Review: The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge by M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin

A couple more audio drama reviews posted at Unreality SF the past couple of days: The Diary of River Song: Series Four, Bernice Summerfield: Escaping the Future, and Bernice Summerfield: Year Zero.

Hardcover, 525 pages
Published 2018
Acquired October 2018

Read November 2018

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge
by M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin

M. T. Anderson-- my favorite working YA writer-- has a new book out, The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge. It gives equal billing to its illustrator, Eugene Yelchin, and this is because it's a story where words and images are of equal importance. Sometimes the images offer a different set of events than the words; at other times, the images convey events not directly indicated in the text at all. It's about two scholars from warring nations, a goblin and an elf. The text gives the goblin's perspective as he accommodates an elfin guest; the images show the spy reports the elf is sending back to HQ. (There's also occasional letters from an elfin spymaster to their king.)

It's clever, though given it's by M. T. Anderson, I kind of wanted it to be cleverer; by the book's end, it's clear that the text is usually accurate and the illustrations not, and I would have appreciated more ambiguity. It's also a bit lightweight. Which isn't a problem, I don't think Anderson was aiming for the kind of depth of character he went for in Feed or Octavian Nothing or even Landscape with Invisible Hand. It's a cute idea, well executed, with some decent jokes, and you do come to like this odd couple by the novel's end. (The way they achieve their joint comeuppance over the military through scholarly debate is quite nice.)

The art and book design are excellent. Yelchin's style makes me think of medieval art, it's all grotesque, and delightful in its grotesqueries. Really unique, and perfectly suited to the project, given it's an elf's understanding of a goblin civilization. Lots of imagination.

For any other write, this would probably be a high watermark; for Anderson, it's just another pretty good book.

How Much Literature Does a Man Need?

Jim Downie (right) at Gethsemani Abbey
from the summer 2017 St. Xavier alumni magazine

Like a lot of kids, I went through a number of potential adult occupations. My junior year of high school, I figured out what I wanted to do in Mr. Jim Downie's English literature class.

He wasn't one of those teachers who was a wide favorite, but Mr. Downie was without a doubt my favorite teacher from my four years at St. Xavier. A confirmed bachelor, he would spend his summers travelling the world; one time he brought in a tray of relics from the Middle East.

He was very dry but sometimes slyly funny. Every now and then he would drop a witticism into his lectures. (He was the kind of teacher, though, where one suspected he had penned the joke into the margins of his lecture notes years ago, and told the same joke at the same point every year.) He was good-- for this sixteen-year-old at least-- at bringing the themes and potentials of literature to life. I had him for British literature, where we made it from Beowulf up to the middle of the twentieth century; it was in his class that I first read Nevil Shute's On the Beach, a novel I went on to teach myself.

We used to chat about NPR, as both of us listened to WGUC, Cincinnati's classical music station, on our drive into school in the morning. For a while, there was this surreal thing going where one day in class he would mention a classical piece (like Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance," during a lecture on And Quiet Flows the Don) and then the next morning I would hear it on WGUC, like he was tied directly into the classical music zeitgeist.

As seniors, we had lots of options for English; you needed a full year of it, but could pick between a number of one-semester courses. I actually took a full year of AP Lit, a semester of creative writing, and a semester of European literature, the latter with Mr. Downie. Mr. Downie had an appreciation of the dark and the depressing; we read Candide and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Kafka and Joyce in that class, and he was good at bringing out the despair in these stories cued to the end of class. "And so human life is meaningless: all you have at the end of it is the grave," he would say, and the bell would ring.

It was in one of those moment, I think, where it flashed across my mind, This is what I want to be doing.

I don't think I'm quite him as a teacher, but I often think about him. He was a good teacher, not just in his ability to explicate the literature, but also in his ability to apply the literature to life. Perhaps naïvely (one of my colleagues just gave a lecture where he called this middlebrow populism or something), I think literature can teach us how to live our lives, and I think at least partially this derives from how Jim Downie taught.

