Sable Aradia's Blog, page 21

Migration: Queer Sci-Fi – #1 Amazon Bestseller!

[image error]Delighted to report that it looks like I and about 120 other LGBTQ2+ science fiction authors get to add “#1 Amazon Bestseller” to our bragging rights! “Migration: Queer Sci-Fi 6th Annual Flash Fiction Contest” made number 1 in LGBT Science Fiction on its release day, July 24! My story, “A Weight off Their Shoulders,” is one of many other stories in this excellent collection. I’m very excited!

If you want to get a copy, you can get it at these links:

Amazon Kindle: https://amzn.to/30WLBZl

Amazon Paperback: https://amzn.to/30XUUbu

Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/migration-j-scott-coatsworth/1132393683;jsessionid=E570B49A0E713D6F306BCAB9F9760EB4.prodny_store01-atgap10

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/migration-19

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/46811776-migration

QueerRomance Ink:  https://www.queeromanceink.com/book/migration/

And don’t forget that if you’re one of my Patrons at the $25+ level, you get one of my print books, signed, for FREE every year.  This could be one of them!  My Patrons, my loyal crew, make it possible in part for me to continue to do this thing which I love, just like my readers – and I’m grateful.

You can join my Patreon at the link below:

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Book Review: The Withered King by Ricardo Victoria

The Withered King by Ricardo Victoria

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Like Final Fantasy meets Dungeons & Dragons! An action-packed sci-fantasy adventure that fans of the genre will love! Victoria delivers a lively story that feels like a video game, with plenty of heart and humour along the way. The characters are interesting, the action keeps you turning the pages, the concepts are fascinating! This is good stuff! The one-liners are killer too!

I enjoy LitRPG from time to time, and this is good work in the genre. This is the story of Fionn, a veteran of a magical war who basically had a Captain America experience; he had a long magical nap as a result of the last battle he was in, and when he woke up, the world had changed. He retired from saving the world and, indeed, from the world entirely. But signs of an old foe making a reappearance bring him out of retirement, and into a position of mentoring a new generation of magical warriors.

In this universe, adventure chooses you. Some people receive what they call the Gift when they come within a hair’s breadth of death. The Gift is raw magical power, and it manifests itself in different ways depending on the person receiving it. As far as I can tell, it potentially could do almost anything, but like in video games, each person ends up finding a handful of abilities easier than others to do and that shapes the Gift’s primary form for each person.

A bunch of young university students in a world where technology and magic blend (with a lot more “pseudo” than “science,” so not a book for hard sci-fi fans) end up in the path of this growing threat. It’s Fionn’s task to prepare them for the trials ahead, because he can’t face them alone.

They must also learn to harness the powers of the Tempest Blades; twelve magical swords imbued with a soul, each with its own history and unique origin story, that were created in ancient history to fight great evil.

Fionn doesn’t want to do it, because he’s failed at teaching before, and because he’s lost people he cares about to overwhelming forces. I think I’m a lot more sympathetic to his reluctance and his PTSD than most of the characters in the book (probably because I have relatable experiences, though of course mine didn’t involve slinging raw magical force at people.) The younger members of the cast try to convince him that he can succeed where he has previously failed. Fionn has a bit of a martyr complex, and he also has to get over this before they can join forces to beat the baddie.

Each of the characters is sympathetic, flawed and interesting, and each has their own character arc that is fun to follow. I don’t want to give you any spoilers (any more than I have) so I won’t get into the details. I will say that I came to care about the characters and their fates very much, and I was even a bit teary at the end.

I also love the world. This is not your standard fantasy setting. There is an internet, television, radio, police, detectives, reporters. The inhabitants of this universe often use a combination of magic and tech to accomplish things that our technology does in our own universe, and things we can’t besides. The society and cultures within it are clearly shaped by this magi-tech, just as ours is shaped by the technology we use. I want to emphasize this because when those elements first appeared, they surprised me. I was distinctly reminded of the universe of Final Fantasy in its feel, though this is not Final Fantasy.

I gave it four stars rather than five, however, because of some of the flaws that are inherent in LitRPG. You have to understand at the outset that Victoria’s world is like that of an RPG or a video game. Time distortion is common – characters have opportunities to have dialogues and monologues while the bad guys seem to wait to attack. A bunch of people fall from a height all at once, yet there’s time to get to them all before they reach the ground. Sometimes in combat, there are what I would describe as “video game finishing moves” that seem to make little sense from the perspective of a person who knows a little bit (just a little bit, no expert here) about martial arts and swordfighting. Magic, of course, violates the laws of physics at whim, but if you’re into “magical realism,” this is not the book for you.

However, I believe that what makes a good book is a simple list of requirements. The story should draw you in and get you invested in its outcome. It should keep you turning the pages. It should not fail to suspend your disbelief enough to distract you from the story. Above all, when you finish, the conclusion should be satisfying but still leave you wanting more. Victoria manages all of this with flying colours. It’s an outstanding first novel in the sword and sorcery genre.

