Nov 06 2021

Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History by Michael Witwer et al.

For a certain kind of person, this book is a source of great joy. Fortunately, I am that kind of person, and I have kept coming back to it since I bought it in February. I first became aware of Art & Arcana when I flipped through an electronic version that came as part of the Hugo voters’ packet in 2019. Even through a laptop screen, I could see that the physical book would be something special, and so it has proved.

D&D Art & Arcana

Art & Arcana is a visual history of Dungeons & Dragons, beginning before the beginning with the game’s immediate (Chainmail) and more distant (H.G. Wells) antecedents, and continuing through D&D’s fifth edition, its current incarnation that began publishing in 2014. The book itself is a serious object: just over 400 pages, oversized, hardbound, printed in full color on every page. I’ve been out of the printing business for too long to spec paper by hand anymore, but it’s quality stock that will stand up to years of reading and referencing, and the colors fairly leap off the page, especially in the many full-page illustrations.

I learned the game from friends and their various older brothers just as the original version of D&D was transforming into Advanced Dungeons and Dragons; the three little tan booklets and the several supplements were giving way to hardback books, although at that time only two of the three books necessary for AD&D had been published, so we mixed and matched as required. The wait for the Dungeon Master’s Guide seemed an eternity, though Art & Arcana tells me it was about a year. I played with great regularity through the mid-1980s, tapering off and essentially coming to a stop in the early 1990s. My D&D books did not come with me to Budapest, and they still have not caught up with me. About half of Art & Arcana is familiar from when I was either playing or still reading and buying bits of D&D things here and there. The rest is just as gorgeous, if not as familiar. Of course for people whose formative experiences came from newer editions of D&D, the ones that feel like home to me will be history, maybe even primitive ancestors.

The book’s modest amount of text recounts the story of the game’s development, beginning with how Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, along with other members of their gaming clubs, worked out how to add medieval and fantasy elements to the games they were already playing with miniature soldiers. In the early 1970s, the game changed from rules about what to do with miniatures — which by then included monsters — to open-ended role-playing for which miniatures were useful but not necessary. In 1974, Dungeons & Dragons proper made its debut.

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Nov 05 2021

Once & Future, Vol. 1: The King is Undead by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora & Tamra Bonvillain

The first comic that really expanded my idea of what graphic novels could do was Camelot 3000 by Mike W Barr and Brian Bolland, which I read as a young adolescent, then again less than a decade ago. It certainly was not as good for me the second time around, but I’ll always treasure the book for really opening my eyes to the possibilities of the medium.

And now here we have Once & Future, a new comic title based on a similar premise: the resurrection of King Arthur and how history attempts to repeat itself, to varying degrees of interesting success and even more fascinating failure. Instead of being set in the far future like C3000 tho, it’s set in the modern-day. Also unlike its predecessor, I’m fairly confident it won’t make me cringe on a re-read a dozen or so years from now.

An old scabbard is found on an archaeological dig in Cornwall shortly before the man responsible for the find is shot and killed. Hearing the news, independent senior citizen Bridgette McGuire takes off from her nursing home, prompting her athletic if dorky grandson Duncan to cancel a dinner date in order to come find her. The last thing Duncan expects is to find his gran digging up a small arsenal of weapons, right before a mythological creature attacks! Gran seems to be coolly taking everything in stride, to the utmost consternation of poor Duncan, whom she’s raised not to believe in monsters or fairy tales. Now both such things are appearing before his very eyes, and he’s not sure how to handle any of it.

Gran, however, believes that violence is almost always the answer, and has him take her to Glastonbury, where she wants to intercept the people responsible for the theft before they can set in motion their wild plan to resurrect King Arthur. She knows that the prophecy of him returning in Britain’s darkest hour is double-edged: while it might mean he could come back to save them, it can also mean that his return will herald the worst era the isles have ever known. But Gran will need allies in her quest, and might not even be able to rely on Duncan once he learns the truth about who she really is.

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Nov 04 2021

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

Piranesi lives in a vast House of marble statues, so tall that its top story is in the clouds and its lowest is filled with floods and marine life. He spends his days charting the different halls, paying attention to tide patterns and gathering information for the only other living person to haunt this place, a man he calls The Other.

