Twelve Months
I started reading Jim Butcher’s wizard series, about Harry Dresden, because they were mass market paperbacks and so good for putting in my backpack when I was traveling. Now I associate Harry’s characteristic end-of-his-rope exhaustion with travel, so it was different to read the newest one (annoyingly only out in hardback), Twelve Months, while snowed in and feeling quite well-rested.
This is the twentieth novel “of the Dresden files” and just as good as any of the previous ones. Taking place after the death of one of the major characters of the series, it covers the events of the year after the massive battle of Chicago (in Battle Ground). Harry does all his regular stuff, including some dicey joking around with powerful supernatural creatures, including his now-fiance, a powerful vampire. When she asks him what’s his favorite book, he gives this answer:
“You can’t pick a favorite….They’re books. They’re pieces of someone’s mind and soul. They’re almost friends….Sometimes a poet speaks best to what’s happening to you. Sometimes it’s a philosopher. Sometimes it’s a storyteller. Lately, I’ve been thinking of Kipling a lot.”
I think most readers will agree that’s a good answer.
Despite becoming an increasingly powerful supernatural creature himself, Harry remains partly human, like when he talks about Mouse, his dog:
“Near as I can figure he’s at least half an angel’s worth of protection. Good guardian….He once got hit by a car, got up, and hit it back.”
When his new apprentice observes that “I just thought he was a really good dog,” Harry replies “he’s mostly that….Could be that’s the more important, really. Most days, you don’t need a ferocious guardian. Hard to think of a day a really good dog wouldn’t add to.”
Part of why Harry still seems human is that he always struggles with the ethics of his situation. In this adventure, someone tells him that “gentleness is power that chooses to restrain itself. That is under control. Gentleness is someone strong who makes the choice to be careful with that strength. And that is you.”
Since I was reading this book during a snowstorm (we got a foot of snow followed by a week of temperatures hovering around zero degrees fahrenheit), I liked the part about “a world at war with the night. The cold of January. Where if chill winds sucked the warmth from the marrow, it was because elsewhere in the world was sunshine and light giving them energy.” I especially liked it because I’m looking forward to getting out of the cold and traveling to Los Angeles at the end of February, always one of the longest months to endure in the north.
There’s a Valkyrie who plays a big part in this adventure, and I enjoyed everything about her, especially that she doesn’t like coffee (as I don’t), saying “My God….Why would anyone drink that bitter nonsense when there’s already hot chocolate?”
And there’s a part that speaks to the current wrestling we’re doing with the use of AI, a topic that always makes me think about the Harry Potter book in which Mr. Weasley tells Ginny “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.” In this book, Harry Dresden’s daughter has a supernatural helper named Bonea (much like her father’s supernatural helper Bob) and Harry warns her that “she has access to a lot of information. Just remember that she’s unaware of a lot of things, too. So the information she does have has to be weighed carefully against what you know, what makes sense, all kinds of stuff like that. Don’t rely solely on Bonea, even though she really does want to help, and really does mean well. Look in lots of places. When you look for what’s true, the truth tends to line up over and over.”
Twelve Months is a fun book, and if you haven’t read any of the Harry Dresden adventures yet it’s great to know that there are twenty of them now.
Last Night in Montreal and Atmosphere
Emily St. John Mandel’s Last Night in Montreal and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmosphere don’t have a lot in common, but the one thing they do share is an ending that seems to me to trivialize the main conflict of the novel.
Reid tries to fix the fact that her ending trivializes the main conflict by giving her novel a subtitle: A Love Story. Ok, fair enough, I was warned that the fight of the protagonist, Joan Goodwin, to become one of the first female astronauts is ultimately secondary to the story of Joan’s romance with another astronaut candidate.
It’s a nice love story; some of the best parts are about how Joan is inspiring to her niece. So in the end the novel is about what a support Joan is to the two most important people in her life–the woman she loves and the niece she raises.
In a few places readers get very clearly-explained ideas about what it’s like to want to be an astronaut. This paragraph, for example:
“Astronomy was history. Because space was time. And that was the thing she loved most about the universe itself. When you look at the red star Antares in the southern sky, you are looking over thirty-three hundred trillion miles away. But you are also looking more than five hundred and fifty years into the past. Antares is so far away that its light takes five hundred and fifty years to reach your eye on Earth. Five hundred and fifty light-years away. So when you look out at the sky, the farther you can see, the further back you are looking in time. The space between you and the star is time.”
