Book Review: By Fire Above by Robyn Bennis

Reviewed by J. D. Popham

By Fire Above, the latest novel by Robyn Bennis, is not the adventure story it deserved to be. This is a hard thing to say as I quite enjoy the irreverent and slightly manic quality the author brings to her stories. Sadly, while there are passages in Fire that work well, the book as a whole is sufficiently weighed down by its flaws that it struggles to stay airborne. 

Fire is the second novel in Bennis' Signal Airship series, a steampunk offering centered around protagonist Josette Dupre, captain of the airship Mistral. Bennis' first novel, The Guns Above, followed Dupre's trial by fire as the first woman to command a combat airship. Her need to prove herself and gain her crew's confidence as captain provided that book's primary source of dramatic tension. At the close of The Guns Above, Dupre's command bone fides are established, both with her crew, and the Ganarian Kingdom's high command. Even the enemy Vin, awed by her heroics, refer to both Dupre and the Mistral as "The Shark". 

By Fire Above begins where Guns left off, aboard the battered Mistral in the aftermath of the first novel's climactic battle. It's a tricky starting point. The dramatic energy and tension, expended in battle just ended, are at low ebb. The wounded Mistral and her depleted crew head back behind the lines for refit, replacements and some much deserved R&R. Spare parts shortages and logistic snarls delay the Mistral's return to combat, forcing Captain Dupre to spend her time attending galas, rubbing elbows and playing politics with Ganria's upper crust, and dallying romantically. Despite two ship-board incidents inserted to boost the tempo of its early chapters, the first half of By Fire Above drags badly.

Even in the absence of action sequences, the nuanced shadow play of high-stakes political intrigue is endemic to seats of power during wartime. This should have provided ample edge-of-your-seat story telling opportunities. Unfortunately, in By Fire Above, Bennis never really engages their potential. In large part, this is Josette Dupre's fault.

In order to convince us of the captain's badass bone fides, Bennis continually resorts to dumbing-down the other inhabitants of her steampunk world. At times this is such a naked device I'm reminded of Spengo, the planet of idiots from Mom and Dad Save the World.  Faced with the kingdom's political and social elites Dupre yawns her way through one political or social confrontation after another, either deflating or overawing imperial aristocrats and bourgeoisie, according to the needs of the plot, with unrealistic aplomb. Amusing at first, this device quickly becomes tedious. By hobbling Dupre's supposedly dangerous political opponents in order to make the Captain appear formidible, Bennis jettisons much needed opportunities to inject dramatic tension and narrative velocity into the story. 

Absent drama from Fire's political intrigue, Bennis is forced to keep the reader engaged by playing for laughs. But humor and the odd dallop of pathos (particularly when so much of the humor depends on her lead characters smirking and rolling their eyes) aren't enough to sustain By Fire Above through the novel's early chapters.       

Finally, in chapter eight, Dupre and the Mistral depart the capital to besiege the city of Durum, occupied by the enemy Vin, and the story gradually picks up much needed steam. While Durum has no strategic value, it's Dupre's home town and her mother and assorted friends are trapped there. In order to free them, Dupre has convinced the King of Ganaria that the city is only lightly defended: a perfect training mission for a newly minted army division (jokingly referred to as the Fearless Fops) in need of 'blooding'. The Mistral accompanys the mission, only to find that Dupre's intelligence as to the defenders' strength is on the unreliable side. Hijinks ensue.

This is where Bennis seems most comfortable, and where the steampunk world she's created comes to life. The city provides a well drawn backdrop for the book's second act, and its siege is a marvelous set piece with many moving parts. Shifting her point of view between Dupre, aristocratic second son Bernat, and young Ensign Kember, Bennis deftly shows the parts off in detail while keeping the larger action moving at a brisk and steadily rising tempo.

Even here, though, Bennis' characters and plot often ring false. She repeatedly breaks through the belivability envelope in order to push the plot forward, or to deliver Dupre and her companions from disaster. Events hinge too often on characters acting against character, or wildly improbable strokes of luck becoming unaccountably probable, causing the story to lose its natural flow and become forced. Fortunately, the brisk pace of events Bennis maintains in the second half of the book are sufficient to keep the story aloft.

