The Price You Pay by Aidan Truhen (aka Nick Harkaway)

 ". . . that guy must be the unluckiest man on the face of this Earth.  Unless he had enemies.  You think he had enemies?  Because I fucking think he had at least one that I can think of."

So recently I was reading Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway after a friend of mine told me it was out; ordinarily I'd be a day-zero reader of anything of his but I'd missed it for whatever reason.  It's good, by the way, a little bit of social commentary wrapped up in a sort of technology mystery story ribbon, but also remarkably short by his standards and I don't really have much to say about it.  However, in the afterward it mentioned that he'd written two other novels under an entirely different pen name than his usual one which I also hadn't heard of.  So I ran out and got those (figuratively I mean, just logged into the Kindle storefront) and nearly immediately got buzzsawed by the first chapter.  I set it down and then looked up more information on what exactly the hell was going on here and discovered an interview that he'd done with himself which explains that this is entirely the opposite of a morally uplifting novel.  I suppose that would make it more of an infernally downlifting novel?  So I went back to it and it's great, but I can't help but wonder if liking this is a character flaw or not.

There were a couple of things I was thinking of while reading it in particular.  The first is the really excellent 2009 blaxploitation parody Black Dynamite, which is the sort of parody that pokes fun at the source material by taking it entirely seriously and just turning up the elements to an absurd degree.  For instance you don't have a parody of a tough guy, you have an actual tough guy who's simply invincible and ends up in a battle to the death with Richard Nixon in the Oval Office.  I was also thinking about the "Godzilla Threshhold", which is a TV Tropes page, defined as a situation that's so dire that any plan becomes reasonable regardless of the cost.  Maybe also a little bit of Cormac McCarthy because in his Truhen persona he's apparently allergic to most punctuation marks but there you go.

Anyway the novel features Jack Price, who starts out as a very wealthy and successful retail cocaine dealer.  A lot of Harkaway's previous protagonists have been police or military (although I guess there was a merchant banker in Gnomon and a watch repair guy who ended up as a criminal in Angelmaker), so this is a little bit of a departure.  Price narrates the story throughout and is clearly a very intelligent and funny guy who is perfectly happy to not rock the boat too much - he's perfectly aware that selling cocaine is against the law but tries to order his affairs such that when cocaine becomes legal he'll become legitimate by printing out a business card and won't have to change any of his other operations.  Or at least that's what he says, but he also does a little bit of bribing the police to ignore his operations and incidentally take out some of his competition if they become troublesome.  Also there's a little incident with a crazy and dangerous person on the crosstown train that Price takes care of with somewhat less concern than you'd expect.  What I'm saying is that ol' Jack here may not be entirely on the level about how chill and peaceful he is.

Then the lady on the floor below him gets taken out execution-style, which concerns him.  Not that he cared for Didi Fraser at all, either in an actual human way or his own particular cheerful sociopathic way, in fact he considered her to be irritating at best.  But he has to be concerned that this might have been intended as a message to him, or an attempt to get at him, or even just that it might attract attention to him somehow, so he makes a desultory effort to see if anyone's heard anything about this.  Just asking a couple of questions to people causes three guys to show up at his house to beat the crap out of him.  And then it's on.

He wasn't expecting the three guys in his house, which is how they got the drop on him, but after figuring out who sent them (at least the coordinator, not the ultimate source) he offers to let bygones be bygones for a token $50 million indemnity.  The contact offers him twenty bucks, and Price says he'll keep the offer open until midnight, and shortly thereafter Price discovers that his mystery opponent has retained the services of the Seven Demons, a flashy and psychopathic mercenary group that's much better known for destabilizing entire countries than just killing one random guy.  So Price is now up against the equivalent of a criminal nation-state with nothing except his own wits and his command of the gig economy, and he thinks it's great.

You see, what the Seven Demons might have wanted to know prior to taking this job is that Price is not just a clever psychopath, but completely twisted and insane and had been waiting his whole life for an excuse to abandon proportionate response.  Most people, they would probably say they'll do whatever it takes to save their own life, but when it comes down to the ultimate meaning of whatever there's still going to be some lines there.  Price legitimately doesn't give a shit about collateral damage; it's not like he's going out of his way to destroy property or bystanders but he's not losing sleep over it either.  This makes him a match for the Demons, who have a reputation to uphold and obtained it mostly through terror, so having ever associated with Price in the past is a sure way to lower your life expectancy.  Or for that matter sort of vaguely looking like Price and being on a plane or train that Price might have been on.

So in some books of this type the question of who murdered Didi Fraser might be very significant to the overall plotline, but although Price actually does solve this mystery he does it mostly in passing.  By that point the major focus has become the struggle between him and the Demons, because Price inflicts damage on them that their reputation can't let slide; it's not even so much about them fulfilling the contract anymore, they just have to show that they can't be defeated.  It's not even really about escalation, either, because both sides immediately pursue the most extreme methods they can conceive of.

For just one example, the Demons undercut Price's business model by selling their own branded cocaine on his turf.  I'm not sure what a typical proportionate response to this would be, possibly some pistol-whippings or shootings or something, but what Price does is purchase some of the competing cocaine through cutouts, add some anthrax to it, and then resell it again through some other cutouts, which totally kills the Demons' cocaine brand identity.  And that's possibly one of the least crazy things that Price does throughout this novel.

This is specifically the part that made me think of Black Dynamite, because how the hell would this guy even think of such a thing, and also even if he did, how would he happen to just have some anthrax sitting around for an occasion like this?  Admittedly the narrative does provide some explanation, but still.  Price and the Demons constantly battle each other in violation of all laws, decency, and common sense, and I'm not sure how much you're supposed to take it seriously, but it is a hell of a ride.

I've read and enjoyed a lot of books with the central hook that you have some sort of antiheroic badass against a cabal of evil dudes who are much, much worse.  This one coquettishly teases you that it's the same kind of thing, but it's really not.  I think Price is more sympathetic than the Demons in general, after all he was minding his own business until the Demons accepted a contract on his life, it's not like he antagonized them or even knew who these people were before everything went straight to hell.  Also, he just generally seems like a lot more fun to hang around.  But again that seems is doing a lot of work there, I'm pretty sure that Price does not have your back in any conventional sense if you actually need something from him.  He's certainly not going to risk his life for you, that's for certain.  Although I guess he does spare a dog at one point, but even in that case there's something in it for him.