And there are some good early feminism moments, like when Joan’s lover Vanessa observes:
“People think you’re so easygoing….But you’re surprisingly intense about things. Nobody sees you coming.”
“I don’t give up,” Joan said. “When I want something.”
Vanessa nodded. “Persistence. Highly underrated in women. Overrated in men, but underrated in women.”
In the end, though, reading Atmosphere is like reading any other romance novel but with a bit of space program flavor.
St. John Mandel begins Last Night in Montreal with the words “no one stays forever” and then demonstrates that idea with the actions of her characters, although their continual fleeing never culminates in anything more than a recovered memory of abuse, the action that set all the flight in motion.
The character most of the other characters seem to be seeking, Lilia, says “I’ve never moved to anywhere in my life. When I show up in a city, it doesn’t mean I’m arriving, it only means…when I show up…I’m not arriving anywhere, I’m only leaving somewhere else.”
There are a few nice moments in the novel, like the one when the narrator tells us that “memory is too unreliable to entrust a story to the hero alone. Someone else has to have observed the chain of events to lend credibility; if no one else remembers your story, how are you to prove that it was real?”
But there’s a terrible part that winds its way all the way through, about a man who dedicates his life to finding a little girl who has disappeared while completely ignoring his own little girl.
In Last Night in Montreal I saw hints of what makes St. John Mandel such a good writer in later novels, but found that the characters don’t end up mattering to each other very much and the plot doesn’t really go anywhere in particular, which is ironic for a novel about continually moving around.
I think that how a novel ends matters a lot in terms of how I see it. To what extent do you agree?
Weyward
Weyward, by Emilia Hart, is a good novel for a long winter’s night. It weaves together the stories of three women from the same line: Altha in 1619, Violet in 1942, and Kate in 2019. Their stories have similarities—they are healers, herbologists and entymologists, and they have to find ways to survive the abusive men in their lives.
If you’re as averse to reading about abuse as I am, you might be glad to know that the abuse never reaches its ultimate end for any of the three Weyward women. Their magic comes to the rescue. Oddly, though, the magic is not the focus of this novel. Much of it reads like a realistic novel, up until the point that one of the women is backed into a corner, and then birds and bugs come to her rescue.
Right now it’s the deepest, darkest part of winter and the senile madman who has seized control of my country is spewing lies and declaring that he feels entitled to more countries, so it’s easy to believe in evil. We’ve been watching Slings and Arrows, and the second season is all about a production of Macbeth. Life seems precarious. So many innocents are being “detained” (the photo of the little guy in the blue bunny hat is particularly heart-wrenching).
Last weekend we thought it was possible to drive an hour to Columbus, but there were chances of “snow showers” and one caught us for a frightening fifteen minutes. First there was snow, then hail, sleet, lashing rain, and finally five minutes of whiteout. We made it there and back again, but the experience makes us loathe to go out on any of the many upcoming days when snow is possible. I’m feeling a bit trapped. So it’s the right time of year to read about Altha, who is literally imprisoned, Violet, who is not allowed to leave her father’s estate, and Kate, who is being isolated and controlled by her abusive husband.
Kate’s timeline, being the more-or-less contemporary one, is how readers get a perspective on the powers of the wayward women:
“The tree must be hundreds of years old. She imagines it standing sentinel for generations, keeping the little cottage safe in its shadow. She reaches out her hand and presses her palm against the bark.
It feels warm. Alive.
The air shifts. Suddenly, she wants to go back inside. There’s something about the garden that feels crowded, overwhelming. It’s as if there is no longer any barrier between the outside world and her nerves.”
To make the magic more familiar to readers, Kate thinks about a passage from The Secret Garden and quotes it, as we’re told she has had it “memorized since childhood”:
“Everything is made out of magic, leaves and trees, flowers and birds, badgers and foxes and squirrels and people. So it must be all around us.”
Late in the novel, when readers have seen what has become of the women in her line, we see Altha, the earliest character, remembering what her mother told her:
“This wildness inside gives us our name. It was men who marked us so, in the time when language was but a shoot curling from the earth. Weyward, they called us, when we would not submit, would not bend to their will. But we learned to wear the name with pride.”
Weyward is an easy read. I dipped into it during my grandson’s mid-day nap over a few days, and each time I did, it was easy to slip back into the world and remember what had been going on when I left off. My grandson is going to be a year old in a few weeks. He’s now spending 10am to 4pm at my house every weekday and that is bringing joy to my life, despite everything.