Piranesi by Susanna ClarkeThe Other believes that the secret to accessing an ancient, powerful knowledge lies hidden somewhere in the House. He and Piranesi meet twice a week to share knowledge, their discoveries and the occasional supplies. But one day, he comes to Piranesi with a warning: another person has found access to the House, bearing naught but madness and instability. Piranesi must do everything possible to avoid talking to this mysterious figure he terms 16. But it’s another chance encounter that sets Piranesi on the slow path to the truth, unraveling the mystery of the House and the true reason for his presence in it.

Early on in the book, I got the weird feeling that this was being plotted out like a psychological thriller. While one can imagine this novel as a whole in those terms, it is certainly far more fantastical than your average mystery, a bit like Gormenghast meets House Of Leaves, as re-written by Ann Cleeves. Reading the book, I kept waffling between how much I admired the economy of Susanna Clarke’s language while also wanting just a smidge more description of the House: the Coral Halls sounded especially gorgeous, and I would have liked a little more of that descriptive effort in other rooms. This is not, overall, a lush novel. Like the marble halls of the sprawling House, it is mostly austere.

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Nov 03 2021

Octavia E Butler’s Parable Of The Sower: A Graphic Adaptation by Damian Duffy and John Jennings

I actually hadn’t read the original text of Parable Of The Sower before this, but I have read and loved Parable Of The Talents. I’ve also read and, in retrospect, disliked Kindred — I had good things to say about it at the time, but the way Sarah treated her ancestress feels more selfish and less forgivable with time.

PotS will not leave a similar impression on me, thankfully, but it will also not reach the heights of PotT in my esteem. A large part of why is gently pointed out by Nalo Hopkinson in her outstanding introduction: the Lauren Olamina here is a teenager and thinks she knows it all and is impatient with the older people who seem, to her, to be stuck in their ways. She lives in the walled enclave of Robledo with her preacher dad, her teacher stepmom, her brother and half-siblings. Life in Robledo is hard but much better than the squalor outside their walls. At least inside the enclave, they have enough food and shelter for everyone.

Lauren still doesn’t feel safe there, tho, and is constantly dreaming about traveling north to where, she’s heard, there are greater opportunities and less incivility. She also dreams of forming a new religion with a god vastly different from her Baptist father’s. She doesn’t dare tell anyone about her dreams or preparations for fear of scolding or worse, but when disaster strikes and her proto-prepper precautions turn out to have been prescient, she must set off on her path much earlier than expected.

The way north to safety is hard and with few allies, but Lauren slowly gathers the beginning of Earthseed, as she calls her religion and the community around it. But will the promised land prove nothing but false, and her journey through hardship, evil and literal fire be all for naught?

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Nov 02 2021

Daggers Drawn edited by Maxim Jakubowski

I really struggled with this short story collection, which is unusual given that its publisher tends to be astonishingly good at anthologies. I wonder if some small part of that was due to how my brains have been practically leaking out my ears as I worked to hit several deadlines this past week (including the publication of my own brand new role-playing game system, Equinox.) Like, I had to sit down and re-read the introduction twice to see if I could properly grok the point of this book, which is apparently to collect in one volume the winners of the Crime Writers’ Association’s Short Story Dagger since the award was first handed out in 1983. Twenty of those stories have been included in this book, cut down from thirty-eight, as several of the authors won more than once (and picked out the one they liked best for inclusion here,) and at least one other is not permitting reprints. So this is essentially a really good look at the stories that crime writers have really loved over the past four decades or so.

Trouble is, I found very few of them surprising in much more than how envelope-pushing they were attempting to be. The first story, Swiftwing 98, by Peter O’Donnell writing as Madeleine Brent is clever enough. While I enjoyed the unusual cast of the next entry, Julian Rathbone’s Some Sunny Day, I was quite underwhelmed with the mystery itself. Larry Beinhart’s Funny Story was a thoughtful tale of crime and genuine evil wrapped in a morally ludicrous, if not outright terrible, framing device. Things started to go rapidly downhill from there on in. I was not a fan of the moralizing in Jerry Sykes’ Roots, and I straight up cringed through Stella Duffy’s Martha Grace, which reduced its title character to a punch line throughout. John Harvey’s Fedora had a similar sort of punching-down feel to it, and I am 100% not surprised to discover that the author of Apocrypha, a tale narrated by a Black man down on his luck, is, as far as I can tell, a white guy. I also found the representation of neurodivergency in Denise Mina’s Nemo Me Impune Lacessit incredibly grating, if not borderline offensive.