Victoria’s lively sense of humour is also a glowing asset. Just when you’re feeling at your lowest for the characters, Victoria will surprise you with a good laugh. This book is not flippant – the characters experience great hardship and suffering – but its tone is light, encouraging, and heroic. It’s a breath of fresh air in a literary market that’s currently enamoured of “grim-for-grim’s-sake.” I am invested in this universe and definitely look forward to any future books in the Tempest Blades series!

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Book Review: Cauldron of Ghosts by David Weber & Eric Flint

Cauldron of Ghosts by David Weber

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I really enjoy this series. When Weber and Eric Flint get together, they are better than the sum of their parts. Victor Cachat and Anton Zilwicki are best appreciated as a superspy buddy comedy, something like Lethal Weapon with spies in space.

This book is no exception, and here, facing off against the shadowy Mesan Alignment, is where the real action of the later Honorverse books is taking place. This book finds our heroes on the ground when the Alignment activates Houdini, their plan to disappear, and they learn just how bad these bad guys really are.

I like that Weber and Flint try to humanize these bad guys, though. The Space Nazis have families, and they really believe they’re doing the “right thing.” They are the heroes of their own story, and it’s a good object lesson. Fascists look just like everybody else. They go to church and the PTA. They can be really nice to the people they consider to be full humans; they just disregard the humanity of anybody that doesn’t fit their definition of that, whether it’s about melanin content, like on our world, or whether it’s about the “right” combination of designer genes, like in this book.

It’s an excellent illustration of Nazi double-think. Detweiler and the rest of the Alignment really believe themselves to be superior humans, because they have chosen the combination of genetic modifications that they’ve imposed on the very genetic slaves they’ve abused over the centuries. In other words, there’s no real difference between the “masters” and the “slaves”; a truth every Nazi fears in their heart of hearts.

I have one complaint, and that is that Weber and Flint spend more time telling us that Cachat and Zilwicki are superspies than they do showing us. They can be forgiven, though, because they showed us enough of that in the last two books and related stories. The real hero of this novel is Thandi Palane, and she is amazing!

Also, it was nice to get a better feel for how the Beowulfian Biological Survey Corps (not a survey corps; more like Special Forces Marines) actually work.

An excellent addition to one of my favourite series.

I’ve started my True Chronological Reading of the Last 10 Honorverse Books, as I said I would in the last couple of Honorverse reviews I did. You can check it out at the link above!

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Book Review: Dexter by Design by Jeff Lindsay

Dexter by Design by Jeff Lindsay

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Still struggling through with my headache, so not much to do but read. And I wasn’t up to reading anything challenging, so it was a perfect time to carry through with the next Dexter: An Omnibus novel, my guilty pleasure. For those unaware, Dexter is a psychopathic serial killer who hunts and kills only other serial killers, the ones who slip through the cracks of the justice system. And he’s in a unique position to find them, since he is a forensic pathologist with a specialty in blood spatter who works for the Miami police department.

I liked this book considerably better than the last one, Dexter in the Dark. Nobody dabbled in supernatural weirdness in this one (whether that was a case of Dexter’s crazy in an unreliable narrator technique, or not). Just a sick bastard who likes creating screwed up art with the bodies of tourists, and a real ironic sense of critiquing society that appeals to be my funny bone, even as I’m disgusted by it.

And that’s the key to the whole story, actually. We start out with Dexter’s “Dark Passenger,” his inner serial killer, being strangely silent when normally, the insight it offers him is part of how he catches the bad guys so well. Silent, but mildly amused.

I was immediately annoyed. The Dark Passenger is part of what makes Dexter so awesome, and we’ve been without his company for one whole book already, and now you’re doing it to us again? Lindsay, what’s the deal, here? I realize that it’s important to constantly up the stakes, but you’re sucking all the juice out of the food! Stories where the hero (anti-hero?) loses his superpowers are fun and good for character growth, but you only do one at a time. Eventually we want to see them get their powers back.

But… Lindsay fooled me, and apparently, he fooled a lot of other reviewers too. Because that’s the thing: this isn’t what it looks like. And because it isn’t, Dexter runs into a problem that’s entirely of his own making. One should never take responsibility for the actions of others (nobody ever makes anyone hit them or be cruel to them or try to kill themselves, no matter what abusive people say) but the fact is, Dexter makes a crucial mistake, because he doesn’t think things through, and the problem would never have arisen if he hadn’t. And that’s great! “Hoisted on your own petard” is always an excellent plot! And strangely, when we are talking about a serial killer, it’s a moral mistake, and that’s even better!

