Cora Buhlert's Blog, page 71
May 5, 2019
First Monday Free Fiction: Tea and Treachery
Welcome to the May edition of First Monday Free Fiction. To recap, inspired by Kristine Kathryn Rusch who posts a free short story every week on her blog, I’ll post a free story on every first Monday of the month. It will remain free to read on this blog for one month, then I’ll take it down and post another story.
[image error] And because I talked about the somewhat premature death announcements for Steampunk in yesterday’s post, what better story to post than my one published foray into the Steampunk genre, Tea and Treachery?
So prepare to accompany Lady Violetta Chesterfield, as she employs her intelligence and all the feminine wiles at her disposal to rescue her fiancé Captain Nicholas Blackstone of the airship Renegade from the gallows…
Tea and Treachery
“Your Excellency…” The bespectacled head of his secretary popped into the study, snivelling as always, “…I beg your pardon to disturb you. But you have a visitor. From England.”
“From England? Again?” With a sigh, Count Danilo Ostrowsky returned the silver flask filled with most excellent vodka to a drawer of his desk. “What do they want this time?”
“The same as usual,” the secretary, one Mr. Wurm, replied, “Beg for mercy for the pirate.”
“Send them away then.” Ostrowsky punctuated the order with a dismissive wave of his hand. “The matter is settled. The pirate will be hanged tomorrow at sunrise, together with his comrades.”
Privately, Ostrowsky wondered just why the British were so very interested in the pirate anyway. Whenever a foreigner was sentenced to death here in the Kingdom of Dragomir, you normally had to deal with an overworked consulate clerk, an ambassador at the very most, if the condemned was particularly important or notorious. The pirate, however, had drawn not just the British ambassador to his study, but even an undersecretary from Whitehall. All of which suggested that the man was no mere pirate after all, but a spy. Just as Ostrowsky had suspected from the very beginning.
Oh well, by this time tomorrow, the matter was academic anyway. The pirate and his crew would swing and there was nothing anybody could do about it.
“But Sir…” Wurm’s normally corpse-pallid cheeks had taken on a hint of red, as if an overzealous undertaker had smeared rouge on them. “…the visitor… it’s a lady.”
“A lady?” Now that was a surprise. Ostrowsky hadn’t even known that Whitehall employed ladies. “Is she pretty?”
“Well, Sir, not that I’m an expert in these matters, but… yes, I think one could say that she is quite attractive.”
Ostrowsky sighed. For if there was one weakness apart from fine vodka that he had, it was pretty women. “Well, send her in then.”
***
As Wurm ushered the lady into the study, Ostrowsky saw that for once, Wurm had not exaggerated.
For the lady was indeed very attractive. She was well-proportioned with gentle curves that were clearly a gift of nature rather than a corset, though she was wearing one, of course. Her hair was the colour of ripe chestnuts. Her gown was of cut according to the latest Parisian fashion. The colour was a deep rich violet, edged in black.
Half-mourning. Interesting. Though certainly appropriate, since the man for whose life she’d come to plead would hang tomorrow.
Ostrowsky rose as the lady entered and rounded his desk to greet her. “My lady.”
He took her gloved hand and bent down for a kiss, his lips barely touching the soft leather of her gloves. “I am Count Danilo Danilovich Ostrowsky, prime minister to His Majesty Roderick III of Dragomir. And whom do I have the pleasure of addressing?”
“Lady Violetta Chesterfield,” the lady said. Ostrowsky noticed that she was carrying what looked like a picnic hamper. Goodness, was she trying to bring food to the incarcerated pirates?
“Enchanted.” Ostrowsky kissed the lady’s hand once more for good measure. “Most enchanted, Lady Violetta. I heard that you — ahem — wanted to talk to me about a matter of some importance.”
“Indeed I do,” Lady Violetta replied, “However, I believe that matters of any importance are best discussed over a nice cup of tea. It’s so much more civilised. Wouldn’t you agree, Count Ostrowsky?”
The British and their damned tea. It could be the eve of the apocalypse itself and the Brits would still be sitting there, sipping tea. Still, if Lady Violetta wanted tea, then tea she should have. Even if Ostrowsky himself vastly preferred a good, strong vodka.
So Ostrowsky bowed and said, “Of course, my lady. I shall have Wurm bring us a pot of tea.”
Lady Violetta shook her head. “There is no need for that. For you see, Count Ostrowsky, I am quite particular about how I take my tea…”
Oh, Ostrowsky just bet she was.
“…and I have everything I need right here.”
Unbidden, she set down her hamper on the sideboard in Ostrowsky’s office. She opened it and produced an electric tea kettle, two delicate china cups with matching saucers, a sugar pot, a cream pot, a plate, two lithographed tins, a measuring spoon, two silver tea spoons and a table cloth embroidered with violets.
“You don’t mind, do you?” she asked.
Ostrowsky shook his head. “Not at all.”
So he sat down, leant back and watched Lady Violetta as she opened the smaller of the two lithographed tins and carefully spooned some tea into the electric kettle.
“You don’t mind, if I use your water, do you?” she asked.
Ostrowsky shook his head. “Not at all. Be my guest, madam.”
Lady Violetta filled the kettle with water and set the timer for four minutes. At once, the clockwork mechanism began to tick.
While the tea was brewing, Lady Violetta set the table. First she laid down the table cloth, then she set down the sugar and the cream pot (filled with real cream even rather than milk powder) as well as cups and saucers and silver tea spoons.
“I also took the liberty to bring some biscuits,” she said, “I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” Ostrowsky assured her.
He watched as she opened the larger of the two lithographed tins, took out some biscuits and arranged them on the plate.
“I wasn’t sure which kind of biscuit you prefer, so I brought shortbread fingers, ginger nuts and spiced tea biscuits. I hope that’s all right.”
“Oh, that’s fine, perfectly fine,” Ostrowsky said, for truth to be told, he had a thing for biscuits, any kind of biscuits. Biscuits and the lovely Lady Violetta, what more could a man want?
The electric kettle chimed, so Lady Violetta switched it off and poured the tea.
“One lump of sugar or two?” she asked.
“Two,” Ostrowsky replied, “I have to confess I have something of a sweet tooth.”
With silver tongs, she placed two lumps of sugar into Ostrowsky’s cup and then one lump into her own. Then she poured a few drops of cream into both cups.
Once the tea had been served, Lady Violetta set down, arranging her bustle.
“See?” She picked up the tea cup and took a sip. “It is so much more civilised to discuss matters of importance over a nice hot cup of tea.”
Ostrowsky picked up his cup and took a sip of his own. The tea tasted… well, it tasted like tea and to be honest, Ostrowsky had always been more of a coffee drinker. Briefly, he wondered whether she’d mind if he added a shot of vodka to his cup. But then, a well-bred English lady like her would probably be scandalised by the very idea.
“So about this matter you wanted to discuss with me…” Ostrowsky began.
“Oh, we will get to that in time,” Lady Violetta said, “But first, do help yourself to a biscuit, Count Ostrowsky.”
Ostrowsky helped himself to a biscuit. The biscuits were infinitely better than the tea, crumbly and buttery with just the right amount of sweetness.
“So, I understand you are here about a prisoner in our custody, Lady Violetta.”
“Indeed I am.” Lady Violetta helped herself to a biscuit. “Nicholas Blackstone, captain of the airship Renegade.”
And here it came.
“Captain Blackstone and his crew were found guilty of espionage, piracy and illegally entering Dragomiran airspace. They were duly tried, found guilty and sentenced to death.”
“I am well aware of that.” Lady Violetta was still holding her tea cup, holding it so tight that her knuckles turned white. Interesting. “However, Captain Blackstone happens to be innocent of any wrongdoing.”
Ostrowsky took another sip of tea. “Our courts came to a different conclusion.”
“In that case…” Lady Violetta took a sip of her own. “…your courts are mistaken.”
“Our courts are independent. I do not have the power…”
“Before I came to Dragomir, I inquired who here would have the power to pardon Captain Blackstone and his crew. Everybody told me that you were the man I needed to talk to.” She set down her tea cup and looked him directly in the eye. “Or were they wrong?”
“Not exactly.” Ostrowsky shifted in his chair. Behind his eyes, he felt the first hint of a headache coming on, so he took another gulp of tea. “As prime minister of Dragomir, I do have the power to pardon condemned prisoners in the name of His Majesty, King Roderick III.”
“Well, then I humbly ask you to exercise that power on behalf of Captain Blackstone and his people,” Lady Violetta said and took another sip of tea.
“And why should I do that, pray tell?” Ostrowsky countered.
“As I said, Captain Blackstone and his crew are innocent.”
“The airship Renegade was captured while illegally in Dragomiran space.”
Lady Violetta took a sip of tea. “A most regrettable accident. Gale-force winds blew the Renegade off course and across the Dragomiran border. And in fact…”
She opened her reticule and took out a sheaf of papers.
“…here I have a sworn statement by Professor Aloysius Weathervane of the Royal Institute of Meteorology regarding the weather conditions on the day the Renegade was captured.”
Lady Violetta handed the sheaf of papers to Ostrowsky, who threw a quick glance at it. There were charts and maps and diagrams, none of which made even the slightest bit of sense to Ostrowsky. The figures seemed to blur in front of his eyes, so Ostrowsky shook his head. Damn those migraines.
He took a sip of tea, draining the cup. “This man Blackstone is a notorious pirate and spy.”
“Correction, Captain Blackstone is a privateer,” Lady Violetta countered, “And in fact…” She opened her reticule again and took out a piece of parchment. “…I here have Captain Blackstone’s official letter of marque from Her Majesty, Queen Victoria, duly signed and sealed.”
She handed the piece of parchment to Ostrowsky. This time, he didn’t even glance at it.
“Pirate or privateer is merely a matter of semantics,” he pointed out, “And I for one do not care whether Captain Blackstone and his crew were preying on Dragomiran airships on behalf of the British Empire or for their own gain. The man is a pirate and here in the Kingdom of Dragomir, piracy is punishable by death.”
“The British Empire also takes a very strict view on piracy,” Lady Violetta said. She noticed that Ostrowsky’s cup was empty. “More tea?”
Ostrowsky nodded, faintly irritated. The headache was getting worse. “Yes, please.”
Lady Violetta poured the tea and continued, “However, as I’ve pointed out, Captain Blackstone is not a pirate nor were he and his crew preying on Dragomiran ships. He was in Dragomiran airspace by pure accident. Therefore, any laws regarding piracy do not apply in this case.”
Ostrowsky was losing patience by now. His headache was getting steadily worse and the air in his study was unpleasantly hot and stuffy. He desperately wanted to loosen his cravat and unbutton his waistcoat, take a generous swig of vodka and lay down on the sofa in his study to doze off and maybe dream of the lovely Lady Violetta with her clothes off and her corset unlaced.
But instead, he was sitting here, exchanging pleasantries, listening to idiotic defences and sipping tea, tepid, lukewarm tea.
“Let’s drop the charade, Lady Violetta,” he said, “Maybe Captain Blackstone and his ship really were in Dragomiran airspace by accident and maybe they were not. However, none of that changes that the man is a pirate and a spy, not to mention extremely dangerous and wanted in half of Europe.”
“Oh, I agree that Captain Blackstone can be a very dangerous man,” Lady Violetta said and took a dainty sip of tea, “However, let me assure you that he poses no danger to the Kingdom of Dragomir, at least not at the moment”
Ostrowsky sighed and took a sip of tea of his own, hoping that would relieve the pounding headache at least a little. It did not.
“And who are you to give that assurance, Lady Violetta? You are not a member of the British government or of the diplomatic corps. Indeed, you are not here in any official capacity at all.”
“I am merely a private citizen concerned about the fate of a man that many consider a hero of the Empire.”
“Why?” Ostrowsky set the cup down with such force that some of the tea spilled onto the saucer. “Why do you care so much about a mere pirate?”
“As I said…”
“Yes, I know. You don’t consider him a pirate and you actually think he’s a hero.”
Now Ostrowsky did reach for his cravat to loosen it, at least a little bit. Damn this woman for trying his patience so much.
“But my question stands. Why? Why do you care so much? And don’t give me any bulls… ahem, nonsense that you’re concerned about a miscarriage of justice or some such bull… ahem, nonsense.”
“All right then.” Lady Violetta delicately balanced her tea cup between her fingers. “I wish to save Captain Nicholas Blackstone, because he happens to be my fiancé.”
Hmm, this was unexpected. The prim and proper Lady Violetta and the rough and uncouth pirate. How on Earth had that happened?
Ostrowsky threw a speculative glance at Lady Violetta. On her left finger, she wore a ring, a fine amethyst ring. An engagement gift from the pirate? Still, ring or not, Ostrowsky could not imagine that Lady Violetta’s family was pleased about such a connection. In fact, he was surprised that they hadn’t taken any steps to prevent it. Unless…
“You’re not with child, are you?”
She didn’t look like it, but corsets hid so many things.
“I do not deign to answer a question of such a personal nature,” Lady Violetta said icily, “All you need to know is that I am engaged to marry Captain Blackstone and that I do not wish to become a widow before I ever was a bride.”
“In that case, Lady Violetta…” Ostrowsky fumbled for his cravat, which was still too damned tight. “…you’d best buy your widow’s weeds, because your pirate will hang tomorrow.”
Lady Violetta raised an eyebrow. “Is that your final word?”
“Damn right, it is.”
“In that case, I’m very sorry, Count Ostrowsky. I had hoped we could settle this matter in a civilised manner, but unfortunately you leave me no choice.”
“Are… are you threatening me?”
“Indeed, I am, Count Ostrowsky.” Lady Violetta shot him a concerned look. “But tell me, Count, are you unwell? Because you do not look well.”
It was a ploy. Feign concern to gain his sympathy. But Ostrowsky wasn’t falling for it.
“Save your concern, Lady Violetta. It’s merely a migraine coming on, like always when the wind blows cold from the East. I need to lie down and therefore, I must really ask you to leave now.”
Lady Violetta, however, made no movement to leave. “Your current discomfort is not due to any migraine,” she said, “And lying down will not make you feel any better.”
By now Ostrowsky was becoming truly and well irritated. “And how, pray tell, can you possibly know that?”
A hint of a smile appeared on Lady Violetta’s perfect lips. “Because I poisoned you.”
“You what?”
“I poisoned you,” Lady Violetta repeated calmly, “The poison is quite lethal, I fear. And since you’re already experiencing the first symptoms, I estimate that…” She pulled an elegant watch from a pocket of her jacket. “…you have perhaps an hour to live. Maybe less.”
Ostrowsky looked at the platter with the biscuits, the half empty tea cup and finally at the smiling Jezebel before him.
“You goddamned little…”
“Oh please, could we dispense with the insults?” Lady Violetta said, “I know you’re upset, but we really don’t have much time and I’d rather settle this matter, before you collapse and drool onto this very fine Persian carpet. So yes, I poisoned you. The poison was in the tea, in case you’re wondering.”
Bitch! That goddamned bitch.
Ostrowsky grabbed the half empty tea cup and hurled it at Lady Violetta who dodged it effortlessly.
“Now that was quite unnecessary,” she remarked, “And useless. After all, you already drank the tea.”
“But you… you drank it, too.”
Lady Violetta nodded. “Indeed, I did. However, before coming here, I took the liberty of taking this.” She reached into her reticule and produced a vial filled with a clear liquid. “It’s an antidote that counters the effects of the poison.”
With all his remaining strength, Ostrowsky jumped up and lunged for her. And once again, Lady Violetta sidestepped him easily, so Ostrowsky crashed into the table instead, sending tea cups, saucers, biscuits and silver spoons flying in all directions.