Anyway if this sounds like something you'd enjoy then it almost certainly is, but you might feel guilty afterwards and it's possible that the book was written in a confused and angry frame of mind to lower the goodness of humanity overall.

Scholomance Trilogy by Naomi Novik

All right, it's been more than a little while and I'm more than a little behind.  I had the best of intentions, but what happened was that I watched the fourth Rebuild of Evangelion movie, didn't like it very much, and was crafting a fairly epic level post about it for a chunk of early 2022, when I mistakenly ended up deleting my draft with no backup copies.  When faced with that endless blank screen again I realized that not even I was interested in repeating my thoughts about Evangelion, although at some point I may do something along the lines of film critic vern's book Seagology about some Eva fanfictions that I read along the way.  (Embarrassing as it might be, some of it is surprisingly good, or at least interesting.)  Anyway, it just sapped my interest in writing anything else at the time, but I really want to get something up for 2022.

I have been keeping up my reading, though, and just got through with The Golden Enclaves, wrapping up the trilogy started by A Deadly Education (2020) and The Last Graduate (2021), both of which I'd read shortly after their respective releases and which I'd greatly enjoyed.  After reading the third book I did something which I don't often do, which was go back and re-read the first two immediately.  I still like the first one best overall for reasons I will explain shortly, but I'm pretty impressed by the level of detail and foreshadowing here.

The series is somewhat based on an old legend about the Scholomance, which was an underground school of magic run by the Devil where you'd have to stay for seven years and for which some number of students' souls would be taken as payment.  I saw an interview with Novik which said that she'd read about this as a child, wondered why anyone would willingly attend such a school, and as an adult writer tried to come up with a plausible reason for it.  What she eventually came up with is that being on the outside is even worse.  In this setting if you're a born wizard, various horrible predatory monsters will come after you from birth to get the magic out of you, which usually results in death if you're lucky.  However, babies and young children don't have much magic to speak of yet, and fully grown wizards are actually quite tough to kill.  In the nature of real life predators who try to maximize reward and minimize risk, they accordingly focus on grade school age through teenage wizards, and only about one in twenty reaches adulthood.

Faced with such horrible attrition, the wizards of the world constructed the Scholomance to try and improve the odds of their kids surviving to adulthood.  It's separated from the world as we know it aside from one heavily warded and fortified gate, and primarily exists in a formless void.  Naturally, most of the safeguards failed almost immediately and the entry hall is now so monster-infested that no adult wizards even dare to go in there and try to fix it.  Three-fourths of the students that teleport in for a four year stint in there die without making it back out again.  And wizards all over the world are falling all over themselves to get their children admitted, since 1/4 is a hell of a lot better than 1/20.  Somewhat amusingly, normal people don't really have to worry about this, since they don't contain magic the monsters don't want to eat them, and because magic works on the clap-your-hands-if-you-believe basis, they are generally even incapable of perceiving them.

Setting up this scenario takes up most of the action of the first book, which as I mentioned above ended up being my favorite of the trilogy, mostly because of its dark humor.  We follow one Galadriel (yeah, she knows, it's why she goes by "El") Higgins, who has a knack for destructive and deadly magic, and who the school really seems out to get.  At this point it's worth mentioning another central feature of the world, which is that you need mystical mojo in order to cast spells.  One way to get this is by physical or mental exertion over time to generate mana, which you can store inside yourself to some degree or stash in receptacles such as crystals and the like.  Mana is also transferable between wizards so long as it's freely given.  Alternatively, you can steal energy from other sources, either from other wizards' stashes or even from life energy, ranging from plants to bugs to people.  This is called malia.  Going all-out down this path as a maleficer will render you unable to use normal mana and eventually kill you.  However, this really only seems to apply if you are doing this to things that are sophisticated enough to care about it, or doing it very frequently - it does appear that most wizards will kill the occasional plant or invertebrate when they need a little extra oomph without really sweating it too much.  Strict-mana wizards exist, but are noteworthy because it's kind of uncommon, maybe the magical equivalent of vegans.

El's a strict-mana wizard, somewhat grudgingly due to morality, but also as a practical matter because she's born to be a maleficer.  Really, there's a dark prophecy about her and everything.  She is constantly tempted to drain the lives out of everything around her and would be super effective at doing so, to the point where she realizes that if she started she'd never be able to give it up.  It's also somewhat against her nature because she's got an affinity for the destructive, and the school tries to play this up by giving her all sorts of mass-casualty and general evil overlord types of spells.

The initial chapters all about the drudgery of the Scholomance are great and full of dark, dark humor.  From when you get up and try to avoid being killed by something coming out of the air vent, to trying not to be the first in or last out of anywhere, and then getting assignments in six different languages, it's just a constant treadmill of the horrific.  In many high schools, lunch table assignments seem like a matter of life or death, but here it's really true; one of the earliest events involves a student dying after being ambushed by something hiding under a serving tray.  And then you know what you're in for when the other students just leave the body there, confident that something will have eaten it by the next mealtime.

There's a lot of other students, of course, given various levels of characterization, but a big one is Orion Lake, a kid from the New York enclave who is just a total monster-fighting weirdo.  The enclaves are bases of magical power and have similar setups to the Scholomance itself; it's hard to get into one but if you do, this means more protection from stuff that's out to get you.  The structures of the enclaves themselves are reminiscent of big law or accounting firms, where you have to work pretty hard to get in and spend most of your time making mana for people ahead of you in the hierarchy.  Anyway, Orion just likes to slay monsters and he's freakishly good at it, having the totally unheard of ability to drain mana from the monsters he kills.  He's probably the only student who has ever actually enjoyed his time in a monster-infested hellhole, and as a direct result of his actions, the currently attending classes have the lowest fatality rate of any students in recorded history.

This also triggers the recurring theme of coordination problems, because it turns out that bigger monsters eat smaller monsters, and by disrupting all the small ones that eat the students, the bigger monsters down in the pits of the graduation hall are beginning to starve, and that means that they're no longer content to just sit down there and wait for the senior class to try and run past them, and the existing seniors who are about to have to run that gauntlet are not happy about it.  Now the seniors aren't saying that they'd like him to stop killing the monsters already and let them eat the other students, they just want him to understand their hints and do that so they don't have to say it.  They are also contemplating possibly killing him themselves, if they can figure out how.  Don't worry, this concept gets more play as we go through the series.

