Qualified Perceptions

This is apparently Book One of a trilogy, but it stands alone reasonably well. The story arc isn't a Hero's Journey mountain shape - it's more like a bunch of medium sized hills - and the book ends after one of the larger hills. So it's a pretty good stopping place, but obviously also there could be a lot more in the long haul. All that is to say, it won't annoy you by leaving you on a cliffhanger. I listened to this on audiobook, and I really enjoyed it. It's narrated by the author, and, unusually, he does Voices, rather than Standard Storyteller Narrative. Apparently Buehlman's original day job was a Professional Insulter at renfaires, so he has some actor chops too. Also, the audio production actually got people to set the songs to melody and someone to sing them properly, which is the first time I've heard that and it impressed me.

Yes, Laura, but what is the book about? says imaginary Andrea in my head. Fair question. The war wih the goblins is mostly over - the peace is barely holding, only because everyone is willing to look the other way when there's a one-off massacre. But now the giants have come over the mountains off in the hinterlands, and a thief gets assigned by his guild to go along with a warrior and a witch to see what's going on. The guild has ulterior motives, of course. So do the warrior and the witch. Nobody's fooling anyone along those lines. So the basic story, once the band gets together, is a traveling adventure story, with a lot of unpleasant mishaps. The genre would be grimdark, except that it's bloodspatteredly funny. Here's an excerpt as the thief invites himself along with the warrior:

"Are you going to Oustrim?" I asked the Spanth.
This was at the inn I had tracked her to, the Roan Horse, a handsome old wooden firetrap much loved by travelers keen to spare their purses. I was sitting in a chair by the Spanth's bed when I spoke, and it really wasn't a fair question, considering she was sleeping.
Quick as summer lightning, she caught me up by the heel and dangled me upside down out of the window I had opened. What she didn't know was that I hadn't spoken until I was ready to wake her [...]
[Skipping a page of digression into coinage from when he searched the room first. Not that it wasn't entertaining.]
"Are you bound for Oustrim?" I said again. "And where'd the bird go?"
"Shut up about the bird."
"Fine. What's your name, then?"
"You don't need to know it."
"All right. But are you going to Oustrim?"
"You're a Guild thief. You have training and magic. If I drop you, it won't hurt you, will it?"
"If I say no, will you think of a different way to hurt me?"
"Maybe."
"Then yes, it will hurt me very much. Please, brave knight, do not drop me on my melon."
She dropped me, but I don't hold that against her.
We were only on the third floor.

Anyway, I thought this was adorable (and the relationship between Kinch (the thief) and Galva (the Spanth warrior) keeps on pretty much in that vein). But also, having added this, I can use it to segue into the world-building. The story is thick with details. The Roan Horse, the name of the inn, has an extra kick of tragedy - horses were wiped out by a magical plague in the goblin wars, and the Spanth in particular, a country of cavalry riders, are shattered by the loss. There's a brief scene later in the book where the party crosses paths with a baroness who has one of the last horses, elderly and mostly ceremonial, and it made me mourn our lost beloved horses. The Guild training & magic is taught at Guild schools, which are costly. (Some are straw schools, and don't teach you very well, but are still costly). Most of the Guild is in debt from their student loans. Kinch, who is still badly in debt, has a Guild debtor's tattoo on one cheek. It's magic, so it can only be seen in firelight, and on any given night, the first person in an inn who claims it can hit him and get a free drink (paid for by the Guild). That's what the Guild is like; Kinch is going on this mission to clear his debt.

There's a lot more detail - little cultural bits from the countries the story goes through, weird spooky witches and wizards that borrow a lot from Buehlman's horror background. And a lot of bloody fights (and a terrifying kraken attack). It's a grimdark world, but the characters aren't ground down - they have hope, and grudging comradeship, and even love. Five stars.