Lady Violetta sighed. “Now that was really uncalled for. And useless, because the poison is already affecting your coordination.”
She held up the glass vial, which contained the key to Ostrowsky’s salvation.
“Contrary to what you might believe, I’m not a murderess. I have no wish to kill you. But make no mistake, I will, if you do not consent to my demands.”
“What demands?” Ostrowsky asked, though he suspected he already knew.
“You will pardon Captain Blackstone and his crew and order them released at once. In fact…” Lady Violetta reached into her reticule again to produce another piece of parchment. “…I have already prepared a legally binding document to that effect, which you only need to sign and seal with the Grand Seal of Dragomir.”
“I will not…”
“And then there is the matter of the airship Renegade, which has been impounded,” Lady Violetta continued undaunted, “Captain Blackstone is rather fond of his ship and needs her back, therefore you will also order the ship released at once and grant the Renegade and everybody aboard safe conduct to the border. And in fact…”
Lady Violetta reached into her reticule to produce another piece of parchment.
“…I have already prepared a legally binding document to that effect. Now if you would be so kind to sign and seal both documents, preferably while you still have sufficient fine motor control.”
“I will not sign that,” Ostrowsky declared, forcing out the words.
Lady Violetta crooked her head or maybe it was just Ostrowsky’s vision that was no longer quite straight. “So you’d rather die? Interesting.”
“If they find you here with me dead, they’ll arrest you,” Ostrowsky said.
“Perhaps,” Lady Violetta agreed, “But I rather doubt it. The poison cannot be detected and I will simply concoct a sob story about how you suddenly collapsed and died in front of my eyes. You may have noticed that I’m quite skilled as an actress.”
“I’ll call the guards and have you arrested right here for attempted murder. Then you can hang alongside your pirate, Lady Violetta.”
Actually, female criminals were beheaded according to Dragomiran law, because hanging women was considered unseemly. But certainly, an exception could be made in the case of an assassin and archvillainess like Lady Violetta.
“Yes, you could do that. And while I confess that a gallows wedding is not what I’d imagined, I would still gladly share the fate of my beloved. However, you will not have the pleasure to watch us hang on account of being dead, Count Ostrowsky.”
“What if the guards seize the antidote?”
“They won’t.” Lady Violetta held up the glass vial once more. “The moment you call for the guards, I will drop the vial. Should you try to attack me again, I will drop the vial. No matter what you try, you will never be quick enough. And by the way, this…”
A ray of light struck the vial, mocking Ostrowsky.
“…is the only dose of the antidote. If you force me to destroy it, you sign your own death warrant.”
“Our finest scientists will analyse the tea, identify the poison and synthesise an antidote,” Ostrowsky declared.
Lady Violetta nodded. “Yes, eventually they will. But not within the next hour. And one hour…” She glanced at her pocket watch again. “…well, actually closer to fifty-six minutes is all you have. Oh yes, and did I mention that death by this particular poison is extremely painful?” Lady Violetta threw him a pitying glance. “But then I suspect I don’t have to.”
“You bitch! Goddamned, lying, fork-tongued whore!”
Lady Violetta seemed utterly unimpressed by his insults. “So, Count Ostrowsky, are you going to sign the documents now?”
Ostrowsky regarded that accursed woman and asked himself whether the pleasure of knowing that she’d hang was worth his life. Unsurprisingly, the answer was no.
“When I sign the pardons, you will give me the vial?”
“You have my word,” Lady Violetta solemnly, “And while I know that you do not hold a high opinion of me, I am a woman of my word.”
“And you’ll take your pirate and your airship and never come back?”
“I promise you that you will see neither me nor Captain Blackstone nor the Renegade again after today.”
“All right then… I’ll do it.”
Stupid woman. As soon as he had the antidote, Ostrowsky would countermand the pardon and have Lady Violetta arrested. And then he would have the pleasure of watching her hang alongside her pirate after all.
He tried and failed to get up. In the end, Lady Violetta had to support him for the few steps to his desk. She helped him sit down, handed him a fountain pen and watched as he signed the pardons and sealed them with the Grand Seal of Dragomir.
“And now the antidote.”
“Not yet”, Lady Violetta whispered. Or maybe, it was just his hearing that was going. “Call in your secretary, give him the documents and ask him to see to it that they are delivered to the respective authorities at once.”
So Ostrowsky had no choice but to call in Wurm, who promptly slithered into the study and skittered to a halt, once he took in his employer’s appearance.
“Your Excellency, are you unwell?”
It was Lady Violetta who answered. “Count Ostrowsky is merely experiencing a bout of migraine due to the oncoming East wind. And besides…” She winked coquettishly at Wurm. “…the Count recently engaged in some strenuous physical activity, if you know what I mean.”
Wurm swallowed. “I… I see.”
Lady Violetta handed him the two parchments, the signed and sealed parchments that ordered the pirates pardoned and their ship released.
“And now would you be so kind to see to it that these documents are delivered to the respective authorities, so Count Ostrowsky and I can engage in more pleasurable activities.”
Wurm bowed. “Of… of course, madam. Your Excellency.” He took the parchments and left.
“And now the antidote” Ostrowsky croaked as soon as the door had closed behind Wurm.
“Of course.” Lady Violetta handed him the vial. “Like I said, I am a woman of my word.”
With trembling fingers, Ostrowsky pushed the stopper from the vial and downed the clear liquid. He looked up at Lady Violetta or rather at the purple blob that he assumed was Lady Violetta.
“It… it’s not working.”
“Give it a few seconds,” Lady Violetta said, “And now I must take my leave. Thank you for your cooperation, Count Ostrowsky.”
She picked up her reticule and strutted towards the door.
“Oh yes, and I forgot to mention that I took the liberty of mixing a powerful sedative into the antidote. It is quite harmless, I assure you, but I fear it will knock you out…”
Ostrowsky’s head hit the desk with a thud.
“…for the next six hours. Don’t worry, I shall tell Mr. Wurm that you want some privacy.”
***
Less than an hour later, Captain Nicholas Blackstone and his men were rudely dragged from their cells in the dungeons of the Fortress of Ratimir. They were shackled and marched into the courtyard of the fortress.
“What’s going on, Captain?” Blackstone’s first officer Mr. Wheelwright asked, “I thought they weren’t going to hang us until tomorrow.”
Nicholas Blackstone was no wiser and the guards were as uncommunicative as ever. “Maybe they’ve moved up the execution”, he said.
He hated this, hated that his crew would suffer on his behalf. Even though they’d all known what they were letting themselves in for, when they signed up with him.
In the courtyard, the gallows was looming, nooses gently swaying in the easterly wind.
Nicholas faced the gallows squarely, unwilling to look away. And while some of his crew gulped, no one whimpered or broke down. Because the crew of the Renegade were the bravest men and women in the sky. And Nicholas was honoured to have served with them.
The prison governor met them at the foot of the gallows, looking distinctly unhappy. Of course, the man always looked as if he’d swallowed a walking stick and was now suffering from terminal indigestion, but this was worse than usual. You’d think he’d be pleased to finally see Blackstone and his crew hang.
“All right, Blackstone, I don’t know how you pulled this off, since you’re as guilty as any man I’ve ever hanged, but…” The governor nodded at the guards. “…you and your people are free to go.”
On cue, a guardsman stepped forward and unlocked Blackstone’s shackles. All around him, his people were being set free as well.
“So take your damned ship and leave. And I swear to you, should I ever see you again, Blackstone, then I will personally hang you.”
In front of them, the heavy gate of the Fortress of Ratimir opened with a croak of pure frustration. Nicholas Blackstone and his people were truly free.
***
Nicholas Blackstone wasn’t sure what he had expected to find waiting for him outside the fortress, but it certainly wasn’t the sweetest sight his eyes would ever see. For there was his beloved Violetta, clad in a purple dress that set off her figure to perfection.
Until ten minutes ago, Nicholas had thought he’d never see her again, never hold her again, never kiss her sweet lips again. But now she was here and he was free and there was no holding back anymore.
In spite of the hardship of two months of harsh imprisonment, Nicholas rushed to meet her. He swept her up in his arms, crushed her to his chest and pressed a kiss onto her sweet lips.
“You didn’t think I’d let them hang you,” Violetta said, once their lips finally parted.
“But how?”
Violetta gave him a mischievous smile. “I persuaded the prime minister Count Ostrowsky to pardon you and your crew and release the Renegade.”
“Count Ostrowsky?” Nicholas had only met the man briefly, but it had been enough to make him dislike the Count most profoundly. “But he was most eager of them all to see us hang.”
“He changed his mind,” Violetta said, “Though he required some persuasion as well as the full deployment of the feminine wiles at my disposal.”
Nicholas looked at Violetta, his sweet, beautiful Violetta. If the Count had laid his slimy paws on her, Nicholas swore he’d kill the man and if he should hang for that, then so be it.
“Please tell me you didn’t…”
“I poisoned him,” Violetta explained, “I poisoned him and made him sign the pardon for you and your crew. And then I knocked him out. He should wake up in…”
She consulted her pocket watch.
“…about five hours. And I suggest that we should be far away from here by then, because he will almost certainly not be pleased.”
Nicholas pulled Violetta into his arms for a swift kiss. “I love you, do you know that?”
Violetta just smiled. “Of course. Or why do you think I went to all this trouble just to get you back?”
The End
I hope you enjoyed this installment of First Monday Free Fiction. Check back next month, when there will be a new story available.
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May 4, 2019
The Premature Death Announcement of Steampunk
Steampunk is apparently dying once again, after having already died sometime before 2017, at least according to this article by Eric Renderking Fisk at The Fedora Chronicles. Back then, the culprits were the so-called “fair-weather Steampunks”, i.e. the folks who occasionally go to a Steampunk festival and dress up in Steampunk gear, but who don’t live and breathe Steampunk. Here is a quote:
It’s those fair-weather steampunkers who are the ones who are actually killing steampunk. You’re either in a punk movement all the way, or you’re not. There are no half measures in punk.
Furthermore, those fair-weather Steampunks completely forgot about the “punk” in Steampunk. Here is another quote:
All the other “punk” movements should be that, too – renunciation of the current norms – not an effort to be approved and accepted and eventually assimilated by the system that’s trying to subjugate us.
In Steampunk, there is none of that angst anymore. There’s no sign of protesting against the establishment, there’s no sign of any resistance against the status quo beyond the mere visual aesthetics, and there is nothing that resembles social anarchy beyond the outward appearance. Let’s all conform to the modern norms of society and allow the ruling class to crush us while we put on our Sci-Fi Victorian and Edwardian costumes to distract us from the inevitable.
That post is very reminiscent of the terminally hip lamenting that now that the rest of the world discovered their favourite band/author/underground movie/other trend, it’s no longer cool. There’s also a hint of “Steampunk – you’re doing it wrong”, even though Eric Renderking Fisk complains about gatekeepers and the Steampunk police, which is antithetical to the “punk” ethos. He’s actually right about that last bit, ironically while he rails about all those other folks who are doing Steampunk wrong.
Alas, Steampunk got better or maybe it’s simply been the walking undead for the past two years. And now Steampunk is dying again, at least according to an article entitled “Who Killed Steampunk?” by Nick Ottens in Never Was Magazine. And who did kill Steampunk this time around? Well, it’s the people who wanted to make Steampunk too political and thus drove the folks who just wanted to dress up in brass goggles and corsets away.
Let’s have a quote:
Steampunk had to be more than Neo-Victorianism and an “escape to gentleman’s clubs”. It had to be aggressive, do-it-yourself and sympathize with the “traitors of the past” in order to rebel against the present.
Other examples of this mentality included Phenderson Djèlí Clark, Jaymee Goh and Diana M. Pho. All insisted that steampunk not only ought to be but was political, whether we liked it or not — and anybody who disagreed was naive.
If anything, it was this activism that drove people away. They were drawn to steampunk because of the stories and the style — and told they weren’t doing it right if they didn’t share the radical, anti-capitalist ideology of a loud minority that tried to mix steampunk and politics.
This post-mortem of Steampunk is eerily reminiscent of complaints from certain quarters of the SFF community that science fiction, the Hugos, WorldCon, Star Wars, comics are dying, because everything is way too political now and no longer fun. Inevitably, those death pronouncements are as premature as those of Steampunk. And indeed, one of the noisier complainers actually does write Steampunk, which he advertises as unpolitical fun. I guess he actually believes it, too.
And indeed, Nick Ottens has written a follow-up post, in which he addresses some of the criticisms of the original post and tries to distance himself from the “women, people of colour, LGBT people and other marginalised folks entered my hobby and suddenly it’s not fun anymore” crowd.
As usual, when someone posts something controversial, there were a bunch of responses. Also at Never Was Magazine, Eric Renderking Fisk, to whose 2017 Requiem for Steampunk I linked above, responds to Nick Ottens and repeats his basic point from 2017 in somewhat shorter form.
Steampunk author Gail B. Williams, who also writes crime fiction as G.B. Williams (her Locked trilogy is excellent) also responds to Nick Ottens at Never Was Magazine and points out that even though her Aether series of Steampunk novels has a diverse cast of characters, she wasn’t trying to push any specific political agenda, it just happened that way, because the world we live in is diverse and already was diverse in the Victorian era. And in the comments, someone promptly complains that Gail B. Williams talks way too much about her characters and not enough about what makes her work Steampunk. I guess clicking through to the reviews the Aether books that are linked at the bottom of the post is too much for that person.
Professor von Explaino (real name Colin Morris) points out that Steampunk is looking pretty healthy to him and that the fact that it’s getting more diverse and inclusive is a good thing as far as he is concerned. He also links to a Twitter thread by Suna Dasi who shares her experiences as a woman of colour in the Steampunk community.
Finally, here is Charlie Jane Anders on Twitter, who is actually what pointed me to Nick Otten’s post in the first place. And no, I have no idea why a post originally made on April 19 only popped up in my feed today, but then the Twitter app can be weird at times.
1) All fiction is political because it’s about the way the world works
2) Steampunk is political because it’s explicitly about colonialism
3) Nobody’s stopping anybody from writing the kind of “fun” steampunk they want
4) Nothing is more fun & exciting than @NisiShawl‘s Everfair https://t.co/xARcTryQko
— Charlie Jane Anders, Our Opinions Are Correct (@charliejane) April 19, 2019
Charlie Jane Anders is absolutely correct, but then her podcast with Annalee Newitz is called “Our Opinions Are Correct”. Because all fiction is political and fiction written by folks who keep decrying how totally unpolitical and fun their fiction is is usually filled to the brim with politics. The authors and their fans just cannot see it, because it’s politics they happen to agree with, which is probably also what makes the fiction so fun for them. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with fiction being political in the wider sense of the word, as long as the author is aware of the political implications of what they are writing.
And Steampunk is definitely political, because it tends to engage with highly politicized subjects. Colonialism, Imperialism and racism are obviously the big ones (and they also affect Steampunk’s sister genre Weird Western), but gender relationships and gender roles, the persecution of LGBT people, militarism, widespread poverty and other social issues of the Victorian era are also very definitely present in Steampunk. Finally, Steampunk is also very much about the industrial revolution, which of course means that touches on topics like labour conditions and the labour movement, exploitation, predatory Capitalism, paternalistic Capitalism, the birth of Communism, etc… In fact, I’m surprised that there isn’t more Steampunk which directly engages with the industrial revolution and its consequences, but I guess airship adventures are more fun.