Bernat, the preening aristocrat, largely delivered comic relief in The Guns Above. He begins By Fire Above in much the same vein, but as the book moves from the capital city to the front Bennis begins adding depth to his character. By the end of the book Bernat is in many ways becoming more interesting than the tin-typed Dupre, who has gained scar tissue from the adventure, but little by way of wisdom or insight. Indeed, during By Fire Above's denouement, Bernat shows himself the wiser of the two, and gets the book's best line in the bargain.

Ensign Kember's character ends By Fire Above much as she began it: primarily a vehicle for reflecting Josette Dupre's brilliance. Despite negligence on Dupre's part that puts Kember and the Mistral in avoidable peril (and could result in the ensign's court martial on capital charges) her hero worship remains undimmed. It will be interesting to see whether, should the series continue, she will cease to see her captain through rose tinted aeronaut goggles and move past the role of dutiful side-kick.

When all is said and done, By Fire Above is bouyed up despite its flaws by the irrepressable sense of fun Bennis brings to her writing. It's a quality that will allow many readers to ignore (or at least quickly forget) the smoke and occasional clanking eminating from the steampunk engine room, and simply enjoy the airship ride. In the current science fiction and fantasy zeitgeist, fun action-adventure stories are often dismissed as 'pulp' fiction: comfort food written by lesser writers for lesser readers. Happily, Robyn Bennis doesn't read those memos.

Book Review: Ancillary Sword by Anne Leckie

Reviewed by J. D. Popham

Possibly the greatest weakness of Anne Leckie's Ancillary Sword is that it has the great misfortune of being the sequel to her previous novel, Ancillary Justice, which deservedly swept the science fiction novel category during the 2014 Science Fiction awards season. 

In Ancillary Justice Leckie told the story of Breq, the last surviving corpse soldier, or ancillary, from the interstellar troop carrier Justice of Toren. Once a peripheral extension of that ship’s Artificial Intelligence, Breq retained the AI's identity following the troop carrier's destruction. Using alternating chapters, Justice told its protagonist's story using two plot lines; one following the star ship Justice of Toren’s AI through events leading up to its destruction, and the other following Breq, Justice of Toren's sole surviving ancillary, on her quest for vengeance against Anaander Mianaai, the emperor responsible for Justice of Toren’s destruction.

Mianaai, Lord of Radch is the ultimate imperialist. She is an ancient, shared consciousness comprised of multiple physical bodies. For millennium, Mianaai has ruled humanity, her many bodies allowing her to maintain personal presence and control throughout her interstellar empire and extend her reign across many human generations. Now, however, some subsets of the Lord of Radch’s personality have begun to rebel against the rest of its collective self. The opening moves of an interstellar civil war are in progress. 

Ancillary Sword picks up the story where Ancillary Justice left off, with Breq having allied herself with one faction of the Lord of Radch’s larger personality. Breq is provided a ship, the Mercy of Kalir, the rank of fleet captain and is ordered to secure and take command of a system called Athoek.

The fracturing of Anaander Mianaai, Lord of Radch, to whom all humans owe absolute and unquestioning loyalty, into rival factions was a rich plot device in Ancillary Justice, driving most of the action in that novel.  In Ancillary Sword Leckie allows the cascade of knowledge and events set loose by Breq’s quest in the previous novel to begin to break out onto the larger stage of interstellar politics and intrigue.

For millennium, failure to obey the Lord of Radch has been de-facto treason. However, when cognitive dissonance ruptures the once monolithic imperial mind into multiple contesting factions, every act of obedience becomes, likewise, an act of treason. With this dissonance now out in the open, the highly centralized imperial society is beginning to break down. A choosing of sides has been forced upon humanity. Thus, Ancillary Sword begins with the makings of a very taut and exciting middle act to Leckie’s planned trilogy in place.  Unfortunately the author misses the opportunity to capitalize on that potential narrative energy.  The result is a disappointing offering by a talented author.