Much of what I’ve seen in other reviews are perfectly legit critiques, however. In places, the coincidences stretch credibility to the breaking point. I don’t think it’s as bad as some readers do, because I am aware, as others might not be, how easily the human mind sees what it wants to see. If it sees something out of context, it will self-edit to make things fit better in the context they’re expecting. So it really is easier for someone to hide in plain sight, like Dexter is doing, than people seem to think it would be. Still, there’s enough of those unlikely coincidences going on that even I, who wants to cooperate, starts to wonder.

If I could, I would give this book four and a half stars because of that. I would rate it lower, except that I really feel that “hoisted on your own petard” almost completely makes up for it.

My other Dexter reviews:

Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Dearly Devoted Dexter

Dexter in the Dark

View all my reviews

Book Review: Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay

Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

So I’ve been miserably ill with a dislocated neck this past week. It’s been causing the kind of constant and persistent headache that makes it impossible to do anything useful. I can’t write, I can’t edit, and I sure as hell don’t want to be on social media, because I’m crabby and bitchy and I can’t concentrate, which is an excellent way to get into a flame war, as we used to call it on Yahoogroups back in the Late Cretaceous Social Media Era.

It seemed a good time to catch up on some reading. But naturally, I wasn’t even up to reading anything particularly challenging.

Which makes it a perfect time for Dexter.

I love Dexter. He’s a guilty pleasure, like eating pre-made cookie dough out of the package without cooking it into cookies. A psychopathic serial killer with a wacky sense of humour, who only kills other serial killers, despite the fact that he’s exactly as twisted as they are, is a great hook. Better yet, for those unfamiliar with the series or the TV show that was based on it, Dexter is a forensic pathologist in Miami who specializes in blood spatter. It’s the perfect setup for a thriller, especially since his foster-sister is a Sergeant with the Force, and where he can’t go in investigation, she can.

Dexter follows what he calls The Code of Harry. Harry was his foster father (and Deborah’s father.) He kills the monsters who slip through the cracks. He must be 100% convinced of their guilt before he commits the murder. Deborah, as of the last book, now knows this about her brother, so there is some tension: will she turn him in? She makes catching people like him her life’s work.

But the fact that this was understood and sanctioned by Harry gives her pause. He was their moral compass. If he thought this was okay…

Dexter never disappoints, but one of the conceits of these novels is Dexter’s belief in what he calls his “Dark Passenger.” This is the urge to be violent and to kill, and while he accepts responsibility for it, in a way he also views it as something outside of himself. He views his life as a masquerade to hide the deeds of the Dark Passenger, which he, like other homicidal psychopaths in the past, lives for.

This novel stretches the limits of this hypothesis, however. First of all, in the last few books, Dexter has found himself a wife (who was horribly abused by her previous husband and therefore, not much interested in sex as a rule) and her two kids (who are psychopaths like Dexter, purportedly because of the trauma inflicted by their father.)

When you know that Dexter was drawn to this family for this reason… okay, fair enough. He intends to instruct these kids, particularly Cody, who also seems to have a Dark Passenger he calls Shadow Guy (but not Astor, his older sister? But she’s still a sadistic psychopath? Not sure why… is this because men are more often serial killers than women?… but that might be a misleading statistic; certainly men are caught more than women are, but I’m not sure that isn’t a matter of expectation and unconscious sexism… anyway, I digress…) in the Harry Way, so they will turn their evil to “good.”

But this book also gets into some metaphysical stuff that I wasn’t looking for out of this series. The bad guys are a Moloch-worshiping cult, and they are presented as the creation and home of the original Dark Passenger. Dexter’s is terrified of them, so it bugs off and fails to provide the usual insights that it gives Dexter in his work. Which basically turns him into a bumbling idiot.

I am willing to allow that much of this is “unreliable narrator.” Dexter tells his story in the first person, and this could just be a symptom of his crazy. But there are a lot of things that stretch credulity in this regard. Maybe the point is for you to wonder, but I was enjoying Lindsay’s intimate understanding of how the psychopathic mind works, and I don’t think I appreciate this foray into toying with the idea of demonic possession. I’ve read books that did this already; they were called The Complete Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice, and they were good, but I liked the solid grounding of this universe in observable reality.

It’s still fun, though. It’s just not as fun as the other Dexter books I’ve already read, Darkly Dreaming Dexter and Dearly Devoted Dexter.

But, Dexter’s sarcastic humour in regards to the behaviour of people, the “cheerfully homicidal” Miami traffic, and Murphy’s Law, never fails to elicit a laugh.

Definitely worth a read if you like thrillers and whodunnits and you have my screwed up sense of humour, despite my complaints!

View all my reviews

Book Review: Fire & Blood by George R.R. Martin @GRRMSpeaking

Fire & Blood by George R.R. Martin

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Eager for all things Game of Thrones and A Song of Ice and Fire, I asked for this book for a Yuletide gift. My kids got it for me for Mother’s Day. They’re good kids (adult kids, now; older than I’d like to admit) and this was a worthy gift that I will treasure.