I also agree that Steampunk fiction has become more interesting and varied, once it ventured beyond airships, brass goggles, totally apolitical adventures in “the colonies” and drinking tea in Victorian England. Because works like Everfair by Nisi Shawl, The Haunting of Tram Car 015 and The Black God’s Drums by P. Djèlí Clark, the anthology The SEA Is Ours, edited by Jaymee Goh and Joyce Chng, Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear, the Arabella Ashby books by David D. Levine, the Alice Payne series by Kate Heartfield, the Iron Seas series by Meljean Brook (which sadly hasn’t had a new book out since 2014), etc… expanded the boundaries of what Steampunk could be, just as the (re)-introduction of supernatural and horror elements into Steampunk by authors like Cherie Priest and Gail Carriger did a few years before. But then, Steampunk is always changing and expanding and has moved on quite a bit from the days of Morlock Night and Infernal Devices by K.W. Jeter, Humunculus by James Blaylock, The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers or The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, let alone The Warlord of the Air by Michael Moorcock, which even predates the existence of Steampunk as a term. And indeed the very fact that Steampunk is changing and expanding is a sign that the genre is not dying, because the static genres are the ones that are close to death.
That said, the Big Five publishers do seem to publish fewer Steampunk novels than they did a few years ago. Tor still publishes Steampunk and indeed most of the newer Steampunk novels mentioned above are published by Tor, though it’s notable that their most recent Steampunk offerings such as the Alice Payne series, The Black God’s Drums and The Haunting of Tram Car 015 or Stone Mad, the sequel to Karen Memory, are novellas rather than novels. Meanwhile, Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century series hasn’t had a new book out since 2013, while Meljean Brook’s Iron Seas series hasn’t had a new book out since 2014 and Bec McMaster’s London Steampunk series ended in 2015, though she is self-publishing a follow-up series. However, Meljean Brook’s and Bec McMaster’s series were both marketed as romance rather than SFF (which is probably why many SFF folks have never heard of them) and probably suffered when the popularity of paranormal romance and historical romance (and Steampunk romances were usually marketed as a crossover between those subgenres) declined and contemporary romance suddenly became the hot subgenre again.
Meanwhile, indie and small press Steampunk is merrily chugging along. I usually have at least one Steampunk book every month in the new release round-up and at the Speculative Fiction Showcase, the “Steampunk” tag has 66 entries (the most recent is Wireless and More Steam-Powered Adventures by Alex Acks), which is fewer than e.g. space opera with 187 entries, urban fantasy with 168 or military science fiction with 104 entries, but also more than Cyberpunk with 57 entries, Weird Western with 36 entries, Biopunk with 5 or Dieselpunk with 2 entries. So in short, Steampunk fiction is very much what it was before the brief boom around 2010-2012, a niche genre but far from dead.
And Steampunk cons and festivals are actually expanding. Only a few years ago, I had to explain to people here in Germany what Steampunk was. Nowadays, there are several Steampunk events in Germany and even more in the Netherlands and Belgium. Last year, Papenburg, an East Friesian town of 35000 people which is probably best known for the fact that many of the giant cruise ships carrying tourists across the world’s oceans are built here, held its first Steamfest and promptly got twice as many visitors as expected. There will be a repeat this year in September and since Papenburg is only approx. 115 kilometres away, I’ll probably be going.
Finally, to return to Charlie Jane Anders’ tweet, you can write your Steampunk fiction exactly as political or apolitical, as monocultural or diverse as you want to. Sure, you will probably get criticised, if you regurgitate colonialist tropes with zero reflection, but if you want to be a writer, criticism is something you’ll have to get used to.
And indeed, Tea and Treachery (come on, you know I had to mention my own books eventually), my one published foray into the subgenre (though I am planning a Steampunk/Weird West collection, which is one of my many books to be published eventually) is not particularly political, unless women with agency offend you. I will probably revisit Violetta Chesterfield and Nicholas Blackstone one day, because I like them quite a bit, though for now their future adventures are somewhere in the long queue of stories I’m going to write one day.
Meanwhile, the Silencer series, which is Dieselpunk of sorts, even though I usually market them as a pulp adventures, are a bit more political, simply because politics aren’t all that easy to avoid in a 1930s setting, and yes, the characters are diverse, because New York City in the 1930s was a diverse place. And ironically, the most political of the Silencer stories is the Christmas story.
So do Steampunk (or Dieselpunk or Atompunk or whichever Retropunk is your thing) however you want to do it. Because there is no Steampunk police. And if someone tries to tell you that you’re doing it wrong, politely tell them where to shove it.
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April 29, 2019
Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month for April 2019
It’s that time of the month again, time for “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”.
So what is “Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some March books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.
Once again, we have new releases covering the whole broad spectrum of speculative fiction. This month, we have epic fantasy, urban fantasy, historical fantasy, Asian fantasy, sword and sorcery, paranormal romance, paranormal mystery, science fiction romance, space opera, military science fiction, science fantasy, post-apocalyptic fiction, dystopian fiction, steampunk, weird western, LitRPG, magical realism, horror, witches, dragons, superheroes, princesses, androids, airship pirates, space pirates, starships, crime-busting witches, grim reapers, necromancers, shadow hunters, space admirals, outcast marines, post-apocalyptic sheriffs, wild west mages, horde kings and their brides, and much more.
Don’t forget that Indie Speculative Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Speculative Fiction Showcase, a group blog run by Jessica Rydill and myself, which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things speculative fiction several times per week.
As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.
And now on to the books without further ado:
Wireless and More Steam-Powered Adventures by Alex Acks:
Captain Marta Ramos, the most dangerous pirate in the Duchy of Denver, is back and she and Simms are up to their goggles in trouble. Has General del Toro found a way to use the Infected as an army and can Captain Ramos work with her arch enemy, Colonel Geoffrey Douglas, to stop him? Can Simms join forces with the devious Deliah Nimowitz on a jailbreak, some sewer misadventures AND a high society soiree involving tea, a heist and sausages? And what about the Rail King and his nefarious plans? Can Captain Ramos and her crew stop him before he completes his latest dastardly deed, one that may result in Deliah’s demise? Check out the next installment of the exciting adventures of Captain Ramos and her valiant crew to find out more!
Wireless picks up where Murder on the Titania and Other Steam-Powered Adventures with 3 linked novellas, all set in or near the Duchy of Denver, in an American West that never was.
“Blood in Elk Creek” – When Captain Marta Ramos’s aeroplane is shot down over hostile territory, she has to work with her nemesis, Colonel Geoffrey Douglas, head of the Duke of Denver’s security division, to try and stop General del Toro’s plot to spread the dreaded Infection throughout the Plains tribes, thereby creating a monstrous private army. And the clock is ticking when Marta contracts the Infection too.
“Do Shut Up, Mister Simms” – While Marta is off having adventures, Simms involuntarily signs up for one of his own. He and the crew have to join forces with the lovely Deliah to break a crewmember out of the Duke’s prison. Then it’s off to visit two of Simm’s least favorite things: the city sewers and a high society tea party, whilst serving as Deliah’s escort. Make that three of his least favorite things.
“Wireless” – Marta returns from the Plains a changed woman and Simm’s plan to cure her gets Deliah kidnapped. Now the crew is racing against time to rescue her and stop the Rail King from executing his latest dastardly plan, with some help from some new and unexpected allies.
A Cold Spell by Stacey Alabaster:
It’s a cold day in… Well, you know the saying
Ruby Swift is learning to use her paranormal powers and how to solve mysteries as a private investigator. Sometimes together. When a freezing spell goes wrong, she’s suddenly got more to worry about than just a murder investigation.
A Cold Spell is part of the Private Eye Witch Cozy Mystery series. If you like fun paranormal mysteries, you will love Ruby Swift and her magical adventures.
Get A Cold Spell and start solving your next supernatural mystery today!
The Admiral by Odette C. Bell:
The battle for the galaxy starts now.
Lara Forest is a simple cadet in the Galactic Coalition Academy – or so she thinks. When she decides to quit, circumstances force her to reconsider. A hand from her future reaches through the past, and it a brings a war.
Soon Lara is thrust head-first into a battle for the Milky Way, not just in this time, but forever. She’s not alone. The meddlesome golden-boy Cadet Nok is with her. She might not appreciate his help now – one day, she will. But that depends on one thing – time. From now on, everything and everyone will depend on it.
The Bleak Heath by Richard Blakemore and Cora Buhlert:
Thurvok the sellsword and his companions Meldom, thief and occasional assassin, and the sorceress Sharenna are fleeing across the Bleak Heath after saving Meldom’s childhood sweetheart Lysha from the gallows. Weary and exhausted, they are relieved to come upon a hut on the heath. But what they find inside that hut may well be more dangerous than the heath itself.
This is a novelette of 10500 words or approx. 35 print pages in the Thurvok sword and sorcery series, but may be read as a standalone. Includes an introduction and afterword.
The Cave of the Dragon by Richard Blakemore and Cora Buhlert:
Thurvok, the sellsword, is enjoying a meal with his friends, Meldom, thief, cutpurse and occasional assassin, the sorceress Sharenna and Lysha, Meldom’s sweetheart whom the adventurers saved from the gallows, when a peasant woman asks them for help. Her young daughter Tali has been chosen to be sacrificed to the dragon that terrorises the area.
Thurvok and his friends want to help her and save Tali. But slaying a dragon is difficult, not to mention dangerous.
This is a short story of 4500 words or 18 print pages in the Thurvok sword and sorcery series, but may be read as a standalone. Includes an introduction and afterword.
The North Star by Killian Carter:
An ancient alien race, a sentient monkey, and epic battles.
Jason Grimshaw has one job…
Get the cadets to Colony 115.
Just another day. Just another milk run. Or so he thought.
When scanners pick up an unidentified alien vessel, it’s already too late.
With his ship blown out from under him, and his crew scattered across a war-torn planet, his day just keeps getting better.
The good news is, one of the pilots survived. The bad news is, it’s the biggest pain in his ass, and she’s stranded miles away.
When Clio Evans said she wanted to fly, crash-landing a starship wasn’t what she had in mind.
She may not be the most experienced Fleet pilot, but she sure as hell has a few tricks up her sleeve, and with an army standing between her and the rest of her crew, she’ll have to pull out all the stops, even if it means exposing a secret that’ll see her hanged for treason.
You’ll love this military science fiction adventure with a twist, because who doesn’t love overbearing Commanders, cocky redheads, and aliens with guns?
Battle Royale Online by Victor Deckard:
It is 2053 and Earth is overpopulated. People desperately struggle for existence. Human life is extremely cheap nowadays.
As a way to deal with the dire effects and problems of the overpopulation, Battle Royale Online has been invented. It is a virtual reality video game where up to one thousand players kill one another off until there is only one survivor in the game. The gaming pods players use to connect to the game are unofficially called players’ coffins. There is a good reason for that: if one gets killed in the game, his or her pod gets deactivated, which results in the player’s death in real life. The sole winner of the game gets a huge amount of prize money.
Jason, a twenty-two-year-old guy, would never have decided to play Battle Royale Online had his mom not gotten in a car crash, which caused a brain tumor. She is in a comatose state and needs immediate surgical intervention. Jason doesn’t have enough money to pay for the surgery. Therefore, he decides to play Battle Royale Online.
Jennifer, his girlfriend, tries to reason with him. She tries to persuade him not to play the game because the odds of being the last player standing in this game are extremely slim. She also warns him that there may be cheaters and hackers in the game. Yet her pleas fall on deaf ears.
Later on, Jason finds out that Jennifer is going to play the game as well. Jason freaks out over her decision because there is no way they both can win the game. Even if they against all the odds defeat the other players, cheaters, and hackers, and make it to the final stage of the game, it won’t let them both leave the game alive. Jason has no idea what Jennifer was thinking when she decided to play the game as well. How the heck are they both going to win the game if there can be only one survivor?
Captive of the Horde King by Zoey Draven:
She made a deal with the Dakkari devil. Now, he owns her.
On the unforgiving planet of Dakkar, I did what all the humans in our village did: kept my head down, worked to provide for my family, and I certainly didn’t break any Dakkari laws to risk inciting the alien race’s merciless wrath.
Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for my brother and one careless mistake brings a horde of the nomadic, barbarian Dakkari straight to our doorstep, led by their powerful horde king—a cold, ruthless, battle-scarred warrior demanding retribution.
In order to save my brother’s life, I do the unthinkable.
I sell myself to the horde king as his war prize. I agree to warm his furs, to travel with his horde across the wild lands of Dakkar, and to never see my family again.
But as I struggle with my new reality, I discover that the surly, mysterious, dominant horde king never intended for me to be his concubine…
He wants me as his queen.
Reaper’s Crossroad by Timothy Ellis:
“The only one enjoying himself in there is the grim reaper.”
The Crossroad system is a battleground.
The Keerah only want to conquer. The Ralnor want control. The Trixone want new eating grounds.
All of them want what they think Jon Hunter has.
Jon is fighting a war on seven fronts, while trying to stay out of politics and diplomacy at home.
As the death toll mounts, Jon is confronted with options, all of which carry an unacceptable body count.
And in the midst of it all, old choices suddenly have consequences.
In the middle of everything, lies the Reaper’s Crossroad.
Princess of Wind and Sea by Cassandra Finnerty:
In 1773, the prince and princess travel across the globe on a series of secret missions.
Along the way, they run into unexpected dangers.
Aisling’s magical abilities are increasing, but dark forces who seek to destroy her powers are hunting them.
The prince must protect her at all costs, as they fight for survival and abiding love.
If you like fantasy, action-adventure and romance, you’ll love this novel by Cassandra Finnerty.
No Planet for Good Men by M.R. Forbes:
Earth. After the invasion.
The planet is in ruins. Humankind struggles to survive.
Hayden is a Sheriff in a world without law. A good man in a world gone bad. He knows the fallout of an alien attack when he sees it. He’s never seen anything like this before.
Isaac is a Marine in a world without order. A good man with troubles of his own. His mission was to protect the innocent, including his son. Instead, he’s the only survivor.
Two good men. Two frightening discoveries. Two paths to one inescapable truth:
The invasion may be over, but the real fight is just beginning.
Go big or go home. For privateer Captain Magdalene Landon, it’s all about going big. For Kay Ellis, it’s about getting home. Together, they’re about to architect the most daring heist in the galaxy.
Kay knows too much. She knows it’s a matter of time before a Conglomerate hitman finds her. She’s desperate for safe passage back to Union space.
Then Magdalene shows up, promising a way home in exchange for that information. It’s a risky bet, but Kay is out of options. So she strikes a deal: the heist of the century for her freedom.
Kay is playing a dangerous game, and she knows it. She’s made herself Enemy Number One of the Conglomerate. She’s relying on privateers for her safety. It’s a fool’s game. But the worst part is, her fool’s heart is starting to warm to the enigmatic captain. And that’s a risk for which she hadn’t planned.
Every victory comes with a price
Krox’s assault on Shaya has been foiled, but the cost was bitter. Ternus lies in ruins, its gravity doubled by a god. Shaya is a paradise, but one populated by a mere handful of survivors. Only one power strong enough to oppose Krox remains… The Last Dragonflight.
Aran and his Outriders travel to Virkon to wake Virkonna, praying that she will join the war on their side. But neither Krox nor Nebiat is the true threat. Nefarius’s rebirth has been carefully orchestrated, and is finally at hand.
When the dust settles gods will die. Heroes will be slain. The sector will never be the same.
He was told he would use his powers for truth and justice…
Instead, Bobby has been given an impossible task…Hunt down and execute some of the most powerful superhumans in existence.
When his entire team of heroes goes rogue and begins committing acts of terror, he is ordered to bring his friends to justice.
But every encounter with his former allies bring up questions that can’t be answered, doubts begin to surface, and he is forced to make the terrible choice between duty and friendship.
