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.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Hmph, it's been almost a year and I don't have much of an excuse.  I've been pretty busy at work and also chasing small children, but it's more like I've just been grouchy in general about politics and assorted other items that aren't really within my control, and at least for me that makes it tough to do things that aren't immediately necessary.  I have been doing a fair bit of reading, though.  Between the libraries I'm qualified to borrow from and my overflow stack from Half Price, I've got enough for a couple of years even assuming that I continue to power through it.  And here's one I enjoyed.

Other than seeing this series on some end-of-year award lists, I didn't actually know anything about The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet going in.  It's a fun, very soft SF romp that has elements of a picaresque novel and no particular ambitions to rewrite genre conventions or anything like that.  It primarily follows the crew of the working-class starship Wayfarer and its multispecies crew as they make their way across the galaxy.  Wayfarer is a tunneling ship that can construct hyperspace conduits, and the captain made a bid for a lucrative contract to build a tunnel to connect the Galactic Commons to a new prospective member species in the galactic core.  That overarching plot is basically an excuse for a series of vignettes involving various crew members as they hook up, go shopping, get arrested and occasionally boarded by space pirates.

Although they don't necessarily have that much in common, I was reminded of Ann Leckie's Ancillary novels and Goblin Emperor as well.  These novels deal with various intrigues and science fiction elements, but at the same time really focus on the well being of their characters, make sure they're getting enough sleep and eating well.  It's perhaps a little jarring that I'd use the word comforting to describe a novel that includes the Earth being rendered uninhabitable and a genocidal war being fought by another species that involves weapons called "organ cutters" which are as unpleasant as that sounds, but honestly this whole thing was like literary chicken soup.

If you're the sort to complain about realism in your SF then this is not for you.  The idea of blue-collar space travel aside, the ship manages to run its batteries off of algae somehow, there's little outside of handwaving about biological intercompatibility of the various species, laws on cloning seem implausible, and I've got a bit of side eye as to the implementation of artificial intelligence here.  But there's a gray centipede/gecko creature with six arms who is the ship's doctor and also the cook, and calls himself Dr. Chef because his real name takes three windpipes and one minute to say, and if you don't at least get a smile out of that then I don't know what to tell you.

Pretty much everyone gets their turn in the limelight, but the novel begins and ends with Rosemary Harper, which isn't her real name, and she's gotten the gig on the ship under her real resume as a bureaucrat and linguist.  What she's fleeing from is pretty obvious if you pay much attention and to the extent that the book has flaws that's one of them.  It's not really presented as that big of a deal and when she comes clean there aren't that many consequences for her.  Also, it's not her fault.  But I did really like the idea that she manages to save the day a few times with her knowledge of other species and her mastery of obscure regulations.  The captain is a committed pacifist, after all.

You might assume that the Small Angry Planet in question is Earth, but in fact Earth is an uninhabitable backwater of very little account and while humans are members of the Galactic Commons they were let in more out of pity, and don't have that much power in the body.  Everybody finds everybody exasperating, but at the end of the day they are at least trying to make sure everyone's dressed warmly and not freaking out too much.  The aliens on the far side of the proposed wormhole don't necessarily feel the same way, and to the extent it's a pretty heavy handed message that's also a weakness here.  But on the whole, I'd like to hang out with these people, and that's about as much motivation as I need to read something.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

Several years back I reviewed the first in the rebooted Tomb Raider trilogy, the 2013 game somewhat unimaginatively named Tomb Raider.  My opinion of that was that it was really fun as a game, but thematically was a total incoherent mess.  Now that the third game in the trilogy has come out, there was a special deal on the second one, a 2015 release that I'd sort of been meaning to get around to at some point.  A sale is some point, right?  And as it turns out, they basically did the same thing as last time, and so I mostly enjoyed playing some more of it.  Only "mostly" because I am not sure I really liked myself for enjoying it.

Bear with me here.  There's a pretty good book called Armor by John Steakley that deals with the standard SF trope where you have some guy in powered armor fighting a bazillion alien monsters.  He keeps dropping down onto the planet again and again for astoundingly dangerous missions, while his humanity is slowly eroded by the horrible things he witnesses, all the creatures he kills, and the trauma of witnessing his comrades constantly getting killed around him.  Eventually he disassociates his personality from what he calls "The Machine" and becomes basically an automaton, with no drives beyond continued immediate survival - no desires, no friends, no hopes, which is apparently what it takes to become totally fearless.  In this case though it turns out the whole thing was sort of a ghastly mistake.  When his unit had been dropped the very first time and everyone except him got killed, they'd never deleted the unit from the computer roster because they thought it was nonexistent, so he was basically slated for all those combat drops by accident.  When someone eventually catches the mistake the people responsible are aghast that they put anyone through this (and even more astounded that any person could possibly survive).  It's one of the better SF examinations of the psychological effects of participating in extreme violence for a long time.

