H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu by Gou Tanabe

Gou Tanabe is a manga-ka whose work has largely been adaptations of literary works - with a particular line in adapting H.P. Lovecraft stories. He's put out a fairly long shelf of work, but I can only speak to his two-volume version of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, which I read a few years ago.

Tanabe - in this edition, supported by Zack Davisson (translation), Steve Dutro (lettering and touchup) and Carl Gustav Horn (editor) - is, from what I've seen, a very faithful adaptor of the stories he chooses. He picks up large chunks of the original author's prose and runs those as large captions, floating over his pages, occasionally for several pages at a time. He also replicates the structure of those stories, at least in the Lovecraft works I've seen, which is particularly notable since Lovecraft tended to use a multi-section, fake-document style in his major works, and Tanabe closely follows that.

H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu - the Tanabe adaptation, I mean; the original short story is from 1928 - was published in Japan in book form in 2019, and this English translation followed in the fall of 2024. And it does adapt the underlying story very, very closely, turning a thirty-some page story into about two hundred and fifty pages of comics. The only thing I could think to complain about is that the main character, Francis, looks a lot more like Elric - very pale, thin face, stringy collar-length hair - than I think Lovecraft would have been comfortable with.

Tanabe's backgrounds and objects are hyper-detailed, especially the horrific visions - he's an artist who clearly delights in the monstrous and hideous, crafting his images of Cthulhu, cyclopean ruins, and the like with great care and to strong effect. His people are slightly less detailed, though still well into the realistic side of manga art styles - and he gives his people distinct faces here, something American readers don't always find the case with manga.

Do I need to describe the Lovecraft story? It's, like a lot of Lovecraft, one of the world's creepiest document reviews, as Francis gathers and annotates several statements by other people - all of whom, spoiler alert! - are dead because of the horrific things they witnessed, which slowly reveal to the reader the by-now well-known Lovecraft view of the universe: humans are small and unimportant; beings of far greater power and scope used to rule, and will come back "when the stars are right;" understanding humanity's very small and temporary place in the universe almost inevitably leads to a mental breakdown if not immediate death.

This story was one of the earliest crystallizations of that idea, the story where all of Lovecraft's ideas melded into the final form that he would work out in a series of stories over the next nearly twenty years. And Tanabe's adaptation of it does justice to Lovecraft's "unspeakable, unnamable" language - Tanabe is excellent at drawing gigantic, shadowed, horrific, bizarre creatures that both seem real on the page and yet are impossible. This is a fine adaptation of a major horror story; I'd recommend having a familiarity with the original story first, but anyone interested in a Lovecraft adaptation will have that arlready.

Free Pass by Julian Hanshaw

Comics are about sex less often than most artforms. Call it a lingering prudishness, the hangover from long decades seen as a medium just for kids, or just the fact that drawn sex is inherently a bit more fleshy than the written kind. But it's true: comics avoid sex a lot of the time, and often only wink when they come close to that territory.

Free Pass, Julian Hanshaw's 2022 graphic novel, isn't winking. Hanshaw avoids drawing the nitty-gritty of sex most of the time, or obscures it, but this is a book about one couple and their sex life - and they're young and reasonably energetic. And...but then, I'll get into the plot in a moment.

The book opens with the couple - Huck and Nadia, young British tech workers who are maybe thirty, maybe a few years one side or the other of that - talking sex, while we see their house from outside, porno movies playing on a big screen we can see through a sliding door. They're discussing having sex with other people, we come to realize, possibly partner swapping. They haven't done it yet, but they're both intrigued, and running through the other couples they know, the times they wonder if it might have happened, and what comes next.

Eventually, they decide to make "Free Pass" lists - five celebrities for each of them, people they could have sex with guilt- and consequence-free if it somehow happened. We see Huck making his list over the next few days - the book mostly follows him, mostly lets us understand what's in his head - in his job at a tech company, Abrazo.

They both work at Abrazo, which is mostly a fictionalized Facebook: big, all-encompassing, dominant. Nadia is a programmer; we don't see a lot of what she does, but she's more technical, more specifically skilled, than Huck is. Huck is on a moderation team, maybe a low-level supervisor there. We don't see the things he moderates, just the complaints about them, and something of the internal Abrazo double-speak about what they get rid of and what they don't.

Frankly, I think Hanshaw has a specific political point here, and it's a bit opaque to me. In the US, especially now, three years later, what we saw the big tech companies trying to do with moderation was largely getting rid of the worst of the worst: hate speech, death threats, attacks on people with racial and sexually-charged language. The complaint with that approach was that they tended to censor right-wing voices - the unspoken underpinning was that the right wing was deeply hateful, sexist and racist, but that they saw that as a good thing and wanted free rein to spew their anger and vitriol everywhere, to yell as loudly as they could and take over any spaces they could drive other people out of. I'm pretty sure Hanshaw isn't saying he's in favor of that, but, from a US perspective in 2025, I'm not sure what else he means. Maybe it's some more lefty flavor of Abrazo being too chummy with the government, and getting rid of anything against their interests.

Because, you see, there's an election coming up. The candidates are fictional, and we don't know what parties they represent. But there's a "four more years" person (Libby) and a "change it all" person (Maynard) - which I think codes them as Tory and Labour, respectively. The book is organized by the days until the election: we start a little more than two weeks out. But, like Abrazo's moderation decisions, any actual political policies are presented in coded, nonspecific terms - so I think what it means is clearer if you're British, particularly if you are British and it is 2022, looking towards the general election that eventually happened in 2024.

The election itself is mostly background, but Abrazo's moderation decisions are a huge part of Huck's day, and a source of stress to him. He's listening to podcasts from "the other side" - I think Hanshaw means people like the EFF, free-internet types, rather than Nigel Farage and the kick-out-the-foreigners crowd - which some of his co-workers look askance at. He's also a bit awkward, in that tech-guy way, and for a while I wondered if he was meant to be seen as incel-adjacent, as having picked up some of those thoughts and ideas despite being in an on-going successful relationship.

That's all swirling around, when Huck gets a new product to test - from Ali, the male half of the couple he and Nadia hit upon as the perfect choices for their first swinging experience in the first scene. It's an AI sex robot, Ali says. It comes in a big box; it's a blank humanoid form that has a tablet to control it. On that tablet is a menu of people, men and women, and the user can choose who the robot turns into. And, of course, the robot is a wonderful, perfect, lover, in that time-honored way that traces back to at least Tanith Lee's Silver Metal Lover (or maybe Barbarella, or even, if you accept much more winking and hinting, "Helen O'Loy").

Many stories with a sex robot like that would be about jealousy, about a break-up, but Huck and Nadia are enthusiastic and experimental and geeky, and they take to their new fuck-buddy like fish to water. Hanshaw presents this imagistically, but I think it's mostly "turn it into a man for you, and then into a woman for me," with maybe some three-way fun along the way. But they have a lot of sex - even more so once Nadia realizes she can mildly hack the tablet and turn the robot into anyone, not just the hardcoded choices. They spend something like a week just fucking celebrity simulacra, and seem to be fantastically happy at it, if maybe a bit sore and tired by the end.

But, meanwhile, Nadia has been interviewing with a newer tech company, Hapus, which promises to be more responsive and independent. They specifically do not moderate in the way that's problematic with Abrazo, whatever that's meant to be. She gets the job, and Huck is supportive, but maybe not entirely happy - because she might be moving away from him or because he feels guilty about what he does for Abrazo, or both.

Huck and Nadia actually call out sick from work for several days for their fuck-fest, which is yet another element that leads to a confrontation between Ali and Huck. They give back the sex robot, and the election happens.

I think we're meant to guess who won; Hanshaw doesn't say. The last section jumps ahead a year: Nadia is happily working for Hapus, Huck is running for a local political office, and the sex robots are rolling out broadly. I think it's meant to be a happy ending, but I don't know what party Huck is standing for or what his platform is, and ubiquitous easily-hackable sex robots might not be the most stabilizing element to add into a society. So maybe ambiguously happy.