Demon’s Carnival by T. Thornton Gray:
The promise of fun and thrills arrives with the rides and amusements atop the trucks of the traveling carnival. But beneath the balloons and lights lurks a foreboding monster seeking only to fulfill his darkest desires. The powerful and twisted desires of perverted mind that seeks the young and the pretty to use like play things. To use and destroy. To feed a never-ending desire for an unhinged ecstasy.
Join Bilbo the Clown and the good nun Sister Sledge, as they are again thrust into the icy demonic grip of evil. An evil unlike any they have yet encountered. This time Bilbo has met his match in more ways than you can imagine when he reaches the Demon’s Carnival.
Jess Flowers is the sole surviving guardian, sworn by oath and fate to protect the residents of the sleepy, isolated town of Salt Creek. But she’s failing. Innocent blood has been shed. Despite Jess’ best efforts, the killing hasn’t stopped. Bodies are piling up, and the other two guardians are dead, murdered by a killer who’s always one step ahead, always just out of reach.
Jess is a theikos, a race of people born with superhuman gifts, a race of people who have hidden safely in Salt Creek and isolated communities just like it for centuries. But the safe days are over, and time is running out.
The fate of the town and the lives of Jess’ friends, her family, and her one true love are on the line as a frightening truth suddenly becomes clear: The killing won’t stop until all the theikos are dead, driven to extinction. Someone has discovered their secret and is hunting them. The killer knows who they are, what they can do, and exactly where to find them.
Book Haven And Other Curiosities by Mark Allan Gunnells:
An eclectic mix of tales to entertain and engage the imagination!
Come peruse the dusty shelves of BOOK HAVEN. Scan the titles, study the strange trinkets that are lined up on display. Maybe pull aside the cobwebs and run your fingers alone the spines of the books, caress the artifacts. You will find many forgotten treasures and un-mined gems among the debris.
From the author of Flowers in a Dumpster comes a new collection of short stories to terrify you, to move you, to make you think. In the spirit of High Cotton by Joe Lansdale, Trigger Warnings by Neil Gaiman, and Skeleton Crew by Stephen King, this short story collection offers an eclectic mix of Horror, Scifi, Fantasy, and drama.
-The title novella features a futuristic landscape where the world’s literature has been lost, and a group of government agents are on the hunt for the mythological Book Haven, a vast secret library.
-In “C U Soon,” a girl dies in a car accident while texting with her boyfriend, but after her funeral he continues receiving mysterious messages from her.
-In “The Man Who Watched the Ocean,” a man mourning the loss of a past love decides to try and join her.
-In “Tanner” a man purchases a used tanning bed in which someone once died and finds that houses aren’t the only places that can be haunted.
-In “Human Bones in a China Cabinet,” a young man has an unusual collection hidden away in a china cabinet
-In “The Sandbox,” a friendless boy playing in a sandbox encounters a strange yet familiar old man who shapes the course of his life
-In “The Farm,” a horror fan visits the location of a cult classic
Some of what you find will be dark and suspenseful, some beautiful and haunting, but all of it is yours for the taking. We’re so glad you found your way here and welcome you inside BOOK HAVEN.
Proudly represented by Crystal Lake Publishing—Tales from the Darkest Depths.
Their children hunted. Their home seized. Their land threatened.
Once, Silas and Lainie Vendine, former bounty hunters turned renegade mages, had a home and ranch of their own and a position of respect in the town of Prairie Wells.
Now, mage-hating foreigners have driven them from their home. But the Chardonikans want more than Silas and Lainie’s ranch. Though they deny that magic exists, the foreigners are after Lainie and the children, Wildings-born of mage blood.
When their retreat from Prairie Wells turns into a flight for their lives, Silas and Lainie seek refuge in the forbidden canyonlands. But it isn’t only their family who are threatened by the ruthless, powerful Chardonikans; all the mages who make the Wildings their home and even the very magic of the Wildings itself are endangered.
With the Chardonikans intent on tearing their family apart, Silas and Lainie must find allies and discover the true nature of their enemies if they are to have any hope of fighting back and protecting the people and magic of the Wildings.
Mages’ Exile is the second book of Defenders of the Wildings, a follow-up series to the western-inspired fantasy series Daughter of the Wildings. It is a self-contained series and can be enjoyed even if you haven’t read Daughter of the Wildings.
Burning Horizon by T.M. James:
Nicole Greene is brought onto Earth’s first interstellar ship – the last place she ever wanted to be.
Completely out of her element, and with more questions than answers, Nicole finds herself surrounded by the best and brightest scientists that ever lived… a crew that soon begins to exhibit increasingly bizarre, frightening behavior. Not knowing who she can trust, Nicole soon discovers a dark secret aboard the ship… a secret that will ultimately leave the fate of mankind in her hands.
But, unfortunately for her – the only way to save mankind is to save herself first.
Shadow Hunter by B.R. Kingsolver:
When my magic manifested at puberty, my parents sold me to the Illuminati. The Order of the Illuminati trained me as an assassin, spy, and thief. But when they sent me to steal a magical artifact that reveals Truth in all things, I discovered that I was working for the Dark and not the Light. The Illuminati trained me well, and paid the ultimate price for their deception.
Thousands of miles away, I landed a job in a quirky little bar. But the scattered remnants of the Order still strive for world domination, and no one leaves the Illuminati alive.
Only the Quiet by Amanda M. Lee:
Izzy Sage is settling into her new life despite the pall hanging over her past.
While the memories of the catastrophe that took her parents when she was a child remain elusive, she finds she’s comfortable in her new environment … even though she happens to have taken up the same position her father held when he was killed.
She’s the new death gate operator, which means she’s in control when souls are ferried to the other side. She literally controls death … and it’s not a comfortable spot to be in.
Her only problem is a man … and it’s not something she thought she would be facing because romance was supposed to be off the table.
Braden Grimlock isn’t exactly known for being mature and grounded, but there’s something about Izzy that calls to him. He can’t stay away. The feeling only grows stronger when a group of deaf students tour the aquarium located on top of the death gate … and the teacher drops dead in the middle of a blackout.
Right away, Izzy senses something is wrong … other than the obvious, that is. She simply can’t figure out what sort of opponent she’s facing.
The past is about to meet the present as a long-hidden secret grabs Izzy by the throat and demands answers. There’s a malevolent spirit on the loose and he has designs on escape from Belle Isle. The havoc he could wreak if freed is immeasurable.
It’s up to Izzy and Braden … and the rest of the Grimlocks … to figure out what’s happening and stop a horrifically determined ghost from claiming an innocent life. It’s going to take all of them working together … and if a little romance gums up the works, they’re simply going to have to deal with that, too.
Izzy is a powerful Bruja. Even she might not be strong enough to face the horror of what’s to come, though.
Ramshackled by Erynn Lehtonen:
Some rules should be broken.
The dragons are gone, but their ki remains within the fabric of the world, and only those with the knowledge to access it might use its power. For centuries, the Genshu family has supported the Seiryuu Emperors, Empresses, and Shoguns during periods of war and prosperity. Now they would see their line of warriors and majyu put to an end.
But twin brothers Masanori and Hidekazu Genshu have other plans.
To the eye of the public, they dutifully follow their parents’ demands and don’t learn how to fight. But in the early hours of the morning, far from home, they practice in secret. Until the day Tsukiko City is attacked, a woman is kidnapped, and life returns to normal without a second thought.
The day Masanori and Hidekazu realize they can’t sit on the sidelines any longer.
Masa and Hide’s journey begins in Ramshackled, the first of four novellas prefacing the Wyvern Wars series: an epic fantasy adventure inspired by selections of Japanese mythology and folklore.
Captive Embers by Brian Mansur:
The humans wage war across space.
But who is the real enemy?
Mykonian fleet Operative Rafe Hastings has spent several tours around Belia trying to keep weapons traffickers from tearing the local space habitats apart. He’s eager to go home when an informant passes him dire news about an infamous cartel boss named Lilith. Not only has she acquired nuclear weapons, but she has somehow gained permission from the mysterious robotic overlords of inhabited space – the Wardens – to use them.
The battleship Tsunami is dispatched to investigate Rafe’s discovery and veteran operations Officer Sean Merrick soon finds himself caught in a conspiracy involving feuding Wardens. With allies dying all around him, his only hope for survival turns out to be a junior combat nurse named Sarah Riley who has scarcely fired a gun before.
As Rafe, Sean, and Sarah battle Lilith, they’ll be forced to rely on the unexpected to save the people they love. But with the Wardens constantly changing the rules, could it be that no matter who wins the war, everyone loses?
The SLS Excelsior has a million credit bounty on her, and pirate captain Christopher Raleigh leads his crew to claim the prize. But with the Digital Assassin and the Tetrarch’s daughter onboard, no plans can ever be safe.
When Space Marines recapture Jillian in the midst of battle, Raleigh and his crew have to find a way to get to Clarion and take her back. Or die trying . . .
Don’t miss the second installment of this action-packed space opera adventure! Contains the bonus chapters not available online.
Rise of a Necromancer by Rosie Scott:
Many people want Cerin Heliot dead.
While studying to be a mage at a prestigious university, Cerin is seized by an obsession with necromancy. When his secret knowledge of the forbidden magic is discovered, he becomes one of the nation’s most-wanted criminals overnight, sending his life into a tragic downhill spiral.
In this gritty story of survival, Cerin learns the hard way that to make it in a cruel world, he must become its match. Rather than run from the law forever, he builds an undead army to face it and make it fear his name. When all living loved ones are lost, Cerin must rise to be a master of the dead.
Rise of a Necromancer is a standalone character-driven origin story in the Six Elements universe.
That Sort of Partners by Hollis Siloh:
When Jake is assigned to work with the new guy at the precinct—their first robot cop—he’s nervous, to say the least. But his new partner turns out to be a great guy on every level. They work together and learn from each other—and then feelings start to develop.
Jake never thought he’d be the sort to fall for his partner. Or a robot.
Renegades of the Lost Sea by A.F. Stewart:
A god, his mother, and a Nightmare Crow.
Old enemies surface once again and undead pirates roam the seas. The man he killed, Black Axe Morgan, has returned for revenge on Captain Rafe Morrow, while from the shadows the Nightmare Crow reveals his true self. The two form an alliance and bring mayhem to the seas, all to draw out Captain Morrow and his crew.
Yet, this time, Rafe doesn’t face his enemies alone. Death walks the Outer Islands to save her son and the Sovereign of the Gods leads Captain Morrow past all the lies to the truth. The fate of Chaos and Harmony itself hangs in the balance of this fight.
Will centuries of schemes and plans reforge the bond of the realms, or will the Seven Kingdoms and the Outer Islands fall?
Can the God of Souls find his destiny before it is too late?
The endgame of gods begins…
Invasion: Proxima by James David Victor:
The most dangerous enemy is the one who knows you inside and out.
A Military Science Fiction adventure from #1 Bestselling author James David Victor
Solomon and the Gold Squad are back on Ganymede recovering from the shock of learning true nature of the war. When they are betrayed by a comrade, they barely escape with their lives. Their only chance is to take the battle directly to the enemy. Can they successfully invade Proxima and save humanity?
Invasion: Proxima is the fifth book in the Outcast Marines series. If you like science fiction with “heroes” who are anything but, the Outcast Marines will suck you into their battle to save humanity, from itself and the rest of the galaxy.
Boston, 1984. Even in a world without cell phones, messages come through loud and clear if one is listening. When thirty-something Nora Forrest travels to Manhattan to see a Broadway play starring her idol, an aging Irish actor named Hugh Sheenan, she doesn’t know whether what happens in the theater that night should be credited to witchcraft, extrasensory perception, synchronicity, or simple accident?and she knows that many people would tell her nothing had happened at all. Told through the voices of four people, Gillyflower is a story about intersections and connections?real, imaginary, seized, and eluded. It’s a book about everyday magic, crystalline memory, and the details that flow through time and space like an electrified mist. It’s a detective story, a love story, and a coming-of-age story?for the never really young and for the almost old.
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April 28, 2019
The Joy of Writing, How to Lose It and How to Get It Back
First of all, I’d like to share a couple of promotions, because who doesn’t love free or cheap books?
The first of those promotion is the Mirth & Mischief sale at Double-Cross Lit, where you can get fifteen e-books, including one of mine, in two genres, thriller and humor, all for 99 cents.
I also have a book in the Out of this World Romance giveaway at StoryOrigins, where you can get 32 different science fiction, fantasy and paranormal romance e-books for free, if you sign up for the author’s newsletter (Don’t worry, you can unsubscribe later). So if you like a bit of romance with your SFF and/or if you’ve always wanted to try my In Love and War space opera romance series, check it out!
And now the commercial break is over, let’s get to the meat of this post. Regular readers of this blog may know that I’m a big fan of Kristine Kathryn Rusch and her Business Musings series of writing and business advice. Indeed, it was Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith who persuaded me to give self-publishing a try, because if those two respected figures in the SFF genre said it was okay to self-publish, then it probably was.
Two weeks ago (yes, I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but then stuff happened and other topics demanded to be written about), Kristine Kathryn Rusch posted an entry in her Business Musings series about the fun of writing, how easy it is to lose it and how to recover it.
This post resonated with me, because my experiences have been similar. I’ve also been making up and telling stories for as long as I can remember and eventually started writing them down. Unlike Kris Rusch, I didn’t start writing seriously, until I was in my teens, but there are certainly earlier story attempts buried somewhere in my parents’ attic. And of course, I loved it when we were actually allowed to write stories in school, which happened all too rarely, because in 1980s West Germany writing assignments even in elementary school usually meant “Read this (usually totally boring) story and write a retelling” (My attempts to improve on the inevitably dull stories to make them better were not appreciated) or at best “Write about an exciting experience you had” (But not too exciting, because appearances of aliens, unicorns, dragons etc… were not appreciated either – realism was the order of the day).
Any kind of fiction writing vanished from the syllabi of German classes altogether around sixth or seventh grade, but I continued making up and writing stories, though I wasn’t quite clear about which medium to use to tell my stories at first and so my early attempts include the screenplays plus some drawings for two animated movies (I had seen a documentary about stop motion animation and wanted to try that, not knowing what a huge workload it is) as well as an opera libretto complete with music. I can still hum some tunes from that one. Eventually, I started writing science fiction and switched to English, because all the science fiction I read except Perry Rhodan was in English, too.
In university, I took every creative writing class I could, including the poetry classes, and even was on the staff of the English language literature magazine of the university. I learned a lot, even though my plot-heavy SFF or crime fiction stories didn’t really fit into a literary culture that valued poetically written vignettes about doomed love stories between exchange students (those were so common, I nicknamed the genre “tragic Erasmus romance”), couples having breakfast, while the cracks of their relationships were exposed, women baking cookies and reminiscing about their grandmothers or – this is one was so awful I remember it twenty years later – a fly musing about art history, while observing a couple’s troubled relationship breaking up. I pointed out that regular domestic flies live maybe a month, that their brains don’t even remotely work like ours and that I really couldn’t imagine one of them musing about art history, but my objections were shot down. Quite a few of my stories have their origin in something I wrote for a university creative writing class, though only two stories of mine were ever published in the university literature magazine – all other publications I had there were poems.
But what really resonated with me about Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s post were her early experiences with the world of SFF writing. Here is a quote:
I wanted to be published, though, so I went to Clarion to learn how to become a published fiction writer. I learned a few things, but mostly how to critique stories. I also learned that much of what I loved was “garbage” and I “shouldn’t waste my time at it.”
So I wrote a lot of it in secret. Those romances—fuggetaboutit. That space opera—keep it in a drawer.
I learned that the things I loved the most were old, and hackneyed, and Not Worth My Time.