First of all, because it’s freakin’ good.

Second, because it’s beautifully made. The cover is beautiful and the illustrations are fantastic! A worthy keepsake that I would recommend for any Game of Thrones fan in your life.

This is Part 1 of Martin’s Silmarilion. It’s a history of the Targaryens from Aegon the Conqueror to the Dance of Dragons (which means we know there’s going to be a Part 2, because A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms aside, we haven’t even touched on the Blackfyre Rebellion yet!)

But wait! Don’t go! I know the Silmarilion is as dry as toast. It’s written that way because J.R.R. Tolkien was a Professor of Literature, and that’s what the histories he read sounded like (seriously; have you ever tried to read an early 20th century history textbook? I have. Snoresville.)

Martin is a modern writer, and reading this is like reading a popular history; something like The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire (which I highly recommend) or maybe Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Which means it’s interesting. While much of the action is described, not experienced, the players are clearly characters, and they are given characterization, their motives are speculated upon, and when it’s important, the things that they are “purported” to have said are quoted.

Ostensibly written by Grand Maester Gyldayn of the Citadel of Oldtown, this lovely book even invents contradictory sources for the Maester to draw upon, each coloured with its own bias. And even as the Grand Maester sneers at their biases, his own are clearly apparent. For instance, he automatically discounts the more lurid stories from “The Testimony of Mushroom,” who was a dwarf that served as Court Fool for many of the events in the Dance of Dragons (the event, not the book,) because they are clearly intended to show the seedier side of things — and that might be wise, since many such tales might have been exaggerated.)

But he also snorts contemptuously at the religious bent of the writings of the High Septon of the period, who wrote his account as a confessional from a prison cell, and any story of a woman fighting or using a sword except in the case of Targaryen queens (because he has absorbed the Doctrine of Exceptionalism – namely, that the Targaryens are just “different” and the usual rules “don’t apply to them”) — which clearly is not wise.

Martin makes extensive use of his masterful “unreliable narrator” skills, and you are left, as most students of history are, to examine the evidence and make your own decisions about what really transpired. It’s a point that often eludes people who don’t read history; what we think we know about historical events is based on a small percentage of what may actually have been written in the period, and is, at best, an educated guess. Which is why theories about history – especially in regards to cultures who left little writing – are constantly changing.

And that’s another thing: it feels real. I can smell the blood and the flames and the leather and the stone castle walls or earthen palisades or the snow or the bog or the desert.

Also, Martin continues to provide us with a veritable feast of complex, interesting, and loathsome or inspiring characters (often both at once,) while he continues to surprise us with “realistic” deaths changing everything that seemed predestined at the flip of a coin.

This is a breathtaking feat of worldbuilding, and as a writer, I can simply stand in mute admiration. As a reader and a fan, I ate it up wholesale. Really, don’t skip this one! I realize you’re waiting for the rest of the series — so am I. But this will definitely keep you busy in the meantime, and is well worth the read. HIGHLY recommended, and I’m sure I’ll read it again and again.

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Book Review: Shadow of Victory by David Weber

Shadow of Victory by David Weber

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is not about Honor Harrington. It’s not about Aivars Terekhov. It’s not even about Mike Henke or either of the series’ Zilwickis.

This book is about Sinead Terekhov. It’s about Grezegorz Zielinski and Tomasz Szponder. It’s about Adam Siml and Zdenek Vilusinsky. It’s about Mackenzie and Indy Graham. It’s about the Allenby family. And above all, it’s about agent provocateur Damien Harahap, a.k.a. “Firebrand.”

Firebrand, you know, if you’ve been reading the Honorverse. Sinead you’ve met briefly, because she is Captain Terekhov’s wife. The rest are new, and with the series being so deep in, it’s confusing people, I think.

So who are all these people? They are folks who have been hurt by tyrannical Verge planet governments whose regimes have been propped up by the Solarian League’s Frontier Security. They want to overthrow those regimes, but know they also have to fight Frontier Security in order to do it. And they are the ones approached by Firebrand on behalf of the Mesan Alignment’s shadowy false flag operation to pretend to offer that support… from Manticore.

There’s only one problem. Firebrand actually sympathizes with the movements he’s been “pretending” to assist. And Mike Henke – and now, Aivars Terekhov – intend to deliver on the promises that someone else has been making on Manticore’s behalf.

On its own, this would be a fantastic space opera book. I chewed it up in about three days, and it’s a big, BIG book.

This late in the series, it’s not what people expected. It goes back in time and seems to cover ground that’s already been covered (and it some places, it does do that.) And yet, it’s absolutely necessary to get the whole picture of the story that Weber is trying to tell in this vast, epic conspiracy.