Another one not solidly in the middle of a genre. Deeplight is sea-monster horror sliding sideways over into steampunk fantasy. I also really liked this (okay, I have a soft spot for sea monster horror since Lovecraft and Subnautica), though it does look for a long time like it's going to be one of those stories where if the protagonist had just not gotten up in the morning, things would have been better. (It is not, but we don't learn that until pretty late in the story.) So what is this one about? Hark is a mid-teenage urchin on a dead-god-haunted island. Like many fictional teenage urchins, Hark has a stronger braver badder recklesser friend, who drags him into trouble and is the impetus of most of the plot. Let's just say things go wrong, and then they go more wrong, and then they go on from there. A nice inclusion: the "sea-kissed" are divers who are deaf in one or both ears. Because divers (for bits of the dead gods) are one of the big sources of wealth and power, being sea-kissed is high-status in island society. Everyone with any social climbing skill knows at least some sign language.

The gods were as real as the coastlines and currents and as merciless as the winds and whirlpools. The Glass Cardinal throttled galleons with translucent tendrils. The Red Forlorn floated like a cloud of blood in the water. Kalmaddoth howled with a razor lattice instead of a mouth. Dolor lurched through the water, kicking with dozens of human legs. The Hidden Lady waited in the silent deeps, shrouded by her own snaking hair. Now and then, one would rise from the Undersea and appear in the pale light of day, devouring schooners, smashing ports to splinters, and etching their shapes into the nightmares of all. Some of them sang as they did so.

A few hours later, the pair of them were hiding on the hillside watching the dusk draw in. Jelt didn't get nerves when he was about night business. Hark did, though he knew better than to admit it. He dealt with it by telling himself a story. He watched himself as if he'd already done it, already survived, and was telling the tale of his adventure to an agog and adoring audience in a tavern afterward. It calmed him down and slowed his pulse a little. He was the hero, and everything was going to be all right. It already was all right. The things happening right now weren't real peril; they were just drama.

Charm is the madam of a very strange brothel, and the mistress of the Emperor. The Emperor dies and the rest of his family are psychotic sadists. Politics follows. The strangeness of the brothel is that Charm grows everyone in vats from bone-trees in the garden, and their personalities are psychically split-off portions of herself in kind of self-induced dissociative identity disorder. I think that about covers it. It's really gothic. Anyway - it was interesting enough that I kept reading it, but there was something of a shortage of sympathetic characters. Maybe just on average, because all the princelings are pretty seriously awful. Three stars?

These are set in the same Nine Worlds setting as the Stargazey Pie series I talked about last time, but are quite different. I adored the first book. The back-cover description is:

An impulsive word can start a war.
A timely word can stop one.
A simple act of friendship can change the course of history. Cliopher Mdang is the personal secretary of the Last Emperor of Astandalas, the Lord of Rising Stars, the Lord Magus of Zunidh, the Sun-on-Earth, the god.
He has spent more time with the Emperor of Astandalas than any other person.
He has never once touched his lord.
He has never called him by name.
He has never initiated a conversation. One day Cliopher invites the Sun-on-Earth home to the proverbially remote Vangavaye-ve for a holiday. The mere invitation could have seen Cliopher executed for blasphemy.
The acceptance upends the world.

So... I thought I knew what it was going to be about. And it was, for about the first third. Cliopher is the awesomely competent bureaucrat and Decent Guy. The Emperor is busy Emperoring, and Cliopher is working behind the scenes to get things passed like UBI and good public transportation. I kind of expected that it would be partly about teaching the Emperor to see the humanity "below" him (with Cliopher as the worst Manic Pixie Dream Girl ever) but it wasn't nearly that facile. The Emperor is not Mr. Darcy. He's more complex and more human already at the beginning, we just don't get to see it. But anyway, that's just the first part. There's a whole second arc about colonialism and "civilized" meaning "my culture not yours" and an amazing victory that Cliopher can really only get away with by virtue of having the Emperor on his team; simply being in the right would have been insufficient. And there's a third arc kind of mixed with the second arc about Cliopher's estrangement from his family, that... well, it's where all the angst and drama is, and I think there are a few too many go-rounds of 'his family doesn't understand' (for example, imagine your parents being disappointed that you were "only" a secretary, when you were the Secretary of State). The initial misunderstanding, sure. But to persist in the misunderstanding after some of the events of the book is... implausible. But after that last series, I really should have expected something to turn the angst up to 11.