Not just from Clarion, but from the entire sf culture around me. I had gotten into sf because I loved Star Trek and Star Wars, and I thought that was science fiction. Whoops, I was wrong. But sf did have a lot of short fiction markets, and I loved writing short stories with plots, not the slice-of-life vignettes that passed for short stories in the mainstream markets in the 1980s. Besides, those slice-of-life stories had to be “muscular” (meaning “masculine” of a certain macho, emotionless type), and I didn’t do “muscular.” At least, not with men as the main character. If I wrote “muscular,” the main character was female, and really, who wanted to read that?
(Kris raises a cautious hand. Me. I want to read that.)
Getting into the world of professional fiction writing, even thirty years ago, was all about the don’ts and never about the do. And slowly the fun leached from my writing.
Unlike Kristine Kathryn Rusch, I never went to Clarion. I probably could have scraped the money for the workshop itself together, but since Clarion only happens in the US (and for a while in Australia), I’d have to spend a lot of money on plane tickets, car rentals, etc… in addition to the workshop fees and that just wasn’t happening. But nonetheless, her experiences remind me very much of mine, once I got on the internet and found the online SFF community.
Up to then, I’d been reading and writing SFF mostly in isolation. I had a decent collection of SFF non-fiction (that’s probably why I feel so strongly that the Best Related Work category at the Hugos is for genre-related non-fiction), including a copy of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which I used as a guide to find more books and authors to read, and I also grabbed whatever SFF magazine I came across, usually media mags like Starlog, SFX, Cinefantastique or Famous Monsters of Filmland, usually backissues, because new issues were horrenduously expensive. Fom these sources, I compiled lists of authors, books and movies to check out. But mostly, my method of finding books and authors to read was browsing the limited foreign language shelves at the bookstore and buying whatever looked interesting. That method served me well, too, because I found a lot of books and authors I enjoyed.
But once I got on the internet and found the online SFF community, I realised that I had been reading the wrong books all those years. I eagerly sought out the books that were recommended as the ones to read and found that I disliked approximately ninety percent of them. As for writing, the stories I wanted to tell were old-fashioned, hackneyed, scientifically illiterate and not worth bothering with. Mind you, this was the turn of the millennium, the time of singularity fiction, New British Space Opera, the New Weird, mundane science fiction and the early stirrings of grimdark fantasy, which didn’t even have a name yet or at least not the name by which it would eventually become known. And none of those genres and trends were even remotely what I wrote or liked to read. I did write a parody of the New Weird type stories overburdened with tortured metaphors that were popular around the time. It will probably never see publication, at the time because the joke was too on target (I was pretty sure editors wouldn’t appreciate me making fun of then highly regarded stories and authors) and now because its time has passed.
I did send out a submissions to magazines, quite a few of which don’t exist anymore, but I self-rejected stories more often than I sent them out (“It’s old-fashioned and besides, their submission guidelines say that they don’t want stories about X”). The reactions I got – form rejections or a complete black hole – weren’t encouraging either. Besides, in those days submissions were still mostly by snail mail, which was very expensive, when you lived outside the US and had to bother with international reply coupons (oh, how I hated the damned things), too.
Eventually, I concluded that I simply had a horrible taste in SFF and was obviously too stupid to write it, especially when scientific articles completely failed to inspire story ideas in me, even though this was supposedly how all the “real SF authors wrote”. In short, the atmosphere in the SFF community in the early 2000s completely destroyed my joy in both writing and reading the genre.
I turned to other genres, read and wrote mysteries and crime fiction (which unfortunately have a tiny short fiction market in the English speaking world), rediscovered romance after a brief and unsatisfying brush with the genre during the bodiceripper days and eventually found a few obscure magazines, most of them long defunct, that actually liked my old-fashioned and hackneyed stories like the first few Silencer adventures (including Flying Bombs which had been rejected by a then fairly high profile SFF anthology, even though it perfectly fit what they were looking for).
I eventually came back to reading SFF via urban fantasy and paranormal romance, which reignited my love for the genre. I also found science fiction romance and though much of it didn’t get the worldbuilding versus romance balance right, the books that did were so worth it. But even though I was reading SFF again, I wasn’t writing it, because I still had that voice in my had that told me that I’d never be a real SFF writer, because my taste in SFF was horrible and besides I was too stupid to get inspiration from science articles.
So I tried my hand at romance, which was a big market and welcoming community. But SFF elements kept creeping in (not too mention that my writing is too gritty for the tame US romance market) and so my attempt at a regency romance turned into a curious regency steampunk hybrid complete with airships and even chemical weapons. I should probably revise and publish that one some day, since it had potential. Meanwhile, my attempt at a contemporary romance not only contained all sorts of no-nos such as swearing and people having sex, while one of them was theoretically in a relationship with someone else, but also had the characters have long, geeky conversations about Doctor Who and Star Wars. Even the title was (and is) unpublishable, since you cannot use the f-word in a book title (it was supposed to be called “Fuckbuddies”). Still, I wanted to write a contemporary romance that actually felt contemporary and was about people I recognised and that’s what I did. I’m not sure if that thing is salvagable at all, though I’m still glad I wrote it, because it taught a lot about writing emotional scenes and also about describing life with warts and everything.
When self-publishing suddenly became a viable alternative, it also brought the joy of writing back, because suddenly every story idea was potentially viable and no longer subject to “But is there a market for this?” considerations. Who cares if there is no established market for this story, I’ll simply make my own. But nonetheless, I didn’t get back to writing science fiction, even though it was my first and best love, because I still had that voice in my head that told me, “You can’t do that in science fiction.” Until I chanced to read the Deathstalker series by Simon R. Green, where Green basically threw everything (vampires, werewolves, flying castles, superpowers, a whole planet of homicidal toys, 80-page scenes of political debates at court, etc…) and the kitchen sink, too, in, just because he felt like it. And I thought, “If he can do it, then why the hell can’t I?” So I started writing exactly the sort of space opera I really wanted to write and so Shattered Empire (to which I should really get back some time) and In Love and War were born.
Unfortunately, within the space of a few years, the whole climate of indie publishing changed from “We can write whatever we want, hear us roar” to a “Write to market and strictly adhere to the genre tropes readers demand” ethos that is much more restrictive than traditional publishing ever was. And so we get entire categories in the Kindle store that are dominated by cookie cutter books, because that’s what the market supposedly wants. It’s a depressing development, especially considering that “freedom to tell the stories we want” was one of the main reasons writers went indie in the first place.
Would I sell more, if I stuck to one genre, one series and wrote the sort of thing that the “market” a.k.a. American Kindle Unlimited subscribers apparently wants? Probably. But I don’t particularly want to write about manly space marines killing evil insectoid aliens in space or young men who get sucked into videogames, where they become the biggest Gary Stu ever and all the women want to have sex with them. Even if I try to write that sort of story – A Mess of Arms and Legs and Limbs was my attempt at a “pew, pew, let’s kill all the aliens” story – it usually turns out quite different from what the market supposedly wants.
Therefore, Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s post about the joy of writing is important for both indies and traditionally published authors. Because sadly, it’s all too easy to lose the joy of writing and forget why it was fun in the first place.
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Indie Crime Fiction of the Month for April 2019
Welcome to the latest edition of “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”.
So what is “Indie Crime Fiction of the Month”? It’s a round-up of speculative fiction by indie authors newly published this month, though some March books I missed the last time around snuck in as well. The books are arranged in alphabetical order by author. So far, most links only go to Amazon.com, though I may add other retailers for future editions.
Our new releases cover the broad spectrum of crime fiction. We have cozy mysteries, small town mysteries, historical mysteries, WWII mysteries, paranormal mysteries, crime thrillers, psychological thrillers, forensic thrillers, legal thrillers, action thrillers, spy thrillers, police procedurals, romantic suspense, private investigators, amateur sleuths, lawyers, serial killers, missing children, missing detectives, missing agents, amnesiac spies, forensic geologists, crime-busting witches, sinister carnivals, murder on university campuses and aboard cruise ships, in Hawaii, the Grand Canyon, Hollywood, rural Ohio, rual Nebraska and much more.
Don’t forget that Indie Crime Fiction of the Month is also crossposted to the Indie Crime Scene, a group blog which features new release spotlights, guest posts, interviews and link round-ups regarding all things crime fiction several times per week.
As always, I know the authors at least vaguely, but I haven’t read all of the books, so Caveat emptor.
And now on to the books without further ado:
A Cold Spell by Stacey Alabaster:
It’s a cold day in… Well, you know the saying
Ruby Swift is learning to use her paranormal powers and how to solve mysteries as a private investigator. Sometimes together. When a freezing spell goes wrong, she’s suddenly got more to worry about than just a murder investigation.
A Cold Spell is part of the Private Eye Witch Cozy Mystery series. If you like fun paranormal mysteries, you will love Ruby Swift and her magical adventures.
Get A Cold Spell and start solving your next supernatural mystery today!
Death by Dissertation by Kelly Brackenhoff:
Ambitious Cassandra Sato traded her life in Hawai’i for a dream position as Student Affairs VP at Morton College in tiny Carson, Nebraska. She expected the Midwestern church casseroles, land-locked cornfields, and face-freezing winters would be her biggest challenges, but it’s her job that’s rapidly becoming a nightmare.
A deaf student is dead and the investigation reveals a complicated trail of connections between campus food service, a local farmer’s beef, and the science lab’s cancer research. Together with her few allies, Cassandra must protect the students caught up in the entanglement.
Dealing with homesickness, vandalism, and a stalker, Cassandra is trapped in a public relations disaster that could cost her job, or more. No one said college was easy.
Fortune Furlough by Jana DeLeon:
It’s not a vacation until there’s a murder.
Fortune, Ida Belle, and Gertie are finally off to Florida on the vacation they’ve always talked about. Days filled with white sand, turquoise water, and fruity drinks are the only thing on the agenda. But when Gertie’s “hot date” turns up dead and she’s the number one suspect, they’re forced to hang up their bathing suits and shift to investigating mode.
They soon discover that Gertie’s beau was up to all kinds of shady behavior, leaving them with a long list of people who are happy he’s dead. But which one resorted to murder?
There are plenty of ways to die in the Grand Canyon.
Forensic geologists Cassie Oldfield and Walter Shaws investigate one way: trouble on the canyon’s Colorado River. Stranded raft. Life vests unused. Rafters missing.
The only clue to the fate of the rafters is a bag of pebbles caught by the bow line. Following that clue, the geologists uncover a hellish scheme. Not only are the rafters in peril, but the river itself is under attack.
The race to stop it takes Cassie and Walter deep into the canyon, and onto the mighty river, putting their own survival at stake.
In Her Defence by Jan Edwards:
Bunch Courtney’s hopes for a quiet market-day lunch with her sister are shattered when a Dutch refugee dies a horribly painful death before their eyes. A few days later Bunch receives a letter from her old friend Cecile saying that her father, Professor Benoir, has been murdered in an eerily similar fashion. Two deaths by poisoning in a single week. Co-incidence? Bunch does not believe that any more than Chief Inspector William Wright.
Set against a backdrop of escalating war and the massed internments of 1940, the pair are drawn together in a race to prevent the murderer from striking again.
An actress is murdered at a Hollywood house party and a naive young man stands accused.
In this debut novel, greenhorn attorney Ezekiel Blackbird has something to prove as he struggles to establish his own practice in Los Angeles straight out of law school. Eager but insecure, Zeke would prefer to attract easier, high-paying corporate clients, but he can’t refuse the chance to represent an alleged murderer who desperately needs his help. His love life is in tatters and his physical safety is under threat, but Zeke remains loyal to his client despite the difficult lessons he must learn to become a shrewd criminal attorney.
Perilous Seas by Lily Harper Hart:
Her father may be back in her life but things are hardly smooth sailing for Rowan Gray.
He faked his death to get away from a group of people investigating psychic abilities – a group he is convinced is still out to get him – and he’s positive the group want his daughter for the same nefarious reasons.
Rowan is simply happy to have him in her life. She gets to spend time with him and her uncle and plot for a future they might never have.
All that’s thrown into turmoil when The Bounding Storm, the cruise ship where Rowan works, stumbles across a family that’s been lost at sea for weeks. Only some of them are on the rescue ship her boyfriend Quinn Davenport brings back, though. The rest are missing and lost.
What happened to the other family members? That’s the question on everybody’s lips as the media descends. The family at the center of the rescue is rich, essentially American royalty … and the horror of what they went through makes for a terrible tale.
The problem is … the story doesn’t hold water.
When a hand belonging to one of the deceased washes up on the beach, miles away from where the family went missing, things start to fall apart … and fast.
It’s up to Rowan and Quinn to discover the truth while working on their own investigation into a group of people that may well mean to do Rowan harm.
It makes for a busy – and dangerous – few days. All they have to do is survive to find the answers they seek.
That’s easier said than done.
The Fat Detective Disappears by Christian Hayes:
Where on earth is Eugene Blake?
Eugene Blake has gone missing and it’s up to amateur detective Christina Walker to do everything she can to find him.
She uses her sleuthing skills to uncover a cache of notebooks that she is certain will hold the answer to Eugene’s fate.
Meanwhile Eugene is at the centre of his own mystery that he is desperately trying to solve.
The Fat Detective Disappears is the ingenious final puzzle in the Eugene Blake Trilogy by London novelist Christian Hayes.
Read now to discover Eugene’s final mystery
Black-Market Body Double by Vicki Hinze:
IF TROUBLE FINDS YOU, YOU WANT HER ON YOUR SIDE
Captain Amanda West is assigned to the elite S.A.S.S. Unit. All its Secret Assignment Security Specialists are highly trained and well experienced covert operatives. While on a mission, Amanda is buried alive in a tomb by S.A.S.S. nemesis and black-market broker Thomas Kunz who elevates ruthless to new heights. Amanda escapes and is astonished to learn she has been missing not for three days but for three months!
And soon she discovers another who has an unexplained three-month absence. An operative in a highly classified and sensitive position, Captain Mark Cross. Working together, Amanda and Mark must discover what happened to them and why. And they must determine if there are others like them. In their line of work, finding the truth is essential not only for their careers but for the lives of those in the nation they have taken oaths to defend and protect. What Kunz could be up to chills them both. But as bad as that is, it pales to what he is actually doing. Can Amanda and Mark stop Kunz before he attains his goal? Kunz wants nothing more than to destroy the entire nation!
Luke on the Loose by Amanda M. Lee:
Luke Bishop is the center of attention and life of the party at Mystic Caravan Circus. He’s a great guy, who just so happens to be in a bit of a funk. That doesn’t change when the circus hits Ohio, one of their least favorite stops.
Since nothing ever happens in Ohio. The group believes that will hold true during another boring trip. They find out better after the first night, when one of their clowns is killed.
They know right away what they’re looking for: an incubus, a creature that lures women with his song and then kills them in an intimate manner. All the men are on full alert because that means the Mystic Caravan females are in danger.
Luke takes it upon himself to infiltrate an area biker bar where the killer may be hanging out. All he has to do to find the culprit is fit in, not tip his hand, and make sure his partners in crime don’t draw too many sets of eyes in their direction.
It’s a difficult job, but Luke is up to the task … that is if he doesn’t fall victim himself. The circus men are joining together to protect the women for a change, and it’s going to be a dangerous ride.
Patricia may be well-traveled – but this is a mystery with a dangerous destination.
Patricia always viewed the world from the end of her pen. Her feet hop from place to place; her exotic experiences are filling the pages faster than stamps on her passport. Someday, she aspires to land a big-time publishing deal.