The Correspondent
Occasionally I enjoy an epistolary novel, and I was given a copy of Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent at a good time to enjoy it, years after the last thing I read that made use of those gaps when a reader imagines what must have happened after the receipt of a letter. I was so eager to find out what would happen next that I made my way through the novel in only two sittings.
One of the things that made The Correspondent a book I wanted to stay sitting down with is that she writes to famous authors and they actually take her thoughts seriously and respond. What a great fantasy, for readers! The authors she admires and writes to are not necessarily my favorites, but I did love that the first one featured is to Ann Patchett, about State of Wonder, which is my favorite of her novels.
I’m not yet quite as old as the letter-writer in this novel, Ms Sybil Van Antwerp, who is 73, but her thoughts about being retired and what her life might have meant to others rang true to me. I particularly enjoyed this passage, from a letter addressed to Sybil’s friend Mick Watts:
“One day…you yourself will be gone. Perhaps if you have children, they will remember you; if you have grandchildren, they, God allowing, may also retain a few fragments of memory including you, but their children will not. They may keep some old photos in a book on a shelf, and perhaps two or three times in a lifetime may turn the page and find your face and think Ah, yes, doesn’t Jimmy resemble this great-great-grandfather Mick, and continue to turn the page, so that will be what is left of you, nearly erased, in fewer than three generations, and your life, the life you see from the inside, right now, as monumental, will be reduced to the blood in their veins and perhaps, if you are lucky, a distant namesake….And yet, if one has committed oneself to the page, the tragedy I’ve just laid out will not apply. Imagine, the letters one has sent out into the world, the letters received back in turn, are like the pieces of a magnificent puzzle, or, a better metaphor, if dated, the links of a long chain, and even if those links are never put back together, which they will certainly never be, even if they remain for the rest of time dispersed across the earth like the fragile blown seeds of a dying dandelion, isn’t there something wonderful in that, to think that the story of one’s life is preserved in some way, that this very letter may one day mean something, even if it is a very small thing, to someone? If all of this amounts to you as nothing more than drivel, then you might also consider a simpler value of the written letter, which is, namely, that reaching out in correspondence is really one of the original forms of civility in the world, the preservation of which has to be of some value we cannot yet see. The WRITTEN WORD, Mr. Watts. The written word in black and white. It is letters. It is books. It is law. It’s all the same.”
The plot of the novel circles around Sybil’s memory of what happened when one of her children died. Early on she tells her sister-in-law that “it is as if, in my mind, there is a sentry standing outside the locked room of this memory—it won’t let me in.” Later she seems to remember more, but the earlier letter suggests the fallibility of memory, especially when it’s associated with trauma.
Another memory that gives shape to the plot is what happened to a person whose case came before Sybil and the judge she worked for, and the whole story is gradually revealed while someone associated with the case watches Sybil’s house and sends her frightening letters.
A third memory that becomes important to the plot is the memory of Sybil’s birth mother, who gave her up as a toddler. Finding out why she had to do that and who she was is the subject of many of the letters in the last half of the book (in the middle, there is an amusingly long and increasingly personal exchange of letters between Sybil and someone at a DNA testing company (Sybil’s children give her a DNA testing kit as a gift).
Sybil’s evolving relationship with her adult children also gives shape to the last half of the novel, and at one point she writes to one of them, saying:
“On the phone the other night you mentioned this, that you wondered if maybe I could only have meaningful relationships through letters, and I have been thinking about that. When I was young, by writing letters I found a framework that made living easier, and that has never changed. However, I do wonder if by conducting the most intimate relationships of my life in correspondence, I have kept, since I was a child, a distance between myself and others. I think it’s true the letters have insulated me, have been a force field, just as practicing law insulated me from dealing with humanity directly, and I wouldn’t change any of it, but I find myself, at this old age, wanting closeness.”
After my friend Victoria died, I realized that conducting intimate relationships by correspondence—writing in letters, texts, emails, and social media—did keep a distance between her and others. That’s one of the many ways that what the main character in The Correspondent writes in her letters to other fictional people, ends up meaning things that feel true to me.
The Summer War
Naomi Novik’s new novella The Summer War is delightful. It ends with a love story, but it’s also about cleverness and ambition and revenge. The plot centers around a girl and her two brothers who grow up in a fantasy border kingdom and eventually find a way to work together in order to overcome a century of animosity between their kingdom, Prosper, and the neighboring one, the Summer Country.