In part this is due to the structural differences between the two books. Ancillary Justice had the danger and urgency of Breq’s quest plot-line trading fours with the impending disaster of Justice of Toren’s destruction, an event that reveals the splintering of a 3,000 year old emperor’s multiple selves into warring factions, to drive it forward.  The loss of the ship’s-eye-view of events in Justice, with scenes described as they unfold from the AI’s many-POV perspective as a means of driving dramatic tension, is particularly missed in Ancillary Sword.

With the alternating Breq narratives reconciled, Leckie continues her story in linear fashion and from a conventional first-person point of view.  After the opening chapters orient the reader and introduce the crew of Mercy of Kalr, Leckie sets the book in motion as the ship and crew travel to Athoek. However, once the Mercy of Kalar arrives at their destination, Ancillary Sword segues into a meditation on human social and economic hierarchies and the evils of empire. The narrative velocity of the story is allowed to dissipate as Breq turns her hand to delivering comeuppance to those at the top of the social order and succor to Athoek's much put-upon underclass.

While essentially a spaceship's AI downloaded into a human body, Breq understands humanity and what is best for us much better than we do ourselves. Leckie's rationale for this is that, having seen to the needs of its human crew for thousands of years, the AI is well equipped to intervene in human affairs. This could have been an interesting idea if Breq were allowed to stumble as she navigated the differences between managing a few dozen humans in the tightly controlled context of a ship under military discipline, and doing so with billions of obstreperous free-range humans within much looser social construct of civilian society.  Sadly, this opportunity is missed as well. Breq begins the work of re-ordering society, humbling the exalted and exalting the the humble, with nary a misstep. Every human intervention Breq undertakes goes surprisingly well. And that, to some degree, is the central weakness of Ancillary Sword. Time and again, Leckie passes over the opportunity for nuance in favor of easy moralizing.

While Leckie is an ambitious and talented world builder, her characters tend not to receive the same level of attention. Beyond the protagonist Breq and Anaander Mianaai, the characters in Ancillary Sword tend toward thin and shallow sketches. They exist functionally and, at times, as a gestalt without seeming to emerge as fully realized characters. Breq's crew are not referred to by names, but as a number within their unit designation; an odd conceit for Breq to maintain given her objection to the continued use of humans as ancillary troops. Privileged characters are venal and shallow. Unprivileged characters are, almost invariably, good and thoughtful souls; the salt of the earth except when pushed to extremes by the venality of their privileged overlords. Most exist primarily as moral foils for Breq, providing her reasons to comment on events or hold forth on her personal philosophy. Or they offer facile counter-arguments for Breq to dispatch with ease. There is little by way of spark of life within them.

A notable exception to this is Dlique, a human raised by an alien race, the Presger, in order to serve as their translator. Translator Dlique explodes onto Ancillary Sword's stage for a mere ten pages or so but, in that brief space, manages to become the series' most memorable character to date. Indeed, Dlique's commentary in the inadequacy of eggs (they never become 'anything interesting like regret, or the middle of the night last week') is Ancillary Sword's most frequently quoted passage. Alas, poor Dlique is hustled back to the wings all too quickly. Understandably, I think. The light and color injected by Dlique into Leckie's otherwise brooding narrative would quickly have become too difficult to maintain without putting the larger work off its balance.

In the last quarter of the book Leckie re-engages the larger story arc, which injects sufficient energy into Ancillary Sword to drive the book's crisis and denouement to a satisfying conclusion. Revelations place Breq and the Mercy of Kalr in the shadow of potential threats lurking near the Athoek system. The impending civil war, which has spent much of Ancillary Sword as a faint rumble on the far horizon, seems suddenly (and finally) a clear and present danger once more.

While Ancillary Sword is not as good a work as Ancillary Justice, it is still a respectable entry into the far-future science fiction subgenre. It delivers a thoughtful 'ships in space' novel, leveraging the conventions of space opera and military science fiction without slipping into their more hackneyed tropes. While Sword does not stand well on its own, it provides a passable transition from Ancillary Justice to the final book in the Imperial Radch trilogy.

More than one author, having dazzled the public with their first novel, have become trapped by that success and never published a second. With Ancillary Sword, Leckie has gotten past the second novel curse in good form.

