★★★★★ King of the Cats, Alice and Thomas, Fairies, bogeymen, and assorted entertainments

Patreon Year 5

Seanan McGuire

I will begin by clarifying what I am reviewing here. Seanan McGuire has a Patreon Creator page. Patreon is a website where artists can share their work with subscribers. Subscribers pay a certain amount (usually monthly, but that varies from artist to artist), and in return get access to things ("rewards" in Patreon-speak) that the artist posts on Patreon. "Things" can mean images, videos, or (most relevantly in this case) eBooks. Typically there are multiple reward tiers -- the more you pay, the more you get. McGuire set up her Patreon page in June 2016 and has posted a story every month since then, which makes 64 now (September 30, 2021, when I am writing this), plus a few one-time extras. These "stories" can be pretty substantial literary works. For instance, the reward for July 2021 was an 80,000-word novel. The way Patreon works, if you subscribe to a tier, you typically get access to everything that was posted for that tier at any time in the past. (In principle an artist could delete past rewards to prevent subscribers from gaming the system, but few of them do that. And in fact, this is a great way to lure in new subscribers. I subscribed in June at the CAD 1.50 level (CAD=Canadian dollar) and in this way immediately got 61 stories.) Most of the stories are posted in MOBI, ePub, and PDF form. MOBI files can be converted for reading on Amazon kindle, and that is how I have read most of these.

I started reading McGuire not long ago after stumbling on Discount Armageddon, the first book in the Incryptid Series. The Incryptid Series consists mainly of novels: ten currently published, with the eleventh due out in March 2022. Although McGuire has a stated intention of making the novels stand on their own, she has also released many Incryptid stories separately. The Incryptid Short Stories page on her web site lists about two dozen of these, some published in anthologies but most available free for download (completely free -- no subscription required). This list does not include the Patreon stories. In addition to the Incryptid Series, McGuire is best known for another series, October Daye. She also has a page of October Daye short stories on her web site.

I have read all ten currently available novels of the Incryptid series (that is, through Calculated Risks) and all the Incryptid short stories listed on McGuire's web site Incryptid Short Stories and the 49 stories posted in her first four years on Patreon (June 2016 - May 2019). I will assume you have, too, in the sense that this review may include spoilers for those works. Aside from Patreon stories, I have not read any October Daye works, so you're fairly safe from spoilers on those. I will try to avoid spoilers for the works I am reviewing here, which are the 12 works McGuire posted in her fifth year on Patreon. These are:

Wishes and Tears (Tybalt #11), June 2020 Patreon reward
Ratting, July 2020 Patreon reward
What was I meant to do? (Dave #1), August 2020 Patreon reward
Belief, September 2020 Patreon reward
Poor Fancy’s Followers, (Tybalt #12), October 2020 Patreon reward
What You Pay For, (Alice and Thomas #8), November 2020 Patreon reward
Our Trial Patience, (Tybalt #13), December 2020 Patreon reward
What You Build, (Alice and Thomas #9), January 2021 Patreon reward
Inflatable Angel, February 2021 Patreon reward
The Hand of the Forest, (Alice and Thomas #10), March 2021 Patreon reward
Earth for Charity, (Tybalt #14), April 2021 Patreon reward
By Any Other Name, (Alice and Thomas #11), May 2021 Patreon reward

This year was dominated by Tybalt (four stories) and Alice and Thomas (also four stories). Tybalt is from the October Daye world, and Alice and Thomas from the Incryptid world. We have another Incryptid story here, What was I meant to do?, and then we have three standalone stories.

In past years I have not liked the Tybalt stories. Tybalt was a pompous jerk who was difficult to like. However, in Patreon Year 4 he began an evolution towards a better person, and that continues this year. Overall, I had fun with this batch of Tybalt stories. They fit together into a bigger story, one that reflects well on Tybalt, so that was good.

This year's Incryptid stories were very good. We start with the unusual What was I meant to do?. This is told in the first person by Dave, the bogeyman who sold Verity out in Discount Armageddon. This little bit of treachery did not go as planned -- Dave was caught, and what's more, Verity survived. So Dave flees New York as if the whole Price family was after him. I enjoyed this story for two things. First, we are treated to Dave's musings on Prices, the Covenant, and humans in general, and thus to a view of how the North American cryptid community sees the Prices and the world. Second, Drew Baker, who was adopted by Angela Baker and thus became a member of the extended Price family, shows up. He tells most of the story of how that happened. So that was informative.