One of my favorite assignments during European literature is that he had all of us look up the etymology of our names to verify our origins. It was from this that I learned möll was a German root related to "mill," and thus that one of my ancestors must have been a mill-man, i.e., a miller. After we did this, he met with each of us individually to help us pick a book from our country of origin that he thought we would like. It was thanks to this that I read Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, which for some time I went around trumpeting as my favorite book. Perhaps it still would be, but I haven't read it in thirteen years!

I began my academic career as a language arts education major, though I ended up teaching college, not high school. It was thanks to his example that I wanted to. Probably many teachers have such a story, but Mr. Downie is mine.

It's been a long time since I've seen him. At least twice during my college years; I remember stopping by St. X and telling him I was taking or had taken a Victorian literature class, and he asked if I had read any Thomas Hardy. All I'd read was some short fiction (it had been a summer class, so we'd hardly done any novels), and he bemoaned that I hadn't read The Mayor of Casterbridge. I picked it up next time I went to the used bookstore, and thus began a lifelong love.

Searching my old LiveJournal reveals that I bumped into him once after that, a week into my relationship with Hayley, when we went to the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. (He was a big fan, and my parents would bump into him a lot.) All I recorded in my LJ was that seeing him "was nice"; I wonder if he was disappointed that I'd decided to not be a high school English teacher after all.

This whole post was spurred by a question about role models, and it's perhaps odd, I've ended up writing not about a model for living, but a model for work, and there's so much of life that's not work. But it's not about work, it's about literature, and for me, literature is a wellspring for both work and for living. And a large part of how I view literature goes back to Jim Downie, and I hope I live up to his example in some small way.

#71: Who is your role model?

Reading Roundup Wrapup: October 2018

Pick of the month: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Kind of by default, I guess, though I did enjoy it. Hopefully now that I've finished this door-stopper, next month goes better!

All books read:
1. Bernice Summerfield XIV: Present Danger edited by Eddie Robson
2. The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace
3. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
4. Gods of Risk: An Expanse Novella by James S.A. Corey

All books acquired:
1. The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge by M. T. Anderson
2. Single White Who Fan: The Life & Times of Jackie Jenkins by Jackie Jenkins
3. The War of the Wheels: H. G. Wells and the Bicycle by Jeremy Withers
4. The Monster Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson

Still, at least I'm not over-acquiring. Well, sort of.

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 656 (no change)
Books remaining on "To review" list: 10 (up 2)

Review: Bernice Summerfield: Present Danger edited by Eddie Robson

Reviewing a book tied into some audio dramas reminds me that I actually haven't cross-linked my audio reviews here of late; there have been three. "Flight into Hull!", a Doctor Who: Short Trip read by Camille Corduri, features Jackie Tyler and the "metacrisis" Doctor. The Root of All Rage is the second Star Trek: Prometheus audiobook, presenting the German 50th-anniversay special. And Jeremiah Bourne in Time is a new, original concept from Big Finish about a teenager travelling between contemporary and Edwardian London. (Quoth my editor when I submitted the last review: "'famous magistrate and infamous nudist' is a hell of a character description, I need to listen to these." Indeed he does and so do you.)

Hardcover, 208 pages
Published 2010

Acquired August 2015
Read October 2018

Bernice Summerfield XIV: Present Danger
edited by Eddie Robson

Present Danger fills in the gap between the audio dramas Resurrecting the Past and Escaping the Future. Partially it serves to just move characters into position (in Resurrecting, Benny and Hass are on Earth, but when Escaping opens, Benny is travelling through time to fight the Deindum with a restored time ring, while Hass is a Deindum prisoner on Maximediras), and partially it serves to dramatize the Deindum War more completely, since it's mostly off-stage in Escaping, but of great importance.