Book Review: Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch

Reviewed by J. D. Popham

Until now the Rivers of London series has kept Police Constable and apprentice wizard Peter Grant close to home and followed his encounters with the ghosts, mystical creatures and Newtonian magics that exist just beyond the public's sight in contemporary London.  In London, of course, even things that go bump in the night are subject to the Queen’s peace, and the Metropolitan Police has the job of dealing with breaches of said peace; even when they involve malevolent spirits, jazz vampires and river goddesses.  

Foxglove Summer, the fifth book in the series, takes PC Grant out of his beloved London and deep into the English countryside; to Herefordshire, to be precise.  There, two eleven year-old girls have gone missing and the search for them has captured the attention of the 24-hour news machine and thus the British public. What with the disturbing connection between the blood of innocents and the more ethically challenged magics, Grant is dispatched by Inspector Nightingale to check in on an elderly wizard, long retired to the area, in order to confirm that he is not somehow involved in the girl's disappearance. 

Before long both Peter Grant and the urban river goddess Beverly Brook, are drawn into the search proper. What follows is a very pleasant collision between urban Fantasy and the rustic/rural wellspring of the tales and folklore that form much of modern fantasy's foundation.  At the same time Foxglove Summer's police procedural elements get the opportunity to rub shoulders with British police/detective fiction's countryside tradition. 
  
The urban/rural divide in English crime fiction is one of long standing.  Sherlock Holmes famously opined in Silver Blaze that "the lowest and vilest alleys in London do not present a more dreadful record of sin than does the smiling and beautiful countryside".  Happily, Aaronovitch avoids reaching for the threadbare tropes about the city cop out of his element in the sticks.  PC Grant is as good humored as he is tough and clever, and his view of the countryside and its denizens is pragmatic and even-handed.  Besides, between his duties as a copper in the ongoing search for the missing girls, magical doings afoot, and a river goddess to act as his liaison with the local genius loci, boredom is the least of Peter Grant's worries.  

London has been central to the Rivers series so far, and setting Foxglove Summer in the English countryside makes evident the degree to which the city drives the tempo and energy of Aaronovitch's Peter Grant stories. The little town of Rushpool lacks the kinetic charge of London, and not even the frantic search for the girls and the accompanying news media feeding frenzy is going to change that.

This, however, is where Aaronovitch shows his skill as a story-teller. He never fights his setting or attempts to press Rushpool or its denizens into behaving out of character as a means of injecting energy into Foxglove Summer.  Rather, he lets the story move at a pace appropriate to the setting, allowing Peter Grant's narrative voice, his observations of and interactions with the town, and with the emerging evidence of the fantastic that lies beneath, provide the book's rhythm and tempo.

Some of Aaronovitch's more impatient readers have grumbled that the Rivers story arc featuring the Faceless Man, the series' primary antagonist, gets little attention in this outing. Over at Tor.com Liz Bourke has gone so far as to dismiss Foxglove Summer as a 'placeholder novel', which it is certainly not.  Given that in Broken Homes Peter's fellow constable and apprentice Leslie May betrayed Peter, Nightingale and the Metropolitan Police, joining the Faceless Man on the ethically challenged side of both magic and the law, they can be forgiven for feeling a bit let down.  However, anyone paying attention to the pacing of the Rivers series to date will have expected the sound and fury of the Faceless subplot to recede to the background in Foxglove Summer.

Aaronovitch tends to avoid spending his story's dramatic tension all at once. He leaves the Faceless Man subplot largely behind periodically, knowing the reader will be all the hungrier for it when he returns.  However, to call Foxglove Summer a mere placeholder is to imply that its central story is throw-away and that the book contributes nothing of value to the larger story arc, neither of which is the case.  Foxglove merely changes the larger story's tempo, creating a bit of narrative elbow room before foreshadowing the storm to come.    

By doing so, Aaronovitch allows himself the space and literary tempo needed to extend Peter Grant's character at something less than a gallop.  It also allows the author to develop Beverly Brook, who has been consigned to cameo appearances since her introduction in Rivers of London, and to give their heretofore slow-approach relationship room to breathe and unfold naturally.  He uses Foxglove to expand the back-story of Molly, Nightingale's otherworldly housekeeper, of Ettenberg where the flower of English wizardry was broken, and to hint at what is walled away in the basement of the Folly behind sheets of battleship steel.  And we learn that that the Genius Loci of the rivers of London are reaching out and establishing their own entente with their peers in the countryside.

