilogy) by Heather Albano (Stillpoint Digital Press Prometheus)

The concept: Jane Austen-style characters travel through time to keep Frankenstein’s monsters from saving the Battle of Waterloo and transforming Victorian London into a nightmare of pollution and Orwellian robots.

The execution: Deft prose, careful characterization, and meticulous historical research brought the story alive from the opening pages; On the eve of the Battle of Waterloo, Wellington’s position is dire. The French have inflicted massive losses on his forces and he fears with good reason that his lines cannot hold another determined assault. The Prussians, whom he had counted on for relief and reinforcement, have been delayed, despite promises of imminent arrival. His only hope: the “special battalion” troops, descendents of the monsters created by “the Genevese” student (presumably a historical Dr. Frankenstein) a generation ago. He makes a choice and sends for them. That’s the set-up.

Across the Channel in England, a young woman, straight of the pages of Jane Austen and very much an homage to Elizabeth Bennett, aptly named Elizabeth, befriends William, a disabled veteran of those same Napoleonic wars. A mysterious gift, a watch-like device with multiple dials whose purposes are unfathomable, catapults the two to London half a century later, where the city has become an inferno-esque nightmare of pollution, poverty, child labor, and an Orwellian spy state, enforced by gigantic robots. The robots, it turns out, were developed against the “monsters,” who did not simply go away after Waterloo but were used as slaves in hazardous occupations like mining, rebelled, and were driven to Scotland behind “Moore’s Line” (shades of Hadrian, anyone?) Here they meet enigmatic Maxwell, possessor of a second time-travel watch, whose goal has been to prevent the current catastrophe by changing history. His multiple attempts – convince the Genevese to not create a monster, prevent Wellington from using the “special batallion,” etc., have all been unsuccessful. Now our stalwart team, aided by a few sundry folks from 1885 and a few more allies they make upon the way, embark upon the same mission. Needless to say, the following adventures are vastly entertaining, full of poignant moments, character development, and perspectives on the cultural shifts between 1815 and 1885, particularly for women. When they finally return to 1885, the initial signs are good: clear skies, fresh air, streets bustling with normal commerce…except they have inadvertently broken history. And obviously must go on to fix it in the second volume.

Short Book Reviews: A Jewish Homeland in Kenya

Unholy Land, by Lavie Tidhar (Tachyon)

I never quite settled into this highly praised novel. I really wanted to like it, but found myself reaching for something else to read. The review in Publisher’s Weekly said, “Fantasy Award winner Tidhar (Central Station) will leave readers’ heads spinning with this disorienting and gripping alternate history,” and I think that’s an accurate description of my experience. I could never tell which of many connected alternate worlds I was in, or sometimes which character’s point of view I was in.

On the positive side, I loved the premise: in another world, the Jewish people find a homeland in the early part of the 20th Century, not following the horror of the Holocaust. And not in the Middle East but in Africa, in Kenya. As in modern Israel, where Palestinians are exiled from the lands they have lived in for millennia, Africans are relegated to the other side of the (literal) wall and systematically disenfranchised. I appreciated the evocative parallels between this African Palestina and the modern American immigration debate or Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Our guide to this world is pulp fiction writer Lior Tirosh, returning home (to Kenyan Palestina) from Germany. At first the story reads like a murder mystery, alternating Lior’s discovery of a body (and so forth) with the first-person narrative of a police officer. However, the initial mystery is quickly superseded by others, eventually centering on the breakdown of the barriers between alternate worlds. That’s a pretty tall order for one book, and I found the switching of worlds and viewpoints (third, first, and even second, which just knocked me out of the story every time) to be confusing rather than intriguing.

Others may find Unholy Land to be a brilliant tour de force, but for me it was frustrating to be repeatedly baffled and to be thrown out of the story line just when things were beginning to make sense.

The usual disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book, but no one bribed me to say anything about it. Although chocolates might be nice.

Short Book Reviews: Teddy Roosevelt's Secret Agency in World War I

Black Chamber, by S. M. Stirling (Ace)

S. M. Stirling has been writing alternate history for a long time now, and he handles the genre with ease and panache. This book is no exception; he’s created a perfectly believable world in which Theodore Roosevelt regains the presidency and is in office on the brink of World War I. Roosevelt’s enthusiasms have already shaped much of American culture and institutions, including a flowering of invention and his top-secret spy-and-assassin agency, the Black Chamber. Posing as an agent of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (the resistance movement bent on freeing Mexico from American domination) Agent Luz O'Malley Aróstegui goes undercover in Europe to infiltrate the mobilizing German forces. The contrafactual history and subsequent changes are perhaps the most interesting aspects of the story, yet all this is but a background for what is essentially a spy thriller featuring a female James Bond. There’s sex (with and without romance), tension, and page upon page upon page of exciting action.