Rise of the Tomb Raider ain't interested in any of that shit.  You may recall from the first game that Lara Croft had been shipwrecked on a haunted island populated by an evil cult and a bunch of undead monstrosities.  There was a malicious sorcerer queen keeping anyone from leaving by force, so she literally had no escape short of either dying or defeating her foes.  Due to the sort of stupid nature of the plot I didn't appreciate how important this element actually was until it was missing in the second game.  The first game actually did a pretty decent job of depicting Lara going gradually mad; she's at first reluctant to kill anybody, then comes to accept it, and by the end is basically taunting her hapless opponents while firing a grenade launcher at them.  When finally rescued she just sort of huddles under an emergency blanket.

And apparently she does go get some therapy, but her therapist is secretly working for the evil secret society that was behind everything all along, so I guess that's why it didn't work out so well.  But after her experiences on that island she's convinced that her disgraced father was really right about searching for immortality (although why the existence of a soul-surfing nature witch means that, I couldn't tell you) and goes on this quest hoping to find the Divine Source, which allegedly will grant immortality.  This quest leads her to Syria, where the secret society tries to kill her, and then on to remote Siberia, where the secret society tries to kill her again.

In the first game Lara wasn't looking for trouble and couldn't escape it once she found it.  Now she's going out of her way to enter what she knows will be a dangerous situation, and continues to say she "has to" do a bunch of really dangerous crap.  She doesn't!  She was free to take other options, or even just to leave.  By the time she's killing mercenaries by the dozen she never stops to reconsider her life choices or even consider taking another option.  And yes, the mercenaries are evil because they want to steal the artifact and are going around murdering everyone, while Lara makes allies with the locals.  But she's there to steal the same artifact as they are.  The Trinity people are just being more obnoxious about it.  Plus the narrative sort of has a lot of elements of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade about it, where it turns out that even if you can steal the Divine Source it might not do just a ton of good anyway - and it's guarded pretty well already, as it turns out.  Lara might have been worried about Trinity getting this thing but it's unlikely they would have been able to do so if she hadn't been there in the first place.  But the game isn't interested in you thinking about this.

Despite the griping, the game as a game is really well done.  Lara's very responsive, the scenery is fantastic.  Morality aside, I enjoyed the combat quite a bit, especially once I'd unlocked some of the better weapons and skill tree abilities.  There are some very fun optional tomb puzzles which require some lateral thinking and utilize the physics engine in interesting ways.  And there are a ton of optional things to collect and do if you're so inclined, including some extra sidequests and bonus challenges.  One of which is to take some pumpkins from a pumpkin patch and toss them into some strategically placed buckets as sort of a physics/basketball challenge.  Oddly, it was this one that really stood out as morally egregious, since it takes place in a village where Trinity massacred a bunch of innocent people.  And in fact their bodies are still strewn all over the place as a testament to Trinity's depravity.  Lara doesn't let a little thing like piles of corpses stop her from practicing her pumpkin-tossing abilities, though.  So really there's just an absolute disconnect between the game part of the game and the story part of the game.  (I tossed the pumpkins anyway, I'm a completionist.)

Further disconnect is the absolutely enormous stash of weaponry you collect over the course of the game.  Although Lara can only equip one weapon of each of four types at a given time, she's got tons of spares to swap out at campsites, as well as up to twenty different changes of clothes which give various combat/exploration bonuses.  Those do change her model in cutscenes which is a little jarring if she's wearing a deer skull as a hat and no one feels like this is maybe worth commenting on, or maybe questioning her sanity.

Actually, the deer skull hat thing comes from completing an optional DLC sidequest which is probably the high point of the whole game.  It's an absolutely gonzo section where you have to go through a forest full of hallucinogenic pollen in order to confront someone claiming to be the Baba Yaga.  Lara ends up having to complete an epic boss fight which involves jumping, fighting and puzzle solving while tripping balls the entire time.  None of it makes any sense but it's so gloriously excessive that it doesn't really need to.  I wish the whole game could have just been an excuse for great setpieces like this.  Another great setpiece occurs later in the game when you've got to fight about eight commandos in a smoke-filled room and you can use holes in the ice in the floor to pull them down one by one like an evil whack-a-mole.

