The Rare Book Room

In which it's penultimate episode of the season time, which means things get very dark indeed, though not in all storylines.

( The Cleons Strike Back? Revenge of the Cleons? Master and Apprentice? )

More books:

Stella Duffy: The Purple Shroud. The sequel to her novel Theodora, this one covering the time from when Theodora becomes Empress to her death. It's as readable as the first one, though I have a few nitpicks. Not about what I feared - the novel Theodora keeps morally ambiguous, and it confronts head on that once you are in power, you cannot simultanously be "one of the people", no matter how low you were originally born or how disadvantaged a life you've lived until this point. Doesn't mean your decisions can't benefit the disadvantaged, but you yourself are no longer one of them. So far, so good, and in case I hadn't mentioned it before, Duffy's characterisation of Narses is my favourite after Gillian Bradshaw's, and Thedora's relationship with him, ditto; they're firm allies from before she married Justinian, but they also sometimes have different opinions, and his ultimate loyalty is to Justinian, not to her. Also, Antonina (Belisarius' wife) in several lhistorical novels of the period tends to be presented as a none too bright promiscuous tool of Theodora's, and not so here, where they are friends, but up to a point, and Antonina has her priorities which are neither about her sex life nor about Theodora.

( Spoilery Nitpick is Spoilery Because Not Historical )

Naomi Novik: Spinning Silver. I've heard many good things about this one but didn't get around do reading it before now. Turns out it is absolutely worth the hype. I had been charmed by Novik's Temeraire saga, though less so the more books were published and stopped reading before Laurence and Temeraire got to Australia. This novel, by contrast, didn't just charm me but made me fall in love and start it all over again as soon as I was done. Rather unusually for what I've read of Novik's novels so far, almost the entire main cast is female, and she even pulls off multiple first person narrations without this reader getting confused as to who is narrating which passage (note: in my copy, this isn't marked with "Name of Character" to signal a pov switch), because the individual voices are that individual.

The setting is vaguely Russian, using various fairy tale elements (Rumpelstiskin, Cinderella, Baba Yaga) to weave something new. The main narrating ladies are: 1.) Miryem, daughter of a Jewish moneylender who isn't very good at moneylending due to being too kind and exploitable by his antisemitic village, who takes over the moneylending business, makes a success out of it and makes the fateful for fairy tales boast of being able to turn silver into gold, which gets overheard by a Staryk (= essentially fairy for the purposes of this novel) Lord who decides to take her up on it, 2.) Wanda, downtrodden but strong and determined daughter of a drunken and abusive farmer who is in debt to Miryem, which causes her to work for Miryem, 3.) Irina, daughter of the provincial Duke who through a plot device involving Miryem's business with the Staryk lord sees a chance to gain power by marrying Irina to the young Tsar despite said young Tsar's very sinister reputation. There are more first person narrators among the supporting cast, but these are the three main characters who drive the narrative, who have to use their wits to first survive increasingly dangerous situations and then get a step ahead and actually defeat the cause of said situations, and who along the way form relationships with other characters (and each other) that help them achieving this. It''s really, spinning metaphors being inevitable, a fantastic and brilliant yarn, and every time I thought "hang on, I can see where this is going, but how does that work with Character X' previously established behavior", the novel surprised me by making it work in the best way.

More tv:

Alien: Earth, episodes 1.01 - 1.04: Not a sequel but a prequel, setting wise, though made with an awareness that most of the audience will be familiar with at least the first few Alien movies. Mind you, with the heavy emphasis on AI beings already introduced in the pilot I thought, hang on, to which Ridley Scott cult movie is this supposed to be a prequel to? (Four episodes later: leaving aside the four years limit on the life span of Replicants in Blade Runner, this actually would work in a kind of shared early Ridley Scott films universe.) Not that Alien and its sequels don't have robots (robots here being used as a collective noun for various different AIs in human shape) as important parts of the plot, of course, but this show really puts them centre stage (perhaps recalling David was one of the key elements of Prometheus that worked even for people who disliked the movie?), and it absolutely works. It also so far provides a good remix of core elements. Ripley in I think not one but two of the Alien movies said that the company (not just Wayland-Yutani which she originally worked for, but also its successors in the movie plots) were the true monsters, given that the Xenomorphs "just" follow their instincts but Wayland-Yutani et al sacrifice fellow human beings for greed. If this was late 1970s and early 1980s scepticism of capitalism and where it's going, well, now we the audience live in the world of tech bros and politicians not even trying to hide their corruption anymore but boasting of it, and so this tv series so far doiubles and triples down on Ripley's observation. Not just the good old Xenomorph but newly introduced creatures like the T-Ocelius deliver the creeps, horrors and scares, sure, as they go after their organic victims, but the character you really loathe and with every episode more wish to fall to an extremely unpleasant fate is the resident main tech bro billionaire, Boy Kavalier (what he really calls himself), so covinced of his own brilliance, so utterly unconcerned with any empathy whatsoever, and seeing both human and synthetic workers as his property.

(Future eras may write their film and tv thesis about tech bro villains from Glass Onion onwards.)

But any genre that involves horror needs sympathetic characters as well, characters the audience cares for and wants to survive, not getting torn apart by the Xenomorph (and other murderous species). Which is where this show also excels, ( but saying why gets too spoilery to talk about it above cut. )

World building wise, the Earth as presented by this show no longer has nation states, it's run by five cooperations (this reminded me of what Mike Duncan did for the Mars part in his Podcast Revolutions, and he couldn't have known), with Weyland-Yutani as one of the older powerful ones and Boy Kavalier's company, inevitably named Prodigy, as the newbie which together with another new company changed the "Triumvirate" to "The Five". Democracy, of course, is also a thing of the past. For once, North America isn't a location (so far), instead, the Weyland-Yutani vessel in the series pilot crashes down on what used to be Thailand, and Boy Kavalier's lair seems to be located somewhere in South Asia (Vietnam, I'd say, given the scenery) as well. We all know how a Xenomorph looks in the various stages of its existence by now, but the design team came up with four other creepy species as well which are new and are excellent at bringing on body horror. Though like I said: the truest revulsion is created by human greed. Contrasted, which makes it compelling and not nihilistic, by the capacity of doing better than that, by artificial and human beings alike.