As you read this, we’re still at Worldcon. We still won’t know how the Hugos turn out, because the ceremony is Saturday night. I’m afraid that in the middle of the fight, an awards ceremony might break out. Or vice versa. Or it could be worse. Just because I can’t imagine worse at the moment doesn’t mean it won’t happen. The business meeting about trying to fix the mess will still be going on. It will still probably still be going on when we leave on Sunday. That is possibly more frightening.
In other news. I attended both the Baen and the Tor showcases of upcoming books. While I found the prevailing attitude in the Baen presentation to be more than a bit disturbing, I did pick up a marvelous t-shirt. And unfortunately for the state of my TBR pile, I found plenty of books I will want to read in both presentations. Is that the good news or the bad news?
And in other news, I managed to get an eARC of The Last Time I Saw Her from Netgalley, so I cancelled my preorder. I feel much better not having to pay money for a book I know is going to be a trainwreck, even if I can’t resist reading it. Review next week, because I have no patience to wait to read it.
Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via Edelweiss Formats available: hardcover, large print, ebook, audiobook Genre: historical mystery Series: Bess Crawford #7 Length: 336 pages Publisher: William Morrow Date Released: August 18, 2015 Purchasing Info:Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository
An explosion and fire at the Ashton Gunpowder Mill in Kent has killed over a hundred men. It’s called an appalling tragedy—until suspicion and rumor raise the specter of murder. While visiting the Ashton family, Bess Crawford finds herself caught up in a venomous show of hostility that doesn’t stop with Philip Ashton’s arrest. Indeed, someone is out for blood, and the household is all but under siege.
The only known witness to the tragedy is now at the Front in France. Bess is asked to find him. When she does, he refuses to tell her anything that will help the Ashtons. Realizing that he believes the tissue of lies that has nearly destroyed a family, Bess must convince him to tell her what really happened that terrible Sunday morning. But now someone else is also searching for this man.
To end the vicious persecution of the Ashtons, Bess must risk her own life to protect her reluctant witness from a clever killer intent on preventing either of them from ever reaching England.
My Review:
The title may be “pattern of lies” but the end result became a design for destruction. While this is a murder story, it is also, and more significantly, a story about the evil that men (and women) do, and man’s (and woman’s) inhumanity to their fellow humans. And that’s what makes this one so chilling. It’s not the original murder, it’s the mob mentality that takes over a small town and very nearly hounds an innocent man to his death.
As we have found out all too often in modern times, the cover-up is often nastier and more costly than the original crime. This particular instance takes that truism to new heights. Or perhaps that should be depths.
Something horrible happened in a small town in Kent. In 1916, the gunpowder mill exploded, killing over 100 men and putting a big dent in explosives production right after the Battle of the Somme. It was a heavy blow for the British Army to lose one of their best producing explosives factories, but it was an even bigger blow for Cranford, the small town that provided the workers for the mill. Not only did most families lose a breadwinner, but the mill’s production was moved elsewhere, and the town never recovered economically.
Kent is near the Channel, so the Army conducted an investigation into the cause of the explosion and the fire that followed it. They determined that there had been no sabotage, by the Germans or anyone else, and that the tragedy was just a terrible accident. At the time, everyone seemed saddened but satisfied.
Bess Crawford visits Cranford in 1918, two years after the tragedy, only to find that someone or something has revived all of the horror and all of the blame-seeking in this village. She visits one of her former patients, Mark Ashton, and his family. The Ashtons owned the mine, and suddenly, out of the blue, someone is conducting a malicious rumor campaign that places the blame for the explosion squarely on Mark’s father Philip’s shoulders. Philip Ashton is arrested for multiple murder while Bess is visiting.
The question is, who started up all the horrible rumors? And why? Who benefits from not just putting Philip Ashton in jail, but also terrorizing his family and even trying to get his poor innocent dog put down? There is a campaign of terror being waged against the Ashton family, and by the point that Bess becomes involved, every single person in Cranford is involved, including the police. Everyone lost someone in that explosion, and everyone has decided to blame the Ashtons for their grief. Whether that blame is justified or not.
Bess, with her dogged determination, follows the trail of heartless evil back and forth across the Channel, from the battlefields of France to the civilian warfare in Cranford. As more and more lies spring up in Cranford, more and more soldiers with even a tangential connection to the original tragedy turn up dead at the hands of their fellow British soldiers.