The story is told from Celia’s point of view, starting with the fact that she “was twelve years old on the day she cursed her brother” although she didn’t know it was a curse at the time, because she didn’t know she was a sorceress yet. We get her pre-adolescent perspective on the affairs of the kingdom: “the summer war had been over since before Celia had been born—Father had won it for Prosper, which was how he had become Grand Duke Veris.” We also get to overhear her oldest brother, Argent, recounting a memory of something that happened when he was twelve. And finally we get to hear her younger brother, Roric, recount a memory of Celia’s mother, from when he was very young, before the day Celia was born. The childish perspectives make the story seem sweet, even when the events are tragic.
The real action of the story begins when Celia is fifteen and the King of Prosper decrees that it’s time she marries. There is political intrigue and betrayal, and Celia’s power is neutralized by a magical object forced on her by the prince of the Summer Country. Then Argent shows up, the greatest knight in either country, and declares that he will fight for Celia’s freedom, a fight he can never win. It takes the combined efforts of all three siblings to free Celia from her imprisonment, Argent from his curse, and Roric from his habitual feeling of inconsequentiality. Roric’s part, in fact, turns out to be very important, and he plays it as a “story-spinner,” a traveling teller of tales.
In the end, the answer to all the riddles is a match between Argent and the prince of the Summer Country, as they are in love with each other. Celia and Roric get their own happy endings because they have learned to care for each other and, consequently, other people. There’s a happy ending we get to see “as they kissed one another with all the trees and vines around them blooming so furiously that the embroidered flowers on their clothes begin to lift off the fabric and come alive to join them.”
The Summer War is a small jewel of a story, perfectly cut and polished.
A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping
I read A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping, by Sangu Mandanna, because a friend alerted me to the fact that it begins with necromancy. It does, and there is a price.
The novel belongs to a fairly recent genre called cozy fantasy. It’s about found family and making a home, with plenty of scenes of the characters reading on couches, drinking cups of tea, and eating buttered toast. I’m a suggestible person, so I tried all of these while reading the book. (My tea is in a Jane Austen mug.)
The main character, whose name is Sera, is a very powerful young witch until the moment her great aunt Jasmine, who raised her, suddenly drops dead in the garden. When another witch who is standing nearby tells Sera that she knows an illegal resurrection spell and asks if she wants to think a moment before casting it, we’re told that “Thinking was exactly what Sera wanted to avoid. If she started thinking, her heart would crumple at the thought of losing the woman who had been more of a parent to her than her own parents had ever been. No, thinking was out of the question.”
So Sera raises her recently dead great aunt and also a 2-years-dead pet chicken and loses most of her magic.
Let’s stop here for a minute and think. So far this novel has featured all of the things that are infuriating me about what’s left of American society today: after retreating into our own family spaces during the pandemic lockdowns, we’re fantasizing about the kinds of people we’d really like to be isolated with while giving up thinking about truth and consequences in the outside world, breaking laws that we decide aren’t important, and imagining that staying inside while the world goes to hell all around us is just about all we can do.
Anyway, Sera’s love interest is brought to the inn that she runs with her great-aunt Jasmine by a spell she cast before she lost her magic and although he’s not sure at first that he wants to stay it’s clear that he fits right in:
“Undead chickens and memories materializing right before one’s eyes were only part of the weirdness he’d inadvertently stumbled into; there was, after all, also a knight presently lying on the sofa with a possible concussion, a cursed witch hiding from the Guild, the improbably theft of a priceless book that his own employer had apparently had a hand in, and who knew what else. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to how things worked here, no line between guest and family, no logic to who did what and when and why.”
Readers are supposed to see the inhabitants of the inn as remarkable for doing what I believe any thinking person would do for a child who has trouble following rules:
“At the inn, when Posy jumped on the sofa, she was firmly but gently asked not to, and then the following day, there was a trampoline in the garden….At the inn, Posy was obliged to brush her teeth, even when she made a fuss about it, but she was also given eighteen different kinds of toothbrushes to try until she found one that she liked.”
Posy most of all, but each of the characters are refugees from a cruel and authoritarian world. Eventually Sera does tell the witch’s Guild that they need to stop letting people from “the same ten families” make all the rules. Maybe in the future of this fictional world there’s hope that people can find happiness outside their own cozy little homes.