By this time, I had given up the initial expectations that soured me towards The Shadow of Saganami when I first read it, because I think I had finally absorbed what it was that Weber was trying to do. As a result, I thought this book was excellent.

The loss of a star is simply because it’s so complex that it becomes difficult to keep track of which characters are which if you’re not paying close attention, especially with the plethora of unfamiliar Polish names (I have Polish ancestors, but I am Canadian, and I had to make a list.)

Definite plus: all of these tyrannical governments were tyrannies in different ways. No cookie-cutter regimes here, as would have been all too easy to do, especially with the similar cultural milieus. I can only imagine the brain-wracking worldbuilding that would have required!

I’m also a bit staggered by the enormity of the timeline Weber would have had to shuffle! Keeping track would have been a nightmare! As a result, it suffers occasionally from pacing problems, but nothing that I think is a deal-breaker.

A definite must for fans of the series, and if you’re up for a chewy space saga that’s as complex as A Song of Ice and Fire, well worth it for the discerning space opera fan as well.

I’m doing a True Chronological Reading of the Last 10 Honorverse Books, as I said I would in the last couple of Honorverse reviews I did. You can check it out at the link above!

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Book Review: Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey

Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

No one would ever publish this book, were it written today. It’s full of purple prose and repetition, heaving bosoms and moustache-twirling bad guys, and it’s considered a foundational book of the Western genre, and established maybe 75% of the tropes, but despite that, it’s still more of a romance or a gothic chamber mystery than a Western as we would understand the genre.

Which says more to me about the failings of the modern publishing industry than it does about this book. You want to talk about “formulaic writing?” Be a writer and go to a critique group. “I counted 17 adverbs in this chapter, that’s 16 too many.” “You didn’t start in media res. No one wants to waste time reading your carefully-established character backstory upon which all their decisions as people hinge.” “What? You used a dialogue tag other than ‘said’? How dare you try to be creative! Minus 150 points to Ravenclaw! And why did you use a dialogue tag at all? It would be better if the dialogue were relayed without any emotion or context and the reader had to guess who was speaking.”

This book would fail absolutely every single one of these tests, except for the in media res part. A modern publisher would probably burn it.

Except that it’s been republished about a million times, and is considered a classic, because it works.

That’s it. It just does, never mind what arbitrary test you might want to put against it (which it would fail.)

There are two interweaving storylines, and you’d be hard pressed to say who the “protagonist” is. Clearly we’re meant to follow Lassiter, the archetypical black-clad lone gunman, but there are three other major characters and you could follow any one of them and enjoy the story, much in the same way that Patrick O’Brian might have been writing the story of Jack Aubrey, or the story of Stephen Maturin. We spend more time in Jane’s POV than anyone else’s.

The story is bound together by two factors: the protagonists’ relationship with the antagonists, and their relationship with the landscape; which, like in any good Western, is as much a character as any person in the book.

I’d urge the modern reader to look past the typical melodramatic early 20th century pulp novel language. If you do, you can see the storyline is complex, the characters are deep and complicated (despite some built-in early 20th century assumptions, but they’re not the ones you would expect,) and all of them have dynamic development arcs, which is not something “pulp fiction” has a reputation for.

Thoroughly enjoyed this book, despite its warts, and I expect I’ll come back to it again.

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Book Review: Jem: The Making of a Utopia by Frederik Pohl

Jem by Frederik Pohl

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Read for the Science Fiction Masterworks Book Club.

This book was absorbing, interesting, and kept me picking it up to see what would happen next. It was also joyless, cynical, and depressing in a way that makes A Song of Ice and Fire seem hopeful and cheery. The most sympathetic character is an alien with a natural hydrogen balloon making up most of his body. So don’t read it if, for you, a story is something happening to someone you care about, because you will be deeply disappointed.

On the other hand, this book is a scathing criticism of the Cold War and Colonialism. It is sometimes said that science fiction allows us to take issues that are difficult or controversial in the real world, and examine them with some distance. The distance here, despite the weird alien species that feature as metaphors for Indigenous peoples under Colonialism, is as thin as rice paper.

Maybe that was intentional. In 1979, when the book was published, the United States was still blithely full of its own self-importance, believing itself the pinnacle of freedom and righteousness, while in the meantime, American Colonialism was well underway and the Cold War seemed to be eternal. Perhaps Pohl was delivering a solid bitch slap to American exceptionalism.

The plot: the world has divided itself up into three power blocs that are rich in one resource and poor in all others. There is the Food Bloc, the Fuel Bloc, and the People Bloc. I failed to understand the People Bloc or how its “resources” worked; Pohl made it sound like this was the bloc with the most non-white people in it, and that their main resource was contributing labour for the other blocs. I think it was intended as a foil to represent the Communist Bloc as it existed in the 70s, with all his American prejudices showing, even as he criticized America’s attitude of “war for war’s sake, because patriotism.”