It is up to Bess, with a little help from her father and her network of former patients in the Army to track down the horrible truth – before it is too late for both Philip Ashton and for Bess.
Escape Rating A: I loved this book, but I don’t think it’s a good place to start the series. If you love historical mysteries or the World War I period, A Duty to the Dead would be a much better starting point.
But I love Bess Crawford. So often in historical fiction, when there is a female protagonist the author needs to invent a reason for the heroine to be atypically involved in the wider world. With Bess, those reasons are built into the period and her character organically, and it works so well.
Bess is a trained combat nurse during World War I. This provides a reason for her education and attitudes, while at the same time she acknowledges that there are still limits on her behavior and movements. While it seems strange to 21st century readers, Bess really does have to be concerned about the appropriateness of her behavior and appearance at all times, or she may lose her position in the nursing profession. She can be up to her elbows in blood and guts one day, and have to worry about whether the nursing service will think her accommodations unsatisfactory to the reputation of said service the next.
She is also more open-minded than we think of for the period. Again, some of that is her training, back to the blood and guts. Her sometimes cynical view of human behavior is born out of her actual experience in the war. She knows how badly people of all ranks behave because she has to sew up the results on an all too frequent basis. Also, her experience of the world is broader than most women of her class because her father has been a serving officer in the British Army for decades, and her mother “followed the drum” going with him and taking Bess to far-flung postings in the British Empire.
So when Bess sees something wrong, she looks for a way to right that wrong, whether it is a medical emergency or a miscarriage of justice. She doesn’t sweep things under the rug, because that’s where germs fester and grow. She brings things out into the light where they can be identified and if necessary, surgically removed.
The story in Cranford is one that tugs at her because she can see how wrong it is, and how hard it is to fix. Also, from her outsider’s perspective it makes no sense. That there would have been suspicion at the time, yes, that’s both logical and human. But that the suspicion has not just resurfaced but become pervasive two years later? There must be a reason and Bess, as usual, is determined to find it no matter how much danger she throws herself into along the way.
What sticks in the mind in this story is not the motive for the rumor campaign, but the way that everyone in the village jumps onto the bloody bandwagon. We see mob mentality at its worst, and it is both frightening and disgusting. But we know it is all too possible.
As glad as I was to see evil get punished and good triumph, I would have loved to have seen the aftermath. How does the falsely accused recover from all this enmity? One might manage to forgive, but forgetting would be impossible. How does life proceed in this small village where people have willfully torn the social fabric to pieces? It haunts. Good stories do that.
~~~~~~ GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~
In the spirit of yesterday’s Clear Your Shelf Giveaway Hop, I am giving away my paperback ARC of A Pattern of Lies to one lucky U.S. commenter. I adore this series, and I’d like to share the love.
This post is part of a TLC book tour. Click on the logo for more reviews.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
It’s funny that this is the “Clear Your Shelf” giveaway hop because the clearing is just a bit one-sided. I’m going to clear my shelves by giving away some books that I have already read and reviewed. So mine get a tiny bit clearer. But four lucky readers will win these books, so their shelves will get a tiny bit more stuffed. I call this a win-win. If you do too, enter the Rafflecopter further down the post.
There should be something for everyone in this list – or at least I hope so. The first question in the rafflecopter is “Which one do you want?” so that I can give the books to people who will really want them. Books should be loved. Or occasionally, as in the case of The Bourbon Kings, possibly hated with a passion.
Happy Reading!
~~~~~~ GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~
a Rafflecopter giveaway
for the opportunity to win more great books from more terrific bloggers, follow the links:
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Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via Edelweiss Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook Genre: science fiction short stories Length: 400 pages Publisher: Del Rey Date Released: August 4, 2015 Purchasing Info:Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository
London awakes one morning to find itself besieged by a sky full of floating icebergs. Destroyed oil rigs, mysteriously reborn, clamber from the sea and onto the land, driven by an obscure but violent purpose. An anatomy student cuts open a cadaver to discover impossibly intricate designs carved into a corpse’s bones—designs clearly present from birth, bearing mute testimony to . . . what?
Of such concepts and unforgettable images are made the twenty-eight stories in this collection—many published here for the first time. By turns speculative, satirical, and heart-wrenching, fresh in form and language, and featuring a cast of damaged yet hopeful seekers who come face-to-face with the deep weirdness of the world—and at times the deeper weirdness of themselves—Three Moments of an Explosion is a fitting showcase for one of our most original voices.