So, it's kind of like Life During Wartime, but it doesn't work quite as well. Life During Wartime felt like a novel by many hands, showing the progression of the Bernice Summerfield range's cast of characters during the months (and months?) of Fifth Axis occupation. Present Danger is more spotty-- it often feels like things that ought to have been dramatized are skipped over in favor of things that are less important. Like, there's no story about how Bev manages to take control back of the Braxiatel Collection, which ought to be a key character point, and the refugees crowding the Collection is referenced in Escaping, but that's dramatized here in only a very cursory way. It would have been nice to see this in Present Danger; instead, the most we get for Bev is a story by Niall Boyce, "The Empire Variations," where she witnesses a time travel adventure Benny has by seeing how works of art in the Collection change as history does. It's a neat conceit, but if the book was going to tell just one Bev story, it doesn't seem like this is the one.

This goes for a number of stories. Like, I enjoyed a lot of them, but they often seemed like sidebars to the Deindum War. It's neat to have a sequel to Battlefield in Jim Smith's "Excalibur of Mars," but should working Brigadier Bambera in really have been a priority of this collection? There are a few too many Benny-on-strange-adventures stories that are tenuously incorporated on the basis of Benny scouring time for weapons to use against the Deindum. That said, Jonathan Blum's "The End Times" is a great Benny-and-Peter tale in the way that only Jon Blum can do, and I was unexpectedly delighted by the return of the tax assessor from Venus Mantrap in Mark Clapham's "In the Ledgers of Madness," where a group of reclusive monks keep their books in an ancient, dangerous language so that anyone who tries to audit them will go mad.

The book's best stories are those that deal with the Deindum War and the characters more concretely. "Winging It" by Lance Parkin focuses on Braxiatel figuring out how to fight the Deindum through time, and it's a clever time war story that I really enjoyed. Kate Orman's "Don't Do Something, Just Sit There" of course is a winner, with Benny trying to protect an indigenous population as Earth and the Deindum duke it out. Simon Guerrier gives us some Doggles and Adrian in "Six Impossible Things," a potent combination given their history; there wasn't just the space for this reckoning in the audio dramas, so I'm glad to read it here. (Is Doggles the worst? Yes.)

LM Myles's "The Better Part of Valour," Oli Smith's "Digital Dreams," and editor Eddie Robson's Hass-focused interludes were among the other highlights. But if this collection was meant to make us feel the immensity of Deindum threat in preparation for Escaping the Future, it didn't quite accomplish that as well as it ought to have.

Review: Doctor Who: Helana and the Beast by Justin Richards

Hardcover, 37 pages
Published 2016 (originally 2015)
Acquired February 2017
Read August 2017

Doctor Who: Helana and the Beast
by Justin Richards
illustrated by David Wardle

The quality of these "Time Lord Fairy Tales" seems to vary pretty heavily to me, but they're probably really all about the same. I mean, they are all by the same guy and pretty much doing the same thing. I found this "Beauty and the Beast" riff one of the weaker efforts, a pretty ho-hum take on the original that makes Helana even less of an agent than Beauty was in the original story, basically just chilling out until the twelfth Doctor saves her and the Beast. But then she marries the Beast for some reason?

Next Week: Everyone's favorite aliens in Andiba and the Four Slitheen!

Review: The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge

Hardcover, 377 pages
Published 2016 (originally 2015)

Borrowed from a friend

Read December 2016

The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge

I was moved to read this book by a review by Marah Gubar in Public Books. It's a very good review, so I recommend you read it if you're at all interested in this book, which is about a young Victorian girl named Faith whose father is a natural philosopher and minister caught up in a scandal of faking nephilim fossils. To avoid the effects of the scandal, the minister takes his household to a remote island, where he will ostensibly consult on matters archaeological. The beginning of the novel is fine, nothing special, but Hardinge needs this space to get all the pieces into position. When Faith's father dies and Faith discovers the eponymous lie tree, suddenly things kick into gear, and the book becomes compellingly readable. Faith takes desperate measures to locate her father's killer, and to protect the mendacity tree, which can reveal truths to those who sow lies. It's dark and beautiful and compelling; I stayed up late to finish it, and I was rewarded with every page.