There are some evil characters in this series, don't get me wrong, but on the whole there's a lack of mustache-twirling villainy.  Even most of the bad actors have reasonable goals and most people mean well even if they're adding to the total misery of the universe.  This becomes especially significant in the third book where the costs of constructing enclaves become apparent.  Without spoiling too much detail, it's really a prisoner's dilemma type situation where you and yours are safer if you are willing to be a little . . . shall we say, ethically flexible about the harms you cause to the world, and you're still better off doing it even if everyone else feels the same way.

Anyway, first book sets all this up, you get the problem with the very angry senior class, then they have to come up with a plan to make everyone happy except the big horde of monsters and screw those guys anyway.  In the middle of all this one of the monsters that decides it's not happy to just sit and wait is an abomination called a maw-mouth, which is sort of a gelatinous blob covered in the eyeballs and mouths of its victims.  They're possibly the creature that wizards fear most because if one catches you it endlessly digests you while you remain fully conscious and yet never die.  Also the maw-mouths themselves are immortal and mostly indestructible; there are a couple of apocryphal stories of people in the past doing it, and the head of the top enclave in China also reportedly managed to kill one in living memory, but most people are too scared to even try.  Despite this, El elects to try and kill it, and even more surprisingly does so.

I guess this is a good point to mention my actual biggest problem with the series here, which is that I'm not a huge fan of "chosen ones" at this stage of my life. Okay, she only manages to accomplish this due to her affinity for mass murder, but she keeps repeating this feat throughout the series, by the end refining it into a more-or-less routine matter.  Admittedly this makes every magician in the world terrified of her because this is something that no one who has ever lived could consistently do, and I guess they say that once-in-a-generation magical talents similar to this happen - er - once or so a generation, but even so.  Kind of a mismatch between the alleged threat and the effort required to overcome it after the first one.  Also not a huge fan of fated romances, but don't get me wrong, I still liked it quite a bit overall.

Speaking of the fated romances, of course El and Orion get it together.  They've both had pretty rough lives in different respects, and his particular tragedy is that he's great at killing stuff but not really that great at absolutely anything else, to the point that his mother had to drill him with flashcards so he'd remember the names of his neighbors.  At first his compatriots from the New York enclave think El must have enchanted him somehow when he shows an actual interest in her, and when they realize that it's all him they basically offer her a bunch of bribes to come back to live with them and keep him happy.

But that's mostly left for the second and third books.  The first one has a pretty harrowing fight to figure out how to get the seniors out alive, or at least mostly so, and then abruptly ends.  The second one then picks up the next year after that, when our heroes have to deal with the consequences of success and what you'd call a robot rebellion by the school itself, and ends on a massive cliffhanger.  The third one is really impressively tied in with elements of the first two, but also has a little bit of a lack of focus as they do some global traveling and then try to resolve a magical war.  I'm torn between thinking that it wrapped up too quickly and advocating for a fourth book, and I suppose that in itself means that I was pretty well invested in it.  At least you can tell that this is the end that Novik had in mind all along, she wasn't just winging it.

And not to give too much away here but one thing I especially appreciated about the ending was that El succeeded beyond her wildest dreams but still didn't manage to get everyone what they had coming to them, completing the idea that sometimes things just suck and you can't fix them.  But of course this doesn't mean that you shouldn't at least try.  Overall very good and if you're a fan of urban fantasy and black comedy I'd put it on the post-Christmas list.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

 

How fitting to have a game with an apocalypse theme these days.  Possibly more appropriate back in the latter parts of 2020 when I was actually playing it, but still reasonably apropos.

Short version: if you liked this game the first two times you played it, it's back for some more.

Spoilers from here, if you care.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider is the third in a reboot trilogy of one of the original console all-stars.  I played a couple of them back in the day; I really only remember the first one, and that's partially because Lara was really cool.  Even aside from the unlikely body shape, she had a sarcastic sense of humor and a seen-it-all demeanor that she backed up with the ability to backflip twelve feet in the air while firing a pistol in each hand John Woo style.  Apparently they ran the gameplay into the ground and they started over, with Lara just out of college on her first adventure, and in that game they substituted extreme trauma for character development, beating the ever living hell out of her over and over again.  Then in the first sequel, they redid all the plot beats from the first time a second time, but out in the Russian wilderness.  And here they are again, with a couple of differences in the South American jungle.

They threw in so much stuff here that it almost chokes the actual gameplay.  In the first game in the series, you had one weapon of each of four types, and there was generic "salvage" that you could get in various ways.  Get enough salvage and you could upgrade the characteristics of your weapons, get some parts and you could upgrade the weapons themselves.  Admittedly it doesn't make a lot of sense that you could "upgrade" a gun into a whole different model of gun, but <shrug>.  In the second game they decided to take a different approach and add different resource types - antlers, animal hides, machine parts, and so on.  Upgrading required different amounts of those things so it didn't help to grind for the ones you didn't need.  And this time you had a bunch of different weapons, but the characteristic upgrades were consistent across all of them.

This time they went completely gonzo.  There's five different kinds of animal hides (including both regular and deluxe jaguar pelts), three different types of feathers, oil, black powder, two different kinds of venomous insects, four different medicinal herbs with different combat effects, and many others.  You have an absolute crap ton of different weapons and each one has to be separately upgraded.  You also can refurbish different outfits, many of which are cosmetic only but many others which give you really good combat bonuses.  And they still have the usual collections of documents, artifacts, buried survival caches and weird hidden subquests.  I'm sort of a completion fanatic, so I did all that stuff (I didn't entirely upgrade all the weapons though - that borders on total masochism) but you don't really have to.  The initial weapons are all pretty good and you could easily get by just using them.  In fact I really liked the starting pistol and used it in preference to all the menagerie of pistols I picked up along the way. The skill tree is also way out of whack.  A couple of the skills are absolutely vital - in particular the one that prevents you from having to hit a QuickTime event to avoid falling to your death on tough ledges - but most of them just aren't that useful and some of them seem like they should be useful but aren't really.  For instance, the ability to simultaneously headshot three enemies with your bow sounds awesome, but there aren't just a ton of places where they line up for you to do this easily and by the time you can earn enough skill points to unlock this ability, all your enemies have taken to wearing helmets anyway.