My Review:
China Miéville seems to be one of those authors where people who like his writing really, really like it, and people who don’t just don’t. There doesn’t seem to be much of a middle.
After finishing his collection of short stories, Three Moments of an Explosion, I find myself firmly in the latter camp. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried something by him, and my second impression matches the first – “interesting, but not for me.”
I like my stories with a clear beginning, middle and end. However, a lot of the stories in this collection seemed to simply stop, rather than satisfyingly conclude. That’s my interpretation, and your mileage, of course, may vary.
There were also quite a few stories in the collection that felt like horror, some of the Lovecraftian school, and some just plain horror. I very seldom like horror stories, and this was no exception. Creepiness for creepiness’ sake just, well, creeps me out. But also leaves me cold. Sometimes shaking with fear, but mostly cold as to engagement. I don’t warm up to the story.
My favorite story in the collection is the fourth story in. The Dowager of Bees is a story about the inherent magic in cards, card play and card games. It’s part of that satisfaction one feels when the one card in the entire deck comes up, and you win against all odds. It also taps into the wonder of watching someone do complex card tricks excellently. We’ve all handled those pasteboards, how can someone make them dance? But the story involves secret magic, that sometimes, when one is an especially adept player, very special cards appear in the game, and those special cards invoke very special rules that are only available to you while the secret card is in play. It’s also a story about competition, and the desire to win, and oddly enough, love.
One of the horror stories is quietly terrifying in a way that stuck with me. To say I liked it is the wrong phraseology. To say that I’m haunted by it is probably a better match. Säcken is extremely creepy, and creeps along behind you after you finish. A young woman flees something completely “other” that utterly terrifies her, discovers that she can’t flee, and tries to placate it instead. While we all know that was a mistake, it is easy to feel her relief and ultimate terror as she discovers that she has only made things much, much worse. If you think Grimm’s Fairy Tales aren’t nearly Grimm enough, this one’s for you.
There’s a story that is just a bit creepy, but in the thriller type of creepy. It’s also a bit fun and playful. In Dreaded Outcome, we find out just how far some therapists are willing to go in order to help their patients move beyond whatever, or whoever is causing their emotional traumas. If you’ve ever been in therapy, much of the setup will feel familiar. You may also wish that the solutions to your issues could be found in the way that the narrator does.
Escape Rating C+: The few stories I liked, I really liked. The Dowager of Bees is a story that I could see recommending to lots of people looking for a story that might fit into Lev Grossman’s Magiciansseries or even Harry Potter. The idea that there is magic in the everyday world, but that we don’t run across it except in certain special circumstances.
A lot of SF tropes and themes get played with in this collection. There are several stories that skewer the vicious smallness of academic politics. The academic side is very vicious indeed, but what they are fighting over generally starts out small in these stories, until it becomes bigger and creepier than the reader originally thought.
But in general, there is a lot of very creepy weird in this collection. And it’s just not my cuppa. If it is yours, enjoy.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via Edelweiss Formats available: paperback, ebook Genre: historical mystery Series: Inspector Ian Rutledge, Bess Crawford Length: 192 pages Publisher: Witness Impulse Date Released: July 21, 2015 Purchasing Info:Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository
Now published together for the first time: Charles Todd’s absorbing short stories—”The Kidnapping,” “The Girl on the Beach,” “Cold Comfort,” and “The Maharani’s Pearls”—featuring everyone’s favorite Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge and intrepid battlefield nurse Bess Crawford. These vibrant tales transport readers from the home front in Great Britain where ominous clouds of war will soon lead to the trenches of France, to the bloody front lines where Lieutenant Rutledge must risk his life to save his men. And finally to the exotic, dangerous India of Bess Crawford’s youth. Together they create a fascinating glimpse into the extraordinary backgrounds of two of mystery’s most popular characters.
My Review:
This collection of stories makes a great introduction to Charles Todd’s two completely different protagonists – the professional police officer Ian Rutledge, and the amateur detective but professional nurse Bess Crawford.
All of the stories take place in the World War I and immediate post-war period, so if you have an interest in that period, whether courtesy of Downton Abbey or not, these are great people to explore with.