Hanshaw has a fairly lumpy way of drawing people, which is surprisingly excellent for this story: his people are real and flawed, not porn models. Huck and Nadia look like relatively fit, fairly young, absolutely normal people, and even the sex robot doesn't come across as pure pneumatic distilled sex, just another body with which they can have fun.

And Free Pass is absolutely packed with ideas and thoughts - about sex, relationships, online discourse, how to think about governments - mostly posed in non-specific, non-partisan ways, so it doesn't trip anyone's propaganda detectors. It's a fun, quirky, mostly positive book about a couple who have a lot of sex with a sex robot and come out of it (and associated events) with a stronger relationship.

The Pnume by Jack Vance

I've somewhat run out over my skis, here - I'm typing this post on the fourth of the four "Planet of Adventure" novels by Jack Vance before my post on the third book, The Dirdir, publishes. But I can link you to the first two: City of the Chasch and Servants of the Wankh.

The Pnume ends the series. I'll try not to repeat myself too much, but it began with an exploratory starship from Earth arriving at the planet Tschai, circling the star Carina 4269. An attack from the planet killed all but one of the crew. Adam Reith crash-landed on the planet, and the series is his story, as he learns about the various alien races living there - it had been invaded, over and over, for millennia, and currently has three invader races somewhat squabbling with each other and watched by the original inhabitants, the Pnume.

Gersen wants to get off Tschai and back to Earth. For the usual reasons, of course, but also to warn the unnamed spacefaring organization to which he belongs about the threat from the various races of Tschai. As Pnume opens, he's nearly ready - the plan to build a starship from The Dirdir is almost complete. But there is some treachery from the merchant who already betrayed him once near the end of Dirdir, and Reith is kidnaped, tossed into a sack and spirited away into the underground tunnels inhabited by the Pnume.

Well, he's run through the three main invader races already, so surely he has to have encounters with the aboriginals before he can finally make it off-planet, right?

Reith, as usual the hyper-competent Earthman of his era of SF, quickly escapes captivity, but getting back to the surface will be a more difficult task. He gains the aid of a "girl" - a young human woman of the Pnumekin, the human slaves/servants/undercaste - and drags her along with him as a guide. She eventually gets a name, which is not typical for Pnumekin, when Reith starts calling her Zap 210 based on her Pnume designation.

The two travel extensively through Pnume tunnels to find an exit, and then have a similarly danger-packed journey aboveground to get back to the city where Reith and his allies were building the ship. Human servants of the Pnume do chase them, of course, but, obviously, a 1960s adventure SF novel series ends with the hero succeeding at everything and taking his new girl off with him away from the alien world.

And so he does.

This series isn't exactly minor Vance - it's from his most productive era, and is full of inventive touches, fine scenes, and thoughtful descriptions - but it is very much an adventure story, told quickly and mostly straightforwardly, following a well-worn path. It's a decent introduction to Vance, but doesn't showcase the things he does best, or that are more particular to his work. Still, the whole series is available in a single volume, which is nice and convenient.

The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe

I read Gene Wolfe's most successful series, The Book of the New Sun, what I think of as "recently" - though now I see it was six years ago. (The tempus, it do fugit, don't it?) I'd expected to get to this odd sequel "soon," and I guess this counts.

Book was a four-book series that told one continuous story; it was one work in multiple volumes, and has been reprinted in a single volume more than once since then. The Urth of the New Sun was a single novel, slightly longer than the constituent parts of Book, originally published about five years after the end of Book. But - and here I should point out that there's always something quirky about a Wolfe project, often multiple things - the quirky thing about Urth, or one of them, is that it too tends to fall into four distinct sections.

The narrator and hero of Book, Severian - once an apprentice torturer, now Autarch of the most extensive country on his very far-future Earth - spends Urth in a journey to save his planet, that very old-SF hero's journey. Urth starts on a vast starship - made of wood, with immense solar sails, for maximum Wolfean past-as-future frisson - then moves to the planet Yesod in another universe (or perhaps the universe is named Yesod; Wolfe is rarely interested in being clear) where Severian is tested, and then there's a voyage back on the same ship and a final section on Urth.

There's quite a lot of vaguely described time travel along the way: this unnamed ship voyages in both time and space, so the back half of the novel in particular bounces through multiple time periods of Earth/Urth - and, if you follow Wolfe, also Ushas, the new name of the planet once it is "saved."

To put what Wolfe says vaguely in fantasy-coded language into something more clearly science-fictional: it is very far in the future and the Sun is very old and dim. Other stars are visible during the day; winters get longer and colder almost year-by-year. The Sun's collapse is imminent enough to be plausible within a human timescale. Godlike beings - possibly AI, possibly a bio-engineered race - created by the human-like inhabitants of the previous universe (time-travel, remember, and a Penrosian cyclical universe model) are willing to drop a white hole into the Sun, which would rejuvenate it.

But they will only do so if the leader of Urth comes to their planet and goes through a test - at least one Autarch before Severian has taken that journey and failed. Testing leaders of planets seems to be their major industry; we see, from the air, a vast archipelago of islands, each one devoted to testing the leaders of one particular galaxy. And dropping the "white fountain" into the Sun will massively disrupt the current Urth, killing possibly a majority of the people living there. There's no hint of trying to warn them or create bulwarks against the rising seas, despite the fact that the journey of the white hole into the Sun takes at least centuries. Wolfe, as always, has a devout right-wing Catholic's disdain for mere individual human lives.

As usual in a Wolfe novel, the main character is confused and ill-informed, despite insisting repeatedly that he's super-competent and (in this particular case) that he never forgets anything. There are long conversations about the nature of reality and the SFnal underpinnings of this world, all very carefully phrased in such a way such that that none of it is clear to the reader in terms that reader already knows. That's how Wolfe works: if you're not willing to do most of the work yourself - if you don't think of a SF novel as a combination of a British crossword and an acrostic - Wolfe is not the writer for you.

In this novel in particular, most of the charms and interest are in getting additional details about characters and events from Book - but, again, all couched in Wolfean triple-reverse terms, at best allusive and often just gestures in the direction a solution might, possibly, be deduced if you think about everything in the world exactly the way Wolfe did circa 1986.

It's full of interesting moments and arresting images; for all my snark, this is actually on the accessible side of Wolfe's corpus. It would help if you had read, or even better intensely studied Book of the New Sun very soon before reading Urth, but it's not, strictly speaking, necessary. There is a novel here, with characters and events, and Wolfe, at this point in his career, would connect those events into a consistent plot that could be followed with only a normal amount of attention.

Urth is not the triumph Book was; there are multiple times when it threatens to become even more of a Christian allegory than it already is, and it's inherently a secondary, derivative work to begin with, a book explaining how something we knew would happen did happen. But it's a solid, deeply inventive book by one of the best and most distinctive SF writers of his era, and a return to his best-loved and most popular world.

The Dirdir by Jack Vance

The Dirdir is the third of the four "Tschai" novels [1], telling the continuous story of an Earthman named Adam Reith who landed on that planet, the sole survivor of an exploration vessel, and his attempts to get  off it and tell his superiors back home about this big world filled with hostile aliens.

I say "hostile," but they're not actually hostile to Earth. As far as Reith and the reader knows, they don't even know Earth exists. And they're only intermittently - albeit intermittently over the past several thousand years, which shows some serious stubbornness - hostile to each other. But the three intelligent alien races that successively invaded this planet, long ago - the Chasch, the Wankh, and the Dirdir - all have enslaved or indoctrinated then selectively bred humans to serve them, so one or more of them did have contact with Earth, some time in the dim past. And the three races from off-planet presumably still exist in their original spacefaring polities, somewhere out there, too.

This is all set in the medium future, probably early in the expansion of Vance's Oikumene or Gaean Reach universe - I believe there are arguments that those are, or are not, in the same timeline, and I take no position on the matter here - in the usual mid-century SF future, full of strong men in metal phalluses proudly thrusting into the void with minimal computational power and maximum gumption. Vance, as always, has a more sophisticated and complex version of that concept, but this series is still towards the basic-adventure level, all about This One Guy, the adventures of his smart brain and mighty thews, and how he wins out for Earthmen in the end. (And it is all "men," it's that era of SF so the word "human" is used rarely if ever and women are furniture or plot tokens or background details most of the time.)

