★★★★★ Clef's story

Locklands

Robert Jackson Bennett

In this corner we have Crasedes Magnus, the immortal heirophant -- oh, Heck, let's just call him a God -- who wants to enslave all of humanity for their own good. BOO!! HISS!! In the opposite corner we have Tevanne, which is the name we now use for the entity that came into being when Gregor Dandolo allowed the Artificial Intelligence known as Valeria to take him over, and together the two of them took control of all the scrived rigs of the city of Tevanne. (This, more or less, is analogous to taking over all the electronic devices of a modern real-world city.) Gregor's goal was to thwart Crasedes. But, alas. Valeria's intentions for humanity make Crasedes look like Saint Francis of Assisi. More BOO!! HISS!! In a third corner we have our heroes (OOO!! SIGH...) Berenice and Sancia and their good friends (not all of whom are dead). Tevanne has imprisoned Crasedes and has, for the last eight years, been making war on the collective Berenice and Sancia founded, Giva.

Berenice and Sancia haven't exactly lost, but they sure as Heck ain't winning. They have reached the point where, as they themselves put it, "there is no dancing through a monsoon". That means, roughly, that when The Big One comes, you throw finesse to the winds and fight with everything you have.

There is one important character I have not yet mentioned: Clef. Clef is a device -- a key that can open anything. We first met Clef in Foundryside, when Sancia stole him from Gregor. But Clef is not just a device -- he is also a personality. Sancia, because of her unique gift, could talk to him, so right from the beginning we were treated to conversations between Clef and Sancia, in which Clef revealed himself to be witty and clever and kind. In fact, near the end of Foundryside Clef enabled Sancia to see inside the key that holds him, where she saw him as a man once called Claviedes, who had been put in the key by Crasedes. At the end of the second book, Shorefall we learned that Claviedes was Crasedes father. At least, that's what they say, and if you can't trust a god and the person he stuffed into a key, who can you trust?

On finishing Shorefall, it seemed obvious to me that Clef's story had to be told. I even hinted so in my review. And, indeed, we get Clef's history in Locklands! That is not the whole of the book, because Clef's history is revealed in the course of an ongoing war between Giva and Tevanne. It's a huge and exciting story, with battles of mountain-sized missiles hurled against floating city-size battle citadels, and eleven-dimensional chess-like strategies, and hackers scriving their way into secure places, and above all, an ideological conflict -- is humanity truly so irredeemably awful as Valeria and Crasedes believe, or is there hope for us? It is all told through the personal stories of Berenice, Sancia, Clef, Valeria, and Crasedes. It is grand and exciting and, above all, something NEW. It is rare that I read a new book that really tells a really new story. To me, this felt like one.

I picked up The Founders Trilogy because it was the only finalist for the 2023 Best Series Hugo Award that I had not yet read.

⬤ Children of Time Series, by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Pan Macmillan/Orbit)
⬤ The Founders Trilogy, by Robert Jackson Bennett (Del Rey)
⬤ The Locked Tomb, by Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com)
⬤ October Daye, by Seanan McGuire (DAW)
⬤ Rivers of London, by Ben Aaronovich (Orion)
⬤ The Scholomance, by Naomi Novik (Del Rey)

It's a great list -- I love all of them. But if I were voting, my vote would go to this one, to The Founders Trilogy. I am not predicting that it will win. Many readers will, I think, find The Founders Trilogy big and indigestible. It's a fantasy series about software development, and that's not going to be everyone's cup of tea.

The ending is *complicated*. It is not all sad -- indeed, in my opinion, it is more happy than sad -- but if you want an ending where rainbows and happy marriages break out all over -- it is not that. You have been warned.

Amazon review

Goodreads review

Comments

★★★★★ Witches and pain magic

Storm Cursed Patricia Briggs As I have noted elsewhere , the three pillars of magical society in Patricia Briggs 's Mercyverse , also Mercyverse , are werewolves, vampires, and fae. However, she also feels free to import any folkloric creatures that anyone has ever told stories about. Thus Mercy herself is descended from First Nation not-quite-a-god Coyote. Aside from the big three, most of these other magical beings are one-offs. And since Briggs is all about the politics and palace intrigue, they don't have the standing to become pillars of Mercyverse magical society. In fact, the first three books, Moon Called , Blood Bound , and Iron Kissed , served as introductions to werewolves, vampires, and fae, respectively. If there is a fourth, it is witches. Witches are important in the Mercy Thompson series and even more in the companion Mercyverse series Alpha and Omega . Columbia basin witch Elizaveta Arkadyevna has a...

