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Crown of Stars, James Tiptree Jr

It’s probably long past time I acknowledge Tiptree as one of my favourite genre writers, given I’ve read almost everything she wrote and will happily reread many of her stories. I’d also classify some of her fiction as stone-cold genre classics.

Crown of Stars (1988, USA), a posthumous collection, is an odd book. Especially given how Tiptree died. The contents are a mixture of science fiction and fantasy and, to be honest, the fantasy ones feel more like extended jokes than actual fiction. Not that the sf stories are all entirely serious. They are all, however, pretty dark. 

Telepathic aliens visit Earth but go away disappointed there are no gods. Poor single mothers give up their babies for adoption in a future where only the super-rich can afford “meat”. Heaven has gone bankrupt so Satan offers it space in Hell. A soldier on battle-drugs is sent to detox but finds a stash of the drugs and breaks out. A young woman is convinced the Earth is male and does her best to attract his interest. The most poignant story, however, has a teenage girl swap lives with herself at seventy, only to discover her family’s wealth had been lost, the USA consists of gated communities but is otherwise lawless, and in her attempt to make her life when she swaps back better, she inadvertently makes it worse.

These are quality stories, although none are perhaps as memorable as Tiptree’s best. ‘The Earth Like a Snake Doth Renew’, which is clearly in conversation with Tiptree’s own ‘The Last Flight of Doctor Ain’, is perhaps the top story here, or at least showcases those elements in her fiction for which she was most admired. To anyone new to Tiptree, I’d suggest starting somewhere else, perhaps her first anthology, Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home (1973, USA), or one of the later best of collection, such as Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1990, USA), but exploring her oeuvre is certainly worth doing.


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The Green Man’s Holiday, Juliet E McKenna

This is the eighth book in the series, which is pretty impressive given, I believe, the first one wasn’t actually intended to be published, and certainly wasn’t planned as the first book of a series. But the premise lends itself to multiple stories, and the novels so far have been very good… so why not?

 

Daniel Mackmain is the son of a human man and a dryad. As a result, he can speak to, and interact with, creatures from English folklore. He is also occasionally given tasks by the Green Man. Over the course of the preceding seven books, Mackmain has given up his work as a jobbing carpenter, and settled down as estate manager at a stately home, and has a girlfriend who is a hydrology consultant and a Swan Maiden. Mackmain has also built up a network of people like himself, half-human half-folkoric creature, across the UK.

In The Green Man’s Holiday (2025, UK), Mackmain and his girlfriend, Fin, have taken a week off and rented a small cottage in the Mendips. First, the phones stop working, then their car, and then someone dumps a newborn on their backdoor step. They contact the police and the baby is returned to its distraught parents.

But it’s not a real baby, it’s a changeling. And Mackmain realises this. So he and Fin need to find the real baby, and then swap it for the changeling. They find the baby easily enough – through a portal at some nearby standing stones. But Fin becomes trapped on the other side of the portal while rescuing the baby, leaving Mackmain to resolve everything on his own. Without rousing the suspicions of the police.

But not, unfortunately, before attracting the attention of a hag (really nasty pieces of work, introduced in an earlier novel in the series). So Mackmain has to foil the hag, return the baby, and somehow find a way to get Fin back.

They’re a lot of fun these books – and yes, you do learn about British folklore. They deserve to be popular. I’ll happily read them as long as McKenna writes them. In this one, the odds seemed stacked higher than previously against Mackmain – of course, he’s sure to win through, but it feels like a close run thing. I admit a lot of the parts of England where these stories take place are unknown to me, and might as well be a foreign country. I mean, when I hear “Cotswolds” and “Mendips”, I think Midsummer Murders and what I call “chocolate box England”. The Green Man series may use similar locales, but there’s nothing sanitised (or even whitewashed) about them in the books, and they’re very much set in the UK of the twenty-first century.

Not my favourite of the series so far, but they’re all good so there’s only a tiny difference in it. Recommended.