But anyway, the blocs all compete with each other for political supremacy, since they can’t war with each other for risk of blowing up the world in a massive nuclear holocaust. Then they discover a distant world that might be colonizable, and it features three sentient species already on it.

A new Space Race begins to be the first to get to the planet, and exploit its resources, before the other blocs can do so. A rather amusing parallel to the effects of malaria on the Europeans is explored by severe allergic reactions to the native flora of the new planet, although of course the Commun- er, I mean, the People Bloc, is the first to encounter this issue and suffer the results of it, which sets back their population, and thus, available resources, for the entire length of the colonization process.

Each bloc either befriends, or enslaves, although all exploit, one of the sentient races already present on the planet eventually known as Jem. Eventually the competition degenerates into a proxy war. In the meantime, back on Earth, knowing that the human race now exists somewhere else as well as our little rock, the leaders of the blocs feel free to get more violent with one another, as they, too, compete for the resources of “pristine, untouched” Jem. It’s England, France and Spain fighting each other for control of their colonies… or America, China and the Soviet Union competing for control of the other “Capitalist” or “Communist” countries… or America, China and the Middle East competing for control of Earth’s dwindling resources…

The end result is just about as grim as you might expect. Although the humans left on Jem are quite happy in their “utopia” (the subtitle of the book is “The Making of a Utopia”) though the much-reduced indigenous sentients of Jem are perhaps not as happy (please note: this is intended as ironic understatement). Which brings up another point: is “utopia” only possible through the subjugation and exploitation of other groups? I would personally like to believe that we can eventually grow beyond that.

I read this book in a fevered page-turning frenzy over a couple of days, but it was a bit like watching, horrified, as a ten-car pileup starts on the highway. You keep reading because you’re unable to turn away.

A good book to make you think, but you don’t know what to think afterwards, or feel. I imagine the aftermath of drunken one-night stand might feel like this, especially if the sex were amazing but you never would have had sex with that person sober. I felt like this the first (and last) time I got really, really drunk. I had an amazing time, and I remember singing and laughing and cheering, surrounded by friends… but I lost a good part of the night after a point, and I woke up feeling like someone had been beating my head with a brick, exhausted and sicker than a dog. I never drank like that again. And I’ll approach Pohl with more caution in the future.

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A True Chronological Reading of the Last 10 Honorverse Books, Part 5 @DavidWeberBooks

I’m re-reading the last ten books in the Honorverse space opera series by David Weber in true chronological order. That is to say, I am reading it all as if it were one big story, not several separate books, in the order in which the events described took place (as much as possible.) I will even be skipping around between books as necessary. If you’d like some insight into why I’m doing that, and what I recommend you read before we begin (if you’d like to follow along,) please see my other posts in this series:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Prerequisites: War of Honor, Crown of Slaves

Books Required for this Post: The Shadow of Saganami, At All Costs

Background:

The Kingdom of Manticore is once again at war with the Republic of Haven. Unbeknownst to the characters, but knownst to us, Havenite Secretary of State Arnold Giancola has altered diplomatic correspondence between the two star-nations to raise tensions between them in order to increase his own power base by undermining President Eloise Pritchart and her administration. He was aided and abetted by a contact within the elected right wing High Ridge government in Manticore who was manipulating events for her own reasons, encouraged by a third party. Neither nation really wants to fight, but they feel they have no choice.

In the meantime, systems in the Verge known as the Talbott Cluster, have petitioned for annexation by the Star Kingdom of Manticore, who recently discovered a major wormhole nexus, the Lynx Terminus, in their region of space– again as a consequence of the events on Torch. This is in part motivated by the lurking threat of the Office of Frontier Security (Solarian League,) which has a habit of gobbling up nearby systems into their vast empire and then exploiting them, always under the pretext of having been invited in to “help maintain order.” The Talbott Cluster systems believe that Manticore will be able to protect them from Frontier Security.

Reading Order:

I remind you that my idea of the sequence of events at this point is probably, in part, inaccurate. I am making my best guess. If someone is out there who’s better at crunching the numbers than I am, and you can tell that I am in error, please let me know and I’ll make the changes.

I’m basing my estimation of the timeline on a few things:

On the Honorverse Fandom Wiki, a chronological reading order of the books is posted. It tells me that:

Torch of Freedom begins November 1919 PD;
The Shadow of Saganami begins June 1920 PD;
At All Costs begins July 1920 PD;
The Shadow of Saganami ends July 1921 PD;
At All Costs ends August 1921 PD;
Storm from the Shadows begins December 1920 PD.


On the same wiki, a loose chronology of events is posted. It gives me a series of significant events (though often without a lot of information) and at least the rough date at which they occur. Some of these events are retold in different points of view between books. Even when they aren’t, they are often referred to in other books, and have effects which reverberate through all books. They can be used as checkpoints to line up dates, and as cross-references.
All other times are estimates based roughly on the speed of ship travel or on how long I think it would take to accomplish specific tasks. These are often not mentioned specifically, and therefore represent my best guess.