There were four stories here that I did very much enjoy, however. The Weekender by Jeffery Deaver and The Dummies’ Guide To Serial Killing by Danuta Kot actually had twists I did not see coming. Phil Lovesey’s Homework features a swotty teenage girl taking a page from Hamlet to exact some necessary vengeance. And the very last story, #Me Too by Lauren Henderson, gets in some of that punching-up that’s necessary for any type of entertainment to escape soullessness.

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Nov 01 2021

Invisible Kingdom Vol. 2: Edge Of Everything by G. Willow Wilson & Christian Ward

I sincerely love it when I jump into a series arc at the midpoint without any prior introduction, but end the book free of any nagging questions as to things that might have come to pass before. I feel like this is the hallmark of a good writer, and certainly not a trait every author possesses. Fortunately for me, G Willow Wilson has this ability in spades, making for a wholly absorbing reading experience for me and, I surmise, anyone else who tries reading this without the benefit of having read Book 1 beforehand.

In Edge Of Everything, the crew of the freighter Sundog has exposed the conspiracy between the ruling Lux conglomerate and the predominant Renunciation religion. Now they’re low on fuel and desperate to resupply, with the closest planet being the isolationist Rool. Captain Grix wants their renegade ex-Renunciation sister Vess to negotiate with her people for them, but Vess is understandably reluctant, having turned her back on Roolian society in order to pursue an ascetic’s path. What she hadn’t counted on was forming a connection with Grix strong enough to make her falter in her purpose.

It’s while floating in Roolian airspace that the Sundog is beset by a crew of pirates ready to break the ship down for scrap. Grix has no intention of accepting any of their blandishments to join their crew, but getting free of them will require a lot more cunning and derring do than even she anticipates. What will the crew do when all seems lost, and only the infinite void is seemingly left to claim them?

Ms Wilson’s writing is immediately immersive and gripping, deftly imbuing each of her characters with full personalities despite having a good-sized cast, lots of action to get through and not much space to cram all that into either (Xether’s my favorite!) There are certainly no soggy middles here in the second book of what’s meant to be a three-part series! The only complaint I have about any of the writing is the off-putting inclusion of inappropriately timed sexy times: other people may dig that, but “barely out of life-threatening injury recuperation and presence desperately needed to avoid a crisis involving several others who depend on you” is not, for me, the most germane five minutes in which to start exploring a new sexual relationship.

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Oct 30 2021

Premature Evaluation: Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, generally and more pronounceably known as Harrow the Ninth, is one weird chickadee. Even among advanced necromancers, a company not generally known for bland probity, Harrow stands out. Readers of this book’s predecessor, Gideon the Ninth, know it; anyone wandering in on this book as the starting point in the Locked Tomb series (not advisable, by the way) realizes it within just a few pages. More importantly, Harrow herself is only too aware that she is several curves around the bend.

Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

Given her background, it would be a surprise if she were remotely sane. Two hundred children — essentially all the children who remained in the Ninth House at the time — were sacrificed to give Harrow life and necromantic abilities. For the last several years before the book begins, which is to say nearly all of Harrow’s teenage years, she has propped up her undead parents, keeping them going through the priestly motions for the Ninth House when they should be permanently horizontal. The early chapters of Harrow the Ninth also seem to reveal that she entered the Locked Tomb and fell in love with what she found there. Harrow is a most unreliable narrator, so I would not put it past Tamsyn Muir to reveal that those events were not as Harrow perceives them initially, but at the point I have reached I have to consider it another contribution to Harrow’s harrowing.

The book switches from second-person narration in the story’s present to third-person for filling in Harrow’s past. The third-person sections raise more questions than they have answered so far because they are very different from what readers (it’s worth saying again that Harrow the Ninth is not a good starting point) saw in Gideon the Ninth. For one thing, there’s no Gideon. The Ninth House’s cavalier, a counterpoint to Harrow as its necromancer, is a poetic young man improbably known as Ortus Nigenad. “Gideon” is hiding in that name, but what to make of the remaining r-t-u-s-n-a?