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Short, Michael Blumlein

I’ve been a big fan of Blumlein’s fiction for years, ever since coming across one of his stories in an Interzone anthology back in the late 1980s – it was either his debut story, ‘Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report’, in Interzone: the 1st Anthology (1985, UK), or ‘The Brains of Rats’, his second published story, in Interzone: the 2nd Anthology (1987, UK). Whichever it was, it inspired me to track down everything else he had written.

Which was not easy at the time. I found a copy of his first collection, The Brains of Rats (1990, USA), which had been published by US small press Scream Press and was not readily available in the UK (I forget where I bought it; it might have been at a convention). His debut novel, The Movement of Mountains (1987, USA), which was science fiction, appeared in the UK in 1989. His second novel, X, Y (1993, USA), which was horror, was only available as a US massmarket paperback.

Then there was a gap – a story every year or two, a handful of novellas, but nothing at novel-length until The Healer (2005, USA). And a decade later, a handful of collections of his fiction. Of which Short (2023, USA), and its companion volume, Long (2023, USA), are the latest. Sadly, we lost Blumlein in 2019, so when these two volumes claim to be complete, they will stay that way. He was a singular talent, and almost sui generis. His stories were carefully crafted, and always thought-provoking. Some, obviously, worked better than others, and reading Short, which contains all twenty-nine of his published short stories, the differences can be stark.

Blumlein’s debut story, ‘Tissue Ablation and Variant Regeneration: A Case Report’, first published in Interzone in 1984, is remarkable. It’s also emblematic of Blumlein’s career – somewhere on the borderline between science fiction and horror, with occasional steps entirely into one genre or the other, often based around something medical, and always with very analytical prose. ‘Bestseller’, one of his more popular stories, is a case in point: a struggling writer answers a mysterious advert, and agrees to donate bone marrow for a large sum of money to an ailing billionaire. Then other parts of the billionaire’s body begin to fail, and the writer finds himself donating more and more…

Other stories read as though they were written to a specific market – ‘Snow in Dirt’, for example, was written for an anthology inspired by fairy tales. Even the stories originally published in F&SF feel like F&SF stories, and are lighter in tone than Blumlein’s other works.

Having said that, twenty-nine Blumlein stories in succession is a little overwhelming. His prose is intense and his stories are subtle. Short is a collection to be dipped into and savoured, I think. On the other hand, I now want to reread Blumlein’s novels. Fortunately, I recently purchased a copy of The Movement of Mountains (my copies of his books are in storage). 

And, of course, I have Long still to read.


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Wheel of Time 14: A Memory of Light, Robert Jordan

And so the Wheel of Time finally rolls to a halt. After fourteen volumes in what was intended to be a ten-book series, and the literal death of the author. It has been a slog, a brain-rotting plod through some of the worst prose ever to appear between two covers. Jordan had no discipline, seemed to think a plot meant merely moving characters around on a map, or, occasionally, not moving them, and used quirks and silly habits to define each of his cast, who behaved like teenagers. Sanderson, who wrote the last three books, is little better. He may treat the characters like adults, but he doesn’t understand what a chapter is. In A Memory of Light (2013, USA), there is a chapter which describes every skirmish of the Last Battle over a single day and is nearly 200 pages long. And is then followed by three much shorter chapters, also covering the Last Battle on that same day. Sanderson’s prose is also somewhere around the same level as Dan Brown or RA Salvatore, for example:

… a skim of ebullience over sombreness.

The Last Battle is the centrepiece of the novel, it’s what everything has been leading up to over thirteen fat books. It takes place on the Field of Merrilor, which is actually a random piece of ground on the border between two countries. No reason is given for the name, or why a random section of countryside should deserve a name. In real history, battles are named for nearby towns or villages, such as Waterloo. The nearest town or village to the Field of Merrilor is– oh, there isn’t one.

While all this is going on, Rand is battling the Dark One in some sort of place outside of time and space. This fight seems to involve each of them showing each other what the future will be like if either of them survives, and shouting at each other IN ALL CAPS.