This raises my central concern about The Black Chamber. Is it a story set in an alternate Europe, as Germany is gearing up for war with chemical weapons? Does it focus on the unfolding differences that arose from Theodore Roosevelt’s re-election? Or is it essentially a spy thriller – and one in which a woman perpetuates the roles of male spy characters in literature – that could just as easily have taken place in the real world?

The writing is strong and the action scenes and step-by-step, tension-laden revelations are skillfully handled. My reservations are two-fold, as above. I had difficulty with those aspects of Luz that mirrored the most offensively sexist characteristics in male-dominated spy thrillers. Her internal monologues felt immature and insecure as well as insensitive. She didn’t seem to have any genuine relationships until Irish revolutionary and love interest Ciara Whelan came onstage.

Secondly, I found the long, detailed descriptions of action (such as page after page, step-by-agonizing-step portrayal of Luz climbing a wall) quickly went from interesting to tedious. Action often came to a screeching halt for long expository passages of technology, history, or geography. But the biggest problem was that I didn’t find the story hefty enough for its length. It felt to me like a novella stretched out to a fairly long novel. This is obviously a personal taste issue, and fans of Stirling (of which there are many!) will likely see this as a strength and The Black Chamber as a worthy addition to his bibliography.

The usual disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book, but no one bribed me to say anything about it. Although chocolates might be nice.

Short Book Reviews: Steampunk Victorian Revolution

Rebel Mechanics, by Shanna Swendson (Macmillan Children's Publishing Group) Steampunk and 

alternate American history, spies and skullduggery and steam engines, oh my!

From the beginning, I was captivated by this tale of an 1888 America that never freed itself from Britain, a world ruled by aristocratic “magister” magic-users, Masked Bandits and airships, and an intrepid heroine. With the focus on plot and character, perfect for young adult audiences, the world-building is handled with subtlety. Verity Newton arrives in New York City to take up a position as a governess, only to become entangled with the Rebel Mechanics, a fellowship of engineers committed to freeing themselves from the tyranny of the magisters through the creation of steam engine powered devices that anyone can operate, regardless of magical talent. (A particular charming twist was the role of the novel Jane Eyre, and its reflections on the role of governesses!) I hope this will be the beginning of a series of Verity’s adventures and the eventual liberation of the American colonies. Fans of Gail Carriger will particularly enjoy this book.

GUEST BLOG: Warren Rochelle on "What's Next?"

 Warren Rochelle worked as a librarian for eleven years, alternating between North Carolina and Cartagena, Colombia. In 1989, he decided to follow his heart and left school libraries and started graduate school again, this time in creative writing, at UNC Greensboro. His first book was a critical work on Le Guin’s fiction, Communities of the Heart: The Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, Liverpool University Press,2001. He  is now a Professor of English at University of Mary Washington, in Fredericksburg, Virginia. He's the author of The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007) and The Called (2010).

 What is the working title of your next book?
*Hmm. I have a completed novel, The Golden Boy, which is currently being edited by Nancy Berman, a free-lance editor friend of mine.  I am working on a story collection, with the working title, Happily Ever After and Other Stories. I have a novel-in-progress, The Werewolf and His Boy, almost finished but I have put it on hold to finish the story collection.

 Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
*I don’t have an agent, alas. Self-publishing is an option, but before I try that, I am planning on sending the manuscripts to various small presses that have published similar books.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
*The Golden Boy:
The original idea came from the notion that all fairy tales are true, and that the magical and mundane coexist, although the latter is not always aware of the former, or rather doesn’t believe in the former—at first.
Happily Ever After:
Homophobia persists, lingers, and is girding its loins to fight to the death. And as a result, stories are still being published and films are still being made in which the gay characters do not have happy endings, usually with one dying, leaving the survivor to mourn.  I was determined to write a collection of stories in which my gay protagonists have happily ever afters—more or less.
The Werewolf and His Boy:
*The story that inspired this novel, “Lowe’s Wolf” (published in the Spring 2010 issue of Icarus) was inspired from a dream my partner had about a wolf hiding in Lowe’s.