There's much less of an emphasis on combat in this one; there are a couple of big setpiece battles throughout, but there's more focus on Lara being a glass cannon as opposed to the combat in the first two, which encouraged more of a bull-in-the-china-shop style of gameplay.  It seemed to me that Lara could take a lot fewer hits, but combined with this you have a lot more options for stealth killing and disengaging from your enemies even during fights.  By a certain point in the game you can basically freeze time to line up headshots though, so I actually thought the combat toward the end was much easier.  Overall, I thought it worked pretty well.  They also eliminated the massive ammo caches everywhere, so you do need to make your shots count (or rely on the bow, which has free craftable arrows).  Offsetting this is that there are actual merchants now, and they do sell bullets for cash, but it's extraordinarily expensive to rely on that.

The developers also added a couple of extra platforming tools to Lara's repertoire.  In the second game, the major innovation was the ability to swing from hooks.  In this one you maintain that ability, but you can also anchor from climbable walls to rappel down or to run along walls, which is frequently used.  You also gain the ability to overhang climb, which looks cool and is neat enough, but seems to be almost an afterthought in terms of how frequently it's used.  While these new tricks make Lara more able to traverse space, they also seem to have made her somewhat less responsive than before - I found myself plunging to my death with somewhat more frequency than I recall from the first two games.

I bought the super deluxe extended version of the game on sale somewhat after release, which gets an extra 7 DLC sidequests.  I thought that the Baba Yaga DLC sidequest in the second game was actually the gameplay highlight of the whole thing, and they did seem to pour a lot of their creativity into these extra challenge tombs; if you're looking to get this game, that's the way to go.  I think it's also the only way to reasonably get enough XP to fill out the skill tree without having to do an abnormally large amount of grinding.

So that's the gameplay basics out of the way.  What about the plot?  Yeah, okay, about that.  In the second game it was revealed that there was a secret organization called Trinity that was all about finding immortality and other Illuminati-mind-control type conspiracy theories.  So here fairly early on we're introduced to Pedro Dominguez, who is the leader of this group, and who also turns out to have been born into a tribal society in a hidden city deep in the South American jungles.  Overlooking the fact that this is the third hidden secret civilization in this series which also ostensibly has satellite mapping and cell phones, this is absolutely an astounding career path, and incidentally has the effect of making him far more interesting than Lara herself.  She once again starts off by getting involved in stuff she doesn't understand and doesn't really have to get involved in, accidentally triggering the apocalypse unless she can recover the magic dagger she removed as well as some other MacGuffins and doing a ritual or whatever.

I mean, I could try to explain it but I don't really care that much, and what's worse is the game doesn't really seem to either.  Dominguez wants the power of the dagger to become a god and do some sort of vaguely sketched out bullshit that's probably bad.  He allegedly wants to protect the hidden village where he comes from, so it's interesting that he has infiltrated and taken over the secret society that's already been running the village for its own ends for a few centuries, but no particular tension is ever explored with this double or triple loyalty stuff, and then the game just sort of loses interest in resolving the Trinity plot and they all just get killed offscreen except final boss Dominguez and some other guy whose name I forget but who runs all the mercenary teams.

And once again Lara causes a crap ton of collateral damage with her clumsy attempts to get in the way of stuff she doesn't understand; this time moving the dagger causes a bunch of disasters which destroy a few villages and kill a lot of people.  She feels vaguely guilty about this but not guilty enough to stop messing around with stuff, and by the end appears to have no particular worries about what she's done.  She also somehow manages to walk around within the secret South American village and be "disguised" as a member of a secret group of cultists, all of whom are male and much larger than her.  Plus, she repeatedly obeys the rule of secrecy in the village and won't use her firearms openly there, even when involved in a bunch of fights to the death.

Don't get me wrong, the emphasis on stealth killing and camouflage provides an interesting contrast to the gameplay of the prior two chapters, and the game is entertaining enough, but it takes itself far too seriously while making absolutely no sense whatsoever.  So if you enjoyed the last two installments, you'll get at least camp value out of this one.  And it seems like even the developers aren't interested in returning to the well a fourth time with this exact formula, so perhaps they'll manage to match up the gameplay and tone in another sequel. 

The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison

 "Mer Celehar's notions of obedience are most individual," Maia said wryly. -The Emperor of The Goblin Emperor on Thara Celehar.

It's been a while.  What can I say - it's been a long pandemic.  Logging back on here I see that I've got a couple of half-written posts that I don't even really remember doing, but they're not bad and I can probably work them back into shape.  But this is something I recently read and I want to do it first, so here goes.

The Goblin Emperor was a 2014 novel which explored the unlikely ascension of Maia Drazhar to the throne of the Elflands, and roughly his first year of reign as Edrehasivar VII.  I have a review of it elsewhere here (notably it contains a major error in the number of grandsons the prior emperor had, which I cringe on recalling but don't want to pull a George Lucas and retroactively fix).  I find it very hard to describe why it grew on me so much over time, but I've reread it on several occasions since.  The word that I would use for it is "comforting", and despite the fact that it contains a couple of coup and assassination attempts, it's not really a novel of intrigue as such.  With one notable exception the people that are against Maia are threatening and obnoxious (the single exception is in a trusted position, but I just looked to make sure and he's only got one line of dialogue prior to his betrayal - Maia might have good reason to trust him but the audience sure doesn't).  A large portion of it is Maia trying to fit into the role he wasn't really prepared for and trying to some very minor degree to challenge the rules that keep him entirely separated from anything besides the nobility and their court problems.

This sequel doesn't take place at court and starts with protagonist Thara Celehar being called in to try to identify a dead hooker pulled out of a canal, so you can see we're dealing with something entirely different here.

So here's a brief recap on what Celehar did in the first book.  Maia's father was sort of a Henry VIII type in terms of marriages and his fifth wife was a young trophy wife airhead.  As the widow of the former Emperor she gets to hang around at court and maintain her own household, which includes her distant cousin Celehar.  Maia is not satisfied with the progress of the inquiry into his father's murder, and one of his staff suggests that he might want to bring in a Witness for the Dead, a cleric of the god Ulis with the ability to actually speak to the spirits of the departed, one of whom just happens to be at hand.  Maia summons him to give him this commission, discovering an unenthusiastic, morose man who clearly doesn't want to be involved in any of this but nonetheless accepts.  He's taking things seriously but not making much headway either; eventually wind of this gets back to his cousin, and Celehar ends up having to explain to Maia the circumstances which led him to him being stuck in semi-exile; he'd been involved in a same-sex love affair with a married man, and after that man killed his abusive wife Celehar ended up being called upon to investigate.  Celehar easily solved this crime but his lover was executed, and afterwards the scandal led to him being more or less defrocked and unemployable.