The whole thing is dragged out so much, it’s mind-numbingly boring. We know the good guys are going to win because Mat is a tactical genius – despite the fact the bad guys hugely outnumber them and have an actual superhero leading them. There are, of course, other battles going on elsewhere – three of them, in fact. But they’re soon lost and everything shifts to the Field of Merrilor. I’ll say one thing in Sanderson’s defence: he finds some novel uses for Travelling (but then everything else the Aes Sedai and Asha’man do is just your standard AD&D battle magic).

Pretty much all of the central cast survive to the end of the book, although Sanderson throws a few bait-and-switches in order to make it happen. The Forsaken… I’d completely lost track of who was who. They’ve changed names and appearances throughout the series. Nor did they seem to do much except whinge at each other. In fact, for much of the novel, if not the entire series, the biggest hurdles the good guys had to face were other good guys. The Seanchan invasion. The Children of Light. All the various factions. And, after all that, the bad guys turn up in overwhelming force, with hundreds of thousands of Trollocs, every other nasty creature that’s been named in the previous thirteen books, and an actual army, with its own wielders of the One Power, from some other part of the world that’s been mentioned perhaps twice in the entire series…

The Wheel of Time is not a good series, and A Memory of Light is not a good novel nor a good end to the series. I’m glad I finally finished the series. I’m also slightly astonished I bothered to read it all.


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Chronicles of the Kencyrath 4: To Ride a Rathorn, PC Hodgell

To Ride a Rathorn (2006, USA) is the fourth book in Hodgell’s, to date, ten book series, the Chronicles of the Kencyrath. This is heartland fantasy, so heartland it reads like a dramatised supplement for a fantasy role-playing game. And while main character Jame flips between Goth Mary Sue and emo superhero, collecting power tokens as the narrative progresses, there’s still much to like here. The world-building, for one.

Robert E Howard does this thing in some of his Conan stories where he hints at much greater historical depth than his Hyperborea can realistically carry. I’m not convinced it’s deliberate, but it gives some of his stories an added dimension which offsets their illogical mash-ups of historical periods. Hodgell does something similar – the historical depth, that is, not the mash-up.

The Kencyrath have lived on many worlds since being forced from their home world by Perimal Darkling. Rathillien is just the latest. Jame is a Highborn, and the twin sister of Torisen, lord of the Knorth, one of the Kencyrath houses. Jame was introduced as a thief in the first book, discovered her brother and assisted him in a great battle in the second book, tried to discover her role in the third book, and now, in the fourth book in the series, she’s been made Torisen’s heir and enrolled at Tentir, which seems to be some sort of training school for elite soldiers. Jame is not expected to succeed, nor is her presence appreciated.

Despite this, she muddles through, and even manages to resolve a few issues, some relating specifically to her house, Knorth, and its history, and some related to Tentir’s own history. Such as the rathorn colt – a sort of horse with armour and horns, which has been hunting Jame and which she turns into a reluctant ally. The title To Ride a Rathorn is actually a pun – because the phrase means something like “to grab the tail of a tiger” but there’s also this rathorn which Jame might end up actually riding…

Jame’s specialness gets a bit wearying at times – being the centre of a narrative is one thing, having the entire world revolve around a Mary Sue is another. It also means there’s not much jeopardy – no matter what Hodgell throws at Jame, she’s going to win through. There are, after all, seven more books to go. But the details are fun, the world-building is interesting, and the plot rolls forward with the relentlessness of a, er, charging rathorn.

I’m not a big fan of epic fantasy, or sword & sorcery, or whatever this sort of commercial fantasy is currently called. It’s mostly badly-written, derivative and lacking in originality. The basic template may have moved away from mediaeval Europe in recent years, but that hasn’t made it any more original. Hodgell’s Chronicles of the Kencyrath are no less derivative than a fantasy role-playing game from the industry’s heyday back in the 1970s, but I still think there’s enough of a sideways spin in these books to make them stand out from the rest.