But the intensity of the celebration of being cozy throughout this novel eventually started to irritate me. Especially in the dark depths of an interminable Ohio winter, I’m grumpy about people who tell me they like being cozy:
“Here, at last, was the season of hot chocolate topped generously with whipped cream and mulled wine laced with cloves and satsuma slices. The season of curling up on the sofa under the weighted electric blanket, with a piece of perfectly sugared shortbread in one hand and a cup of boozy coffee in the other, while the fairy lights twinkled soft and gold across the mantelpiece and along the curtain rods.”
Also I’m extra grumpy when it seems like the writer is taking lazy shortcuts in her description, as when she describes Sera’s love interest as “a man who looked like he’d fallen out of a myth.” (Which myth? Are we talking Hephaestus here, or the Australian guy who played Thor in the movie? Did the writer even consider that some of her readers might think of a guy from a myth who wasn’t in a movie?)
A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping is a fine little cozy fantasy book, if that’s what you need to get you through the day in a world where even people who look like you are being shot dead for no reason by masked thugs who are hardly even pretending to enforce any kind of law.
Bone Gap
Bone Gap, by Laura Ruby, is a terrific novel about life in a small town. The epigraph is “the nice part about living in a small town is that when you don’t know what you’re doing, someone else does.” I live in a small town, and it took me a while to get used to it. One time my neighbor said to me, in the course of a conversation, “but you’re usually gone on Saturdays.” Another time I passed a friend going the opposite way on a 2-lane highway and she asked me afterwards why I didn’t wave. I said “why would I look into another car?” She said “well, we all look into the car on the side of a road to see who’s getting a ticket.” I do that, now.
Bone Gap seems like a fairly typical small town. It’s hard to escape the view everybody has of you. The main character, Finn, is an adolescent boy who has a reputation for being dreamy: “when he was little, they called him Spaceman. Sidetrack. Moonface….But whatever they called him, they called him fondly. Despite his odd expressions, his strange distraction, and that annoying way he had of creeping up on a person, they knew him as well as they knew anyone. As well as they knew themselves.”
At first the novel seems realistic. The people of the town are much like any small-town inhabitants. Finn gets bullied by some boys who turn out to have their own story. Finn’s older brother Sean, an EMT, falls in love with a Polish girl named Roza. There’s a story of first love between Finn and a girl named Petey. But there’s some stuff going on that readers can maybe pass off as just Finn being dreamy, like when he says “corn can add inches in a single day; if you listened, you could hear it grow.” Later, it turns out that other characters also hear things in the corn and that the fields are liminal and magical; the element of magical realism grows as events transpire.
When Roza is kidnapped, a mythological aspect enters the story. Plants languish and die after her disappearance, and there are other echoes of the Demeter story. Her abductor is mysteriously powerful. There’s a black horse who can carry Finn between worlds, crossing a river. There’s a pomegranate and consequences if it’s eaten.
The story rarely gets too far away from realism, though. Finn and Petey, who are applying to colleges, develop a habitual conversation based on college essay prompts. Depending on what is happening, they will turn it into a prompt: “Describe someone who has had the biggest impact on your life using only adverbs. Explain a moment that changed your worldview, written in recipe format. Tell us how you feel about Thursday—is it better or worse than Tuesday?”
There’s something about Finn that he isn’t aware of and nobody else has realized, until the events of this story. At first it threatens to affect his relationship with Petey, which has always seemed solid, separate from the rest of the world, where people leave. In the end their relationship does remain solid, but only after Finn realizes that a misunderstanding has hurt her: “He’d heard the crap said about her, but he’d assumed she was too fierce to care. But who was too fierce to care?”
The joy of reading Bone Gap is in finding out about the relationships between the characters. If the world moves mysteriously around them, then that’s just part of their story. It’s a great one, and good for a long winter’s night.
Necromancy Never Pays (the poem)
Two of my poems, “Thingvellir Rift” and “Necromancy Never Pays,” were recently published in Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, Vol. 19, Issue 4, December 2025. I thought my readers would enjoy seeing a photo of my poem with the same name as this blog:
You can order the issue here.
The Wager and the Bear
The Wager and the Bear, by John Ironmonger, is a book I’d seen reviewed at Novel Readings and Bookmarks and Stages (a blog new to me but highlighted on a “Winding Up the Week” post). It seemed spare to me, the conceit and characters sketched in quickly, in service to the message, which can be summed up, amusingly distilled, into “don’t bet climate change won’t affect you.”