The first two books were City of the Chasch, in which Reith recuperated from the crash, gathered a couple of unlikely allies, and made his first attempt to get a spaceship; and Servants of the Wankh, in which he and those allies ventured to the other side of the world to return a "princess" in hopes her people would help with the spaceship, and then instead tried to steal a ship from another alien race.

Reith is still trying to get a spaceship, and, this time around, he figures he can more or less buy one, at the Dirdir shipyards in their city of Hei. This is, of course, back in the other hemisphere - but far south - so Reith and team have to undertake a long journey, though it doesn't take as much time in this book as the similar trip did in Wankh. Reith plans a high-risk but ironically satisfying way of amassing the funds to cover ship construction, then heads to the Dirdirman city near Hei and enlists a shady businessman to do the actual (probably illegal) construction. That does not go to plan, for mostly shady-businessman reasons, but Reith does end the novel in possession of both a half-built ship and that shady businessman to complete it.

Don't read this book as a standalone; it would probably work that way - Vance is crisp and descriptive, and the plot is not overly complex - but you would be coming in very much in the middle. All four novels are short and zippy, in that mid-century adventure-SF style, enlivened by Vance's clear-eyed descriptions and wry thoughts along the way. This is Vance in mostly restrained, straightforward mode, so the series as a whole is a decent introduction to Vance for anyone who likes SF adventure. 

[1] All four are available in the omnibus Planet of Adventure, which is how I'm reading them. I recommend it.

Servants of the Wankh by Jack Vance

This book, in recent years, has tended to be published as The Wannek, and the Vance estate likes to pretend that we never pronounced the alien race in the title as it was spelled for almost fifty years. But the edition I have - the Tor '90s omnibus Planet of Adventure, still available and my recommendation as the best way to read this series - proudly lists the second included novel as Servants of the Wankh, as it had been since the novel was first published in 1969.

So that's the title I will use, and if there are any snickering '60s British schoolboys about, well, I guess good for them for keeping their essential youth all these years later.

The overall Tschai series comprises four novels, published quickly from 1968 to 1970, telling a continuous story about Earthman Adam Reith on that planet, where four alien races and the human sub-species they have enslaved and/or co-opted and/or bred over hundreds of generations have been fighting, mostly in a low-key, occasional way, for thousands of years. The first one was City of the Chasch, where Reith was the sole survivor of a Earth expedition to this alien system. From about the middle of that book, Reith has been trying to obtain a spaceship any way he can, so he can warn his people that this planet exists and has a previously-unknown population of these various kinds of humans. And, of course, also the four alien races, two of them spacefaring and all moderately hostile to each other and at least potentially hostile to Earth.

Servants of the Wankh is, if you think of the overall Tschai series as a cruise-ship company, the repositioning cruise. Chasch took place on one continent, but Reith and his compatriots - he's gathered a couple of allies from different human sub-species on this planet in the first book, plus a not-exactly-princess he rescued and was taking home - are off to a major human city on another continent, on the other side of the planet. Most of the book is travel, which is pleasant and works to a lot of Vance's strengths - random moments, interesting cultural tidbits, local color, descriptions of scenery and types of people - but may be unexpected for people reading a four-book series with "Adventure" prominently in the title.

The plan is to return that "princess" - Ylin-Ylan, the Flower of Cath - to her home city of Cath, on the coast of the Charchan continent, where her noble father will, Reith hopes, be gratified enough to help Reith find or build a starship. Cath was the source of a signal sent out into space about a hundred and fifty years ago, so this hope has some factual backing behind it. They first set out in an air-car, hoping to zip across a mountain range, cross a narrow northern strait to Charchan and then zip down the coast to Cath. But the air-car is old and in bad repair, so they have to divert south and take ship on a much longer and more complicated journey across the Draschade Ocean.

Ylin-Ylan's father had sent out various envoys to find his missing daughter - or, rather, publicized that he would grant a boon to whoever did so, causing a bunch of the usual young and plucky sons of the nobility to set off to adventure in quest of her. One of them, Dordolio, meets them in the port, and they take ship together. Dordolio's plans for reuniting Ylin-Ylan with her father do not entirely correspond with Reith's, unfortunately, and Ylin-Ylan, now that rescue is closer, starts to be concerned about everything that has happened to her and what her place will be in society once she returns.

Cath is one of those complex Vancean societies, full of social pitfalls and things that are never said and tight strictures on everything - the kind full of pressures that burst out, not all that uncommonly, with Cathites launching a violent spree called awaile. During the long sea voyage, Dordolio tries to provoke Reith into fighting, Ylin-Ylan sinks into a depression, and then it all blows up.

(There are other events and characters as well - this book is somewhat a travelogue - but that's the main plot, and what connects to the rest of the series.)

Reith and company - what's left of it - does arrive in Cath, and does get caught up in more scheming there. Reith gathers a crew of human workers, and has a plausible scheme to steal a Wankh spaceship, which fails for reasons outside his control and leaves his band in the hands of the Wankhmen. I suppose it's not a spoiler to say that the hero manages to get away from them in this, the second of four books: he does. And he ends with a better sense of more parts of Tschai society, the satisfaction of having disrupted the society of a second alien race, and his health undamaged - but he's not any closer to having a ship to get off this planet.

Good thing there are two novels left!

This is a short book, and very much a middle one. It also has, as I said, essentially a travelogue plot, without as much of the action that readers may want in a late-60s paperback SF book. On the other hand, it's deeply Vancean, deeply entertaining, and full of lovely moments and descriptions. If you like Vance, read this whole series, and hit this one in the middle. If you like Vance in travelogue mode - there may be people like that - this is a good short example of his strengths in that area, and it works outside the series context on that level.

My Time Machine by Carol Lay

Comics take time to make, and come out at moments in time - that's the same as any media product, obviously. But comics often take longer, and the method of creation means they're harder to change, late in the creation, than a prose book would be.

Carol Lay is ambivalent about the future in My Time Machine. I don't want to say it's a lucky ambivalence - it's probably built in, from the beginning, as she thought about the story she wanted to tell - but I think she conceptualized this book starting right around the 2020 election and it was published a couple of weeks before the 2024 election, which obviously foretell very different futures.

So, as I said, the dark aspects of the future her time traveler sees in My Time Machine may seem even more likely now than they did even a few months ago.

Lay's protagonist is unnamed, a woman in her sixties, some kind of artist or creator, living in Sacramento. It's Lay herself: the book doesn't say that explicitly, but we know it. It's very much like her self-insert character in her Story Minute/Way Lay strips. The book is set in the modern day, starting in 2016 and running - aside from the time travel - through 2020.

In this world, Wells's Time Traveler was real, and his time-machine plans come into the narrator's hands, over a hundred years later. She gives them to her ex, Rob, a physics professor at Stanford, who gets obsessed and spends the next few years building a working, advanced version of the machine.

This is the story of her journey, alone in that machine, roughly following the outline of the original Traveler. She jumps to 2035 to see the near future, then in quick steps of five or ten years, then to 802,701 AD, to see if there are Morlocks and Eloi, and finally to 30,002,020 AD, to see the end.

Our narrator is most concerned with climate change; her stated purpose is to bring back proof of how the world will be devastated, which somehow she hopes to leverage to change things in her modern day. She and Rob discuss this, and neither is particularly optimistic - or has a half-plausible mechanism for actually changing things - but she wants to see the future, she assumes a warming Earth will destroy everything, and she wants to accomplish something, so this is her goal.

It doesn't quite work out that way. The 2035 she finds is a dystopian nightmare of pervasive surveillance, collapsing food-production, climate refugees, and dictatorial government. It's also almost the last time she sees human beings at all.

Jumping forward, she sees her surroundings change, burned out by the warming planet, and then somewhat recover when she hits 800k AD. But there is a hostile element in that era - which I won't spoil - and she has to flee that world, as well.