Judged against the whole genre of science fiction and fantasy, they’re perhaps not much. But within the specific space they occupy, commercial European-inspired fantasy, they’re actually not bad, and worth reading.


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The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge

I’d heard good things about Hardinge’s fiction for several years, but I’d never bothered checking them out because, well… fantasy… YA… Not my usual, or preferred, choice of reading. But The Lie Tree (2015, UK) popped up for 99p on Kindle, and I thought it worth seeing what all the fuss was about.

And I’m glad I did.

Faith’s father, a reverend, is a celebrated palaeontologist in the 1860s, but he’s been accused of faking the fossils he discovered, so he and his family flee to the invented Channel Island of Vane to join a dig there. But all is not as it seems. The invitation was a ruse because the reverend is in possession of something that others want.

On the one hand, the title of the novel is a hint to the central element of its plot, which is not revealed until at least halfway in; on the other, it’s hard to describe the plot without spoilers. The spoiler-free version would go: Faith defends her father, uncovers a conspiracy against him, then tries to solve his murder and so learns his secret, the reason why he was invited to Vane, and uses it to take revenge on his killers.

However, a major part of the novel – although it doesn’t really kick in until around a third of the way in – is that Faith is clever, but because she is a girl it means nothing. She wants to be a scientist but her gender bars her from it. This is a novel about women as property, about chattel slavery of half of the human race, and about the means and methods open to women of the time to arrange a future for themselves and then safeguard it. Faith is a teen, and knows her much younger, and not very bright, brother, whom she loves nonetheless, is accounted more valuable than her. Even though she has the intelligence, the aptitude and the interest to follow in her father’s interests.

And it’s this element of the novel which lifts it above others of its ilk. Faith thought her father valued her because of her intelligence, but he was just using her – much as he used others to further his aims. Faith meets a woman – two, in fact, but one more so than the other – who have found a way to be intellectual without offending Victorian (male) society – I am for some reason reminded of JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973, UK), an excellent novel – but it doesn’t end well. And also I’m reminded of Jeanette Ng’s Under the Pendulum Sun (2017, UK), which presents as a fantasy set in Victorian times but is actually a brilliant commentary on Victorian fiction by women, missionary colonialism and women’s rights.

The Lie Tree is really good, and I should definitely read more by Hardinge.


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Towers of Midnight, Brandon Sanderson

The thirteenth book of the Extruded Fantasy Product that is The Wheel of Time, and the second written by premier Extruded Fantasy Producer Sanderson after Jordan’s death. This is the end-game of the series – and has been for several books – and there’s still one more humungous tome to go.

Rand al’Thor has finally grown up (it’s only taken him twelve books), and proves that when he puts his mind to it he has, well, super-powers. But he doesn’t use them to defeat the bad guys because that would end the story real quick. Meanwhile, Egwene is trying to get the Aes Sedai behind her, but someone is murdering sisters in the White Tower, so Egwene arranges an ambush in Tel’aran’rhiod, the dream world. Perrin Aybara finally accepts what people have been telling him for around seven or eight books, that he’s not just a blacksmith out of his depth but the actual leader of an actual army – oh, and he turns out he’s even more powerful in Tel’aran’rhiod than Egwene because of all the wolf dream stuff. Mat Cauthon still eyes up every woman he meets and tries to work out which of his friends he should introduce them to, but he also rescues Moiraine (remember her?) from the Aelfinn/Eelfinn (one of the genuinely dramatic bits of the novel, to be fair). Oh, and he invents cannons, as well. Elayne is, well, Elayne spends the novel being pregnant and being a queen. And there’s some weirdness going on at the Black Tower, with an increase in toxic masculine behaviour (!), and something preventing those there from Travelling out (gosh, not an obvious piece of foreshadowing at all).