And the fact is, I miss Gideon. I miss her glee, I miss her act-first-think-later-if-at-all approach, I miss her irreverence. At least so far, Harrow’s seriousness is no substitute. I don’t really believe that Gideon never happened, as the narration in Harrow the Ninth implies, but I am cross enough even at the implication that I am in no great hurry to find out what *did* happen. Since beginning Harrow the Ninth in the first third of October, I have started four other books and finished two of them. I’ll probably also finish Invisible Cities soon, too.

Going by Doreen’s review, I haven’t really begun the main plot of Harrow yet, a bit more than a quarter of the way in. Harrow has become a Lyctor, but she is far from having the full measure of what that means. She is in the Emperor’s company, and there are hints and intimations, but it is still mostly set-up. Will Harrow the Ninth turn into a different kind of book the way Gideon the Ninth did? Very probably.

It may just be a while before I come along and find out. I know where Harrow will fit in my Hugo voting, and I still aim to read the novelettes and the novellas before the rapidly approaching deadline arrives. Maybe then I’ll go back and see what happens to Harrow.

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Oct 29 2021

Space Case (Moon Base Alpha #1) by Stuart Gibbs

My ten year-old brought this home from his school library and recommended I read it, too! Fortunately, he warned me that he hadn’t actually finished it when I handed it back to him, else I would have likely dropped some major spoilers, but I could tell him that it was a fun read with at least one surprising twist.

Space Case takes place in a semi-distant future where Lady Gaga is considered an oldies singer and America has built a permanent colony on the moon, with Earth’s nations agreeing to treat any of their colonies the way they do their Antarctic ones (a very reasonable solution, IMO.) Dashiell Gibson is one of the lucky first colonists on Moon Base Alpha, or MBA, as it’s known. Well, “lucky”. He not-so-secretly hates living in such cramped quarters and very much misses his old Hawaii home. But since communiques off-base are strictly censored by NASA in order to keep up appearances, he has to help maintain the whole “perfect kid in a perfect situation” facade. MBA is partially funded by tourist dollars after all, and the last thing NASA needs is for people to see through the cheery advertising and stop sending exorbitant amounts of money their way.

Ofc, all their efforts are for naught when MBA’s most prominent scientist, Dr Holtz, takes a long walk out of a short airlock. The official story as promoted by the Moon Base Commander is that Dr Holtz’s death was accidental. Trouble is, Dash is pretty sure Dr Holtz was murdered. Just hours before the unplanned moonwalk, Dash had overheard Dr Holtz engaging in an excited conversation about an important announcement he was planning on making in several hours. But before that time could arrive, he was dead.

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Oct 28 2021

Hugo Awards 2021: Best Novelette Nominees

There was an incredibly strong field in this category this year! I’m going to go ahead and review these from my least favorite to the one I hope will win, starting with Aliette de Bodard’s The Inaccessibility Of Heaven. In all honesty, her overuse of the em dash is a pet peeve of mine: it’s like reading a short story gasped out by Emily Dickinson, and throws me right out of the rhythm of reading. That said, the novelette, about witches and Fallen angels in a city below the heavenly City, has an interesting premise loosely related to Ms de Bodard’s Dominion Of The Fallen series. It was, ultimately, a little too Catholic for my taste: YMMV, ofc.

The next story on my list was A. T. Greenblatt’s Burn or The Episodic Life of Sam Wells as a Super which posits a sort of grownup X-Men dilemma: what if superpowers erupted in one’s 20s and people around you feared and hated you for having them? Ms Greenblatt more explicitly ties this to the representation of historically marginalized, if not outright persecuted, identities, with more adult angst than adolescent. Overall, it’s quite a good story, if not groundbreaking. That said, I’d completely forgotten I’d read it once I was done reading everything else in this category, and had to be reminded by the handy pdf given to me by the Hugos.

Two Truths And A Lie by Sarah Pinsker is wonderfully atmospheric, and by far the scariest of these tales. It opens really strongly with a young woman, a habitual liar, offering to help a childhood friend clean out his family home after the death of the hoarder older brother who’d inherited it. Their excavations turn up memories (or otherwise) of a strange kids show from their youth. The creepiness starts to lose a little coherence towards the end, but it is overall an effective horror story that ruminates on the eternal struggle between conformity and freedom.