Eventually - well, the book starts at this moment, so more than eventually - she's thirty million years in the future, looking out at a once-again-dead world, dealing with a balky time machine. Will she make it back to 2020 to report on what she saw? That's the story here: you need to read it to find out.

I always like Lay's art - she's a bit less spiky than usual here, with full-color and full pages surrounding her people, so it's not quite as Lay-like as I expected. (I feel like the Story Minute years were the purest Lay drawings, all pointy jaws and spiky hands and stark black-and-white.) And I'm roughly in sympathy with her (not overt, but clear) political concerns here as well. Any time-travel story is always, paradoxically, intensely about the cultural moment when it's created, and this is no exception. This is a good one, with a clear, distinct take on the outlines of the original Wells story.

City of the Chasch by Jack Vance

I've been re-reading Jack Vance books the past year or two - first the Dying Earth series, then the Demon Princes. I am vaguely lazy in this endeavor, so I've been picking things available in convenient omnibus editions. And that meant next I found the Planet of Adventure compendium, and read the 1968 first book in that series, City of the Chasch.

This is from the same era as the first Demon Princes books, but substantially less ambitious. That assumes it makes sense to talk about ambition when all of the book were disposable mass-market paperbacks published by the same small group of houses, at basically the same length, to the same audience. The Tschai books are old-school planetary adventure - and I mean they were already old-school in 1968, when Vance wrote this one. It was a solid armature for a traditional story, which Vance tells with verve and energy but doesn't get into the depth he does in Demon Princes.

Adam Reith is a scout on the starship Explorator IV. This is probably the same universe as most of Vance's SF, but it feels fairly early in the timeline - maybe before the full Oikumene is settled - because the focus is on this ship being from Earth. Because Reith and his partner had just cast off in their space-boat to explore the planet Tschai, he was the sole survivor of the expedition when missiles from the planet destroyed the ship and sent the boat crash-landing on the planet.

He soon learns that Tschai is home to four alien races - the native Pnume and the successive invaders Chasch, Wankh, and Dirdir - who have been warring for tens of thousands of years. Each of the invaders also has a caste of humans - this is the 1960s, so Vance always calls them "men" - somewhat transformed through long-term breeding programs to be more like their alien masters. They have at least a minor capacity for space travel - the invaders obviously came from other planets, once upon a time - but the low-level war seems to have kept the planet mostly stagnant for long eras, a place where small wars or sudden devastating attacks could pop up at any moment and destroy entire cities.

The series is about how Adam Reith, the mightily-thewed Earthman, tackles each of the alien races in turn, defeats them with the power of his Terranness and wit and prowess, and gives the oppressed human peoples of Tschai a vision of how they could live free from alien shackles and be reunited with the main course of humanity.

Reith starts this book with a whole bunch of injuries from the crash-landing, and gets lucky by being discovered by a tribe of non-alien-affiliated tribesmen. He befriends the chief of the tribe, Traz, retrieves some of his survival gear from the crash, upends the social structure of this tribe, and runs away with Traz, hoping to find where the Chasch have taken his space-boat.

He learns that the Chasch are divided, like Gaul, into three: the civilized Old Chasch and Blue Chasch, who are also eternally at war with reach other, and were two separate waves of invaders back in the mists of prehistory, and the Green Chasch, nomadic bands of telepathic semi-barbarians who are purely a force of destruction.

Reith and Traz save the Dirdirman Anacho - one of the human subject to the Dirdir and resembling their masters - on the way, and then join a human caravan, where Reith discovers a beautiful woman, held captive by the Priestesses of the Female Mystery and to be taken to their templet for a presumably-horrible fate. The woman turns out to have a bewildering array of names, but we can call her Ylin-Ylan.

Reith saves Ylin-Ylan from her horrible fate - two or three times, as I recall; the Priestesses are pretty determined - and all four make it to Pera, a human settlement in a ruined old Chasch city. Nearby is the current Chasch city of Dadiche, where Reith's locator tells him the space-boat is. 

Reith tries to be sneaky and reconnoiter the space-boat; that does not go well. (He also, almost incidentally, overthrows the tyrannical human leaders of Pera, and unexpectedly is himself installed as the new leader, because he has to save Ylin-Ylan once again.) The Chasch attack Pera, but Reith, now in charge of a militia he organized, takes advantage of their contempt for humans to trick and defeat them, eventually leading an attack that murders pretty much every Chasch in Dadiche, and a large number of the Chaschmen (presumably including Chaschwomen and Chaschchildren).

And the book basically stops there: Reith has the scout-boat, but it's been gutted. He can't use it to get back to Earth; even the comms equipment is gone. The story, obviously, pick right back up in the second book - good thing for modern readers that all four were published quickly more than fifty years ago.

This is Vance in adventure-story mode; it doesn't have the languidness of his better work, or the in-universe quotes that open chapters in many of his later books. Vance is good at adventure stories, and is here, as ever, interested in quirky societies and the many ways humans can be turned into slightly different sub-groups. His writing is quick and energetic, and his language not as baroque as it gets in the books I would call his best. So it's a solid but not really typical Vance book - this series could serve as a good introduction to Vance for readers more used to straightforward adventure stories, in particular.

Starter Villain by John Scalzi

This is a short, funny, inoffensive novel by one of the biggest bestsellers in SF today: it does everything it sets out to do, does that well, and has delighted the author's many fans in the year since it was published. It's light SF adventure, humorous division, of the "what if <insert standard media trope> was actually real, and a normal guy fell into that world?" type.

I intermittently read books like this - just days before it, I hit Tom Holt's Barking, which is a fantasy version of exactly the same thing - and I struggle to say anything interesting about them. I find myself dragged between the opposite poles of pointing out how silly and referential those books are - which is the point of the exercise, and I know that - and just pointing and saying "if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you'll like," which is deeply unhelpful.

Anyway: Starter Villain, by John Scalzi. It's got a cat on the cover! Cats are important in the book as well, in what I don't actually think was a cynical play for the famously cat-loving SF audience.

Charlie Fitzer is the usual protagonist for novels like this: early thirties, with one career (business journalism) and one marriage (heterosexual, of course) in ruins behind him, living somewhere comfortable that might not be good for him (his childhood home in Barrington, Illinois, after the death of his father), stuck and sad-sack and beaten down by the world. He wants to buy the local pub, as a random next thing to do in his life, but it costs over three million dollars and his only major asset is one-quarter of the house he's living in and not consistently paying his bills for. So the local bank is friendly but not particularly encouraging.

But his uncle Jake Baldwin - only sibling of his mother, who died when he was five - his just died. Uncle Jake, as far as the world knows, owned a large collection of parking garages across the Midwest, and was considered to be a billionaire. (Charlie, since he is a Nice Guy - or maybe just dense - doesn't immediately think, "Hey, I'm possibly the only living relative of a dead billionaire, so there's probably a way I can pry at least some cash loose from his estate, and I might even be an, or even the, heir.")

Luckily, Charlie doesn't have to do anything to chase that estate - because he's not the kind of guy who ever would. Uncle Jake has actually already left something to Charlie, and it turns out to be bigger and messier than "to my darling nephew, I leave the Dyna-Top Parking Complex of Boise and all its revenues," which is what a slightly smarter Charlie might have anticipated.

Uncle Jake, as the title of this novel implies, was a supervillain. Volcano lair in the Caribbean, giant satellite-killing lasers, intelligent spy cats, private bank stuffed with trillions, fiendish plots worldwide - that whole deal. And Charlie - this is before he learns the supervillain thing; I'm condensing for simplicity - is asked to run his funeral in Barrington. Charlie does, and sees a large number of clearly minion-coded thugs arrive, not actually mourn the deceased, and make sure Jake is actually dead. Charlie has to stop one of them from stabbing the corpse, actually, in the first of several very important random events in the novel, all arising from Charlie's immediate reactions to unexpected, usually violent, situations.

(The moral of Starter Villain, if I may be so bold, is "Good Guys will do the right thing automatically, and will be rewarded for it." It's downright medieval when you think about it.)