There’s a few other bits and pieces going on, and a handful of sections from the POVs of supporting characters – but it still feels like there’s a lot of verbiage for very little actual progress. By the end of Towers of Midnight (2010, USA), the good guys have a gigantic army gathered at the field of Merrilor, which I think puts them in place for the Last Battle… Incidentally, I don’t recall any actual towers of actual midnight being mentioned in the novel, other than in the glossary (which places them on the Seanchen continent – er, what?).

On the plus side, Nynaeve loses her braid, so there’s no more pulling of it (although it doesn’t stop Sanderson from repeatedly mentioning she wants to pull it). Sanderson clearly doesn’t have Jordan’s fascination with spanking, but every female character is introduced with a description of her breasts. There are also lots of descriptions of clothes, mostly female. The prose reads like it was dictated (which is how I believe Sanderson “writes”), the sort of narrative scramble created by someone who puts things down as they think of them. There must have been some planning, of course, given the vast cast (ugh) of the series and the even vaster wordage, but was that Sanderson or Jordan?

Sanderson doesn’t appear to know what a chapter is. There are 57 in this novel. Each one contains sections from the POVs of the different lead – and supporting – characters. The chronology is more or less linear, but there’s no structure or logic to which narrative thread follows which – sometimes, several sections follow one POV, other times it flips between several in a single chapter. It’s not as if the chapters were all the same length, either. I couldn’t work out what in story terms signalled the end of one chapter and the beginning of the next.

There’s only one more book to go: A Memory of Light (2013, USA). There’s a lot of heavy lifting needed to finish off the story – which no doubt explains its 350,000+ words.

We shall see how that goes. 


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Soul Music, Terry Pratchett

I’ve heard it said the Grateful Dead were not actually very good live, but every now and again everything would sort of fall into place and it would be an almost transcendental experience – and it was those moments which led to their popularity. I’ve no idea if that’s true, but I do know that such moments can happen at a live performance. I remember one gig at Corporation in Sheffield – I forget the year, or who was the main act, but a support act was playing. I was standing with two guys, complete strangers, and none of us was impressed. Then the band started a new song and all three of us said, “Now that’s interesting.” (For the benefit of non-Brits, that means it was good.)

In Soul Music (1994, UK), Pratchett takes those moments – generated here by magic, and by some magical force for its own ends – to chart (see what I did there?) the invention of a new kind of music in Ankh-Morpork. A harpist from Llamedos (read it backwards) moves to Ankh-Morpork. Unable to afford a license to perform, the harper falls in with a troll and a dwarf, and the three form a band, The Band With Rocks In (because the troll is a drummer and his drums are, er, rocks). The harper’s, er, harp is broken at an unlicensed performance, but he finds a new one in a mysterious shop that mysteriously appears mysteriously. And that changes everything. Suddenly, all The Band With Rocks In’s performances are like those mythical Grateful Dead performances.

Meanwhile, Death has left his post, upset over the death of his apprentice and adopted daughter, so his granddaughter takes over the role. But she’s not especially good at it. When she turns up to the Mended Drum at which the harpist – now calling himself Buddy (referencing a pop star who died, um, 66 years ago), and the troll has taken the name Cliff (a rock joke, and referencing a pop star who, I suspect, will never die)… The harpist is supposed to die at the gig, but instead Death’s granddaughter allows him to live… which only makes the music magic more powerful…

Pratchett has a great deal of fun taking the piss out of the music industry, although many of his references are a good thirty years earlier than the year the book was published. And some of the jokes about bands on the road were already clichés when Pratchett made use of them. Neither of which means the book isn’t amusing. And the Death/Death’s granddaughter narrative makes for a good contrast – and introduces some interesting characters (and makes use of several old ones).

I find the music industry a more interesting target than some of the targets in earlier Discworld novels, but it does occasionally feel like the jokes are a little too obvious and the commentary not as pointed or insightful. Having said that, my taste in music is… niche, and quite specific, and has regularly been misrepresented in popular culture. So perhaps that got a little in the way when I read Soul Music. All the same, I enjoyed it, although I wouldn’t put it in the top five of Discworld novels (of the ones I’ve read).