The second book is more different, and too much detail would spoil the first book. But I will say, there's a detour into the one of the other Worlds, and they meet a lot of the Stargazey characters, so if you haven't read those, they will come out of nowhere. Hands of the Emperor stands on its own (though it was nice to have gotten a sense for what the fall of Astandalas meant beforehand), but Return of Fitzroy Angursell might want more backstory. I was kind of disappointed because I wanted Hands Of The Emperor Part Two and it really wasn't, but that's not the book's fault. Four and a half stars for the first; I'm going to recuse myself from giving stars to the second.

This is Scalzi's lighthearted pandemic-and-Trump escape book. It's a fine example of that. Also, in the way that The Good Fight was the first explicitly Trump-era TV I saw, this is probably the first set-in-pandemic-era book I've read (because I read SFF rather than contemporary fiction or non-fiction). This is the second time I haven't noticed that I didn't know the gender of the protagonist until I saw someone mention it later. But it isn't *just* that I assume everyone is male! I've had books where I was startled to discover multiple chapters in that the protagonist was male, too. It's more that everyone in Scalzi's books has a very similar voice, and to me they all skew kind of male. But also, yeah, I have a lot of defaults I'm blind to.

After writing the above, I was racking my brain because I knew I had read a post-Trump SF book recently. Kindle is proving to be an unreliable tool for ordering what I have read. These recast Holmes and Watson as Black women in a semi-near future with a civil war on with white supremacist insurrectionists. They certainly aren't comfortable escapism. The recasting was interesting; at first I thought the characters were really not much like the originals, but how could they be? Instead they were more like, extracting out a number of characteristics from the original (Watson as the wounded veteran doctor who can't afford an apartment; Holmes as the high-handed rich aloof investigator with a controlled drug habit) and uses them as the seed crystals for entirely new people. Who would a female Black combat veteran doctor in a near future setting be? What would she have had to deal with all her life? This Watson. Anyway, these are quite good, but definitely *not* lighthearted Trump escape.

Some random thread of the Internet led me to classicmystery.blog, "Spoiler-Free Reviews of Fair Play Detective Fiction". The author of this blog has made it a goal to get all 50 of Flynn's novels republished, and has succeeded - good for him! Flyn was a Golden Age detective author who was mostly forgotten. This was Flynn's first book, and it was entirely reasonable as a air play puzzle mystery, set a hundred years ago in a British country manor. I may read more. But it's a niche. (I am now boggling at the timing. You know, those things like "Cleopatra lived closer to the building of the first Pizza Hut than the building of the pyramids". The first Poirot novel was set in 1916. The last Sherlock Holmes story was set in 1914. Yet somehow I thik of Holmes as from an earlier time, and all of those British country manor houses as just a generation ago. Stuff gets stuck in your head when you're a kid; I'm pretty sure I knew Dickens and Doyle and Austen were "long ago authors" but I thought Christie and the like were just writing about what it was like in England, which was different than California and had, well, lots of lords in manor houses. Maybe it's just whether or not motorcars are in genre. :)

I think what brought me to classicmystery.blog was in fact searching for a new mystery series author. I might stick with this one. The genre seems to be the unearthing of a parallel historic mystery (in this case in an archaeological dig) that goes along with the modern mystery. I was initially dubious - would this be like Nancy Drew where whenever Dad had a case it was secretly tied in? But the cases aren't tied together, they just have similar motifs. That's more reasonable - and I think all mystery series need to have a Thing that makes them different, whether that be that crossword puzzles or antique etchings are relevant to all the plots or that the detective is actually themselves a mystery novelist, or a dog, so this is comparatively tame.