The plot, recounted in previous reviews, skips back and forth between St Piran, Cornwall and Qaanaaq, Greenland, places that seem very far away to American readers like me. The two characters who make the bet are Monty, a politician who is not concerned about climate change and Tom, who says he should be because “it’s a slow-motion car crash. It’s so slow the driver thinks he doesn’t need to put his foot on the brake. He thinks he has plenty of time. But it might already be too late.”
The narrator has a detached attitude, beginning the third chapter by explaining that
“this little window of time, these few fleeting years, during which the first few decades of our story unfolds, would come to be given a name: the Age of Fire and Flood. And when the historians wrote their histories, and the analysts offered their explanations, and the apologists contrived their excuses, and the activists pointed their fingers of blame, they would all nonetheless agree with the name….All around the world, wildfires burned. Forest fires. Brush fires. Grass fires. Jungle fires. Plantations burned. Farms burned. Homes burned. Brazil, and America, and Indonesia, and Malaysia. Greece, and Spain, and France and Siberia. Finland and Lithuania. China and Cambodia. Nigeria and Congo. The planet burned….And even as the world burned, and even as whole continents were stricken by droughts, elsewhere the rains fell.”
Tom and his wife Lykke work for The 1820 Foundation, an effort towards “rewilding the planet, regrowing forests, and repopulating wild creatures to something like their status in the year 1820—a year that Lykke identified as perhaps the last pristine year on Planet Earth.” The author uses Tom, often summing up Lykke’s ideas, as a mouthpiece:
“Ban the sale of coal, oil, and gas with immediate effect. Or, at the worst, with one year notice….Fund a program to plant a trillion trees around the world. Tax the sale of meat and dairy products tenfold so a burger that costs a pound would cost eleven pounds. Three quarters of global farmland grows feed for livestock. Scrap the livestock and plant forests of native trees, wherever sheep or cattle used to graze….Fund farmers to make it happen. Stop using cement that isn’t from carbon-neutral production. Come to that, stop government procurement of any product or service that isn’t from carbon-neutral production. Invest in carbon capture and storage. Fund research into green hydrogen as a fuel. Perhaps use some of the land we waste growing food for livestock to grow biofuels. Stop massive factory-trawlers from denuding the oceas. Make half of our coastal waters into protected zones and police them. Harvest our sustainable forests, convert the trees into charcoal and then bury the charcoal back into all those empty coal mines, and keep on doing that for centuries until the mines are full again….Force every company and the richest ten percent of people to publish an accurate annual audit of their carbon footprint and if they aren’t net-zero, make them pay to sequester carbon until they are. Invest in ambitious geoengineering projects to reverse all the damage we’ve done.”
The scenes at the end of the novel, floating on a broken-off piece of glacier, with Tom and Monty being menaced by a polar bear, keep the novel from veering off entirely into climate change propaganda. They’re fun and inventive.
The Wager and the Bear has a lot of preaching in it, though, so I doubt it will affect anyone who isn’t already concerned about climate change.
Kitty Cat Kill Sat
For more than a month I spent about twenty minutes a day dipping into a science fiction book entitled Kitty Cat Kill Sat, by Argus, from an independent publisher. The ideas are really interesting, but the writing isn’t very good.
The kitty cat is named Lily, and she’s been living alone on a satellite orbiting Earth for hundreds of years, since before an apocalyptic event that destroyed most of the population. Lily can talk and think and live forever because of something that happened in a medlab on the satellite, and she has taken responsibility for keeping it running and using its weapons to fight off other space stations with automated weapons and also to protect the remaining humans on the surface from all the weapons, wars, and inter-dimensional monsters that plague them. It’s a big job for a little cat. As she puts it, “I am very smart, and that is why I own a space station.”
The first-person narration is fun because we’re not always aware of how Lily’s perspective might be limited, even by something as simple as her diminutive size among the human-scale technology or the awkwardness of having to use paws to manipulate equipment designed for hands.
The amount of information and digression is occasionally fun, although the plot of this unwieldy 466-page novel is unnecessarily weighed down by it. Lily comments on this early:
“To explain this plan, we’re going to need to go on a tangent.
‘Wait,’ you say, no longer so foolish that you think you can talk to me, but still reflexively talking to yourself. ‘Lily, you just started. Is it really time for a tangent?’
You fool. You lack vision. It is always time for tangents.”