So Charlie learns about the supervillain thing, is whisked off to the secret lair, gets a whirlwind tour of same and a quick precis of Uncle Jake's vast shadowy holdings and business interests, and then jets off to a conclave of supervillains at a fancy Italian resort. (This is a short, zippy novel full of quips - the plot has to happen at speed, and it does.)

Things escalate from there, as they must, but Charlie several times instinctively does the Right Thing when confronted with sudden violence or other surprises - the Right Thing as defined by Scalzi, of course, being generally nice and positive and pro-humanity, including caring for cats and being in favor of union organizing - which means he is victorious in the end, almost in spite of himself.

I won't spoil that ending, but I will note that I don't expect any direct sequels, which is mildly disappointing. Scalzi set up a world that he could have spun out for more than one book if he wanted to, and then basically blew it up, at least as far as Charlie goes. I also don't believe one element of the very last chapter for a second, but this is a book for cat-lovers, and they will eat that up.

So this is a fun book that does amusing things with a neat and not over-used premise; it's very good for this sort of thing. This sort of thing may seem pretty small to many readers, and it kinda is, but, at this point in my life, I don't discount the power of a funny, short book that hits exactly the goals it has for itself and entertains readers just the way it plans to. 

Space Junk by Julian Hanshaw

I suspected Julian Hanshaw was British - even in a SF story, there's details of phrasing and character interactions that are culturally distinct - and I see now I was right. I also see Hanshaw has been making graphic novels for more than a decade, and I've somehow completely failed to notice his work, so perhaps I shouldn't be lauding my amazing powers of perception here.

Space Junk was Hanshaw's new book this year; it came out a few months ago, from the excellent Top Shelf line (which is why I noticed it to begin with, actually). It follows about half a dozen solo books and some collaborative and shorter work, none of which (see above) I'm going to be able to contextualize or compare.

But this book is an interesting thing: the kind of soft SF that's more about the vibe than the world-building, with some frankly woo-woo fantastic elements and a world that doesn't actually make sense if you sit down and think about it in any detail.

We don't see anything like a government, just the Mondo Corp, which runs an extensive mining operation on this unnamed planet, sometime in the medium future. Mondo's operating plan is to hit a world, build what looks like a pretty extensive city, extract a bunch of minerals for a decade or so, and then pack the whole thing off to another planet. Even quirkier, the corporation seems to be organized generationally, with children explicitly part of the workforce but working under their own parents - and operations seem to leave from the top down, so we're now at the point where the population here is mostly unsupervised teenagers, with a few adults left.

This obviously doesn't make much sense in SFnal terms: to make only the first complaint, planets are big and one city-sized operation can no more exhaust the useful mineral wealth of an entire planet in a few years than a mosquito can drain the blood of an elephant. But of course, this is more of a metaphor than an actual world to be taken literally: Hanshaw wants all of that waste and pointlessness, alongside the forced conformity and infantilizing happy-talk of Mondo. This is late capitalism, as seen by alienated, troubled teens: stupid, pointless, broken, something to be ignored or escaped.

There are two main characters: Faith, who has a piece of metal in her head after a childhood accident that her gambling-obsessed parents were too cheap to fix correctly with something flesh-toned, and Hoshi, who has an anger-management problem and an obsession with chickens. Both of them are seeing their required counselor, Pieter Uzmaki, who seems to be trying his best to help them and to actually be decently good at his job and committed to it. There's also a horrible kid, Steve, leader of a group of bullies, who torments both of our heroes and generally causes trouble.

(For a satire of capitalism, Space Junk is surprisingly low-key and easy-going. Mondo is wasteful, but never seems evil, and even middle-management is entirely missing here. There's no company-town shenanigans to keep everyone indebted, invasive surveillance, obviously dangerous cost-cutting, or destruction of native life. The villainy comes from one person, another one of the kids.)

Everyone is obviously supposed to leave. They all have specific shuttles they're booked onto: Faith, Hoshi, and Pieter are all scheduled for the very last one. And, as these last few days are going on, more and more of their surroundings - movie theaters, convenience stores, and so on - are bodily picked up and shoved onto other ships to be sent off to the next planet.

(Again: super-wasteful and ridiculous from a cost-benefit perspective. But metaphorically resonant.)

Faith and Hoshi both don't want to leave, for slightly different reasons. Pieter, we think, is a solid company man, and will leave - he does seem to be trying to help them both come to terms with leaving, and accept the next steps in their lives.

But the reader knows they won't leave: that's the story. They'll meet each other, find common ground, evade the schemes of Steve, and stay behind in the ruins of their childhoods. The fantastic elements come into that, and I won't spoil them, but they are goofy and very soft-SF, while also amping up that central metaphor Hanshaw wants.

This is a thoughtful, interesting book, good at showing character and nuance and self-assured of its metaphorical material. As an old SF hand, I found parts of it difficult to take seriously, but that's on me: this is the kind of book where you grant the premises. And, if you can do that, it has a lot of depth and leaves you with a fine experience in the end.

Anthropocene Rag by Alex Irvine

I used to be able to do cast-offs, a quick calculation to estimate how many words are in a manuscript or published book. I could probably figure it out - everything is on the Internet, so I'm sure someone has explained the numbers somewhere - but it's mostly dropped out of memory from years of disuse.

I say that because Old Me would have done that calculation, and given a rough ballpark word count for Alex Irvine's 2020 book Anthropocene Rag. It's a 250-page book that I think claims to be a novella, and my (now unsupported by data) opinion is that it's probably north of the 40,000 words that was the traditional SF marker of "novel," renowned in song and story and Hugo rules. What I mean is: if Irvine had somehow written and published this in the 1950s - quite unlikely since he, like me, was born in 1969 - it would have been considered a novel then.

That and $12.95 will get you a ham sandwich at a deli, but I like to mention random things like that. It makes me relatable as a blogger and helps pad out the word count, neither of which is an actual concern for me.

This is a post-Singularity story, set in the vaguely near future. The actual Boom happened sometime in the mid-21st century, and is maybe twenty years in the past. Our main characters are all about twenty - Irvine doesn't underline this, but they were all born around the time of the Boom and have lived their entire lives, growing to new adulthood, in this transformed America. And it's structured like a novella, though with a fairly large cast, so we don't get all of the details and explanations.

The narrative voice does point out that there are still millions of people living normal lives in this nano-transformed USA, which I suppose is meant to be reassuring. I instead remembered that there are well over three hundred million people in the USA right this moment, and going from there to just "millions" is a die-off unprecedented in human history. Perhaps that's not what Irvine, or the narrative voice, meant. But life is clearly contingent and random in this newly transformed world: traffic across the country is rare, and I don't see how large-scale business entities can still be operating. (SF is always good at small business - shops, places to get a meal, small marketplaces, artisans and individual tinkerers - but often is more cartoonish, dismissive, or simply ignorant of larger enterprises.)

As the book goes on, the narrative voice makes a distinction - not always clear, as it's not necessarily clear to the entity telling the story - between what I guess I might as well call sentients and sapients. (The book does not.) Sentients have minds, and models of the world, and affect change; various constructs and elements of the Boom, or its echoing and constituent Boomlets, are sentient. They are self-motivated actors doing things in the world, the constructs in the form of humans or other large organic entities, and others seemingly entirely in the software spaces of a world saturated with nano. Sapients are aware of themselves, their choices and options, and can question what they're doing - all humans are sapients, and one construct wakes up along those lines during the course of the action.

We do learn the origin point of this world, how this specific Singularity happened. I won't spoil it completely, but it was a combination of a natural disaster (made worse by global warming) and an arrogant billionaire's technology. We don't know if it's worldwide; we only see America here. Canada is mentioned, but may be quite different. The rest is blank spaces on the map.

So we should start with the legend, the story as told: Monument City is a myth, but possibly real. Built by Moses Barnum somewhere in the Rockies, containing many of the greatest major structures of mankind, in the immediate aftermath of the initial Boom. A city of mysteries and wonders, forbidden to almost everyone. Once in a while, Life-7 - which may be the main AI entity dominant in America after the Boom, or maybe just the entity that runs Monument City - sends out a construct to invite a small group of humans to Monument City, for whatever reasons that time.