Shortly thereafter, Celehar claims that he had a dream from Ulis about how to proceed with his investigation and skips town on the next available airship to a far-off provincial city without bothering to explain himself beyond a cursory note as he's leaving.  This leads to Maia's quote from the top, and Celehar spends most of the rest of the book appearing only by virtue of sending letters to Maia explaining what he's up to off page.  This part also explains why Celehar got his own spin-off novel, because what he does in the town of Thu-Athamar is single-handedly figure out how the prior Emperor was assassinated, identify the likely culprits, insinuate himself into their social circle and later work with the local police to round them all up and return them for trial.  He also tells Maia the identity of the nobleman whom he believes bankrolled the whole thing - which he's also right about. This earns him the approval of both the chief priest of the Elflands and an Imperial favor, which he uses to receive reassignment as sort of a freelance criminal investigator priest.

This is where we find him at the start of The Witness for the Dead, back in the city of Thu-Athamar but this time with his own office where supplicants who need his particular services can find him.  Or the local watchmen can rope him into solving their issues as well.  In case you're wondering about what Maia and his entourage are up to then you are out of luck; he's off in the capital doing his Emperor thing and no one talks about it that much.

Anyway, the woman in the canal was actually an opera singer and not a hooker as such, although The Goblin Emperor implied that female opera singers were widely considered to have this sort of reputation and this book establishes that this isn't entirely without basis.

You'd think that the ability to speak with the spirits of the dead would be incredibly useful in a murder investigation, but in this you'd be only partially correct.  These aren't omniscient dead and they tend to fade away pretty quickly, so first of all they won't know any more than they did when alive and second of all they quickly forget all but their names or things they felt really strongly about as their spirit transitions to wherever it is dead elves go.  So Celehar was able to use his abilities to ID his doomed lover very easily because the murdered wife saw her husband very clearly as he killed her and was very pissed off about it even in the afterlife, but Celehar wasn't able to get anything useful off the deceased Emperor because he'd been blown up with a bomb he knew nothing about and his last thoughts were more along the lines of "Aaaaaaaaaaah".  The dead opera singer is more along the lines of that latter one; although he's able to figure out who she is pretty quickly, he isn't able to solve the murder through strictly supernatural means.  And as it turns out the trick is finding out who didn't want to kill her - she was something of a jackass and a kleptomaniac, among other things.

It's possible to have an entire book revolve around resolving one murder, but this one doesn't take that route.  In addition to this investigation, Celehar also gets caught up in a bureaucratic turf war among the local priesthood, participates in a contested will, tracks down and destroys an undead monster, goes through a trial by ordeal due to the participants in the aforesaid will contest getting pissed off about his testimony, works with some other priests to discover then track down an entirely unrelated serial killer, and helps out in the aftermath of a horrible industrial accident which kills dozens.  It's amazing that he has the time in the day to do all this stuff.

But here's the thing.  Celehar is suffering from major depressive disorder and although his sense of duty keeps him going (and he's competent, dear lord is he ever) none of it really affects him that much.  Unlike Goblin Emperor, which was in third person through Maia's eyes, this one is first person through Celehar's bleak and gloomy perspective.  He just feels he was put on Earth (er, or wherever planet this takes place) to do this stuff and it's not worth getting excited over.  About the only time he really has a big emotional reaction is when he's about to get ripped apart by the ghoul, and again, it's more along the lines of "Aaaaaaaaaaah".  I get the feeling that if the ghoul was a little slower and Celehar had a little more time to think about it he would have ended up being indifferent even to that.  He doesn't really want to do any of this but he can't imagine quitting.  It's certainly off-putting when an author tells you how amazing and incredible things are without actually presenting them that way, but this is one of the very few books that I can remember where the narration actually seems to be trying to clog up the fascinating events actually contained in the book with the protagonist's constant Eeyore like musings.  At some level, if even Celehar isn't that invested, how can you be?

But of course for those of us that can relate to this, and I unfortunately have felt this feeling myself, it's moving nonetheless.  I felt bad for this guy, who manages to do the right thing every day for not much money and barely more respect.  I wanted him to succeed.  And I liked that we finally get a little inkling of what's really eating him - not that he had the illicit affair, because he's pretty adamant that there's no real issue with that; not that he had the guy turned over to the law, because that's just how he sees his job description; but that he still mourns for someone who did something that horrible, and wonders whether that makes him horrible too.  Then at the end he gets a little bit of unexpected advice that it's okay to mourn just the good parts and forgive himself for the rest.

Does he take the advice?  I don't know, but unlike the very extreme on-the-nose hopeful ending of The Goblin Emperor it basically just ends with Celehar not cured and not happy but with the potential to get to those things.  It's a lot shorter than The Goblin Emperor and I don't think I'll read it as many times, but I think I enjoyed getting back into this world even through the eyes of someone who doesn't necessarily want to be there himself.

Altered Carbon and the Adaptation Thereof

I've got a review somewhere on here of the Takeshi Kovacs trilogy; it's really one of my all time favorites.  That's not to say that the series isn't without issues.  The first novel in the trilogy, Altered Carbon, is basically a straight-up SF retelling of a noir pulp detective story, very Chandler-esque.  And that's fine with me, as I love that stuff.  But that does mean that it inherits some of the more problematic themes from that genre as well as its strengths.  Nonetheless, when I heard that it had been optioned to Netflix, I was super excited to see what they did.  Then, I heard some details and watched the trailer, and was prepared to be underwhelmed.  When I actually watched it, it exceeded my expectations.  I started to write down my thoughts about it, but then just sorta did finish it.  But the second season is about to come out, so this seems like a good time to revisit this show.  It could be that it'll crash and burn in the future, but at least it'll have the chance to do so on its own terms.

If you want to go on, I suggest that you be familiar with both the book and the series.  I want to talk about details of the adaptation, and that means all plot points are fair game.  More specifically, I'd like to discuss specific areas of the adaptation, what I thought worked well, what didn't, and what was just interesting.

First, let's just cut right to the chase.  Are you up for a series where a man, instead of opening a door, blows up the whole wall in a fiery explosion, and then walks through the smoke while carrying a severed head?  If your response to that is "yes", then strap in, because this show is for you.  If your response is "no", then I don't know what to tell you besides to stay far, far away.  If your response is "why didn't he just open the door, since that's going to draw a lot of attention to him, especially since his next action is to murder yet another man out in the middle of the street and all those people looking to see what the explosion was about will be watching him do it", then surely there's a meeting of Nitpickers Anonymous you can go check out, because you're going to be bugged as hell.