At a stopover in Atlanta, she is shocked to discover the body of a local businessman, Peter, dumped in a camp in the outskirts of the city. For the first time, her wings are clipped as the lead detective; Brian Johnston launches an investigation into Peter’s death – firmly suspecting that cause of death was murder.
Patricia and Brian band together in his murder investigation, slowly uncovering leads to a shady underbelly behind Peter’s flashy ‘successful’ exterior, and the illicit dealings he was determined to keep from prying eyes. As the details begin to piece together, someone intends to step in and silence them. By any means necessary.
Paradise hides a master thief.
What if diamonds aren’t a girl’s best friend?
A heist at a high-end auction house sends tech specialist Sophie on a new case hunting down a thief whose skills match her own. Even as she chases a cache of precious gems, events begun in a distant land threaten the fragile happiness Sophie’s building—and an enigmatic new partner brings challenges close to home, luring Sophie into the world of vigilante justice.
All Things Considered by A.B. Plum:
The police say Ryn Davis is guilty of murder.
Ryn claims she was asleep. Sound asleep. Dead-to-the-world asleep.
An insomniac with a long history of sleepwalking, night terrors, and other sleep disorders, Ryn’s dodging a life-changing decision. Should she leave her iconic rock-star lover? Is his fame and money worth his mood swings? After a particularly explosive argument, she goes to bed. He follows. The argument escalates. Exhausted, she goes to the guest bedroom. She pops a sleeping pill. Technically, a hormone. Not a drug. One melatonin, she rationalizes, determined to think more clearly.
She wakens the next morning, groggy and disoriented. Fragments of a dream fade in and out of memory. Not the argument with Stone … but something more disturbing. When she enters their bedroom, she sees him in bed—a red hibiscus blooming on his chest.
Unable to produce the melatonin bottle, Ryn acts more and more defensive and guilty. The police ridicule her testimony. Definitely bitter, can she prove how an insomniac slept through two bullets?
Honorable Death by Linda S. Prather:
Detective Kacy Lang wasn’t surprised when the body of her twin brother washed up from the icy depths of the Chicago River. She’d known since the day she graduated from the academy that one day he’d wind up on her beat, and she’d have to arrest him… or kill him. She could accept the fact he’d been murdered. What she couldn’t accept was the massive torture he’d endured before his death. Someone would pay for that.
A multilayered, fast-paced archaeological dig of a mystery.
When Sergeant Brad Braun is called to a scene in a familiar location, what looks like an average murder case quickly turns into something that is far from typical. The dead man is someone from Braun’s past, and the body happens to be located in the exact spot where Braun last saw him.
With no witnesses and almost a total lack of evidence, law enforcement is scrambling for clues. Another dropped-off body quickly follows the first, left in the same spot, and Braun is once again familiar with the deceased.
As the killer claims more victims, Braun begins to connect the dots. Unfortunately, the last dot may connect straight to the sergeant himself.
Don’t Lie to Me by Willow Rose:
When twelve-year-old Sophie Williams went on a Girl Scout summer camp, she never returned home.
Three months later, her body is found inside her sleeping bag in the most frequented area of Cocoa Beach, and the town is outraged.
The girl isn’t just any child. She’s the town’s most beloved surf idol, and it was believed that she could be the next Kelly Slater.
As another child, the son of a well-known senator is kidnapped, and the parents receive a disturbing video, FBI profiler Eva Rae Thomas — who has just returned to her hometown, divorced and out of a job — plunges into the investigation, breaking her promise to her children not to do police work again.
Local law enforcement, with her old flame Matt Miller in charge, are the ones who ask for her help in a case so unsettling that only she can solve it. But the deeper they dig, the deadlier it becomes for Matt and Eva Rae. Soon, everyone she holds dear is in grave danger as this case hits a little too close to home.
DON’T LIE TO ME is the first book in the Eva Rae Thomas Mystery Series and can be read as a standalone.
Presumption of Guilt by Rachel Sinclair:
A wealthy family with DARK secrets.
A SHOCKING reveal that you guaranteed won’t see coming…
Avery Collins is an attorney with the tender heart of a warrior for the wrongfully accused, for one simple reason. She was once wrongfully accused, and spent 7 years in prison for a murder she didn’t commit.
Now sworn to protect the indigent accused, she’s persuaded to represent Esme Guitierrez, an El Salvadoran refugee who is accused of killing 21-year-old Aria Whitmore. Aria was the daughter of the prominent billionaire hotelier Jacob Whitmore, and was also an aspiring concert pianist and music composer.
As Avery digs further into the case, she realizes that there were some sick games taking place behind the closed doors of the Whitmore mansion, and Avery ends up with more questions than answers.
What happened to Aria’s birth mother?
How did Julian Rodriguez, a young schizophrenic man, come to befriend Aria?
And who is sending threatening emails that are filled with facts that are not widely known to the public?
When Avery finds out the answers to these questions, she’s shocked. But she also realizes that the big reveal opens up more questions than answers, and the case takes an unexpected turn.
As time runs out to find the true culprit, Avery faces the trial of her life. Amidst an intense media glare, death threats, protestors and stalkers breaking into her home, Avery nonetheless gives this case her all.
Because if she doesn’t, her client will end up on death row.
Winter’s Origin by Mary Stone:
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. And sets you on a path of revenge.
When The Preacher targets her family for his last kill, Winter Black is the only survivor. After recovering from the brain injury she received that brutal night, Winter single-mindedly pursues a career as an FBI agent. Her unexplainable talents, discovered after her coma, might be the key to taking down the notorious serial killer… unless he finds her first.
Welcome to Winter’s Origin, the prequel to the soon to be released Winter Black crime fiction series. If you enjoy gripping crime solving, hair-raising villains, and riveting suspense, then you’ll love Mary Stone’s debut page-turning series.
Storm Front: Memoirs of a Secret Agent by Jazzmyn Storm:
When a spy loses her memory, she doesn’t know who to trust…or what to believe.
I felt myself flying through the air, and I was strangely calm for a moment as the reality of the situation faded away. This wasn’t happening. It couldn’t be happening. I’d wake up any moment and realize it was all a bad dream.
Then, I hit the water.
What happens, when the people you thought you could trust betray you? That’s bad enough in any relationship…but when you’re a spy, it can be deadly.
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April 22, 2019
In Memoriam Martin Böttcher
German film composer Martin Böttcher (1927 – 2019) died April 19th aged 91. Once again, there is no English language obituary, but here are some German ones from Tagesschau, RP Online and Deutschlandfunk Kultur. Deutschlandfunk Kultur also has a nice profile of Martin Böttcher with some musical analysis by Oliver Schwesig.
Together with Peter Thomas and Klaus Doldinger (both of whom are still alive), Martin Böttcher formed the trifecta of the great film composers in post-war (West) Germany. All three started out as jazz musicians and those musical origins also determined the course of (West) German film music for decades.
Martin Böttcher’s early life did not seem to predispose him to a musical career. Due to a childhood injury, he was deaf in one ear and initially showed little interest in music. Instead, young Martin dreamed of becoming a pilot. Those dreams were derailed, like so many, by World War II. Böttcher was drafted towards the end of the war, when the Nazis were drafting every male German aged 16 to 60. He survived and wound up in a prisoner of war camp, where he taught himself to play the guitar. After his return home, he joined the dance orchestra of the newly established North West German radio NWDR (nowadays known as NDR) as a guitarist.
By now, Böttcher had also started composing and eventually left the orchestra to become a film composer. The first movie for which he composed the music was the otherwise forgotten 1955 war movie Der Hauptmann und sein Held (The Captain and His Hero). It’s part of a series of West German WWII movies made in the second half of the 1950s, which are quite critical of the Nazis and militarism and inevitably contrast the Nazi true believers (often officers who senselessly send soldiers to their deaths) with common soldiers who are just victims of the system. I guess the brief popularity of such movies was one way of people coming to terms with World War II. I found a trailer for Der Hauptmann und sein Held on YouTube, where you can hear Böttcher’s music.
Martin Böttcher’s next work as a film composer was a minor classic, the 1956 juvenile delinquent drama Die Halbstarken (the English title is apparently Teenage Wolfpack), starring a young Horst Buchholz, who would go on to be one of The Magnificent Seven, and an even younger Karin Baal as a teen femme fatale. Die Halbstarken is a nice period piece and important to German movie history, but I have to admit that I was kind of disappointed when I first saw it. Karin Baal is great as the bad girl with the angelic face, but Buchholz’ character basically just wants the same bourgeois 1950s life as the parent generation, he only wants to use crime as a short cut to get there. That’s not how I imagine a teen rebel. The plot is very much the filmic version of a 1950s sleaze paperback. Böttcher’s music, however, played by his own jazz group Mr. Martin’s Band*, was great. Listen for yourself:
The success of Die Halbstarken, not least because of the music, made Böttcher a very much in demand film composer. He composed the theme for the 1960s Father Brown movies starring Heinz Rühmann, which are still the most palatable version of the character, probably because they are only very loose adaptations of the stories by G.K. Chesterton. Sorry, but I just cannot abide Chesterton. Still, here is Martin Böttcher’s Father Brown theme, which was reused for the German Father Brown TV series, which ran from 2003 to 2013 and starred Ottfired Fischer.
Böttcher often worked for producer Horst Wendlandt and provided the music for several of Wendlandt’s Edgar Wallace movies such as Der Fälscher von London (The Forger of London, 1961), Das Gasthaus an der Themse (The Inn on the River, 1962) or Der Mönch mit der Peitsche (1967), which had the disappointing English title The College Girl Murders, though a literal translation would be “The Monk with the Whip” (which the villainous monk uses to strangle college girls). I’m a huge fan of the Wallace films and for more about this unique movie series, Edgar_Wallace. The music was a large part of what made those movies so good, though nowadays Peter Thomas is more associated with the music for the Wallace movies than Martin Böttcher. However, here is Martin Böttcher’s delightfully gothic soundtrack for Der Mönch mit der Peitsche. Naturally, considering the main villain is a monk, the theme starts off with an organ, for why not?
But Böttcher’s most famous film score would be the one he composed for Horst Wendlandt’s other series, the Winnetou movies of the 1960s, based on Karl May’s adventure novels. Ironically, Martin Böttcher himself had never read a single Winnetou novel, which must make him one of the very few Germans of his generation who did not read Karl May. When someone asked him why he didn’t read the novels, Böttcher answered, “I’ve seen every single Winnetou movie dozens of times. I know how the story goes. I don’t need to read it.”
I’ve written about the Winnetou movies and what they meant for several generations of Germans before, so let’s just listen to Martin Böttcher’s iconic Old Shatterhand theme. I suppose every German born in the past sixty years will instantly have a vision of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, portrayed by Pierre Brice and Lex Barker respectively, riding across the prairie, portrayed by a national park in what is now Croatia:
Martin Böttcher also composed the themes and incidental music for several popular TV shows such as the police procedural Sonderdezernat K1 (Special Division K1) and Forsthaus Falkenau (Forester House Falkenau). We will forgive him the last one. Meanwhile, enjoy the seventiestastic title sequence of Sonderdezernat K1 and Martin Böttcher’s theme for the show.
And because I can, here are twenty-five years worth of title sequences for Forsthaus Falkenau (yes, the darned show ran for a quarter century) with Martin Böttcher’s theme in slight variations:
So thanks for the music, Martin Böttcher, and rest in peace.
*A couple of future music stars were members of Mr. Martin’s Band. The most famous is probably trombone player Ernst Mosch, who would eventually become famous as the king of traditional brass band music. Mosch’s mere name is enough to invoke shudders of horror among those who were children in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, because he and his brass band were seemingly always on TV, always plaing the same old music. Hard to imagine that he was once a gifted jazz musician, but then a lot of talented German jazz musicians eventually wound up making terrible folk pop and Schlager music.
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April 20, 2019
The Obligatory 2019 Birthday Post
April 18 was my birthday, so this year’s birthday post is two days late, because the weekly link round-ups for the Speculative Fiction Showcase and the Indie Crime Scene as well as the review of the Star Trek Discovery season finale got in the way.
I celebrated with my parents and we had sailor’s curry (or spaceman’s curry, as I’ve renamed the dish in Freedom’s Horizon, where you can also find the recipe) for lunch. No curry pics today, because I already posted some in the old post linked above as well as on Twitter.
Afterwards, we had to go to Oldenburg to pick up my Dad’s new car. As for why we had to drive almost fifty kilometre to pick up a car, when there are umpteen car dealers closer than that – the car is a plug-in hybrid (replacing an older plug-in hybrid with a weaker battery) and not all dealers are authorised to sell them. That took quite some time, partly because there was a minor problem getting the car to recognise our phones. Traffic was really bad as well, especially since the local authorities in their infinite wisdom have decided to repave a major road in the area just before the already busy Easter weekend, so you had to take long detours to even get onto Highway A28 to Oldenburg.
When I got home, a neighbour dropped by with a bottle of wine and we chatted for a while. I didn’t do anything birthday like in the evening, largely because I was tired.
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Birthday presents, wrapped.
Of course, there were presents as well. My dad took a few photos of me unwrapping them, but unfortunately, he isn’t the world’s greatest photographer. Still, these two came out all right.
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Me unwrapping presents. Okay, so you can only see my hair, but it is me, I promise.
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Me unwrapping presents. And this time, you can even see my face.
Because I love books, people tend to get me books. And because of online wishlists, getting books that I actually want (and don’t yet own) is much easier than it used to be. I remember painstakingly writing up lists of books I wanted and handing them out to relatives, only for half of them to ignore the list completely and others to helpfully ask, if I really wanted that book, since it appeared to be science fiction and looked somewhat scary. The book in question was an Anne McCaffrey novel (I’ve forgotten which one) and I was sixteen and therefore well able to handle whatever scares Anne McCaffrey dished up. Never mind that I actually find some of the squickier bits in those books more problematic today than at sixteen.
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Birthday presents unwrapped. Lots of books, bookended (quite literally) by two bottles.
It’s a somewhat ecclectic mix of books this time: Science fiction, mostly new, but also a Liaden Universe novel that was missing from my collection (the typically lurid Baen cover raised some eyebrows), crime fiction (the Locked trilogy by G.B. Williams is highly recommended BTW) and a vintage historical romance by Madeleine Brent a.k.a. Peter O’Donnell as well as wine and champagne. Regarding the champagne, in Germany it’s customary that a car dealer gives you a bottle of champagne to go with a new car (of course, the champagne is only to be drunk, once you’ve taken the car home). And once the car salesperson realised that it was my birthday, he just handed me the bottle, so I sort of appropriated it.
And that was it for my birthday. And for something else.
I’d planned to do a 2019 Hugo finalist reactions round-up, but ninety percent of the discussion this year seems to be focussed on the Hugo nomination for Archive of Our Own in the Best Related Work category. I’ve already said how I feel about that and seeing how the Archive of Our Own nomination seems to hog all the attention doesn’t make me any more inclined to vote for it.
Meanwhile, Thomas Wagner of SFF180 (which would be a fine choice in the fancast category) has put up the first of two videos reviewing the short stories nominated for the 2018 Nebula and 2019 Hugo Awards. He also briefly goes into the 20Booksto50K not-a-slate controversy at this year’s Nebulas (see my posts here, here and here). Thomas Wagner reviews the two Nebula finalists that were on the 20Booksto50K not-a-slate and is considerably less than impressed.
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April 19, 2019
Star Trek Discovery Boldly Goes Where None Has Gone Before in the Season 2 Finale
This is the last weekly Star Trek Discovery review for the time being, since the season finale aired last night. For my takes on previous episodes, go here BTW.
Warning! Spoilers behind the cut!