The construct this time is Prospector Ed: he's the one that starts developing self-doubt and awareness. The invitees are six people, from across the country: Teeny from San Francisco, Kyle from Orlando, Henry from New York, and three others. All orphans; all orphans of the Boom. All get a Wonka-esque ticket, which only they can touch, which will help them get safe passage to Monument City.

It's a short book, so it happens quickly. They get their tickets; they set off. Well, mostly. Kyle is a twin, and isn't all that interested in cross-country travel - so his twin, nicknamed Geck, grabs the ticket and heads off instead. But Kyle's girlfriend Reenie hates that, and spurs the two of them to follow. So there are eight people, in various permutations and circumstances, traveling from various points across America, all trying to find a place they all think is probably mostly myth.

They all get there. They meet Moses Barnum, who I should say is not nearly as horrible and self-centered as some real-world tech billionaires, which is a small comfort. They also meet Life-7, going though some transformations of its own, and also not nearly as unpleasant as so many AIs from past SF stories - mostly benevolent, even.

The ending is quick, more evocative than explanatory. I don't know if Irvine plans more stories in this world, or had planned for this one to be longer and more detailed. He does end this story well, but he ends it like a novella, with more questions than answers.

It's a kaleidoscopic, phantasmagorical journey through a transformed America, full of mythic and historical wonders, full of transformative entities that can remember and change and build but not plan or understand or reflect. I think it changes again at the very end of this story, but that's always a question for individual readers: a story can never tell you what happens after the end. You have to decide that for yourself. 

The Book of Dreams by Jack Vance

I remembered the last line of this book for decades - maybe not quite exactly word-for-word, but pretty close.

I have been deserted by my enemies. Treesong is dead. The affair is over. I am done.

Where other authors would be triumphant, Vance instead shows us the deflation of his hero, a man who focused his entire adult life on one thing...and has now done that, so there's nothing left. I thought that was interesting when I first read The Book of Dreams as a teenager, and it's fascinating now as an older man.

That melancholy, that lurking worry behind the drive for revenge, was an undertone in the first four books on the Demon Princes series - The Star King, The Killing Machine, The Palace of Love, and The Face - and is still an undertone here, though closer and closer to the surface until that last sentence.

Kirth Gersen survived an assault and massacre in his youth: the settlement Mount Pleasant, on a remote bucolic planet a thousand or so years in the future, in a human-dominated galaxy, was attacked by a group of gang leaders calling themselves the Demon Princes. The five Princes each led large criminal organizations, trafficking in slaves and drugs and other illegal things in the wild stars Beyond the civilized worlds ruled by law, and they came together for this one massive operation. Gersen and his grandfather were among the very few to escape; his grandfather spirited the two away to old Earth, where the young Gersen was trained up to be an instrument of vengeance, to eventually find and kill all five of the Princes.

The series of books that bear their collective name starts when Gersen is about thirty, and cover a few years of time - how much isn't clear. Maybe two years, maybe five. Not much more than that.

And The Book of Dreams is the last. As it opens, there's only one Demon Prince left.

The Princes were never close associates, though. The reader gets the sense that Mount Pleasant was a quirky one-off. They didn't work together any other time, and they don't care - or possibly even notice; there's no sign in the series that Gersen's destruction of earlier Princes is known to them or society at large - that someone is hunting them.

The last one is Howard Alan Treesong, who organized the group to take Mount Pleasant. It would be a cliché to say he was the worst, the most megalomaniacal. And not really true: each Prince, as Vance made clear throughout the series, is uniquely horrible in a different way. Treesong is a schemer, who desires power. He's also - Vance doesn't underline this, but makes it clear - possessed of, or possessed by multiple personalities, who seem to mostly do what the core Treesong wants but with their own separate whims and manias. He's mercurial, changing, many men in one.

And, as this book goes on, Gersen learns Treesong had two major plots recently - one of which Gersen foils in the novel - to take over two of the political and social pillars of the human universe. If Treesong had succeeded, he would have been not just a Demon Prince, but something like emperor of all humanity.

As in the last two books, Gersen uses his pose as Henry Lucas, special writer for a major galactic magazine - which Gersen secretly owns - as a way to lure his quarry out of hiding. A picture supposedly showing Treesong in a group of people comes into his possession, almost randomly, from the magazine's archives. And Gersen-as-Lucas launches a massive contest to identify all of the people in the phot, which, as expected, attracts Treesong's attention.

As in the other books, there's a fair bit of cat-and-mouse, as Gersen tries to keep his interest secret and to ferret out Treesong, and Treesong uses agents to get closer to the contest and find out who is investigating him.

We know how it ends. We know how it must end. This is a five-book series about revenge, and that means Gersen will kill Treesong in the end, and be finally free.

Or "done," as he puts it. Whether that's done like a necessary task, or like a steak, is up to the reader to decide.

(Consumer Note: I read the whole series in the two-volume Tor omnibus editions - Volume 1 has the first three books and Volume 2 the last two. Above, I've linked the current single-volume edition, from the Vance-family-controlled Spatterlight Press. Either one would be a decent choice; these books are also available used fairly easily.)

White Cat, Black Dog by Kelly Link

Kelly Link is one of the best writers of our time: full stop. I can say more - I will say more - but I'll start with that bedrock. She's already one of the greats, from the work she's already produced. (And I say that knowing her first novel is fairly new in the world, and I haven't read it yet.)

White Cat, Black Dog was her new story collection last year, gathering seven stories from roughly the previous decade (including, as is traditional, one brand-new piece). Her previous collection was Get In Trouble, back in 2015; I know I read her earlier books but they were long enough ago that I might have read them for work, or just before this blog.

I'm tempted to write a bit about each story, but that urge drags me back to 1992, trying to capture every genre book I read on those fussy little pieces of paper for the SFBC (those who know, know) with a single log-line at the top for genre, a long plot description with all of the names clear and spelled correctly, and a short, separate editorial opinion at the end. It took me a long time to break the habit of writing about books like that, but short fiction always wants to drop me back into it:

Fantasy short-story collection, all based loosely on fairy tales, mostly reprint.

The White Cat's Divorce - A rich man's usual three unnamed sons are sent on various errands to win his fortune, over the course of several years. We follow the youngest son, who...

and so on drearily.

These are precise stories, told uncannily well. When I read these days, I keep an eye out for interesting passages to quote here on the blog - with this collection, I stopped and started dozens of times, wondering if I could quote some particularly devastating moment. Mostly, I couldn't - to explain the moment, it would have taken too much detail, too much explanation. The hallmark of a great short story is that it contains just the right words - no extras, no fluff, nothing extraneous. Link does that, over and over, here.

The collection does start with a white cat and ends with a black dog. Like so many other things, Link means that both literally and figuratively. A word or phrase will rarely have only one purpose in a Link story.

Look: just read it. It's a short book. It's been on multiple award shortlists and "best of" lists. Link has the narrative power of genre, the puzzling insight of fable, and the cuttingly pure prose of literature, all in one writer. You'll thank me afterward.

Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller

This was Carol Emshwiller's first novel, originally published in 1988. She'd been writing for decades at that point, though, and publishing short fiction since the early 1950s. So my first question reading it was: how long was she working on it?

It's a short book, something like an allegory or a fable. And some elements feel very New Wave or classic-SF - there's a scientist with a major research project in his basement; that kind of thing - while the style and concerns are more modern and feminist. (Though, given the timing, clearly second-wave feminist, which could be important to understanding it.)

Emshwiller was mostly a writer of short fiction, and she writes this novel like a short-story writer: quickly, tightly, without extra details, explaining only as much as she has to and moving on to the next moment immediately.

The main character of Carmen Dog is not named that, though she is a dog, and she does have an unquenchable desire to sing Carmen, to be an opera diva.