Especially since two of the stories in this series, the Ian Rutledge story Cold Comfort and the Bess Crawford story The Maharani’s Pearls, serve as prequels to their respective series.
Bess Crawford is a trained nurse who serves all too near the front lines during the war. Bess is in some ways a special case. Her father, often referred to as the Colonel Sahib, is a career officer who served in India, and continues to serve in some super-secret capacity during WWI. Though her connections to her father, Bess is sometimes able to circumvent authority, or at least drag more information out of it than it wants dragged. She also has a more thorough knowledge of how the Army works (and doesn’t) through her years following her father’s many postings.
The story The Maharani’s Pearls is a case in point. This story takes place during Bess’ childhood in India, and could be said to be her first case. It explores the relationships between the British military and the local population, and showcases Bess’ early talent for detection as well as subterfuge. When I picked this collection, I didn’t realize that I had read and reviewedThe Maharani’s Pearls last summer.
Cold Comfort, while it is listed as #16.5 in the Inspector Ian Rutledge series, is also a sort of prequel. The series as a whole takes place in the post-war years, where Inspector Rutledge, after his military service, returns to his pre-war police career after a hard-fought recovery from shell-shock. However, the story in Cold Comfort takes place during the war, when Lieutenant Ian Rutledge is serving in France. He has to use his detection skills to figure out just why two Welsh sappers are so intent on killing one Manchester miner, to the point where they are willing to blow up their own side in the process. This is a case where Rutledge uses his skill and intuition to figure out the very civilian motive for all of the skullduggery that is concealed within the ranks.
The other stories in this book, The Kidnapping and The Girl on the Beach, show their respective detectives in their more usual settings. The Girl on the Beach, the Bess Crawford story, is particularly good at showing the way that Bess often inveigles herself into investigations that should be none of her business. One of the things I particularly liked about this one was the police detective who finds himself working with Bess almost without realizing he is doing it. Bess, of course, does contribute to the solution, but the fun thing for me in this story was that the description and mannerisms of the police detective reminded me very much of Christopher Foyle in Foyle’s War. Admittedly, Foyle actually served in the Army in WWI, but the detective still felt and acted like him.
In The Kidnapping we see that Inspector Rutledge’s faculties are firmly back on track after his recovery from shell shock, but that his career still needs some healing. He’s stuck on night duty because he has so little seniority, and his seniors are unhappy that he manages to solve a very sensitive case without their help.
Escape Rating B+: These are all great stories in their respective series. The Maharani’s Pearls and Cold Comfort would make excellent introductions to their series for anyone who loves historical mysteries or historical fiction in this period. We are able to see the characters start, and then in the later stories we see how far they have come since those beginnings.
If you’ve never dived into either of these series, this collection is a great place to start. And it certainly whet my appetite for the new Bess Crawford book, A Pattern of Lies, which I’ll be reviewing at the end of the week.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
THE WEREWOLVES HAVE A NEW LEADER…AND HE CANNOT BE STOPPED.
Something is rotten in the state of Wisconsin.
Werewolf packs are being united and absorbed into an army of super soldiers by a mysterious figure who speaks like an angel and fights like a demon. And every Knight Templar—keepers of the magical peace between mankind and magickind—who tries to get close to this big bad wolf winds up dead. No knight can infiltrate a group whose members can smell a human from a mile away…no knight except one.
John Charming. Ex knight. Current werewolf. Hunted by the men who trained him, he now might be their only salvation. But animal instincts are rising up to claim John more powerfully than ever before, and he must decide if this new leader of wolves is a madman…or a messiah.
My Review:
Although I read Daringbefore Fearless(review here), I’m posting it after. I’ll be packing for WorldCon in Spokane when this posts, and frankly, I needed to have stuff pre-done for as much of this week as possible. Let’s face it, the odds on my managing to write up reviews and prep posts while at Sasquan are virtually nil. And so they should be.
But about this book…Daringis the second book in the Pax Arcana, and it helps to have read the first book, the surprisingly terrific Charming(reviewed here) first. While the author does a pretty good job of summarizing the action so far, and in John Charming’s charmingly snarky voice, you always miss some of the nuance.
And Charmingis damn good urban fantasy of the snarky hero/antihero school, so what’s not to love?