It turns out was the first half of the two-part season finale to the point that both episodes even share the same title “Such Sweet Sorrow”. I’m not really convinced that the season finale needed to be a two-parter, especially since last episode was mostly an extended series of tearful good-byes and this episode is mostly a huge space battle (okay, it’s a really cool space battle) with some revisiting of previous episodes.
Last episode, Michael figured out that since the data from the infodump sphere, which will enable the rogue AI Control to destroy all sentient life in the universe, can neither be deleted from Discovery‘s computer nor can Discovery be destroyed in any way, since the data prevents it, the only solution is to send the Discovery off into the far future, where Control cannot get to the data. Michael promptly volunteers to be the person who goes onto a one-way trip into the future, cause that’s the sort of thing she does, and gathers a motly crew of co-volunteers – basically the core cast plus the bridge crew.
This episode then, Michael and the Discovery crew do exactly what they planned to do last episode. But first, the Discovery and the Enterprise get caught up in a massive space battle with several Section 31 ships controlled by Control. And since the Section 31 ships can break apart into smaller ships, there are even more of them. As space battles go, this one is glorious with phasers and photo torpedoes firing and consoles exploding left, right and centre. Now Star Trek has never really been a space battle show, not least because of budget and tech issues, but once in a while, they get to pull out all the stops and pretend that they’re Star Wars.
The Enterprise gets an unexploded torpedo stuck in its saucer section. Pike, Number One (who still hasn’t gotten a name) and Admiral Cornwell try to disarm it. But the attempt fails and so Admiral Cornwell sacrifices herself to save the Enterprise from destruction. Considering that Admiral Cornwell has been a pretty significant presence in the first two seasons of Discovery, her death doesn’t carry much more weight than the death of any other redshirt of the week sacrificing themselves for the good of the many. Even Airiam’s death carried more weight and we barely got to know her. Admiral Cornwell had a lot more screentime than Airiam and yet her death fails to have much impact, probably because her final moments are spent with Pike, with whom she only shared a few scenes, and Number One with whome she barely interacted at all. But then the character of Admiral Cornwell was very much tied to Lorca and the Klingon war storyline of season 1. In fact, I strongly suspect that the showrunners wanted to write the character out, since they apparently had no real idea what to do with her after season 1. But given the events of this episode, I don’t quite understand why they had to kill off Admiral Cornwell, since the end pretty much made sure that we never need to see her again. Never mind that Admiral Cornwell basically dies of bad ship design (the lever to lower the bulkhead is only on one side of the bulkhead – the wrong one), so her death feels contrived.
One of the few useful things Admiral Cornwell did post-season 1 or at all was providing some much needed therapy to Dr. Culber after his miraculous resurrection. The events of last week’s episode seemed to cement the break-up of everybody’s favourite same-sex Star Trek couple (okay, so they’re the only same-sex Star Trek couple) Stamets and Culber, when Stamets wanted to go into the far future with Michael and Culber wanted to stay aboard the Enterprise, since dying once was quite enough for him. However, in the middle of the space battle, Culber and Stamets finally realise that they cannot live without each other and unite in the Discovery‘s sickbay, while there is a battle going on all around them. It’s a lovely moment and I’m very happy that Stamets and Culber, who are not just Discovery‘s best couple, but one of the best couples in all of Star Trek are finally back together.
The reunion of Culber and Stamets is not the only emotional scene in part 2 of “Such Sweet Sorrow”, for there is also another lovely scene between Spock and Michael, who are scrambling to get the Red Angel suit active again, so the Discovery can fly into the future. But Michael figures out that she first needs to go back in time to plant all of the Red Angel signals, since they always led the Discovery to places and people who would eventually be important in the fight against Control. So she dons the suit and does just that, taking us on a little season 2 recap tour. Alas, it turns out that Spock cannot accompany Michael into the future after all (as everybody who has ever seen Star Trek already knew) and so the siblings share an emotional good-bye scene, as Michael essentially tells Spock that he’ll eventually find good friends who will accept him as he is, just as we all know he will.
Meanwhile, the Enterprise and the Discovery are holding their own, but they’re vastly outnumbered and the rest of Starfleet is busy elsewhere, I guess. But help is on the way in the form of L’Rell and the Klingon fleet and some Kelpians led by Saru’s sister Siranna, who have appropriated some of the Ba’ul’s spacecraft. Saru’s reaction upon learning that his sister, the peaceful high priestess, has taken up flying space fighters, is priceless.
While everybody is shooting at everybody else, Control decides to use the space battle as a distraction and beam its meat puppet Leland aboard the Discovery to access the sphere data, while everybody else is busy. But Lieutenant Nhan and Mirror Georgiou and lead Leland on a chase through the Discovery‘s corridors, while giving Michelle Yeoh a chance to show off her mad martial arts skills. In the end, Georgiou manages to lure Leland into the spore drive chamber and uses the spore drive and its containment field to pull Control’s nanos out of Leland’s body and destroy them. Leland promptly collapses and the various Control-controlled ships go dead, since Control apparently neglected to make a backup copy of itself. It’s amazing how much of the plot of season 2 of Star Trek Discovery is determined by the fact that people (and rogue AIs) don’t follow basic computer safety protocols. And no, Leland and Control are not the origin of the Borg, as many have speculated. So here is one totally obvious shocking plot twist(TM) that Discovery has managed to avoid.
Michael has by now completed her tour of season 2’s highlights and opened a wormhole, through which Discovery flies into what is presumably the future. We don’t know for sure, since we basically see the Discovery vanish in a burst of light to boldly go where no man, woman or Kelpian has gone before. Of course, the time jump is completely unnecessary, since Mirror Georgiou has already killed Control. Not that I don’t understand why the showrunners had the Discovery make the time jump, but making the jump after Control is dead doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
In fact, I wonder whether the scenes were supposed to go in a different order, i.e. the Discovery goes through the wormhole, but Leland has already beamed on board and now the future is at risk as well. Luckily, Mirror Georgiou manages to kill him, but the Discovery has already arrived in the future or wherever. Talking of which, Mirror Georgiou is still aboard the Discovery, when she flies through the wormhole and is now presumably stuck nine hundred years in the future, which will make it difficult for her to appear in the planned Section 31 series, which is presumably not set nine hundred years in the future. Though in this interview with Andrew Whalen in Newsweek, Michelle Yeoh says that she will apparently be in both season 3 of Star Trek Discovery and in the Section 31 series, so she’ll apparently find a way back.
The episode ends with Pike, Number 1, Spock and Ash Tyler (who stayed behind, because he and Michael cannot possibly be together because of reasons) at a debriefing with the Starfleet commanders at the Starfleet headquarters in San Francisco. Ash Tyler is tasked with rebuilding Section 31 into something more open and less clandestine (we’ve all seen how well that worked out in Deep Space Nine) and Spock convinces the various Starfleet bigwigs that for the sake of the safety of the universe, the Discovery must be reported lost with all hands aboard during the space battle and no one must ever speak of the Discovery, the spore drive, Michael Burnham and Control again. And just like that – snap – Spock has restored Star Trek canon to its pre-Discovery state.
In many ways, season 2 of Star Trek Discovery was a trasitional season that tried (and largely succeeded) in undoing the complete and utter mess that was season 1 before pressing the big red reset button and sending the Discovery off to new adventures in the far future, where no collisions with established Star Trek canon are possible. This is probably the best decision showrunner Alex Kurtzman could make, especially since the fact that Discovery was a prequel was always the biggest weakness of the show. But now the Discovery and her remaining crew can start over on a completely blank slate and hopefully have great and glorious adventures. Meanwhile, Spock’s little “Let us never speak of all this again on the pain of treason” speech gets established Star Trek canon back on track. Okay, so there’s still a never before mentioned war with the Klingon Empire and a race of spacefaring Kelpians who will never be seen again (both of which can be explained away), but otherwise Alex Kurtzman and his team put all the pieces back where they found them.
It very much seems as if the production team was aware exactly what a huge mess season 1 of Discovery was and so they set about to fix it by essentially wiping the slate clean. The whole plot arc of season 2 was basically set up to do just that and tie up some leftover loose ends from season 1. Not that I really care about what happened to L’Rell and the Klingons, but by bringing back Culber, the production team corrected one of season 1’s worst mistakes, even if the way they did it was completely contrived. The bridge crew got more to do and at least some of them acquired a hint of personality. I assume we’ll see more of them in season 3, especially considering that the Discovery is operating with a smaller than normal crew now. I’m still not sure why they felt the need to write out Ash Tyler, but then the writers often didn’t seem to know what to do with him this season anyway. And he’ll probably still get his chance to shine in the Section 31 spin-off.
Since the production team still needed a whole season to wipe the slate clean anyway, they decided to have some fun with the fact that Discovery started out as a prequel set a few years before the Original Series and brought in characters like Pike, Number One and of course, Spock. The character of Christopher Pike very much benefitted from this, since Anson Mount turned him from answer to a trivia question into a fully fledged character we care about, which makes his ultimate fate all the sadder. I was initially skeptical about bringing in Spock at all, but Ethan Peck’s portrayal of one of Star Trek‘s most iconic character very much grew on me in the second half of season 2. And seeing Spock in his familiar blue uniform with his familiar 1960s haircut take his usual station on the bridge of the Enterprise probably gave every Original Series fan a little thrill. I’m a bit sad that we didn’t get to see more of Rebecca Romijn’s take on Number One, especially since Number One always struck me as a character with a lot of potential, unlike the bland Pike. So I really hope we get to see Pike, Spock, Number One and the rest of the Enterprise crew again someday, maybe in a mini-series or one-off special.
All in all, season 2 of Star Trek Discovery is much improved compared to the unholy mess that was season 1. The show still hasn’t fully found its feet and season 3 will likely be very different from what has gone before, but season 2 managed to tell a coherent, if not all that thrilling story (Control and the Red Angel were the sort of threats that the Enterprise dealt with in a single episode in the days of the Original Series and The Next Generation), and also managed to have some fun along the way. Season 2 even felt like Star Trek much of the time, while season 1 often seemed to forget what Star Trek has traditionally been about.
And now the Discovery and her valiant crew under the command of – Who actually is Captain now? Saru or Michael? – have the chance to explore a whole new era unencumbered by the shackles of established Star Trek canon. Let’s hope they make something fabulous of it.
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April 16, 2019
Ian McEwan is Clueless about Science Fiction
I have to admit that I never liked Ian McEwan. He always struck me as the sort of white middle class dude novelist who believes that his white middle class dude stories are somehow of universal human relevance. I disliked Atonement intensely and didn’t feel much more charitable towards Saturday and On Chesil Beach, all of which came out when I was at university or – in the case of On Chesil Beach – shortly after I finished and the writings of important and award winning white dude novelists were something I was supposed to care about. Coincidentally, I just realised that McEwan has published four novels plus a fifth, which will be the subject of this post, since On Chesil Beach, all of which completely passed me by, which shows that once I finished university I stopped paying attention to writers whose work I don’t like. Or maybe McEwan’s cultural relevance is fading and his latter books got less attention than his earlier ones.
Besides, McEwan is the sort of writer who inevitably has to weigh in on every political issue and is usually on the wrong side. He made islamophobic remarks, was in favour of the Iraq War and criticised anti-war protesters (though he has since admitted that he was wrong and the protesters right – well, better late than never). Though amazingly, he is opposed to Brexit, so maybe he really has learned. And then there is the appalling treatment of his first wife, who apparently embarassed him in front of his cool friends, because she was into New Age stuff. His Wikipedia entry has the whole ugly story with links and sources.
So in short, I don’t like Ian McEwan and I don’t care for his work. And when I saw that he had a new book out called Machines Like Me, which was apparently about artificial intelligence, I groaned and thought, “Oh great, another white dude novelist who deigns to descend from literary heights and either believes he invented science fiction or that he doesn’t write it at all. And I bet the novel is totally unoriginal and tells a story that has been done to death.” Then I went about my day, cause I stopped caring about what Ian McEwan wrote when I finished university.
However, other folks still pay attention to what Ian McEwan says or does and so Tim Adams’ recent interview with Ian McEwan in The Guardian caught some attention among genre folks for the complete and utter cluelessness both interviewer and interviewee display about science fiction.
Here is a quote:
McEwan has an abiding faith that novels are the best place to examine such ethical dilemmas, though he has little time for conventional science fiction. “There could be an opening of a mental space for novelists to explore this future, not in terms of travelling at 10 times the speed of light in anti-gravity boots, but in actually looking at the human dilemmas of being close up to something that you know to be artificial but which thinks like you. If a machine seems like a human or you can’t tell the difference, then you’d jolly well better start thinking about whether it has responsibilities and rights and all the rest.”
I guess even at The Guardian (which actually does a pretty good job of covering genre fiction otherwise) you could hear the groans from science fiction folks, as they wonder how McEwan has managed to miss that science fiction has done all that and asked precisely those questions and has done it for decades. And indeed, D. Franklin asks exactly that question in this excellent Twitter thread, which is also full of suggestions for books and movies (There are responses like, “But surely he has seen 2001 or Blade Runner or Humans or Avengers: Age of Ultron or Ex Machina or Star Trek: The Next Generation?”) to fill Ian McEwan’s and Tim Adams’ knowledge gap. And finally, someone also asks, “But surely he has read at least Frankenstein?”
Well, apparently McEwan has read Frankenstein, he just didn’t get it, at any rate if this quote from the interview is any indication:
In this sense, you might say, he is coming at the AI question from the opposite angle to Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. “There the monster is a metaphor for science out of control, but it is ourselves out of control that I am interested in.”
Of course, it’s possible that McEwan was misquoted or his words taken out of context, as some folks in the comments at File 770 wonder. After all, we’ve seen again and again when writers normally known for literary fiction suddenly decide to write science fiction that even if the writer in question isn’t clueless about science fiction, a lot of mainstream critics are and reviews and interviews tend to reflect that. One example is Frank Schätzing‘s 2009 novel Limit, a science fiction novel (though marketed as a thriller) wherein a space elevator plays a role. Now Schätzing himself definitely isn’t clueless about science fiction, but every single mainstream review of the novel focussed so totally on the space elevator and what an awesome innovative idea it was that they completely forgot to mention what the novel actually was about (aside from a space elevator, obviously) or whether it was any good. Interviews were just as bad, because Schätzing found himself having to explain what a space elevator is and how it works over and over again and wasn’t even asked a single question about the rest of the novel.
So in short, it’s quite possible that interviewer Tim Adams quoted McEwan out of context, especially since The Guardian article is not a direct interview transcript, but rather a profile with quotes. However in the comments at File 770, John S. linked to two more articles about McEwan’s newest novel, which seem to confirm that he really is as clueless as he comes across.
The first of this is an article by Matt Reynolds in Wired, a source no one would accuse of being clueless about science fiction, which literally starts out with the sentence “Ian McEwan has no interest in science fiction.”
The second article, an interview conducted by Barry Didcock and published in the Scottish newspaper The Herald, is even more damning. Here is a quote:
“One of the reasons I’ve never been a fan of science fiction is that by setting a novel in the future it always has a vaguely predictive quality. The chances of it being right are minimal,” he says. “The other is the technological stuff. Although I’m fascinated by science in general, my toes curl when people are crossing the universe at a trillion times the speed of light because the empiricist in me is saying ‘Well if they’re exceeding the speed of light, then we have to have a whole new physics’.”
Oh dear, so McEwan is a mundane science fiction adherent, too, not that he has ever heard of the term. Not to mention that even if FTL breaks his suspension of disbelief, there are still plenty of science fiction novels for him to read without a whiff of FTL.