Okay, so you've read the book (or you don't care what the book says) and you think this sounds like your thing.  Remember that the big shtick here is that your brain gets backed to a little device in your skull, so getting killed isn't necessarily that big of a deal. It also it means that mental training is more important than mere physical ability, since if you need a giant muscleman body then you can just put your brain-chip into one and take it for a spin.  In the source material, the Envoys are shock troopers for the status quo, the elitist of the elite of the UN government troops.  They've undergone extreme mental training and conditioning so that they are able to seamlessly adjust to conditions on any world, in any culture.  They've lost most of their dominance-hierarchy submission instincts and almost all of their aversion to doing violence to other people.  Just the whisper of an Envoy deployment will shove most rogue governments back into compliance.  Kovacs used to be one, but after a botched deployment at some planet called Innenin, he quit.  In the show, he's still an Envoy, but instead of being government troops, the Envoys were Quellists.

Quellcrist Falconer was the nom de guerre of a poet/philosopher/activist on Kovacs' home planet of Harlan's World, and in the books she led a major rebellion known as the Unsettlement some centuries before Kovacs' own birth.  Although this was in fact a high-intensity conflict and many were killed during it, based on evidence from the novels, Falconer's forces were outmatched from the beginning and handily lost.  Nonetheless, clean-up from the conflict is still ongoing on Harlan's World some centuries later.  Needless to say, making the Envoys her soldiers rather than government soldiers changes a lot of things about both the setting and motivations for Kovacs.  I was hesitant about how this would be portrayed and ready for it to be extremely disappointing, but aside from a few hiccups I actually think it's an improvement, for the most part.

In the novels, Quell has a liberal-arts background and is primarily known as an author and poet.  We do get to see some of her thoughts on power and the aggregation thereof, but aside from a few pithy and quotable lines the majority of the work of hers we see is sort of freshman year bullshit session Marxism.  As of the end of Woken Furies she's ready to take the fight back to the oppressive UN government but it's not entirely clear what she's going to set up on its ashes if she prevails.  In the show as in the book her real name is Nadia Makita, but while in the book this is generally known, in the show it's one of her most guarded secrets.  Here she's a scientist and did more than anyone else to develop the cortical stack technology that forms the core of the SF assumptions of the show.  She's become concerned that the use of this technology will cause unstoppable stratification in society and accordingly needs a technical fix to limit any one person's lifespan to 100 years.  This isn't something that she is absolutely certain that she is correct about, but she's willing to put her life on the line for it.

Quell's objective here runs with some of the elements from the novels that didn't get introduced until later in the series or which weren't really fleshed out that well.  The books were quite clear that one of the downsides of immortality is that the rich and powerful get to keep accumulating wealth and power, and in the show they get to live in a beautiful sky city separated from all the grounded slum-dwelling proles below them.  You know, in case you didn't get the metaphor.  And they're portrayed as arguably somewhat insane by their cocoons of great wealth and privilege.  It's a little on the nose, but as a visual, I like it.  In the book, Kovacs' erstwhile patron Bancroft wasn't really that bad as super wealthy nigh-immortal business dudes go, and I think that the show's portrayal of him as actually that bad is probably both TV adaptation schlock and more faithful to the ultimate themes of the trilogy.  If anything, the original book downplayed how destructive it would be to eliminate death but not eliminate ongoing concentration of wealth.  It's simply not possible for Bancroft or those like him to lose their money or their positions, ever, and keeping that level of power means putting the boot on a lot of other people - also forever.

Likewise, I thought it would be disastrous to have major villain Reileen Kawahara be Kovacs' sister, but the change works surprisingly well.  In the book, Kawahara sort of comes in from nowhere in Act 3; Kovacs worked for her once but the details are not gone into, he hates her because of her cruel barbarism, she thinks he's a weenie and that ethics are for suckers.  It's an all right dynamic, but it's confusing then when Kawahara doesn't just kill him when she has the chance, and torture him later in VR if she's so inclined.  By giving them more of a shared history and an actual connection, this actually provides a plausible reason for Kawahara's actions - she doesn't kill Kovacs because she doesn't really want to.  She's still just as awful as she is in the books, though.  Possibly more so.  One of your better SF villains, in my opinion.

The actors are all having a good time, and the fact that you can swap bodies means that the same "character" can be shared between multiple actors, as they're resleeved in flashbacks, possibly trying to disguise themselves, or so forth.  Because the show is a visual medium, this is a lot more striking than it is on the page, and the show also has a lot of fun with elements of it.  That giant, tattooed biker looking guy may just well be inhabited by a Mexican grandmother - referencing a throwaway line in the books about awkward family reunions where old relatives come out of storage for the day and then go back.  Only here it turns out that if you're not resleeved in a clone of your original body, you eventually go crazy unless you have undergone extremely strenuous mental conditioning like government troopers or Envoys do.  And this clears up why maybe you'd stop going to those reunions, as only the very rich can afford to have racks of cloned bodies as Bancroft does.

The underlying mystery is pretty much the same - Bancroft was killed, his backup copy doesn't believe that he would have killed himself, and he hires the most badass private detective he can think of to try and sort this out for him.  Admittedly, this makes less sense in the show, since Kovacs is the last of a bunch of dangerous revolutionaries and has been on stack for 250 years.  I don't really see that the UN government would be willing to let him out again ever, much less give him a pardon for his past actions.  In the book, he was just one of a number of ex-Envoys running around, most of whom were involved in shady or criminal actions, more of a nuisance rather than an existential threat.  I guess they also couldn't get rights to use Jimi Hendrix, so the AI hotel is now called the Raven and run by Edgar Allen Poe (who does a bang up job of being earnest, weird, and earnest and weird.)

By incorporating flashbacks of much of the worldbuilding from the following two books, the show diverges substantially from the source material by the end of this one while remaining more or less faithful to the plot of the first book overall.  They're clearly going to be taking it in a vastly different direction for the second season, and I for one am up for it.

The Labyrinth Index by Charles Stross

I've been enjoying this series for a while now, although I'd like to knock a couple of broad criticisms out of the way first.  Many of them, especially the middle set, appear to have been first or 1.5 drafts, with all the fluff and plot holes that entails.  For some time, they also tended to rely on the whole "oh God there's a portal to somewhere gotta close it before the forces of evil get through" climax.  Some of the characterization were spotty, and they tended to end on anticlimaxes. 