I adore Naomi Kritzer, and enjoyed the moral considerations of her novelette Monster. A middle-aged scientist must travel to China to find and put a stop to a childhood friend who used her gene-editing research for evil. It’s almost as much technothriller as it is spec-fic, but as always with Ms Kritzer’s writing, the sheer humanity of her characters and their relationships shines through.

The runner-up in this category, for me, was Meg Elison’s excellent The Pill. I don’t remember reading anything that’s so successfully dissected fatphobia and the dehumanizing ways society deals with larger bodies through the lens of science fiction before, and I’m really grateful she’s written this. Which is going to make my one complaint about it seem weird, perhaps, in the sense that the story makes a universal claim that I’ve found in my experience not to be true. The narrator of The Pill believes that fat kids have sex later in life than their skinny peers. Perhaps my own adolescence and friendships were different, but anecdotally, my sexually active peers were doing it regardless of size, and any lack of activity was mostly to do with reticence, not lack of opportunity due to perceived lack of attractiveness.

Speaking of opportunity, I hadn’t read Helicopter Story by Isabel Fall when it was initially published, partly because my daily life is crammed so full of reading books for work that I rarely have time to read fiction on the Internet. But also, when the controversy around the story abounded, I felt it wasn’t right for me as a cis woman to place myself into the discourse. Having now read the nominated work and caught up on the controversy, I’m… actually angry that critics chased Ms Fall off the Internet and away from writing (and my God, almost away from living! Ms Fall, if you’re reading this, know that I think you and your work have so much value!) This is a sensational novelette, interrogating gender and identity and the ethics of military action in one stunning package. I can see why certain marginalized groups might react badly to the idea of it — when you’re constantly attacked, feeling defensive comes naturally — but it would be really fucking swell if people with less skin in the game would judge art on its merits instead of having knee-jerk reactions to just the controversy before admitting they haven’t even read the work in question. Ah, well, at least that one big name author apologized. I have also had A Lot Of Thoughts on the recent Bad Art Friend debacle (#TeamDawn) and I must say that it’s been really demoralizing and weird to see all these famous, respected authors just repeatedly pants themselves in public. I know it’s hard to communicate with thoughtfulness and sincerity at all times — I sure as hell don’t manage it as much as I’d like to — but there’s a difference between offering coherent critique and publicly bandwagoning to bully. If you’re not adding anything useful to the conversation, shutting up is freeeeeee.

Anyway, Helicopter Story for the win, and I hope to God that the worst of us haven’t snuffed out the flame of Ms Fall’s writing career for good. Enjoy the links to each available story while they’re still up and let us know in the comments what you think!

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Oct 27 2021

Ghost-Spider Vol. 1: Dog Days Are Over by Seanan McGuire, Takeshi Miyazawa & Rosi Kämpe

with inks by Ig Guara, colors by Ian Herring, letters by Clayton Cowles and covers by Jorge Molina.

My first introduction to Spider Gwen or, as she prefers to be known, Ghost-Spider, was through the excellent Into The Spiderverse animated movie that introduced many of us to all the different Spider-people of the multiverse. I knew she had a solo book, but I hadn’t had time to take a look until this volume was nominated for the Hugo for Best Graphic Story.

Combining issues 1-5 of the ongoing series, Dog Days Are Over follows the Gwen Stacey of Earth-65 as, tired of her notoriety, she decides to enroll at Empire State University in Earth-616, where Peter Parker is a teaching assistant. He proves more than helpful in getting her into school and into the right classes, as well as providing her with solutions for her slight suit problem (also, kale chips are delicious, you weirdos!)

At first, Gwen is happy to be your semi-typical college student, even if things in this dimension are just ever so slightly off from her own. It’s just a relief to be able to focus on her studies here in relative anonymity, before poking a hole back into her own dimension to patrol the streets and make it to band practice on time, no matter MJ’s huffiness.

Things get complicated when Man-Wolf is released from prison back on Earth-65 and Miles Warren hatches a plan to get rid of the Ghost-Spider for good. But the Miles Warren on Earth-616 has other plans when he lays eyes on Gwen Stacey once more. As dimensions collide, will Gwen be able to juggle her responsibilities in both and keep safe the ones she loves?

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