But let me get to the premise first. This is a fantasy novel written in a SF style, about a massive unexpected and unexplained transformation in the world. Well, I say "world," but the book takes place in the US - the New York area, more precisely - and its viewpoint is both expansive and tight, so I would not be quick to assume the transformation is happening everywhere in the same way.

But here, in the US, women are turning into animals. And female animals are turning into women. Emshwiller does not want to treat these as two different phenomena; they are the same thing. All female beings who live closely with human men - I think that's the point; this is happening to pets, mostly, not to wild animals far off in the wilderness - are "moving up and down the evolutionary scale," as if that scale has suddenly become a game of Chutes and Ladders.

And, in the one house where we start the novel, the wife - never named, never a speaking role - is turning into a snapping turtle. At the same time, their beloved pedigreed golden retriever, Pooch, is having to take on care for the three children, starting to talk, and forming more complex thoughts and desires. She's our heroine: she wants to sing opera. (But she also still wants, at least at first, the things she wanted before: to be helpful and loyal and faithful, to care for and protect her family and master.)

The narrative mostly follows Pooch, as she travels, Candide-like, through the rapidly changing society, as "females" are all thrown into one category - with about as many rights as the half of them who were originally animals - and the men from Institutes of Motherhood and other big, "logical" edifices to understand and contain - and, most of all control - both this transformation and "females" in general.

The metaphor is not particularly subtle, obviously. Women are treated like animals by men, or maybe "no better than." And Emshwiller's tendency to be general keeps the metaphor strongly in the foreground: major characters here are only "the doctor" and "the master." Only a couple of the men even get names, though all of the women do - some of them, more than one name, as they transform and change and take on new roles.

And, centrally, all of the "females" are in roughly the same position: all somewhere in the middle, with elements of animal and human mixed and mingled. They can talk and have feathers; they want to sing opera but can only bark at the moment. They are sexy and passionate women while still being king snakes. Again, this is not a story about individuals moving up or down, or any contrast between individuals - it is entirely about the mass of "females" - the word Emshwiller uses most consistently; these are not necessarily "women" - and both what they are becoming and what the society around them is doing in response.

This is a sequence of moments rather than a complex narrative - events do follow each other, but there's a random, stochastic element to the book that I'm sure Emshwiller intended: this is an unknown event that transforms everything, which means it's all unexpected and contingent. It's not random, but it does hop and skip and jump through odd moments as it traces Pooch's travails in this transformed Manhattan.

The log-line would be "quirky feminist fable," and Emshwiller strongly hits all three words of that: it's an imaginative, distinctive, utterly original book that a reader might have some minor questions about while reading but should find compelling and fascinating.

The Iron Thorn by Algis Budrys

I have to admit I read this book almost entirely because it was in an omnibus with two other books I'd already read. I bought the omnibus to have a copy of Hard Landing - still, I think, one of the great under-appreciated SF books of the '90s - and then read Michaelmas because I'd been hearing good things about it for decades.

The Iron Thorn is the third book in the omnibus - actually physically first in the book, since it was a 1967 novel, earlier in Algis Budrys's career. I came into it with no preconceptions or expectations: Budrys wasn't particularly prolific, and his career never had any central theme or even periods that I could discern.

It's an iris-out novel, that traditional SF form that starts in a tight, specific situation - as seen from the people in it, with no spoilers or outside explanations - and focuses on a character who is smart enough and travels enough to go further than any previous members of his group and learns the true secrets of his world.

I'll spoil some of those secrets, inevitably, in writing about it. If you care, I'll keep the spoilers in one discrete paragraph below. Our main character is first called Honor White Jackson - his people, we later learn, have a complex naming scheme that embeds their social rank and specific achievements, so that name changes somewhat as he goes along. We join him during his first hunt in a dangerous desert landscape, out beyond the perimeter of his people's settlement, protected by a "cap" from the hostile environment there and seeking to kill an Amsir, a member of another humanoid intelligent race. The title Iron Thorn is the central spire of his people's settlement, which sits in a deep depression - some readers may realize a crater - and clearly is some kind of technological artifact, probably not entirely understood by these now quite primitive, subsistence-level people.

Jackson is smart, in the way of classic-SF protagonists, and restless as well. His hunt is a success, but he learns things during that hunt that surprise him. His interview with the head of the Honors - the top-caste of his people, the hunters he has just joined - is not as fruitful as he hoped. And so he runs away, with a vague plan the reader is not told, and ends up captured, deliberately, by the Amsirs, who live in another crater with another Iron Thorn.

This is still only about a third of the way into this short novel, and Jackson has one more, massively longer, journey to take and yet another society to be surprised by.

So here's the spoiler: all of this takes place on Mars, possibly slightly terraformed, at least a thousand years in the future. Jackson's people are unaltered humans; the Amsirs were bioengineered from human stock; the whole thing was some kind of experiment that has overrun its protocols and not delivered any solid results to the American Midwestern research institution that originally set it up, so long ago. Jackson accesses a spaceship, and flies off to Earth - his people's fabled paradise - along with a crippled, mentally-damaged Amsir. Since he's of original human stock, the ship's computer makes him its new captain and gives him the usual classic-SF implanted education, giving him the memories and knowledge of an undergraduate career at Ohio State and various post-graduate specializations suitable to spaceship-captaining. On Earth, he finds the usual diminished population of decadents, playing at interpersonal relationships and casually cruel to each other - Budrys never says they're immortal, but they otherwise tick all of the boxes for "decadent far-future immortals" - and they are fascinated by his novelty and primitive vigor. They live under the control - not quite smothering, but tending in that direction - of an omnipresent Computer. In the end, Jackson's even less happy with this world than with his own, and lights out for the territory. But this world is entirely tamed and controlled by that Computer, so we know it's just getting away from the decadent maybe-immortals.

All of Budrys's books that I've read are quick and taut and sparse: they don't waste time or words, and imply a lot more than they ever say. This one possibly even more so, since it's more of a genre exercise to begin with. The ending is a bit unsatisfying, though I think that's on purpose: Jackson wanted to learn the truths of his world, and did - but ended up in a situation where he fits even less well than he did at the beginning of his journey.

Planet Paradise by Jesse Lonergan

This is not a sequel to Hedra. There's no way it could be set in the same universe. But they're from the same creator, from the same year, in the same genre, with a similar feel and with SFnal technology that works roughly the same way.

So maybe it's a companion piece, or another element in an era in Jesse Lonergan's career. I liked both books a lot, so I'm hoping something like the latter: I'd be happy to see him do SF books like this for a while, if he and the market agree.

(Although...they're both from four years ago, and I suspect the market has not agreed, since the comics market has been deeply disagreeable for close to a decade now.)

But let me get more specific about Planet Paradise, a roughly hundred-page standalone SF graphic novel. It's the story of a vacation that goes wrong.

Eunice and Peter live in some medium-future multi-system society, seemingly a pretty rich and healthy and happy one. They're off for a vacation on Rydra-17, billed as "the Paradise Planet." The book opens with them individually settling into their hibernation pods, which will then be slotted into bays in the ship.

This isn't a fast-FTL universe; it takes more than eleven days in transit to go from wherever-we-started to Rydra-17. The two crewmembers of this unnamed ship are the only ones awake for the journey.

There's a cliché that says a story is about what happens when something goes wrong: that's the case here. There's some kind of malfunction. The ship ends up crash-landing on some unknown world. One of the crewmembers is killed; the pods are scattered across the landscape and some of them have failed or broken, killing their inhabitants.

Eunice's pod is intact, but it pops open. We don't know why. But there she is: unexpectedly on an alien world, in the middle of a disaster scene, the only human on the surface.

Well, not quite the only one. The captain of the ship, Wanda, also survived: she's got a broken leg and is deep in the wreckage. Wanda yells for help, and Eunice saves her. So then the two of them can work to save the rest and call for rescue.

It's not that simple: Wanda is demanding and injured and obnoxious and treats Eunice as just the hands to do the things she wants done. Eunice is overwhelmed and untrained and unsure. And there are unexpected large carnivores on this planet.

They do manage to find a distress beacon and set it up. An emergency service agent arrives a few days later - again, travel between planets in this universe is at least several days. That does not go exactly as planned, either.