Gubar covers the book's approach to science fairly well, which would normally be my go-to in a review, so I'll hit up a couple things. One thing that struck me was Faith's realization near the end of the book: "Faith had always told herself that she was not like other ladies. But neither, it seemed, were other ladies." No one is the stereotype of their social role; everyone engages in their own small acts of defiance and selfhood. That's probably one of the biggest lessons Faith learns here, but it's a hard lesson to learn. It's also one of the biggest strengths of the book-- these are all complicated characters, with multiple motives jockeying for supremacy. No one is one-note.

Secondly, as Gubar says of the mendacity tree, "The sudden intrusion of this apparently fantastic element into a meticulously realistic historical fiction is profoundly destabilizing." She's right: it's the only fantastic element in an otherwise historical novel. But the mendacity tree worked for me, as it did for her. In addition to what she argues about it, I felt that the mendacity tree actually seemed very scientific in a sense. Faith has to tell lies in order to get truth out of the tree, so that the more truth she possesses, the more falsehoods exist in her social sphere. It has a very First Law of Thermodynamics feel to it: truth can be transformed from one form to another, but cannot be created or destroyed. Increasing truth in one part of the system means it must be decreased in another. It's a very striking idea, and Hardinge weaves the mendacity tree right into the historical substance of her novel in a way that is utterly convincing.

One quibble: the word scientist is used a lot in this book, and I understand why, since it's what we're used to. But in the 1860s, when the book is set, natural philosopher or man of science would have been much more prevalent terms. Did you know Darwin never used the word scientist in his correspondence? And a Victorian minister, I think, would be even less likely to call himself a scientist than Darwin!

Two New Publications: The First Female Scientist, Air-Ships, and More!

I literally had two pieces of writing come out in two days this week, even though I completed both of them back in 2017 at completely different times.

One is a peer-reviewed article in the Wilkie Collins Journal, part of a special issue called "The Heart and Science of Wilkie Collins and his Contemporaries." My contribution is about Wilkie Collins's novel Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time (1882-83). The novel's big but previously largely unheralded claim to fame (or so I assert) is that its main antagonist is the first female scientist in British literature.

I'm very happy with this article. It has its roots in a seminar paper I wrote in a Philosophy of Science graduate seminar back in 2011; this was revised to fit into my dissertation at some point, and then last summer, revised to come back out of it. I thought it would be an easy gig, but I basically had to rewrite the whole piece from the ground up to make it work. (One of my dissertation committee wrote a comment on that section of my diss that they found it unconvincing; I remember bristling at the time, but when I reread it last summer, I realized I agreed.) But I'm glad I did, as it's a much stronger piece, and hopefully I can fold it back into the book project, now a piece with a much clearer argument and a much more compelling interpretation of the novel.

The article is called "The Female Amateur Science and the Sense for Conduct in Heart and Science: Blind to Matter and Morals," but the most recent issue of the Wilkie Collins Journal is always password restricted to members of the Wilkie Collins Society, so you'll have to wait until another one is out to read it if you're not a member.

Here's the first two paragraphs, though:

The real nineteenth century was replete with women of science. From Mary Anning, the legendary fossil finder, to Hertha Marks Ayrton, the suffragist and electrical engineer, the role of women in the actual science of nineteenth-century Britain was substantial, and it has been well chronicled by many. However, fictional women of science are much thinner on the ground. While the man of science recurred through the novels of writers such as Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Thomas Hardy from the 1850s onward, it was not until the 1890s that the literary woman of science made much of a mark, and then she was almost always a villain. The least evil of them is probably the amateur geologist Grace Waring in Kathleen ‘Iota’ Mannington Caffyn’s 1894 novel A Yellow Aster. Grace is one half of a science-obsessed married couple more interested in geology than parenting, and her emotional negligence causes her daughter to grow up incapable of love. Most of the women of science in 1890s literature were villains in scientific romances: George Griffith’s Olga Romanoff, or The Syren of the Skies (1895), T. Mullett Ellis’s Zalma (1896), and L. T. Meade’s The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings (1898) all have female terrorists with scientific training for antagonists. Susan Hroneck suggests that these novels ‘lack the means to conceptualize the woman scientist […] [T]he woman scientist is not linked with science’s fantastic future, but instead the villainous women of history and myth’ (par. 2). It is not until 1909, in H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica, that there is a non-villainous female scientist character of significance.