Then we have the four Alice and Thomas stories. These are, broadly speaking, about the courtship of Alice Healy and Thomas Price. We already know from allusions in the main Incryptid novels as well as the family trees they contain, that Alice and Thomas will eventually marry and have two kids, Kevin and Jane, who will go on to become the parents of the latest generation of Prices. So, we know this courtship is eventually going to work out, although we also know it isn't entirely, because something bad is going to happen to Thomas. Alice is by way of being the central figure of the Incryptid world, as McGuire told us in the Acknowledgments of Calculated Risks, so the courtship of Alice and Thomas is an important story. The first real Alice novel, Spelunking Through Hell will be released in March, and McGuire clearly feels some pressure to get certain aspects of the Alice and Thomas story fleshed out before then. In fact, the next two Patreon stories, To Build a Better..., Halfway Through the Wood (not reviewed here because they are from Year 6) also continue Alice and Thomas's story, and Halfway Through the Wood is not just a story, but an 80,000-word novel. These stories were very good. And in By Any Other Name we finally meet the other Price family dead aunt, Rose, who is the central figure in the Ghost Road series.

The three standalone stories are diverse. Inflatable Angel is a typical McGuire ghost story. Like many of her ghost stories, this one is pretty upbeat. Ratting is also a typical kind of McGuire story, what I call a "ruin story", because, as she once explained, "Sometimes I ask my friends what they want me to ruin for my patrons." The ruin stories are mostly about about a sort of apocalypse or dystopia -- a future where something connected with the thing to be ruined has gone badly wrong. Ratting takes the Covid pandemic to an extreme. Like most of the ruin stories, this one is bleak and dreary. Then we have Belief. There is nothing supernatural in this story. I can't improve on McGuire's introduction to this story: "For this month's story, we're exploring what it means to believe in something bigger than yourself, and why Santa is unfair. A story about a little girl and the post office."

Comments

★★★☆☆ Vanja comes to terms with her history

Holy Terrors Margaret Owen Vanja Ros has a long history of disappointing people. She was the thirteenth child of Marthe Ros, and therefore, Marthe believed, ill-fated. She asked Death and Fortune to take her daughter. Death promised her, "Only one of you will go home." Death and Fortune gave their God Daughter Vanja a home. Vanja's mother never returned home from the forest. Marthe, now a ghost, is still furious about this. And so it went. Vanja went into service in a noble house and there she disappointed. Eventually she ended up as a thief. And then things got serious. A brilliant young prefect (police detective) came after her. She fell in love with him, and he with her, but she left him. She found her family and deceived them. She even became a goddess and failed at that. Now, to be clear, none of that is fair. It is, however, far too accurate a picture of how Vanja sees herself. When Holy Terrors begins, Vanja is estranged from Emeric, the prefect she loves, and sh...

★★★★☆ Embrace the confusion!

Witch King Martha Wells In 1995 I saw the Film Ghost in the Shell . It was a formative experience for me. The film was incredibly confusing -- cyborgs and thermoptic camouflage and international plots and sentient net intelligences and wheels within plots within wheels within plots. When it was over I had only the vaguest idea what had happened. But I was mortally certain of one thing: I LOVED it! What I didn't know at the time was that This Was How It Was Going To Be From Now On. Since then all major science fiction and most fantasy novels have been like that. I expect when I read a new one not to know what's going on. (Consider recent reads Children of Memory , Myriad , or grand-prize winner, the entirety of Tamsyn Muir 's Locked Tomb Series .) In fact, it is now at the point where, if I understand a new F&SF novel on the first read, I feel cheated. Martha Wells 's Witch King does not disappoint in this regard. Hierarchs and Expositors and...

★★★★☆ Where Peter Pan and Tiger Lilly come from

Tigerlilja Erin Michelle Sky, Steven Brown In J.M. Barrie 's Peter Pan Peter's great ally is Tiger Lily, who is introduced thus ...Tiger Lily, proudly erect, a princess in her own right. She is the most beautiful of dusky Dianas and the belle of the Piccaninnies, coquettish, cold and amorous by turns; there is not a brave who would not have the wayward thing to wife, but she staves off the altar with a hatchet. There's obviously a lot there that's problematic in the 21st century. So she gets a rewrite in this Erin Michelle Sky and Steven Brown prequel to Tales of the Wendy . In addition, we get an origin story for Peter, something that to my knowledge Barrie never supplied. In fact, we start with Peter. Peter, it transpires, is descended from gods. Sky and Brown freely mix Norse and Greek gods here. In seeking to protect him from ancestral enemy Buri, Peter's mother accidentally curses him. You will forg...

★★☆☆☆ I don't wanna do what Momo says I should!