Let’s have another quote from The Herald interview:
He isn’t over-fond of other labels for it either, such as speculative fiction or alternative history. “I think it lies along the path of many of my earlier novels. I think of it as a literary novel.” But he does admit that besides allowing him to have Turing as a character, the alternate 1982 setting makes him “immune from any of the demands of the realistic novel, which I’ve been in flight from for these last few novels. I spent years writing novels which I patiently researched to get everything right and getting everything right is incredibly hard. You always get letters correcting you on this and that. Here, I’m beyond correction because everything is fake. It’s all smoke and mirrors.”
And here we have the classic, “I’m not writing science fiction or speculative fiction or alternate history [except that he totally is], I’m writing literary fiction.” Plus, he apparently opted to set his novel in an alternate 1982 with robots and a living Alan Turing, because he was too lazy to do his research, which is certainly something. Though I guess we should be grateful that McEwan didn’t opt to write about an alternate reality where the Nazis won WWII, cause that has totally never been done before.
Now I really wish the endless literary vs. genre fiction debate would die already and I’m not a fan of the blanket dismissals of literary fiction you find in some corners of SFF either. I’ve repeatedly defended Margaret Atwood, who still gets dinged for something dismissive about science fiction (it’s about giant squids) she said in an interview more than ten years ago. Never mind that we still don’t know the full context of the “giant squid” remark and likely never will, unless the BBC releases the full radio interview during which said remark was made. And never mind that Margaret Atwood has repeatedly clarified what she meant and has actually outed herself as a fan of sorts (she read superhero comics and Weird Tales as a kid) since. Large parts of the SFF community still hate her for the “giant squid” remark and wouldn’t even nominate The Handmaid’s Tale TV series for a Hugo two years in a row (while nominating two episodes each of the execrable Good Place in 2018 and 2019), because the TV show which won every award imaginable in 2017/2018 isn’t good enough for the Hugos, cause some people hate the author of the novel the series is based upon.
Not to mention that there is a lot of very good SFF published outside the genre, e.g. Zone One and Underground Railroad (which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the Clarke Award) by Colson Whitehead, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (as well as Gentlemen of the Road and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which are at least genre-adjacent) by Michael Chabon, The Power by Naomi Alderman, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, The Road by Cormac McCarthy, Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James, Vox by Christina Dalcher, Red Clocks by Leni Zumas and yes, The Handmaid’s Tale as well as The Heart Goes Last and the MaddAdam trilogy by Margaret Atwood.
But whenever it seems that we can finally lay the old genre vs. literary fiction debate to rest for good, some white dude literary writer, usually of the critically acclaimed sort, comes along and writes the world’s most cliched science fiction novel, only that he of course would never lower himself to write SF, oh no. And based on the interviews and articles linked above, Machines Like Me does sound like the world’s most cliched science fiction novel. I mean, the robot models are named Adam and Eve. There is a love triangle involving a sexbot (actually, if those robots have any other purpose than sex, it’s not discernible from the articles). There is the question whether robots can distinguish between justice and mercy, a debate that Elijah Bailey and Daneel R. Olivaw already has in The Caves of Steel sixty-five years ago. And based on this excerpt from the Times Literary Supplement, the novel is just as bad as it sounds. The infodump in the second excerpt is particularly groan-worthy. Though at least we learn that the robots aren’t good only for sex, but also give cooking advice and vet potential dates for you.
Honestly, when I read about Machines Like Me, I kept thinking: This has to be an elaborate parody. Not even Ian McEwan could be so clueless. After all, he’s friends with Martin Amis, as every article unfailingly notes (well, they’re both the same kind of unpleasant white dude novelists). McEwan must have known Kingsley Amis or at least met him. And Kingsley Amis could have told him how very cliched his “not really SF” novel was.
But alas, it seems that McEwan is one hundred percent serious and truly has no idea how silly and cliched the plot of Machines Like Me sounds. So I’d like to close with this great 2011 article, also from The Guardian, by the late Iain M. Banks, which Gareth L. Powell mentioned on Twitter. Banks couldn’t possibly have known about Ian McEwan’s totally original, never done before “not science fiction” novel, though the hypothetical example of a clueless literary writer pitching the world’s most cliched mystery novel certainly sounds like he was taking aim at McEwan (though there are so many other examples).
So let’s have a quote from Iain M. Banks:
The point is that science fiction is a dialogue, a process. All writing is, in a sense; a writer will read something – perhaps something quite famous, even a classic – and think “But what if it had been done this way instead…?” And, standing on the shoulders of that particular giant, write something initially similar but developmentally different, so that the field evolves and further twists and turns are added to how stories are told as well as to the expectations and the knowledge of pre-existing literary patterns readers bring to those stories. Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what’s been done, what’s been superseded, what’s so much part of the furniture it’s practically part of the fabric now, what’s become no more than a joke… and so on. It’s just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research. In a literature so concerned with social as well as technical innovation, with the effects of change – incremental as well as abrupt – on individual humans and humanity as whole, this is a grievous, fundamentally hubristic mistake to commit.
And here is the moneyshot:
In the end, writing about what you know – that hoary and potentially limiting, even stultifying piece of advice – might be best seen as applying to the type of story you’re thinking of writing rather than to the details of what happens within it and perhaps, with that in mind, a better precept might be to write about what you love, rather than what you have a degree of contempt for but will deign to lower yourself to, just to show the rest of us how it’s done.
This last bit of advice applies not just to literary writers dabbling in SFF, by the way, but indeed to all writers, including indie writers who write romance, because they think it’s easy money, though they have no real knowledge of and respect for the genre and would rather write something else.
So write what you love. And have some knowledge of the genre you’re planning to write.
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April 12, 2019
Star Trek Discovery jerks the old tear ducts again in the aptly named “Such Sweet Sorrow”
Welcome back to our regularly scheduled Star Trek Discovery episode by episode review. Yesterday’s episode “Such Sweet Sorrow” was the penultimate episode of the second season and I for one am pretty glad that season 2 will soon be over, probably because I was ill for at least half the season and doing these reviews became unexpectedly exhausting. For my take on previous episodes, go here.
Warning: Spoilers under the cut!
When we last saw the Discovery, she was surrounded by several Section 31 ships under the command of Leland, who – unbeknowst to everybody except the Discovery crew – is really an animated corpse under the control of the rogue AI Control (that thing really needs a better name), which wants to exterminate all sentient life in the universe, because that’s what rogue AIs in science fiction movies do. No really, it just occurred to me that we have never been given a solid reason for why Control wants to eliminate all sentient life in the universe. It might simply have watched too many Terminator movies for all we know.
Anyway, Control has control of Section 31 and wants to eliminate all sentient life in the universe. And the one thing it needs to do that is the data from the infodump sphere that is currently stored inside the Discovery‘s computer. Section 31 and Control cannot be allowed to get access to the data, which inconveniently cannot be deleted either, so Michael makes the hard choice(TM) and suggests self-destructing the Discovery lest it falls into Control’s hands. Cue cliffhanger.
As cliffhangers go, last episode’s was the sort of cliffhanager that should be ultra-dramatic, but really isn’t because we know they won’t go through with the threatened solution anyway. After all, this is Star Trek, not Raumpatrouille Orion. And Starfleet won’t just hand you a brand-new ship if you destroy your old one (unless you’re Lorca, I guess) like Commander MacLane was handed a new Orion every time he managed to destroy the old one (he’s up to Orion 7 by the end of the series).
And so the cliffhanger is resolved almost too easily, when the data from the infodump sphere decides that it no more likes being blown up than deleted and simply takes control of Discovery‘s computer to countermand the self-destruct command. It also raises the Discovery‘s shields so the Enterprise, which is on its way to rescue the Discovery crew, ca’t blow up the ship either. And that, folks, is why you don’t download data from strange floting infodump spheres that almost kill Saru, too, onto your ship’s computer.
So Michael comes up with a new harebrained scheme (sorry, but that’s what it is) to keep Control from accessing the sphere data, namely send the Discovery into the far future where Control cannot access the data. And as usual with Michael’s harebrained schemes, everybody just goes along with it. Honestly, much as I like Michael Burnham and love Sonequa Martin-Green’s stellar performance, I’m beginning to believe that this woman should be nowhere near the bridge of the Starfleet vessel.
The only way to send the Discovery into the future is by rigging up a time travel device from a second Red Angel suit (the original is lost along with Michael’s mother) and the time crystal Pike borrowed from the Klingons last episode at the cost of making the future seen in “The Menagerie” a reality. In order to achieve this, Tilly calls in her alien friend, technological prodigy and and bonafide queen Po, a character who first appeared in the Short Treks episode “Runaway”. Po does manage to rig up the time travel device, but it is only good for a one way trip into the future. So whoever volunteers to travel into the far future cannot come back. And because Michael is just as prone to self-sacrifice and martyrdom as Pike (and Spock for that matter), she of course volunteers to take the Discovery into the future, even though she knows she will not be able to return.
And that’s more or less the plot of “Such Sweet Sorrow”. For the rest of the episode is taken up by Michael exchanging tearful farewells with pretty much the entire main supporting cast. These farewell scenes are wonderfully played and full of great character moments, but nonetheless this whole episode is pretty much all character and nigh zero plot. The only reason Discovery can pull off something like this is because of its stellar cast, who wring all the emotional impact they can from these farewell scenes. Even Sarek and Amanda show up for a farewell scene (oh, so now they suddenly care), though their presence makes no real sense, considering the Discovery and Enterprise are in the middle of a fucking space battle.
In the end, it turns out that the tearful good-byes aren’t quite so final, because several members of the Discovery crew decide that they cannot just let Michael go off on her own into the unknown and so declare that they will go with her.
Spock, of course, insists on accompanying his sister, because that’s just the sort of thing Spock does. Saru also decides to come along, because he harbours strong feelings for Michael and has for a very long time, though Michael apparently isn’t really aware of this and neither is much of the audience, even though it’s pretty obvious. The entire bridge crew – Detmer, Owosekun, Rhys, Bryce, Nilsson (Airiam’s replacement) and a random background alien whose name I don’t know – also decide to come along out of loyalty to Michael and Saru, though why Nilsson has that much loyalty for Michael we don’t know, considering she only showed up a few episodes ago. Tilly decides to come along to support her friend and besides time travel is cool. Stamets decides to come along as well, because he’s still suffering from heartache over his break-up with Culber (who does not come along, but rather beams over to the Enterprise, becuse dying once was enough for him, thank you very much). And besides, Stamets has never met a crazy scientific experiment or an opportunity to explore that he did not like. Jet Reno also decides to come along, because – well, I’m not entirely sure why, but because she’s a great character, she’s always welcome. Mirror Georgiou decides to come along because of her maternal feelings for Michael.
Meanwhile, Ash Tyler decides to stay behind to rebuild Section 31 (not that it’s worth it) and also because it is his and Michael’s fate to have to tearfully say good-bye to each other over and over again. Honestly, this is what? – the fourth or fifth time? Just ditch him for good, Michael, and hook up with Saru or Btyce or Rhys or Mirror Georgiou or whoever. Still, Michael and Ash tearfully saying good-bye to each other once again gives Sonequa Martin-Green and Shazad Latif yet more opportunity to exchange longing looks and smoldering glances. As Gavia Baker-Whitelaw says in her review, “Ash is a cross between Mr. Darcy, a Cold War spy, and a hair model” and “someone needs to cast Latif in a Regency romance”. BBC, are you listening?
Captain Pike also decides not to come along, because his place is on the Enterprise and besides, he’s seen the future and he knows it’s not this. At this point, I was yelling at the screen, “Oh come on, Pike. You don’t have to listen to what Voq and L’Rell’s annoying kid said and no one cares if you wipe ‘The Menagerie’ from Star Trek history, because it wasn’t that good an episode anyway.” Regarding Pike, Ryan Britt said something very fitting about him in this article at Tor.com recently:
Last year, Captain Pike didn’t have a personality. Before Star Trek: Discovery’s second season, Christopher Pike was less of a character and more of an answer to a trivia question.
This observation is absolutely correct, because before Discovery nobody cared about Christopher Pike. He was just a bland, vaguely handsome white dude who was in two and a half episodes of Star Trek more than fifty years ago and who happened to be the captain of the Enterprise before Kirk took over. Discovery, however, has given Pike a personality and made him a likeable character who’s rapidly moving up my personal ranking of Star Trek captains. And it’s because Discovery made us care about Pike that his ultimate fate is so unfair. Especially since it’s not as if Star Trek has never retconned details and plot points about the original series, so why is “The Menagerie” so fucking sacrosanct?
And while we’re on the subject of Pike, can I just say how great the Enterprise bridge looks? It’s the perfect fusion of the classic 1960s Enterprise look, updated for the 21st century, and Discovery‘s “darker than thou” aesthetics. Rebecca Romijn once more channels Majel Barrett as Number One, who still doesn’t have an actual name. Apparently, the red-haired female ensign from “The Cage” and “The Menagerie” was also seen in the background, though no other member of Pike’s crew from “The Cage” was seen. Though honestly, does anybody remember any member of Pike’s crew other than Spock or Number One? In fact, I only remember the red-haired ensign, because she was the only member of Pike’s crew who wasn’t an older white dude. Nonetheless, now that they have a beautiful Enterprise bridge set and fine actors playing Pike, Spock and Number One, will we get a Pike’s Enterprise series eventually? I certainly wouldn’t mind seeing more of Anson Mount and Rebecca Romijn as Pike and Number One respectively and Ethan Peck has proven himself to be remarkably good as the younger Spock.
The decision of several crewmembers to accompany Michael leads to a whole new round of tearful farewells (while Section 31 and Control considerately decide to halt the space battle to give them time – no, not really, but those tearful good-byes certainly took a lot of time in what should be an urgent situation), as the various crewmembers record good-bye messages to their various loved ones. And so Stamets and Saru send messages to their respective siblings, Tilly to her mother, Owosekun to her family and Detmer to… well, it’s not entirely clear. Pike gives a beautiful good-bye speech to the Discovery crew before beaming back to the Enterprise. The ever snarky Mirror Georgiou can’t resist telling Pike that she’s from a different universe, whereupon Pike winks at her to tell her that he already knows. And talking of great Mirror Georgiou moments, there is also one earlier in the episode where Tilly’s alien space queen friend Po stares down Mirror Georgiou in a queen vs. empress standoff and coolly informs Georgiou that she made a law against snarky remarks on her planet.
Once more, “Such Sweet Sorrow” shows that it’s the cast and their performances that make Star Trek Discovery, because watching the various characters emoting and tearfully saying good-bye to each other is so affecting and entertaining that I barely noticed that this episode had almost no plot, until I started writing down my review. Not that having a character-focusses episode or two on occasion isn’t a very good thing, but I still wonder if the penultimate episode of the season is really the place for it. Though Camestros Felapton points out that the extended good-bye scenes almost feel as if the show itself is saying good-bye, though we know that Star Trek Discovery has been renewed for season 3.
Will the Discovery really go on a one-way trip into the far future? It would certainly be a great way to cut the show free from the Star Trek canon muddle it occasionally gets stuck in and give it a brand new start exploring a whole new era of Star Trek. Of course, they will have to return Spock, since he is still needed in the 23rd century, and Mirror Georgiou is supposed to get her own Section 31 spin-off show, too. But everybody else could certainly jump into the far future with the Discovery without any effects on established Star Trek continuity. In fact, this would also explain why Spock has never mentioned his adoptive sister Michael before. Okay, so Spock never mentions any members of his family, until they unexpectedly show up aboard the Enterprise.
So will Discovery make the bold jump into the future where no man or woman or alien has gone before? Or will it stay in the 23rd century? Next week, we’ll find out for sure.
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