The earliest fictional woman of science is Mrs. Maria Gallilee in Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science: A Story of the Present Time (1882–83). Mrs. Gallilee is a self-educated scientific amateur, and an active participant in the scientific social scene of the 1880s. She is capable of performing dissections, and is well-versed on a range of scientific topics, from dinosaur dung to atmospheric explosions, from the theory of acoustics to protoplasm and the origins of life. Within the London scientific community, she is regarded highly both for her scientific opinions and her well-appointed scientific soirees. Much of the critical discussion of science in Heart and Science tends to focus on the novel’s vivisectionist, Dr. Nathan Benjulia—perhaps naturally, since Collins wrote the novel for the express purpose of condemning vivisection. Critics primarily discuss the novel’s female characters as Benjulia’s (potential) victims. But Benjulia usually lurks at the margins of the novel, while Mrs. Gallilee is its primary villain: its main plot, after all, is about Mrs. Gallilee’s attempts to obtain the inheritance of her niece, Miss Carmina Graywell, in order to help pay off her own debts.

I've previously explored some of the thinking that led to the article in posts on this blog:

• my original review of the novel
• The Beth Book, an 1897 antivivisection novel
• Lynton Abbott's Children, an 1879 antivivisection novel
• The Sorceress of the Strand, a 1902-03 woman of science novel
• looking for women of science in Punch
• my reread of Heart and Science
• A Yellow Aster, an 1894 woman of science novel
• The Call, a 1924 woman of science novel
• St. Bernard's, an 1887 antivivisection novel

I'll possibly write more about the writing process on this one at some point, as I think I learned something from doing it. It's probably the most comprehensive revision I've ever done of a piece of academic writing!

---

One day later, I received word that The Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction was out. My contribution to this was much smaller; the book has 300+ entries on various aspects of Victorian popular fiction, and I wrote the one on George Griffith, who wrote a number of a future-war novels featuring both air-ships and sexy women with untold destructive capacity in the 1890s and 1900s. It's about half a page, but I think it came out nice. I use the space to sum up Griffith, but also kind of try to push for a bigger significance for him in the development of early science fiction. We'll see if anyone cares. (Weirdly, I'm sharing space with someone I knew from the Star Trek books bulletin boards of the 2000s, but now we're both Victorianists.)

Review: The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings by L. T. Meade

Kindle eBook, n.pag.
Published 2006 (originally 1898)
Read October 2018

The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace

He brought out his microscope, which I saw, to my delight, was of the latest design, and I set to work at once, while he watched me with evident interest. At last the crucial moment came, and I bent over the instrument and adjusted the focus on my preparation. My suspicions were only too well confirmed by which I had extracted what I saw.

I previously read an excerpt from The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings in The Sorceress of the Strand and Other Stories, but the whole thing is on Project Gutenberg. Brotherhood is actually very similar to Sorceress: a scientific man keeps running into the dastardly plans of a scientific woman taking London by storm, a woman both beautiful and vaguely occult. Brotherhood was serialized (in The Strand), but it's somewhere between a Charles Dickens novel and a Sherlock Holmes story. It's not one big story like a Dickens serial, but it's not a string of standalones like Doyle's Holmes stories.