Foxglove Summer is worth your hard-earned shekels, and I recommend it.  Fans of the Aaronovitch's earlier works will enjoy it (provided they can school themselves to patience) and readers who wish make Peter Grant's acquaintance without reading the series from its beginning will find Foxglove a good place to jump in.

Alas for our American readers, while released in the UK in November, Foxglove Summer will not be sold by US retailers until January. The Infinite Reach will reference this review again when the book is released in the US, lest you forget.

Book Review: I Robot: To Obey, by Mickey Zucker Reichert

Reviewed by J. D. Popham

Mickey Zucker Reichert's Isaac Asimov's I Robot: To Obey, published by Penguin Random's ROC imprint is a testament to the greed of publishers and the sad state of science fiction today.

It is a profoundly bad piece of writing in almost every respect.

Reichert's characters in To Obey are flat and uninteresting, the prose is turgid and shot through with information dumps, and the plot devices are both awkward and transparent. The action sequences in To Obey are some of the worst I have ever forced myself to read through. The author has managed to write a tech thriller that is almost completely devoid of thrills or technology.  If that weren't sufficient, Reichert has managed to avoid even the faintest evocation of the eponymous Asimov Robot novels, and gets almost everything to do with Asimov's robots and Susan Calvin completely wrong.

The novel's central conflict involves the efforts of a crew of jack-booted government thugs to upend the three laws of robotics; laws central to the functioning of the robots' positronic brains that make them incapable, through action or inaction, of harming humans.  As written by Isaac Asimov, Susan Calvin was a leading mind in the early days of U.S. Robotics and Mechanical Men, and would have been a reasonable target for evildoers seeking to bypass the three laws for their own nefarious ends.  However, Reichert's Susan Calvin possesses none of the original's cold passion for robotics.  In I, Robot: To Obey, Calvin is a second year Psychiatry resident (Asimov's Susan Calvin had a PhD in Psychology and was not an MD) with minimal insight into or interest in robots.  She is thus an unlikely target for evildoers with robotic mayhem on their minds. To properly motivate the men in black hats, Reichert must provide Calvin with a father who is a famed robotics engineer at U. S. Robots. The shadowy government conspirators believe Susan possesses a key developed by her father that will turn helpful and harmless robots into ruthless killing machines.

Unfortunately, these plot developments are back-loaded into the second half of the novel. To arrive at them the reader must trudge through chapter after dreary chapter of back-story, explications, office politics, and office banter with co-workers and side-kicks. When the intrigue portion of the book finally gets underway, it clanks and grinds its way into motion in a manner more mechanical than even the most primitive of Asimov's robots. Reichert's writing becomes ever more ungathered and her characters' actions ever less credible as the author attempts to force dramatic tension into the novel's flaccid story-line. As the novel collapses across the finish-line, one has to wonder whether Reichert's heart was in the writing of I Robot, To Obey. 

In this book Reichert shows an utter lack of imagination when it comes to writing futurist fiction.  While the sole robot inhabiting I Robot: To Obey is so advanced it is indistinguishable from a human (sparing Reichert the toil of writing a credible robot character), her world of 2036 is otherwise 2013 with a few very cosmetic changes overlaid. Medicine, for example, has not advanced at all and the futuristic medical resident Susan Calvin spends her days treating 2013 diseases with 2013 medical technology, and the residents are still wondering whether 'retarded' is an appropriate term to use with their patients.  (Perhaps all the research grants went to robotics.) A 'vox' subs in for a smart phone, a 'floater' stands in for the bus, and evil government employees bent on subverting Asimov's three laws hide guns in their underwear. Otherwise, at least in Mickey Reichert's imagination, the trip between now and 2036 is going to be one hell of a dull ride. 

"I Robot: To Obey" has every hallmark of a cash grab by Reichert and her publishers at ROC. Both they and Reichert should be ashamed, not only for inflicting this book on the SF market, but for the damage they have done to the Asimov name and brand as well.