The concept of the Pax Arcana still feels like an awesome invention. It’s the concept that magic happens around us all the time, but because of a massive spell that the fae cast just before they left Earth, we can’t see it (unless it’s a question of survival). The fae also created a force of Pax cops – we know them best as the Knights Templar, and pretty much every other order of secret-keeping warriors that has ever been.
John Charming is a big problem for the knights, and it’s one that they created for themselves. John was trained as a knight, just like his father and his father and every other Charming before him. But John’s mother was bitten by a werewolf just before John was born, so John is also a werewolf. The Knights kill werewolves on sight, having decided somewhere in the way back that werewolves are ipso facto violations of the Pax just for existing.
Except that John breaks all the rules, because he is definitely a werewolf, but he is still bound by the geas that binds all knights to protect the Pax. If his existence were an automatic violation, he would have to off himself. But John feels no compulsion towards suicide. The powers-that-be in the Knights don’t want anyone exploring the walking contradiction that is John Charming.
This is also a story where the Knights are not necessarily good, and the monsters are not necessarily bad. They all still have all the messy motivations that regular humans do – so some on both sides are good, and some on both sides are rotten to the core. Except vampires, they’re just rotten, and sometimes rotting.
So when the Knights blackmail John into helping them with a werewolf problem, they do it in the nastiest way possible – they threaten the lives of all the friends that John made during the story in Charming. So John goes along, but also ties the Knights up in some interesting magical protections of his own, because John knows the Knights are not playing fair with him and his friends.
They never do.
But John’s insertion into the big werewolf clan goes even worse than the Knights’ biggest fears – because there is way more going on than their limited perspective on anyone other than themselves is able to comprehend, and because they screw thing up again while they try to screw John over again. Along with everyone else.
Escape Rating A-: This series gets better and better as it goes along. I say that and I’m in the middle of book 3 as I write this review. The trajectory is definitely upwards.
One of the fun things in this story is just how screwed up the Knights are at this point in their history. They seem to be mostly following their leaders blindly, in a world that keeps changing out from under them. They have historically relied on the Pax and their ability to confuse mundanes through chemicals or spells, but the Earth’s population boom combined with the communication power of the Internet is breaking the Pax faster than they can repair it.
Also they have decided that some creatures are automatically their enemies that aren’t necessarily, but by being targeted they become enemies. That the Knights also don’t give a damn about any normal humans that they murder in their quests does not make them any friends, either. Eventually, people start to suspect. And resent. Definitely resent.
John is a werewolf, but he is also a Knight. However, the Knights murdered his lover to get at him, and are threatening the lives of his new friends. He is not kindly disposed towards them. When the werewolf clan takes him in, he gets involved because they seem to be mostly good people, and mostly just defending themselves, and it feels good to be all of who he really is, instead of having to hide parts of himself.
But while many of the werewolves are just good people, there are some who have a much bigger (and badder) agenda, using the general werewolf population as meat-shields and other, even worse, possibilities.
As the clusterfuck reaches epic proportions, John discovers that the sides he thought he was on are not as clearly defined as he thought – and that his own origin wasn’t the unhappy accident he believed.
There is a lot going on in this installment. John has to embrace both sides of his nature, and he does it by fits and starts. Mostly by fits. He also has to learn to not just be in a group, but also lead one, and it’s a demonstrably hard lesson for a man who has spent decades as a lone wolf.
It’s also a story where all the motives are murky on all sides. John knows that the Knights mostly mean well, for select definitions of the word well, but they often do badly and definitely believe that their supposedly righteous ends justify any means, when all it means is that they lose their humanity in the process of becoming Knights, sometimes even more so than the monsters they hunt.
John’s desire to believe in the werewolf cause constantly conflicts with his cynicism. He knows its too good to be true, even when some parts of it are demonstrably true. His conflict drives him to snark and frustration at every turn.
His story also shows that even for a sometimes monster, it is much easier to get by with a little help from your friends.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
In the end, I liked both Stormbringerand Fearlessbetter than I did Scalzi’s End of all Things. I think this is the first time that I haven’t given an A or A+ review for one of Scalzi’s books. I still enjoyed the heck out of it, but it didn’t knock my socks off the way that Lock In did last year. On the other hand, I didn’t have grand expectations for either the first book in the Wyrdseries, Liesmith(I originally judged this one by its ‘meh’ cover and I was so wrong), and both books in that series turned out to be really awesome. And I had fairly low expectations for Charming, the first book in the Pax Arcana series, but that turned out to be quite good and getting better. So if you like Urban Fantasy with a twist, be sure to give one or both of those a try.