This one may be the best yet, though.  I want to talk about why I enjoyed it so much, so I'll be discussing previous events freely; if you are somehow wanting to start a series on the ninth installment then maybe read no further, but also if that's the case then what is wrong with you?  Don't do that.  Although, in some sense, this is more of a reboot of the series than a continuation.

You might recall in the last Laundry Files book, the Laundry sort of . . . ended?  Faced with an invasion by the unspeakably evil Sleeper in the Pyramid, they decided that the only way to survive another day was to make a deal with the, er, speakably evil Fabian Everyman, the avatar of the Black Pharaoh, Nyarlathotep.  The Sleeper planned on using his brain-eating parasites to lobotomize and/or kill everybody in the UK; the Black Pharaoh, on the other hand, will only do that to some people, and has no particular problem with keeping humans around in general, as long as they aren't too annoying and worship him unquestionably.  Narrator Mhari states it best by pointing out that he's like a beekeeper who enjoys honey - he's not too interested in any individual bee but will keep the hive going so long as he's getting what he wants out of it.

Narratively, this was absolutely the right direction to take the series in, but it also means that it's practically a new series at this point.  The Laundry Files started out as more of a bleak office satire that contained supernatural elements.  The point was that an occult defense government agency was still a government agency, which meant annoyances about budgeting, paperwork, personnel management and other actual real life concerns.  For instance, in the fourth book, Bob Howard is surprisingly concerned that he won't be able to get approval for a rental car and a couple of take out pizzas without prior authorization while he's on a covert mission that ends up saving the entire world.  In this one, the protagonists end up running the sort of mission that you might see in any other occult/urban fantasy type of novel, the sort that costs tens of millions of pounds and involves a militarized Concorde jet, massive special operations and military deployment.  Not only would this have been impossible in any of the previous books, merely suggesting it would have been the subject of black humor in the office.

That said, it still works here because it fits in with the Black Pharaoh's overarching goals.  He's willing to expend that level of resources on this particular mission because it's important to him; other areas of the government are of less concern to him and he's deliberately keeping the UK on an austerity budget because he's got very little concern about whether the population is happy or not.  In the early section of the book I thought that Stross might be making some jokes about Trump/Johnson style buffoonish political figures based on some remarks that the Pharaoh makes about Jews, but it turns out that he's actually incredibly intelligent and goal focused.  (It's not clear if he's making the remarks based on genuine ignorance of merely human religious beliefs, if he's doing it on purpose to wind people up, or if he has some sort of other inscrutable reason for it.)

In any case, although the Black Pharaoh is one of the first to awaken and is at present one of the most powerful of the entities that the Laundry has been expecting since the very beginning of the series, he's not the only one.  In the last book, it was apparent that there was something in the United States so terrifying that the Sleeper in the Pyramid had been forced to flee.  It turns out . . . I mean, it's Cthulhu.  It's always Cthulhu.  Here she's portrayed as insectile rather than cephalopodian, but still lies not dead but dreaming and her followers are interested in waking her up fully.  To that end they'll probably have to disassemble most of the inner Solar System to get enough computing power, something familiar to readers of Stross' own Accelerando.  It's unclear if this is actually any sort of physical threat for the Black Pharaoh (I'd guess probably not, since he seems to be at least somewhat open to this plan at some point), but at least at the moment he wants to keep his stuff in the inner Solar System, and so he's interested in delaying or denying this event.  Further entangling this is the fact that these two entities are nominal allies against the truly apocalyptic Cold Ones, whatever the hell those are supposed to be.  Thus begins the Cold War between the New Management of the UK and the Cthulhu worshiping new OPA overlords of the US, as neither side wants the other to do just as they like but they can't openly attack each other, and they're also at least sort of on the same side anyway.

The premise of the Laundry books has always had an undercurrent of bleakness that's right out front and center here.  The Elder Gods are coming back, there's nothing we can do about it, the best we can hope for is that humanity doesn't go completely extinct, and even that might not actually be the worst possible outcome.  Nonetheless in the first couple of books they managed to forestall the inevitable for long enough that even now you can see that most of the characters can't see that it's over.  Mhari is a literal vampire, used as an execution method by her tyrannical overlord, and must obey him without question.  She'd probably kill herself, but the Audit Committee has let her in on their "Extended Continuity Operations" plan - not that any of that's explained, but apparently that's the only thing that is giving anyone reason to carry on at the moment.  It's also unclear if this intended to somehow defeat the New Management, to just survive it, or who knows what.

In form this book is most similar to the fourth book, as it involves a semi-covert operation into America and conflict with the agents and avatars of the more or less openly evil American occult agencies.  The key differences here are that the OPA is now running the country, and it's Mhari narrating the parts that need narration.

I wasn't sure this would work, but she turns out to be a compelling viewpoint character.  Bob's interactions with her have always been heavily influenced by their prior ill-fated love affair, but we saw some of the true hints of her character when she had more screentime in Rhesus Chart and she continues to be a focused executive with imposter syndrome about her own competence.  Some of the viewpoint characters who aren't Bob tend to be too Bob-like to be plausible, so this was a pleasant surprise.  Although, if I'm not mistaken, each novel has had increasing third-person chapters as well, and I tend to think at this point they're typically the strongest.  It may be time to just ditch the first-person narration and embrace omniscience; it's certainly thematic.

Mhari's mission is to find the President of the United States and return him to power if possible, and if not return him to the UK where he can lead a government in exile.  Why, you ask?  The OPA has mind-whammied the entire US to forget they have a President, and they've likewise controlled all members of Congress to unanimously enact whatever legislation they want.  Ostensibly this is because he's the focus for a lot of belief they'd prefer to use for themselves.  One might conceivably ask why they don't just mind-whammy the President as well rather than go through all this rigamarole, and there's sort of a fig leaf given about why they're doing it, and hey over there, look there's a distraction.

The President is in hiding, guarded by the last couple of loyal Secret Service agents, who have the small problem that whenever they fall asleep, the forgetting spell takes over again and they wake up not remembering who the President is or why they're protecting him until they get briefed and break the enchantment as long as they're awake.  The stuff about him is claustrophobic and horrible and honestly cool.  Mhari's extreme reluctance to go on what is a likely suicide mission but gritty determination to stick it out is great.  It's got your favorite non-Bob and non-Mo characters like Officer Friendly and Vicar Pete, also on the suicide mission and doing their very best.  It's got all the Stross body horror you've come to know and love, plus bullets that spread vampirism.  Oh, and it's got a vampiric elven mage on the autism spectrum.  Truly something for everyone.