But here’s one digression I enjoyed:
“The alarm that is in the process of interrupting me is the one that indicates an incoming transmission….Readouts show the signal is coming from nearby, in orbit. But then sophisticated counterintelligence software kicks to life, and I’m given a new piece of information. The signal is being spoofed. It’s actually originating on the surface. Somewhere in the middle of the Cosso rain forest, in southwest Brazil. Which is weird on its own.
There are two things in Brazil that I need to constantly keep an eye on. The first is the fact that the tree cover makes it a great place for emergence events to go unchecked, and as a result, most of the rain forest has a . . .unique ecosystem at this point. The creatures that seem to come out there have nutrient-rich, highly radioactive bodies that also seem modified for overadapted sensory organs. The second thing is that this, the second-largest rain forest on the planet—coming in just behind the Sahara—is home to one of the last great living cities.
The city is sparsely populated and largely seems content to keep to itself unless it’s actively protecting the border of its domain. But it’s one of the few things on the planet that could, if it wanted to, be a threat to me. We’ve never spoken, but this might actually be something from it.
I answer the call and ring my small silver bell to indicate I am listening.
A voice comes through, clean and professional. Human, probably, but in a way that leaves me feeling uncomfortable. It speaks in Old Cossan, an amalgamate language from a very long time ago. The station actually has the linguistic files on hand and provides translation in real time for me.
A pleasant greeting, a small pause, and then, without any input on my part, the voice expresses delight that I’ve agreed with it. And then. . . a sales pitch? It is asking for financial account numbers, so it might renew the impact insurance on my orbital infrastructure.
I cut the connection. And then I sit, unmoving on my haunches, letting the fact wash over me that there is an automated communication station on the surface, centuries old, that is still taking wild stabs at scamming people out of currency that hasn’t existed since before I was born.”
The mystery that Lily and the other space-faring characters she collects on her space station need to solve is about the space station itself. Lily tells her two AI friends “the station, it’s built around a machine. Everything was put here to support its study and use.” Later we find out that the machine, which is probably responsible for Lily’s increased intelligence and lifespan, is possibly some kind of machine that makes mortal creatures immortal. It’s all a bit vague. There are some bad guys from another universe after the machine, possibly the ones who built it in the first place. Lily thwarts their efforts, with the help of her new friends and mysteriously created other selves (one is a “plasmaform sister, a Lily of crackling energy held together by basically the will to be a cat or something dumb like that”).
A lot of what Lily does is to give her AI friends access to more of the satellite than they can access on their own:
“Ennos has a hard line from the processor hardware that the dominant part of their persona runs on, straight to one of the two consumer factories that we’ve unearthed and brought online in the station’s depths.
This would be the part in a bad spark opera where the AI, finally having convinced its organic handlers to give it access to something, would begin to show signs of nefarious behavior. In five or six episodes, it would be revealed that they had secretly been building a robot army and now were going to try their digital hand at genocide or something. Then, the inevitable slow drag of the apology arc where the characters who had supported AI rights were rightly chastised for almost unleashing a robot apocalypse.
‘Hey Ennos,’ I meow innocently. ‘Whatcha gonna build first?’
‘Robot army,’ the AI replies, deadpan.
I knew it, This is why we get along so well. Ennos actually has been watching the same archived media pieces I have.
Seriously, though. I know that history is a different land, and I’ve read a ton of essays and texts that define people as just ‘behaving as a product of their time,’ but it’s still creepy to me how obviously even some of my favorite pieces of fiction are overtly anti-AI propaganda.”
What pleasure there is in reading the novel comes incidentally, not from trying to follow the plot. My favorite bit is about a ship Lily finds with dead people on it, and when she tries to find out why they died, she finds that
“They received and reviewed an incoming Polite War assault request.
And then, not wanting to lose their corp any points on the upcoming Regulation and Tariff Bid, said yes. The idiots.
I glance around the bridge. Nine bodies here, plus the commandmind, plus the twelve more that will be on shift rotation in crew quarters and belowdecks. Twenty-one humans and one uplifted cybernetically augmented lobster, all dead, because a corporation didn’t want to pay slightly higher taxes.”
The ideas were interesting enough to keep me reading, but I wonder if an editor would be able to find a good science fiction novel in this morass of self-indulgent information overload and digression. I’m not sure. It may be that independent publishers are providing a new kind of product—one wanted by people who have gotten used to reading fanfic online, listening to podcasts, and watching videos of other peoples’ unfiltered thoughts.
Necromancy Never Pays 