Momo Michael Ende I was seriously disappointed by Momo . Usually my tastes are not that different from the tastes of the world. If everyone likes a book, I will probably like it. That's all the more true because I like books. I didn't like this one. It felt to me that, under its thin story, it was really just a sermon -- a book telling me how I ought to think and act. I don't like books that preach at me. I like them even less when I disagree with what they're preaching. I LIKE my computers and microwave oven and iPad and digital clocks and kindle. I believe that time is precious, and that time-saving conveniences and time management are GOOD things. So, that's two strikes against Momo . Strike 3 is that Momo is boring. By that I mean both the book and the character. It felt to me like it was trying to be The Little Prince and missing by miles. Undoubtedly my failure to like Momo is a sign of serious moral failings, of a lack of intelligen...

★★★☆☆ Velveteen returns!

Velveteen vs Gainful Employment Seanan McGuire Velveteen vs Gainful Employment is Seanan McGuire 's October 2023 Patreon reward. Velveteen is the hero of a series of quite old stories by Seanan McGuire , notionally published in three books: Velveteen vs The Junior Super Patriots , Velveteen vs The Multiverse , and Velveteen vs The Seasons . I say "notionally published" because most of these books are no longer available as books. You can still find the stories online however. If you click on the links for the books in the previous sentence, they will take you to my reviews of the books on Goodreads, and in each review there is a list of links to free online copies of the chapters. They are a lot of fun. Velveteen, AKA Velma Martinez, is a superhero whose superpower is the ability to animate dolls, stuffed animals, etc, and make them do her bidding. Used imaginatively this is a pretty awesome superpower that has allowed Velveteen to win most of her battles. The last sto...

★★★★☆ An intelligent debut

The Last Bloodcarver Vanessa Le I bought this book because of the spectacular cover, . Judge this book by its cover! Of course you want to know what a Bloodcarver is. The best place to begin is Vanessa Le 's author biography Vanessa Le graduated from Brown University with a degree in Health and Human Biology and now resides in Portland, Oregon. Her writing is an expression of her love for medicine and her Vietnamese heritage. When not writing, she can be found studying medicine, spoiling her two Shiba Inus, or wishing she were writing. A heartsooth, we learn, is a healer who communicates and affects the body through touch. "Bloodcarver" is a sort of slur used for a heartsooth by those who don't understand. One suspects that Le herself aspires to be something like a heartsooth. Although Nhika grew up in Central Theumas and knows no other place, her mother and father escaped from the conquered and oppressed Island of Yarong, where all heartsooths came ...

★★★★★ Chaos mathematics coffee table book

The Beauty of Fractals: Images of Complex Dynamical Systems Heinz-Otto Peitgen, Peter H. Richter I first became aware of chaos mathematics in 1976, when Robert M. May published his famous Nature review "Simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics" , a preliminary exploration of what we now call the Logistic Map. Chaos research proceeded apace through the late 1970s and early 1980s, to the point where some of the questions May had raised were answered. It also became evident about then that there were connections between chaos mathematics and fractals, which had been explored earlier by Benoît B. Mandelbrot , who published The Fractal Geometry of Nature in 1977. In particular, there are deep connections between the logistic map explored by May and a particular fractal discovered by Mandelbrot that became known as the Mandelbrot Set. Now, in 2024, many people have heard of the Mandelbrot Set ...

★★★★☆ A good and intelligent goose girl

Thorn Intisar Khanani The Goose Girl (Die Gänsemagd in the Grimm brothers ' original German) is one of the more obscure Grimm's Fairy Tales, by which I mean that it has never, to my knowledge, been made into a Disney Feature Film. This obscurity, I suspect, is because it is a disturbingly modern story, in the sense of not having clear heroes and villains. (The Grimm brothers , however, perceived no such ambiguity. For them the princess is unequivocally good and the maid bad, in part because the princess has noble blood and the maid is common. Values have changed since those days.) The central story is that a princess takes off to marry the prince of a nearby kingdom, to whom she has long been engaged. She is accompanied by a maid. On the trip the maid forcibly swaps places with the princess and makes the princess, on pain of death, swear not to expose her. The princess takes this compelled oath much more seriously than any legal expert would advise. Arrived at the dest...

★★★★☆ Laziness spurs creativity

X-Men (Penguin Classics Marvel Collection) Stan Lee, Jack Kirby (Artist), Roy Thomas, Werner Roth, Don Heck, Neal Adams, Arnold Drake, Gary Friedrich, George Tuska, Ben Saunders (Editor), Rainbow Rowell (Foreword) The X-Men were born when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby , Marvel's premiere creators of new superhero comics, noted that superhero teams such as the Fantastic Four were box-office, so why not start another one? Lee wrote Then once I figured out what powers they'd have ... how did they get their powers? And they were all separate people that weren't connected to each other, so I knew that would be a helluva job. And I took the cowardly way out, and I figured, hey, the easiest thing in the world: they were born that way. They were mutants. In a world in which nuclear weapons tests had in the recent past released lots of radioactivity in to the atmosphere, this appeared to make a lot of sense. As a card-carrying geneticist, I have to tell ...

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