I felt like I spent most of this week resisting temptation, and looking at this list, I clearly succeeded. However, we are on our way to WorldCon in Spokane this week, and I fear I will not be able to resist the tables in the dealer’s room. Or the opportunity to get books signed by some of my favorite authors.
What I truly fear is watching the Hugo Awards Ceremony turn into a train wreck, but I can still hope that it won’t.
Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via Edelweiss Formats available: paperback, ebook, audiobook Genre: science fiction Series: Doctor Who Length: 368 pages Publisher: Broadway Books Date Released: July 14, 2015 Purchasing Info:Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository
“I shall make you the jewel at the heart of the universe.”
Something distinctly odd is going on in Arbroath. It could be to do with golfers being dragged down into the bunkers at the Fetch Brothers’ Golf Spa Hotel, never to be seen again. It might be related to the strange twin grandchildren of the equally strange Mrs Fetch–owner of the hotel and fascinated with octopuses. It could be the fact that people in the surrounding area suddenly know what others are thinking, without anyone saying a word.
My Review:
Tomorrow, Saturday August 15, has been declared Doctor Who Comics Day by Titan Comics, who, of course, publish Doctor Who Comics.
While I didn’t have a Doctor Who graphic novel in my TBR pile, it did seem like a golden opportunity to review a Doctor Who book. I’d been staring at the eARC of Doctor Who: The Drosten’s Curse, for a few days, so this gave me an excuse to get it.
Why was I staring at it? Because this is a Fourth Doctor story. As the saying goes, you never forget your first Doctor, and Tom Baker was mine. Yes, I got a bit of the weepies when he appeared as The Curator at the end of The Day of the Doctor.
But the Doctor in The Drosten’s Curse was definitely the Doctor as I remember him from the series. Often surprisingly brave, and generally making it up as he went along. If the Fourth Doctor could be described as “madcap”, there was an awful lot of mad as well as curly hair under that “cap”, which was actually a rather floppy hat.
That particularly Doctor often seemed rather floppy, like an animated Raggedy Andy doll, right up until the point where he saved the day and skipped away to a new adventure.
The adventure in The Drosten’s Curse feels like one that could have happened during the run of the series, too. The Doctor lands the TARDIS somewhere he wasn’t planning on (as usual) and discovers that underneath the soil of an unsuspecting small town is a very large intergalactic predator who has changed the local landscape to suit his/her/its nefarious purposes.
What made this one fun is that the alien has been listening to humans for so long, that its purposes have strayed off course. It’s supposed to be a big bad monster who responds primarily to hatethink, but has been preserving the life of a lovely little old lady and making her happy by supplying her with fictitious grandchildren.
Of course, it is also living underneath a sand bunker on the local golf course, and eating anyone who wanders – or is lured – into the bunker.
In this adventure, the Doctor, currently between companions, enlists the help of a local young woman, Bryony, and an inept intergalactic bounty hunter named Putta. Bryony is as helpful as any companion has ever been, and has no trouble believing in not just one, but two aliens with space ships. She has always hoped that someone will rescue her from the humdrum of her life and take her away to see the universe in a classy ship and she hopes that this is her chance!
She gets way more than she bargained for. But Bryony’s life will never be dull again – if she survives both the incipient destruction of the earth and the Doctor’s desperate attempts to use her mind as a mental meeting place for himself, the alien, the TARDIS and that mother of all nightmares.
Escape Rating B: I think this story only makes sense if you are used to the wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey pseudo-logic that so often comes into play in Doctor Who.
The Doctor in this incarnation often gave off the appearance of a big, bumbling fool. Sometimes because he didn’t know what he was going to do until after he’d done it, and sometimes as a way of getting people and beings to underestimate him so he could get the better of them later. “Care for a jelly baby?”
At the same time, he does not suffer fools gladly, or any longer than he has to in order to give them their right proper comeuppance. The interesting thing in this story, and also many stories during this era, is that the evil in the end is not the monster – it’s the humans who try to take advantage of the monster.
There are a few plot bits that owe a lot to speculative fiction that has happened in the years since Tom Baker’s Doctor regenerated into Peter Davison’s Doctor.