Last Episode:

Honor is assigned to command the Unconquered, the only ship in the Manticoran Navy that allows a flag officer to directly command her. In the meantime, she, her lover Hamish Alexander, Earl White Haven, and Hamish’s wife Emily, conspire to keep their relationship a secret, especially after the political fallout that came from the rumours of a relationship that didn’t exist yet under the High Ridge administration.
Havenite Secretary of State Arnold Giancola plots with Colonel Jean-Claude Nesbitt to make it look like someone was trying to frame him for altering the diplomatic correspondence with Manticore, instead of trying to hide that he’d done it at all. They conspire to frame Yves Grosclaude, Giancola’s co-conspirator, for the frame job.
The crew of the Hexapuma begin to work up for their deployment.
Agnes Nordbrandt is starting a terrorist movement on the Talbott Cluster planet Kornati in opposition to the annexation. She meets with a man named Firebrand, who says he is coordinating movement to oppose the annexation on many planets in the Cluster, and he promises her modern Solarian weapons.
The Havenites do an intel-gathering raid on the Zanzibar system. The Zanzibaran leaders decide to ignore Manticoran Navy advice and treat it like a serious attack. Their secret system defenses are revealed to the enemy as a result.

July (?) 1920 PD – At All Costs, Chapter 9 – The Battle of Zanzibar results in the defeat of the Havenite invasion force, but reveals most of the system’s defensive capabilities.

July (?) 1920 PD –The Shadow of Saganami, Chapter 8 – The crew of the Hexapuma realizes they are going to have to deploy shorthanded. They decide to leave Abigail Hearns in place as tactical officer, despite the fact that she’s technically too junior to hold the position. Helen Zilwicki has an issue with her fellow snotty, Paul d’Arezzo, who is too good looking for his own good and who seems to have an air of superiority over his fellow Saganami graduates because he doesn’t talk to them much. They worry that they’ll have to deploy with yard dogs still working on their ship, and they worry as to whether or not Captain Terekhov’s PTSD is going to get the better of him. They make their wormhole transit and get underway to Talbott.

July 1920 PD – At All Costs, Chapter 10 – Eighth Fleet is formed. Honor invites her new flag officers, including old friends from previous books, like Alistair McKeon, Rafe Cardones and Andrea Jaruwalski, to discuss their mission. While they are designated as a “fleet,” that’s mostly to frighten Haven. They are more like a task force, and their job for the moment is to make offensive raiding strikes into Havenite systems and try to be in more places at once than they technically have the power to be in. However, they are, as Honor says, “something of a paper hexapuma at the moment.” They are intended to make Haven think that Manticore has more offensive capability than they actually do.

In the meantime, a persistent stomach upset convinces Honor to see her doctor. Hamish tries to convince his brother, the current Prime Minister, to get the Queen and President Pritchart of Haven talking again, because Manticore is screwed offensively, but the Queen is still angry about the altered diplomatic correspondence. And… at the end of the chapter, it turns out that there has been an error in Honor’s medical records from when she was believed to be dead on Hell. Her implant has failed, and she is pregnant. Dun dun DUUUUNNNNN!

To note: this last detail confirms that we are, indeed, in late July 1920 PD, for reasons which will become obvious later.

July 1920 PD – The Shadow of Saganami, Chapter 9 – Terekhov announces their assignment to Talbott to his squadron and stresses it’s more important than it seems in the face of the war with Haven because the future of the Star Kingdom may depend on it. The middies on their snotty cruise out of Saganami Island don’t buy it. The middies solidify their relationships. Helen Zilwicki shares what she can about what happened on Torch in Crown of Slaves (which is thin enough to be misleading.) After hearing that, and being aware of Talbott’s proximity to Mesa, the middies speculate their deployment might actually be more exciting than they thought.

July 1920 PD – At All Costs, Chapters 11, 12 & 13 – Honor tells her parents, then Hamish, then Emily that she is pregnant. They discuss strategies for how to deal with the fallout, in their careers and in the media. They determine to have the child tubed (placed in an artificial womb, an outpatient procedure) to keep the baby out of the path of war while Honor is actively deployed. They have the child tubed at the prestigious Briarwood Center under the care of Dr. Ilescue, who seems to have some kind of axe to grind against Honor. She declines to register the identity of the father for the time being.

July 1920 PD – The Shadow of Saganami, Chapter 10 – We are introduced to Stephen Westman of the planet Montana, who is launching an armed resistance movement to Manticoran Annexation of the Talbott Cluster. His first encounter with a Manticoran land surveyor is petty harassment only – they steal his stuff and set his party to marching back to civilization in their underwear. We are meant to like him. He is a rugged individualist who feels he has no choice but to launch a rebellion, but he clearly doesn’t want to bring physical harm to anyone if he doesn’t have to.