AAA titles feel they need plots, but if they're going to ever get credit for greatness they can't be totally separate from the game.  Lara can't go around being all mopey and vulnerable at the same time she kills four to six hundred people, and the game itself can't completely call attention to the game elements at the same time it ignores all that in the supposed plot.  Plus it basically hits all the same thematic points at the same time the first game did, so it's sort of a remake of the reboot that they just did.

Still, I enjoyed most of it, even if I felt bad about knifing all those dudes in the back it was fun at the time.  I liked it enough that when Shadow of the Tomb Raider goes on sale in two or three years I'll no doubt pick it up then.  I just wish that they'd stop trying to shove the obvious depiction of a psychotic killer into the round hole of a journey of alleged self-discovery.

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway

In my review of Harkaway's debut novel The Gone-Away World, I compared it favorably to a bunch of SF absurdist and surrealist works, with the caveat that it wasn't for everybody.  Since then I've made sure to read all his output.  I also did a review of Tigerman, and generally liked Angelmaker without an official write-up of it - although in both cases I wasn't sure if they lived up to the promise displayed in Gone-Away World.  But a new work by Harkaway is cause for excitement, and I wasn't sure what I was going to get out of this.

Having read it, I still don't know if I'm entirely sure.  As it opens, we're introduced to the UK of about fifty years from now, where surveillance has become so ubiquitous and social media so intrusive that they're no longer considered distinct things.  Any citizen can learn just about anything about any other citizen with a simple online query, although of course the existence of the query is itself disclosable to anyone who asks.  You live in a fishbowl but so does absolutely everyone else.  As an upside there's next to no crime, since everything is recorded, and there's a benevolent search construct which monitors everything constantly - for safety and security, naturally.  And everyone is more or less happy and content with this situation, and if they're not happy then they can get adjusted until they are happy and content with it.  So far it sounds a lot like 1984 with more than a hint of Brave New World about it.

Anyhow, there's a woman named Diana Hunter who was into some sort of subversive stuff and she's brought in for an interrogation session, which means that they'll plug her in and literally read her thoughts over her protests.  They'll fix what's making her unhappy while they're at it.  And then the unthinkable happens - she dies under interrogation.  Enter investigator Mielikki Neith, since even a panopticon surveillance state can't see absolutely everything, and sometimes the human touch is required.  As an agent of the Witness, Neith is responsible for satisfying the general public that this event wasn't intentional or at least that if it was, those who did it are themselves called out.

You think it's that easy?  The first chapter outright tells you that the investigation will make her doubt everything she believes.  Which is certainly plausible, since she gets a whole bunch of Hunter's memories downloaded into her own mind to sort through, and then things get really weird.

I find myself hesitant to actually say much more about the actual plot of the book.  The comparison that I kept drawing as the book went on is actually the cult classic Illuminatus!, in that much of the pleasure of the book comes from the constant discovery that the authors are screwing with you, and that even when you know what kind of book you're dealing with, it just keeps happening.  There's nothing more trustworthy than some huckster telling you outright that the whole thing is a con, after all.  (There's also quite a bit of thematic similarity around the number 5 . . . coincidence?)

So, without specifics, let me mention a couple of high points.  It's clear from a reading of Harkaway's work that he is very intrigued by the notion of bad things which happen without any specific evil intent on the part of anyone, and he heavily advocates for people to stand up and be counted, even when it's maybe not in their own personal interests to do so.  There's a lot of that here.  And he's also deeply affronted at the idea that procedural and democratic safeguards are to be set aside in the name of safety and exigency.  There's something freeing about reading a good writer really, incandescently pissed off about morally offensive things.

Unfortunately it's not perfect.  I felt that it took a while to really get going.  Neith encounters a villainous figure in the first chapter who engages in frankly preposterous dialog, and that individual continues to do so whenever encountered.  In fact, I wasn't hooked until about halfway though the third chapter, which isn't an unforgivable failure in such a large work but might be a dealbreaker for someone who wasn't already predisposed to give it a chance.  And there are many, many different narrative threads without immediately obvious connections going on there for a while.  All that said, once I did get through the third chapter, I found myself actually really quite absorbed in the story to an extent that I don't normally get, so good on him.  He even manages to mostly stick the landing, although I'm still mulling over the last chapter.

All in all, it's a very solid effort and a good way to kick off 2018.  I'm finding it sticking with me and although I don't know if it'll be an all-time favorite, I think it's going to be at least significant for me.  If you liked any of Harkaway's previous novels, you'll probably like this one, and it's sufficiently different and weird to not be a retread of any of them.  If you want a story that combines Brexit, Facebook, Gamergate, global economic meltdown and a post-Singularity gestalt consciousness, you'll not be disappointed.  If you didn't like Illuminatus! or don't like the absurd, maybe this isn't for you.