The way to end the Drosten’s Curse was not superior firepower (it seldom was in Doctor Who) or even superior brainpower, which often did happen. In the Drosten’s Curse, the most powerful force in the universe turns out to be love, in ways that reminded this reader a bit of the end of Harry Potter.
Also, a significant part of the action in this story includes the TARDIS herself as a thinking being, even if she is not shown as an actual person the way that she was in the Eleventh Doctor episode The Doctor’s Wife. That the TARDIS has her own personality, her own mental space, and her own ability to feel emotion is a big part of what brings The Drosten’s Curse to its successful conclusion. I don’t think we saw the TARDIS act this much on her own before the revived series.
The timey-wimey bit comes at the end of this story, and it was quite touching, kind of in the same way that the end of Reaper Man in Terry Pratchett’s Discworldwas touching.
All in all, The Drosten’s Curse is a lovely Fourth Doctor story that shows just how much substance lurked inside that frequently clownish buffoon.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
Format read: ebook provided by the publisher via Edelweiss Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook Genre: science fiction, space opera Series: Old Man’s War #6 Length: 384 pages Publisher: Tor Date Released: August 11, 2015 Purchasing Info:Author’s Website, Publisher’s Website, Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Book Depository
Humans expanded into space…only to find a universe populated with multiple alien species bent on their destruction. Thus was the Colonial Union formed, to help protect us from a hostile universe. The Colonial Union used the Earth and its excess population for colonists and soldiers. It was a good arrangement…for the Colonial Union. Then the Earth said: no more.
Now the Colonial Union is living on borrowed time—a couple of decades at most, before the ranks of the Colonial Defense Forces are depleted and the struggling human colonies are vulnerable to the alien species who have been waiting for the first sign of weakness, to drive humanity to ruin. And there’s another problem: A group, lurking in the darkness of space, playing human and alien against each other—and against their own kind —for their own unknown reasons.
In this collapsing universe, CDF Lieutenant Harry Wilson and the Colonial Union diplomats he works with race against the clock to discover who is behind attacks on the Union and on alien races, to seek peace with a suspicious, angry Earth, and keep humanity’s union intact…or else risk oblivion, and extinction—and the end of all things.
My Review:
If Doctor Who is the story of a “madman with a box” then The End of All Things is at least partially the story of a brain in a box. While Rafe Daquin is only the point of view character for the first quarter of this story, he is one of the few characters who has at least some significance in all four parts – and that significance rests on his being, and continuing to be, a brain in box. At least for as long as it is useful.
Especially since that brain in a box is very expertly piloting a ship – with or without crew.
Like its predecessor, The Human Division (reviewed here) The End of All Things was published in serial format first. However, unlike The Human Division, the four different parts of The End of All Things (The Life of the Mind, This Hollow Union, Can Long Endure and To Stand or Fall) all tell completely different types of stories, and use different point of view characters, although frequently they are POV characters that we have met before, either in The Human Division or in earlier parts of End. Like Rafe’s brain in a box.
The Human Division was much closer to classic space opera. The humans have to deal with a galactic and possibly catastrophic change in world view and the status quo, while facing a potential alien enemy and a shadowy organization that is maneuvering behind the scenes for nefarious purposes of its own.
In End, we see the shadowy nefarious organization operating in the shadows a little more clearly. Rafe Daquin in the first story is one of their victims. He is also not the first pilot to be kidnapped and crated in a piloting box on an otherwise uncrewed ship. But it is through Rafe and his dilemma that we begin to discover exactly what this new nemesis is up to, and also a little bit of the why.
This Hollow Union shifts back to a character from Human Division who is definitely not a human. Hafte Sorvalh is a senior level political operator in the Conclave, the alien coalition. We got some terrific insight into Sorvalh’s character in the epilog of Human Division, the delicious “Hafte Sorvalh Eats a Churro and Speaks to the Youth of Today” (available free at Tor.com) Hafte’s internal dialog on the political mess that she has to clean up in Hollow Union is trenchant and often darkly humorous, even before the entire thing gets dumped firmly and irrevocably in her lap. At the same time, she provides a different perspective on whoever or whatever is attempting to manipulate both the humans and the Conclave. This is a story about political maneuvers rather than starship fighting, but it is a necessary perspective and still keeps the story moving forward.