We are also introduced to Henri Krietzmann, Bernardus Van Dort, and Joachim Alquezar, leaders in the Talbott Cluster who are working towards a successful annexation. We learn that there is bad blood between Van Dort as former head of the Rembrandt Trade Union, which engaged in a ruthless economic policy in the Cluster in the past, primarily to keep Frontier Security out of the system, but this helped to increase economic disparity between the planets in the Cluster, and some have been poorly treated and exploited under the RTU. We also learn that Aleksandra Tonkovic of Kornati and Andrieaux Yvernau of New Tuscany are stalling the Constitutional Convention, in which the leaders of the Cluster suggest terms under which they will be annexed, by holding out for complete autonomy, which they aren’t going to get. Everyone else is ticked off about it, and the whole affair is threatened by their antics, which will open the door to Frontier Security.

July (?) to August (?) 1920 PD – The Shadow of Saganami, Chapter 11 – The Hexapuma arrives in Talbott. He and Admiral Khumalo meet. Everyone speculates about everyone else’s fitness for the job ahead of them. Khumalo tells Terekhov he basically has to be everywhere and doing everything at once; Terekhov agrees he will do his best.

July (?) to August (?) 1920 PD – At All Costs, Chapter 14 – Nesbitt sets up his trap. But Kevin Usher, Cachat’s former direct superior at StateSec, currently their Director of the Federal Investigative Agency, is already looking into it, and believes that Giancola is, indeed, guilty of doing just that. Grosclaude may possibly have also been on it, he thinks. He authorizes Special Senior Inspector Abrioux, who is better at computers and paper trails than he is, to conduct an illegal, off-the-books investigation to find out.

August (?) 1920 PD – The Shadow of Saganami, Chapter 12 – The senior officers of Terekhov’s squadron are introduced to Dame Estelle Matsuko, Baroness Medusa, the Queen’s Provisional Governor of Talbott, along with the rest of the major players in the Talbott leadership, including Samiha Lababibi, President of the Spindle System, a clear oligarch. The middies marvel at the wealth of her manor, while Lababibi tries to draw Terekhov into taking a side on the political issues dividing the Cluster. Most worry about the actions of the terrorists Nordbrandt and Westman, but Lababibi is dismissive. Baroness Medusa (another character we know from earlier in the series) tries to warn the leadership of the Cluster that Manticore will not screw around waiting for them to get their feces together forever, and may back out if it’s clear that civil opposition against the Annexation is strong.

Observations:

There’s a lot of balls in the air here, and it might be difficult to keep our eyes on them all. But ultimately, they will all come together, so it’s really not as many balls as it looks like. There are a lot of characters, though. That’s something I found rather challenging to keep track of when I was reading the books for the first time, and it’s only marginally less so in this chronological reading, simply because some of those names are starting to stick in my head.

Fortunately, there’s help. You can search any of these names at the Honorverse Fandom Wiki and get a refresher. (Be warned of possible spoilers, though!)

Mostly, these chapters are introducing us to the major players and the situations at hand. It’s enough to make a book in and of itself. I think this section makes it clearer than any other why it was that Weber had to split this into three separate, interlocking series.

Okay; the stage is now set, and we know what’s going on. We have been introduced to all the major characters and we know what their goals and motivations are. And like in any good space opera, we have personal complications to go with the bigger events.

I like the way Honor’s pregnancy is handled. I admit, I groaned a little at the old standby trope of the competent female soldier suddenly finding herself pregnant… but Weber took a different approach than I might have expected. He’s dispensed with the trope of “soldier exceptionally competent in combat but completely useless in real life.” Weber’s obviously spent some time around soldiers. In my experience, the risk-assessment and problem-solving skills that soldiers learn, under conditions designed to be as deliberately stressful as the military can possibly make them, tend to translate to the rest of their lives as well. Soldiers don’t waste time dithering about shit, as so many characters do in stories with similar plot elements. They develop a strategy, then a plan, and then they set about implementing it.

Honor and the Alexanders do just that, when confronted with this unexpected complication. There is reasonable technology available to deal with the problem of how to protect the fetus while the soldier carrying it is in combat, and it’s based on current research (we’ve already grown sheep in artificial wombs, and the long-term assessment of their overall health is going on even now.) And they deal with the personal problems created as directly as they can. This will, of course, be an ongoing subplot, and it does, of course, affect character development of all three involved parents (and again, Mr. Weber, stepfamilies like mine thank you everywhere for immediately and completely making Emily a full partner in parenthood, with little to no concern given to her genetic relationship.) Weber justly is often criticized for his awkward romance writing in earlier books, but there’s nothing awkward about this.

We’ll resume with Chapter 13 of The Shadow of Saganami and Chapter 15 of At All Costs in the next post.