“The game of science is, in principle, without end. He who decides one day that scientific statements do not call for any further test, and that they can be regarded as finally verified, retires from the game.”
— Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery
Okay, I know the decks aren’t fully cleared yet, in that Thanksgiving still looms. Still, Christmas is icumen in, and it’s not too early to think about stocking stuffers.
Which should, this year, totally include this book
The Last Christmas Gift is a heartwarming, disgusting, hilarious Chrismas tale about a young boy, his Granpap, and zombies.
Nathan Shumate is famous on the Wasatch Front as an editor, cover designer, and anthologist, but here he shows that he can also shine as a writer. The Last Christmas Gift is the funniest and goriest story you’re likely to read this Christmas season — Charles Dickens, eat your heart out!
“Nevertheless there are still some who do believe that philosophy can pose genuine problems about things, and who therefore still hope to get these problems discussed, and to have done with those depressing monologues which now pass for philosophical discussions.”
— Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery
For the first few pages of Quincy J. Allen’s Blood Ties
, you might think you were reading a straight Civil War novel. Captain Jake Lasater has been commanded to make what may or may not be a suicidal charge on a rebel-held hill, and after making the necessary protests, will do as he’s been told. A sly reference to a Zeppelin may or may not tip the reader off to what’s coming, but when Jake gets to the top of the hill he finds a machine-gun wielding armored monstrosity that never saw action in the real Civil War, and we know we’re in a steampunk novel.
And then Jake dies.
Only he doesn’t, quite, because in this steampunked version of the Civil War, for just the person at just the right moment, there are other options. So Jake Lasater undergoes some dramatic reconstruction and emerges as a clockwork gunslinger.
Left eye enhanced by a strap-on ocular, left arm and both legs entirely clockwork, Jake is a cool-headed card player and a hard-punching man of violence in the grand tradition of Westerns. His also spiritually sensitive, having apprenticed himself to a Cherokee shaman as a young man rather than waste his time sitting around in his dad’s brewery. And Jake is no loner — his sidekicks include a fellow gunman and a young mechanically-gifted ward. Jake will need every advantage he’s got, when the Tongs of San Francisco start sending supernatural assassins after him to avenge the death of one of their own.
This is steampunk in the best traditions of the genre: freewheeling, fantastic, and adventurous, eager to plunder motifs and themes from any other type of tale, throw them all in a bag, shake them up, see what comes out and punch it between the eyes.
Happy Halloween!
For the holiday, I want to tell you about a series that’s one part Monster Hunters International, one part Supernatural, and one part Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This is the tale of Sonya Fletcher, whose origins are shrouded in lies and whose gifts fit her for witchcraft, assassination, monster-slaying, and ass-kicking. In an era that rubs its knuckles endlessly about having “strong” female characters, Butler has given us a protagonist who is flawed, dangerous, vulnerable, powerful, possibly unhinged–and impossible to walk away from.
Since this is a series and some or all of you will not have started these books, description of plot is delicate. Let me say that Sonja’s tale begins with her efforts to unravel the truth about her mother, and transitions to her uncomfortable participation in a team of monster hunters — along with a dubious ally vampire, whose presence she conceals from her fellow hunters and who involves her in turn in the brutal power plays of vampire politics. Before long it is clear that more than one person lives within Sonja (spoiler! sorry!) and that those individuals may have very different roles in the coming apocalypse.
S.A. Butler has chosen to publish this books in ebooks and in paperbacks that collect the stories two to a volume. In order, the adventures so far are: The Hunt Begins, The Witch and the Leech, The Vampire Lord, and Death Descends.
If you can catch Butler at a convention, you may be lucky enough to get one of her trademark toe-tag bookmarks. Regardless, you should get these books and read them, because Sonya Fletcher kicks ass!
I want to be overrated.
This thought comes out of a weekend post on social media, in which a writer asked what books of the last thirty years other people had found to be the most overrated. It’s a fair question, and I think there’s a paradox here:
The bigger the book in terms of sales, the more overrated it will necessarily be.