Can Long Endure goes back to the humans, but it is a lower-decks (or lower-ranks) type story. Instead of getting the view from on high through the eyes of the political movers and shakers, we get to see how this whole mess works from the perspective of the human grunts who have to do the down and dirty fighting, no matter who is on top. They are in the place that we started in all the way back in Old Man’s War, with people who have lived their lives and are now grunts in this space force, starting all over again with young bodies and old brains. It is through this story that the author is able to show both that “boots on the ground” perspective and what this war means to the human factions – the soldiers are sent to suppress human revolts that think they have already paid for the freedom they enjoy, and don’t like the Earth humans changing the game.
We also get to see just how the shadowy conspiracy folks are playing both sides against the middle, because that’s what shadowy conspiracy folks do. Their motives are all too familiar in the end – they want intergalactic war because it will bring them immense profiteering opportunities. We’ve seen this one before in lots of stories set on lots of worlds, including our own.
The last section, To Stand or Fall, brings the story back together, and brings back the human B-Team that was featured in The Human Division. It is up to the diplomats to figure out how to defang the shadowy conspirators and build some kind of truce with both the Conclave and their own dissident human elements. It’s a tough job that can only be accomplished with the very able assistance of that poor brain in a box that we met all the way back in the first installment.
We end with a brave new galaxy, and a fresh start for whatever the author plans next in this universe. I’m looking forward to it.
Escape Rating B+: I enjoyed The End of All Things, but not quite as much as the other entries in Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series, or even his single titles (so far) like Redshirtsand Lock In. The ending didn’t stick in my head (for days in some cases) the way that those did. Especially Human Division and Lock In.
With The Human Division, even though it was released serially, the completed book in the end read like a single story. While there were a few chapters with different POV characters, most of the story follows Harry Wilson and his B-Team of negotiators in some fashion. They carried the “through-line” in the book. The scattered pieces from other perspectives read like interludes in the main story, and it worked.
The End of All Things reads like four separate novellas that were not quite stitched together. They are very different and very separate, with the “brain in a box” Rafe Daquin feeling like one of the few characters that has an important role to play in the whole story. I liked him, and I also liked how necessary it was for the mission that he stayed in his box. Taking the easy out of “rescuing” him would have muted the force of his character.
Also, The Human Division ended on one hell of a bang. I couldn’t wait to see how it got resolved. The End of All Things ends with almost a happy ever after, all the problems solved and a clean slate for the next adventure. The universe is too messy for that. Not that I didn’t enjoy seeing a whole lot of self-important and self-satisfied idiots get their comeuppance. And I like the point of the view of the B-Team, especially Harry Wilson, that we finally get in To Stand or Fall. But at the beginning of the section, Harry complains about being in the middle of that old curse, “May you live in interesting times.” At the end, his times weren’t quite as interesting as I might have hoped, although I’m sure Harry approved.
***FTC Disclaimer: Most books reviewed on this site have been provided free of charge by the publisher, author or publicist. Some books we have purchased with our own money or borrowed from a public library and will be noted as such. Any links to places to purchase books are provided as a convenience, and do not serve as an endorsement by this blog. All reviews are the true and honest opinion of the blogger reviewing the book. The method of acquiring the book does not have a bearing on the content of the review.
In other news. I attended both the Baen and the Tor showcases of upcoming books. While I found the prevailing attitude in the Baen presentation to be more than a bit disturbing, I did pick up a marvelous t-shirt. And unfortunately for the state of my TBR pile, I found plenty of books I will want to read in both presentations. Is that the good news or the bad news?
![clear off your shelf August[1]](https://www.readingreality.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/clear-off-your-shelf-August1.jpg)
Especially since two of the stories in this series, the Ian Rutledge story Cold Comfort and the Bess Crawford story The Maharani’s Pearls, serve as prequels to their respective series.
Blog Recap:
Coming Next Week:
Why was I staring at it? Because this is a Fourth Doctor story. As the saying goes, you never forget your first Doctor, and Tom Baker was mine. Yes, I got a bit of the weepies when he appeared as The Curator at the end of 
Can Long Endure goes back to the humans, but it is a lower-decks (or lower-ranks) type story. Instead of getting the view from on high through the eyes of the political movers and shakers, we get to see how this whole mess works from the perspective of the human grunts who have to do the down and dirty fighting, no matter who is on top. They are in the place that we started in all the way back in