★★★★★ Kaladin and Sylphrena dance

Wind and Truth Brandon Sanderson Some books contain a moment so perfect, so luminous, that it glows up an entire series. I think of the scene in Lloyd Alexander 's Chronlces of Prydain in which Fflewddur Fflam burns his harp, or the reunion of Molly and Foxglove in Ben Aaronovitch 's Lies Sleeping , or Cordelia's return from her shopping trip in Lois McMaster Bujold 's Barrayar . Wind and Truth , the latest installment in Brandon Sanderson 's Stormlight Archive contains such a moment. It is when Kaladin, trying to imagine something that would make him happy, realizes, "He wanted to go dancing with Syl." Kaladin, "an old spear who wouldn’t break," is a grizzled veteran who has been a solider, a slave, and a leader and who has survived the hardest of lives. Sylphrena is an honorspren -- that is, she is an audible, visible, and occasionally tangible embodiment of Honor. She and Kal are bound by oaths, not t...

★★★★★ Brilliant, dark and dangerous and angry

Once There Was Kiyash Monsef Marjan Dastani is an orphan. Her mother died of cancer when she was eight years old. Her mother's death broke Marjan and it broke her father Jamsheed. Eight years passed, then her father was murdered. That was three months ago. Marjan is still grieving, and hers is not a gentle grief. Marjan does not grieve gentle -- she grieves hard and she grieves angry. Marjan's father was a veterinarian. He had a small, struggling practice in Berkeley. Marjan, being still in High School, has no formal training in veterinary practice. Her father, however, let her watch while he treated animals, and even asked her assistance. Even without formal training, Marjan is a practically trained vet. Marjan's father frequently left Marjan to herself for days or a week while he left town on unexplained trips. Now, months after her father's death, she receives a phone call, and a request to travel to England (along with a first-class air ticket). At the airport a dig...

★★★☆☆ There are three kinds of people…

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything Nate Silver I have mixed feelings about Nate Silver ’s On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything , because it is a mixed kind of book. On the one hand, I find Silver ’s way of thinking: quantitative, probabilistic, epistemically humble, congenial. On the other, his need to make enemies is less congenial. The premise of On the Edge is that people who live by managing risks form a community, which Silver Calls “The River”. His definition of the River (“River: A geographical metaphor for the territory covered in this book, a sprawling ecosystem of like-minded, highly analytical, and competitive people that includes everything from poker to Wall Street to AI. The demonym is Riverian.”) is broad and vague, but that is not really a problem, because the book consists mostly of profiles of hundreds of Riverians — by the end, you have a clear idea of who (in Silver 's mind) the members are. Silver ...

★★★★★ Finding a home

The Blue Sword Robin McKinley When I was growing up my father's job kept my family moving. Mom and Dad eventually settled down, but just when they did I became an itinerant academic, moving to study and work at various research institutions. I was a 27 year old grad student at Stanford when I first read The Blue Sword and the longest I had ever lived in one place was six years. (Understand, I am not complaining -- I was and am a Happy Nomad.) There's a peculiar type of homesickness experienced by rootless people. One usually thinks of homesickness as being away from and missing a very specific place -- the place one calls home. But I had no place to call home. And yet I sometimes felt homesick -- I felt the lack of a home -- all the more because there was no home where I longed to be. In the first few chapters of The Blue Sword I immediately recognized this feeling of rootless homesickness in Angharad (Harry) Crewe, the hero of the book. As the book begins Harry ...