For two reasons. First, the more people have read book X, the more people will have been disappointed with book X.
Second, a book becomes a real juggernaut (Twilight, Harry Potter, Game of Thrones) not by the awesomeness of its writing, but for other reasons that are more complex and harder to predict. Timing, zeitgeist, luck, Hollywood support, other factors. Books do not become disproportionate, higher order of magnitude bestsellers because their authors are disproportionately, higher order of magnitude better writers. Stephen King and J.K. Rowling have both tried to disprove this basic fact by writing under pseudonyms, and both had to face the hard truth that talent does not equal book sales.
So by definition, books that have disproportionate, higher order of magnitude sales are overrated. They didn’t get those sales because of sheer awesomeness — something else happened. Timing, zeitgeist, luck, other factors. The biggest books will always be overrated.
I want to be overrated.
“He that can be persuaded that these things are true, or wrought indeed according to the assertion of couseners, or according to the supposition of witchmongers & papists, may soone be brought to beleeve that the moone is made of greene cheese.”
Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, Book XV, Chapter V
Airships of Camelot is Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan meets The Once and Future King.
Like Leviathan, Airships is likely to get called “Steampunk,” though that category fits loosely at best. In some ways, this retelling of the Arthur story has more in common with Mad Max than, say, Cherie Priest.
After the devastation of the Spanish flu (yes, we’re talking early 20th century here), civilization has collapsed. Admiral Uther Pendragon and his people live by raiding scattered communities that remain and trading their loot to the Texans for the helium their airships need to fly.
Uther’s son Arthur is a diver (read: loot-grabber) in those raiding parties, until a harpooned ship has to retreat, leaving him stranded. On his long march home, he rescues a slave girl, Jennifer (Guenevere), who turns out not to be the savage he expected. Other overturned Arthurian motifs (trying to avoid spoilers here) include the quad-gun X-Caliber and the Obi-Wan-like Admiral Pellinore.
The great thing about young adult literature is its ability to bend genre, and Rob Wells takes full advantage of that here. This is an adventure tale, an Arthurian story, a post-apocalyptic survival tale, a coming of age story, a steampunk novel, and maybe-if-you-squint-just-right a dystopia, to boot. This is gripping, white-knuckle storytelling by a master of the art.
Steampunk luxuriates in the self-bestowed freedom to mix any influence, aesthetic, period, pseudo-scientific or fantastic element, and literary or historical character it wishes into its brew and distill therefrom a tale. The Alyscrai pushes the envelope in its wide-ranging and good-hearted pilfering, and the results are fantastic.
For starters, it transforms Alice in Wonderland. There was an Alice in this telling, and she did indeed find the magical Underland, but she found it in California, and the best parts of her tale had to remain untold. Returning to ordinary earth, she became an evangelist for a faith part of whose mythos is rooted in Underland. When she became too old to be the teller of her own tale, she was replaced by our protagonist, Alysseren.
‘Seren’ is Welsh for ‘star’ and young Alysseren becomes Alice as Performer, trained to recount the publicly-knowable portions of Alice’s adventures as her own, as a proselytizing tool for the faith. Underland in this telling has strong Welsh elements — the Swatidwri (not really rabbits, but sapient and telepathic lemur-like creatures with rabbitoid ears; called tochtin by the church that bestows one as a living conscience on each newly admitted congregant) rejoice in Welshified names like Ymladdfa-gwaladr and Fflwdw-llynwyn.
Alysseren’s church is a potent concoction containing elements of high church liturgy, Levitical theology, Quetzalcoatl imagery, and Canaanite worship, headed by the Queen of Heaven and a priest called Tlaloc.
Alysseren’s adventures start with a bang when she revolts at her first admittance to the High Service of her faith… which turns out to include the actual drinking of blood! We quickly learn that she is being lied to and manipulated by various parties, including her own tochtin, Tlaloc, and apparent agents of the Queen’s enemy, the Knave of Clubs. Before she can truly regain her free will, Alice has multiple layers of truths to learn and secrets to uncover, each one more dangerous than the last.
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