Rather, Norman Head (who studied physiology at Cambridge, but never qualified, and now does it out of sheer love) has a different encounter with some agent of Madame Koluchy's in each story. Sometimes he wins, sometime Koluchy wins, and the stories gradually chart their battle. It's like one of those tv series where the same bad guy is behind every plot, and sometime the situation changes, but mostly it remains static until the season finale.

The stories are decent, if not great. Meade over-depends on characters giving long backstory dumps to one another, which sucks the tension out of some tales, but other I enjoyed. Most stories have some kind of scientific conceit at their heart, making them borderline science fiction or maybe technothrillers-- people killed with new disease strains, or burglars using pendulums, or a temperature-triggered explosive, or x-rays used as a weapon. (The book has a co-writing credit for Robert Eustance; Janis Dawson's introduction to Sorceress says this is Robert Eustace Barton, who provided Meade with medical/scientific information while she wrote the stories herself [19].)

Madame Koluchy herself is kind of the best part. She's barely in the stories, usually working through agents, but that makes her all the more captivating. She's supposedly a scientist, and she does indeed invent things, but this is mostly what we're told about her. When we are actually shown her, her effect is more occult; she pulls people into her orbit with her beauty, and grants them what they desire if they help her advance the power of the Brotherhood of the Seven Kings. Boring old Norman Head (and his lawyer friend) are hardly worthy adversaries; Head used to be a member of the Brotherhood and in love with Koluchy, but it's hard to imagine this. A version of this with more Madame Koluchy, and more consistently intriguing and varied plots, would be a good book, but as it is, we have a pedestrian one with occasional flashes of interest.

Review: Doctor Who: The Gingerbread Trap by Justin Richards

Hardcover, 36 pages
Published 2016 (originally 2015)
Acquired February 2017
Read August 2017

Doctor Who: The Gingerbread Trap
by Justin Richards
illustrated by David Wardle

The Krillitanes from "School Reunion" fit surprisingly well into "Hansel and Gretel": instead of eating them, the "witch" feeds the kids food cooked in Krillitane oil (chips, but they don't know it because it's medieval Europe) so that they can fix its spaceship. Once you realize that, nothing here will surprise you, but it's cute enough, and less of an awkward/random fit than, say, vampires and Cinderella.

Next Week: A tale as old as time... Helana and the Beast!

Review: The Will to Battle by Ada Palmer

Trade paperback, 432 pages
Published 2018 (originally 2017)
Acquired July 2018
Read August 2018

Terra Ignota, Book III: The Will to Battle: A Narrative of Events of the year 2454
by Ada Palmer

The Terra Ignota books are odd. Great world-building, and in the case of this one, absolutely compelling reading. But if you asked me what happened that occupied over 400 pages, I would be hard-pressed to explain. A lot of people talk to each other about things, and it often feels like minor events are given lots of coverage, and important events happen offscreen, only by implication. Like, this one is about the world preparing for war in light of the revelations at the end of book III, and I loved the scenes of the world council meeting and debating the issues, complete with lots of juicy procedural detail. And then there are the 2454 Olympics at the end, which leads into some great developments. The role of the Utopians in the war is fascinating and excellent, and the end of the book is tragic and leaves you waiting for the next one so much. (Which is delayed. After three installments in two years, there's a two-year gap between the third and fourth installment. Understandable reasons, though.)

But what actually happens in the middle? Lots of people talk about J. E. D. D. Mason, people talk about other things... and... uh? I don't really know, which makes me wonder if the book really had to be this long! Plus there are so many characters, and Palmer just throws you back into their world-- I had forgotten who a lot of them were in the eight months since I read Seven Surrenders. Thankfully a lot less time is spent on Madame and her brothel, which really dragged down Seven Surrenders.

Still. What a great book. Utterly unlike any science fiction I've read in a long time, and with some great moral questions at its center, and Palmer has a way with deploying unexpected developments that seem completely natural in retrospect. I'm eager to see where this story goes in book IV, and how it can possibly be pulled together. Sticking the landing on this one will certainly be an incredible feat.