The last book ended on a note of pure dread, since it appeared that there was no hope for the world with the Elder Gods taking over.  And that's still the case here - it appears that anything good is just a salve before the bandage gets ripped off for something even worse.  I'm still here for the ride though.

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

I knew next to nothing about this going in, except that Charlie Stross wrote the cover blurb which advertised "lesbian necromancers explore a haunted Gothic mansion in space", and I figured I was on board for it.  Synopsis like that you know it's at least going to be interesting, whether or not it's actually any good.

Imagine my surprise when it turns out that it not only lives up to the premise but sticks the landing, as it were.  This one's a rare bird and one of my favorites of the year; it's basically impossible to pigeonhole because it does what it wants, sort of like Gideon herself.  The tone is set right at the beginning as she makes her bed, grabs her stuff (which includes her sword and a couple of pornographic magazines), picks the security lock and tries to run away from home to join the space army.

But wait, you say, if they've got interplanetary space travel then why does she have a sword?  Shouldn't she have, like, a ray gun?  And why is paper treated like some sort of rare commodity?  And I'd give a serious response, but the real answer is that it sets the tone right off so you can just put it down if you're not into this stuff.  I've mentioned before that I have a soft spot for absurdist SF/F novels - stuff like Illuminatus! or Sewer, Gas & Electric or The Gone-Away World.  You've just got to accept going in that it doesn't necessarily make sense except on its own terms, and if you approach it in that spirit it's fine.  What I'm really getting at is that this isn't the sort of work you can nitpick.

Anyhow.  Cover blurb aside, Gideon's no necromancer, she's a swordswoman.  The space army she wants to join is the Cohort, which is the military arm of a necromantic interstellar empire headed up by the immortal God Emperor and Necrolord Divine.  They apparently fight pitched battles against humans and things worse than humans all over the cosmos, but the details aren't really gone into because Gideon doesn't really care about any of that stuff, she just wants to get out of the Ninth House, and there you have it.

Most of the book is told from Gideon's perspective and while she's not dumb by any means, she's also more interested in working out than opening textbooks, and a lot of her mental energy has been spent devoted to the sword (which she loves and would marry if she could).  Plus, she's been raised from birth in the weirdo cultish Ninth House and to the extent that she considers it odd, she also considers it old hat.  Therefore, the fact that she fails in her escape attempt due to a bunch of conjured skeleton warriors does upset her, but also does not come as a surprise exactly.

The skeletal warriors are courtesy of Harrowhark, who is a necromancer, and who's ostensibly the heir to the Ninth House but is really running it on account of her parents being secretly dead and being manipulated Weekend-At-Bernie's style by Harrowhark since she was still primary school aged.  This hardly counts as a spoiler since it's in the first couple of chapters, it only comes at you faster and more furiously from here.  Harrow's still just seventeen, and the only person in the Ninth House who is around Gideon's age, so naturally they hate each other.  Gideon appears to think she's a megalomaniac sociopath, and this is more or less borne out by her introduction, but one of the great things about this story is that it both turns out to be sort of true and also way more complicated than that.

Anyway, all the necromantic Houses have received a summons from the Emperor - they're all to send the first of their line to the Emperor's planet, accompanied only by their bodyguard cavaliers, to see if they're worthy of being selected as Lyctors, immortal servants of the Emperor and saints of the Empire.  Harrow's cavalier turns tail at this prospect, being more of a scholar than a warrior, and Harrowhark offers Gideon a choice - pretend to be her cavalier so she can become a Lyctor, and she'll allow Gideon to finally leave.  Gideon doesn't want to do this, for several reasons - first, cavaliers use little dinky rapiers as opposed to the big fuck-off infantry sword Gideon prefers, and she'll have to do a lot of training; second, she hates Harrowhark and doesn't want to do anything for her; third, she doesn't have any of the etiquette and formal training that are the other duties of cavaliers and doesn't really want to learn any of it; and lastly, she thinks that the promise will be broken somehow.  But it's the only game in town, really, so what the hell.

It's at this point that the book does actually stall a little bit, since they arrive at the planet along with the other seven House heirs and cavaliers (fifteen people in all, since one house sends twins) and introducing all of these people takes a while, plus that's so many characters that some of them by necessity get short shrift.  But they make it into the great hall, where the mysterious old monk who calls himself "Teacher" is sure to explain the nature of the tests they will face and the trials they must overcome.  All the necromancers, who on the whole are young overachievers, await instruction.

Except, no.  Teacher says that he's not a Lyctor and doesn't have any more idea about how to become one than they do.  He asks them to please not open any locked doors without permission, and then he just leaves them to it.  Gideon finds this hilarious, and Harrow tells her to pretend she's taken a vow of silence.  And it proceeds on from there.

At this point the story takes on elements of a locked room mystery, a procedural, an action adventure, a serial killer / cosmic horror story.  Just when you think you've figured out what's going on, there's usually another swerve coming.  Various actions are explained, people turn out to have been dead all along, or actually alive when they're supposed to be dead, Gideon and Harrow confront the truth about their past not entirely without hope, and it's just generally a rollicking good time.

I said at the beginning that nitpicking something like this is fruitless, so I'm not going to.  I will make two observations though.  First, one of the original rules of a fair play mystery is that magic or supernatural elements can't make an appearance in the story, or if they do, they have to be consistent and clearly spelled out.  This book is not interested in holding your hand, so at various points characters just come out with, Yeah, I knew X because of my supernatural powers which I never mentioned before now and you just gotta roll with it.  The other thing is, the Emperor presents himself as a pretty reasonable guy but his original plan was pretty dumb.  What did he think was going to happen when he stuck all these ambitious magicians together without any sense of clear direction?  Admittedly most of what happened can't be fairly said to be his fault, but I don't really think this exercise would have ended up that well even in the absence of sabotage.  What the hell, Emperor.

Stories like this often suffer from info dumps, so you have the fish-out-of-water character that needs to get explained to.  But here, all the characters are in an unusual situation and have to figure out what the hell is going on; and there's Gideon, who probably should have known some of this stuff already but was busy working out or reading pornos and didn't pay attention.  She's a great character.  This is maybe the most fun I've had reading anything all year.