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Men at Arms, Terry Pratchett

Cited by many as their favourite of the Discworld novels, Men at Arms (1993, UK), the fifteenth book in the Discworld series, is certainly one of the more quotable books of the series, at least in the sense it has more quotable lines of commentary than the sort of bad jokes people like to quote (but really shouldn’t). The one about Vimes and his boots – a serious point, not a joke – has had a lot of airplay on social media over the years.

Men at Arms is the second of the City Watch novels, featuring many of the cast from Guards! Guards! (1989, UK). A new recruit, human but brought up by dwarfs, is unknowingly the heir to the throne of Ankh-Morpork (which has not had a king or queen for centuries), and a prominent member of the Assassins’ Guild has decided restoring the monarchy would be good for the city and his own much-reduced fortunes.

Meanwhile, the Night Watch has taken on some other recruits under a new hiring initiative, including a dwarf, a troll and a woman. They are, of course, completely inept, except the woman, who’s actually a werewolf. They investigate a series of random murders, and begin bonding as a squad. Sergeant Vimes is due to marry a duchess, the richest woman in the city (although, to be honest, the eccentric animal (dragons, in this case) sanctuary-obsessed aristocrat is a bit of a tired cliché). And the aforementioned assassin has stolen the “gonne”, Discworld’s only firearm, and is using it to murder people to discredit the Lord Patrician, the ruler of Ankh-Morpork.

It can hardly be a surprise the new recruits foil the plot, more by accident than by design, but that’s how these sorts of stories work. Pratchett has fun with his characters, using them to mock various institutions and attitudes, both Ankh-Morporkian and real world. There are several laugh out loud lines, and a number of bitter-sweet moments. II’s easy to understand why so many pick Men at Arms as a favourite.


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Lake of Souls, Ann Leckie

I still think Leckie’s Ancillary Justice (2013, USA) was a much-needed shot in the arm for space opera. It had been taking on more and more characteristics of military sf, after New British Space Opera was co-opted by US authors and editors and became New Space Opera. But that’s an argument for another day. There was lots to like in the two sequels to Leckie’s debut, as well. Also the two pendant novels published since, Provenance (2017, USA) and Translation State (2023, USA) (although less so for the latter, I thought). I’ve yet to read Leckie’s fantasy novel, The Raven Tower (2019, USA).

Lake of Souls (2024, USA) is Leckie’s first collection, containing stories originally published between 2006 and 2019, and including a story original to the collection. The contents are organised in three sections: stories from the Imperial Radch universe, stories from the universe of The Raven Tower, and, opening the collection, stories unconnected to either.

Collections are by definition mixed bags. It probably comes as no surprise the stories set in the universes of Leckie’s novels are (mostly) better than the unconnected ones. Having said that, of the three Imperial Radch stories, only one reads like the same universe as the novels, one could possibly be in that universe, but the third appears to have no connection at all (it’s some sort of fable). 

The unconnected stories… the title story is a first contact that goes wrong, and reminded me of several similar pieces from the 1990s, two stories are based on premises that are definitely creaking at the seams these days, but ‘The Justified’, which is a very modern type of sf, and the Le Guin-ish ‘Another Word for World’ (big clue in the title there) are better.

The seven stories set in the world of The Raven Tower are more consistent, although the longest one, ‘The God of Au’, makes a jump two-thirds of the way in and nothing after that makes sense. I quite liked ‘The Unknown God’ and ‘Beloved of the Sun’, but the others are not especially memorable. Having said that, I suspect a collection of only fantasy stories might have been a better collection than Lake of Souls.

I was not really surprised on reading Lake of Souls to discover Leckie’s short fiction wasn’t up to the standard of her novels. While the world-building was generally done well, even if some of the premises were badly shop-worn, in several stories she failed to stick the ending. There are authors whose short fiction is much better than their novels, James Tiptree Jr, for example. It seems Leckie is the opposite.