But Eunice and Wanda do get off this planet. Eunice does finally get to Rydra-17, and her vacation with Peter. But, as we see in the last scene, her experience has changed her - unexpectedly, making her more confident and able in another dangerous situation.

Lonergan's panels here aren't quite as visually inventive as the wordless Hedra, but he plays with size and sequence and format a lot - there are some excellent big vertical panels near the beginning to emphasize the solidity of the ship and the old-fashioned lying-back take-off position, among other fun sequences - and his art is dynamic, great at both quiet storytelling and the more energetic action moments.

He also makes his world lived-in and specific; his characters consume soap-opera-ish media and grumble to each other about corporate budget cuts. This seems to be a pretty nice universe, all-in-all, but it's not perfect, and the imperfections led to this story - we can imagine those same budget cuts caused a little slacking off of maintenance that caused the original malfunction.

This is not a big story: it has a small cast, a short time-frame, and a modest scope. But it's strongly focused, has a great relatable main character in Eunice, looks lovely, and does everything it needs to do smartly, quickly, and with great style. It is a neat SF graphic novel, totally enjoyable and self-contained, and I would be happy if the world had many more books like that.

The Face by Jack Vance

I don't want to say that Kirth Gersen has fallen into a groove - or that the novels about him have - but there are similarities to all of his pursuits of Demon Princes to this point. His targets are all monomaniacs, not just criminals and ganglords but obsessives about specific things, cruel and mercurial in their temperaments and demanding that things be done their way all the time. They also all hide as other people, concealing their true identities behind masks when traveling through the civilized galaxy, only revealing themselves fully in their lawless homes of the Beyond.

Also common in multiple books: Gersen tracks them, one by one, partially by using the fortune he made in the second book, The Killing Machine. He worries both that he's losing the edge that gives him a chance to find and kill these monsters, and that he's forever unable to have a normal human life because of that edge. He meets women he's attracted to - in this book, as in the last two - which brings that contrast more strongly to his attention. He wants to find love, to live like a normal person...but he can't let himself do that.

Not while any of the Demon Princes still live. He was made into a weapon by his grandfather, and that weapon needs to be used fully before it can be put away.

The Face is the fourth of the novels: it followed The Star King, The Killing Machine, and The Palace of Love. The novel itself takes place what we think is soon after the previous books: it's never quite clear how much time is passing in this series, but it's not very long: maybe a few years, beginning to end. But the book came twelve years after its predecessor - readers in the real world at the time might have wondered if Vance would ever come back to the Demon Princes and finish the series.

(He did, obviously. My memory is that personally I only started reading Vance around the time of the last book, in 1981, so for my entire relevant reading life, the Demon Princes was a series complete.)

The fourth Demon Prince is Lens Larque, a sadist fond of tricks and schemes, a man from the cruel mostly-desert world Dar Sai and whose way of viewing the world - Vance does not emphasize this, but makes it clear as the novel goes on - is that of his people, only in exaggerated, hair-trigger form, just like them only more so.

Gersen spends the novel tracking the purpose and history of a now-worthless mining company that Larque controls through intermediaries, as always looking for a way to find the man he's chasing, to get close enough to kill his target. Along the way, he spends time on Dar Sai, gaining control of that mining company and learning more about the Darsh people, and then on Dar Sai's sister planet Methel, a richer, more comfortable world that hates and is hated by the Darsh in the way of neighboring nations everywhere.

Of course, Gersen does find Larque, and does kill him. That's the plot of the series. But the hunt is the point - both how Gersen has to figure out the aim of that seemingly useless mining company, how he gathers the supposedly worthless shares of that company to take it over, and all the things he learns about Larque and the Darsh along the way.

And now there is only one left: just one Demon Prince, the leader and organizer of them all. And Vance would get to his story much more quickly than he did to The Face, just a couple of years later. 

(Consumer Note: I linked The Face to the current standalone edition, a hardcover published by the Vance-family-controlled Spatterlight Press. That's certainly a solid choice, but the book is also available in a cheaper omnibus edition, The Demon Princes, Vol. 2, which is how I read it.)

Authority by Jeff Vandermeer

Ten years ago, Jeff Vandermeer published a whole trilogy in a year. That's always a dangerous, gutsy move, but I think it worked for him: both artistically and commercially, popping him up from a well-regarded quirky slipstream writer working mostly in the genre-fiction world into a solid position in the wider literary universe. Better yet: I don't think he changed the way he wrote or his subjects - he just got better publishing support and the kind of appreciative quotes that subtly imply this is not genre fiction, because it's good.

(Those quotes are always half bullshit - they were when Kingsley Amis made fun of them in the 1960s, and still are now - but they do their job, and I guess that makes them useful, even if they rely on a kind of reader who is paradoxically both fond of literary invention and skill and unable to see quality anywhere but a narrow plot of "good" fiction.)

The trilogy was called "The Southern Reach." The first book was Annihilation and this second one is Authority. (I'll get to the third book Acceptance eventually. It took me four years to get to #1 and six more for #2, so don't hold your breath.)

The whole series is about Area X: a coastal region in the Southern US - facing south, probably in the Florida panhandle - that had a transformational paranormal event thirty years ago. (The books take place in an unspecified time, probably slightly in the future from when they were published, but it's deliberately vague. Area X could have formed in the 1980s, or 2020.) A impenetrable - well, utterly destructive, as far as anyone can tell, which is nearly the same thing - border came down, except for one access point. Everything made by humanity inside Area X - except for one lighthouse - disappeared or was destroyed. Strange organic life has been growing there. There are other, weirder, less definable changes as well. Explorers into Area X come back transformed, if at all.

The Southern Reach is the organization - it rolls up to "Central," probably some acronymed agency we have heard of - that monitors and investigates and sends expeditions into Area X. They are themselves secret, as is Area X: the general population thinks there was some kind of ecological disaster, and everyone has been kept away from the region.

Southern Reach is also the name of their headquarters building, not far from the border of Area X.

Vandermeer doesn't write trilogies like most people do. Before this, he - to quote myself - "wrote three books about the city of Ambergris... the collection City of Saints and Madmen, the metafictional novel Shriek: An Afterword, and the detective story Finch." Similarly, Annihilation was a novel built from the journals kept by one woman on an expedition - called just "the biologist" there.

Authority is a third-person novel focused on "Control" - a career intelligence professional (OK, call him a spy if you want) named John Rodriguez, who has been sent to take over as Director of the Southern Reach and to investigate what happened to the Twelfth Expedition - the one chronicled in Annihilation.

Three of the four women of the Twelfth Expedition came back, appearing in random places far from Area X, without clear memories of their time there or their lives before the expedition. The one who didn't return, "the psychologist," was the previous Director of Southern Reach.

This book is partly about the conversations Control has with the biologist - he has not read her journals, the ones that formed Annihilation, and she can't tell him much of anything about what happened to her - partly about his troubles taking control of Southern Reach, where the assistant director, Grace Stevenson, is deeply loyal to the missing previous director and quietly blocks nearly everything he does, and partly about how he sifts through what the previous director left behind and what the rest of the scientific staff of Southern Reach can tell him.

Control learns that the most recent expedition was officially the Twelfth, but each numbered expedition was a series - the Eleventh had multiple iterations, and the total number of forays into Area X is well over thirty. And that Area X is not necessarily stable. And that, even thirty years later, the Southern Reach doesn't really know the first thing about Area X or the phenomenon or entity that created it.

He learns many things, plenty of them horrific, over the course of the novel, and loses control of Southern Reach in more than one way by the end. Like so many Vandermeer stories, it has creepy biological manifestations and a tone at most one or two clicks away from horror. It ends with a leap that I assume leads into the third book: it ends reasonably well for the middle of a trilogy, but it clearly is middle.

This is a creepy, unsettling novel, about something mostly unknown that just might be poised to destroy all of humanity and the entire biosphere of our planet - or maybe to do something even stranger, and potentially worse, than that. And Vandermeer does creepy and unsettling better than nearly anyone else: this is excellent in every way.