★★★★☆ Thursday Next goes recursive

First Among Sequels Jasper Fforde We ended Something Rotten with what looked a lot like a resolution. We learned that Granny Next, who had been hanging around wearing blue gingham and looking for the ten most boring books ever written, was in fact Thursday herself in her old age. If you've read the previous books in Jasper Fforde 's Thursday Next series , nothing will surprise you less to learn that 110-year-old Thursday had somehow become a contemporary of mid-thirty-year-old Thursday and died happily in her presence. And if you HADN'T read the other books, you might think that this means that Thursday is going to survive to a grand old age and die peacefully, in the presence of her family. Happy endings all around! But of course nothing is more labile than the past in the Thursday Next series . Thursday's husband Landen has blinked in and out of existence for most of the previous books. So, although I do suspect that Thursday's eventual fate will be as fo...

★★★★☆ A spaceship makes tea and a detective looks for bodies

The Tea Master and the Detective Aliette de Bodard Aliette de Bodard 's The Tea Master and the Detective is a novella/novelette (it took me about two hours to read) set in de Bodard 's Xuya Universe . In my opinion, a reader will benefit from a little background reading on Xuya before attempting any Xuya stories. Of the three I have read so far, which are The Citadel of Weeping Pearls , Of Wars, and Memories, and Starlight , and The Tea Master and the Detective , this is the only one that is really comprehensible without a prior introduction to the world. The main innovation in this story, and one of the principle features of de Bodard 's Xuya, is the existence of spaceships who are persons. Science Fiction fans will have encountered the idea of conscious spaceships before this. The earliest example of it that I know was Anne McCaffrey 's The Ship Who Sang , and a more recent example is Ann Leckie 's Imperial Radch ...

★★☆☆☆ There must be a more concise way to say, "Scientists are bad, and I don't understand virology."

Rise: A Newsflesh Collection Mira Grant Rise: A Newsflesh Collection is a collection of short fiction adjacent to Seanan McGuire 's Newsflesh series of zombie novels. It includes all the Newflesh short fiction currently (14-Jul-2022) listed on Goodreads' Newsflesh series page , except for Fed . And the collection is NOT short. Most of the eight stories included are novellas and took me about two hours each. So, it was a long slog, which I undertook only as part of my project to read everything McGuire has published. I was glad to reach the end. There is, in my opinion, one rather good story in here: The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell . By itself it would rate a high three stars. It is the reason the book gets two stars rather than one. Without further ado, here are the stories: Countdown tells the story of how the Kellis-Amberlee virus (the Newsflesh zombie virus) came to be. it is a long recitation of McGuire ...

★★★★☆ An adult middle-grade children's novel

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches Sangu Mandanna When I began The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches I thought it was a middle-grade novel. The cover is very middle-grade-ish. And three of the main characters, the young witches girls Altamira, Terracotta, and Rosetta, are middle- grade or young-teen girls. The tone is also very middle-grade. As Sangu Mandanna writes in her Acknowledgements When I started writing this book, we were eight months into the pandemic and all I wanted to work on was a warm, cozy, romantic story about magic and family. And that, indeed, is what she wrote. Mika, our heroine, is a lonely, emotionally scarred young woman who finds a home and a family. It is all very warm and cozy -- it feels like the perfect middle-grade novel. I was therefore a little surprised by this quote: Her eyes very round, seven-year-old Altamira said, with perfect gravity, “That was some excellent Mary Poppins shit right there.” That made me laugh ...

★★★★★ Two mysteries

A Drop of Corruption Robert Jackson Bennett Every speculative fiction novel is a mystery. We don't necessarily call it that -- the usual term is world-building. But the best F&SF novels don't just tell you about the world you're in: they make it a puzzle that the reader gradually solves. World building becomes world discovery. Some F&SF novels are also murder mysteries, with detectives and the big reveal at the end. Robert Jackson Bennett 's A Drop of Corruption is both. It starts out as a locked-room murder mystery. Ana and Din figure out how the murder was done almost immediately, but who did it and why they don't know. That is the mystery that most of the novel is concerned with. It turns out to be deeply tied to the nature of the Empire of Khanum. Although I loved The Tainted Cup -- it was just so much fun! -- I didn't love the world-building. It felt perfunctory to me. This surprised me because Bennett is an author who is not afrai...

Search This Blog