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.

Unsafe Spaces

by J.D. Popham

The world is trying to kill you.

Really. Not a joke. Just ask Neil deGrasse Tyson.

The universe in general, and the Earth in particular, are working very, very hard at your untimely demise. From your first breath until you shuffle off this mortal coil, you are on a cosmic hit list as the world conspires to lay you low.

Image Credit: NASA/Don Davis

The good news is it’s not personal. The universe has it in for every living thing. It’s all part of the vast celestial clockwork we inhabit. Think of the universe as an unthinkably massive threshing floor on which the evolutionary wheat is continually and repeatedly separated from the evolutionary chaff. Its fell machinery is relentless, implacable and it never stops. Not ever. Like all other organisms on Earth or in the universe at large, humans are never far from the shadow of the winnowing fan.

To readers for whom being fed, warm and safe is the baseline state, this may sound a tad alarmist. Even in a year rife with natural and human-made disasters, things probably seem far less…perilous than I’m making them sound. In fact, if one were to put together a Relative Peril Scale showing the degree of immediate threat to which individual humans and the overall species are exposed, we’d find that humans are relatively safe at the moment.

Relatively. At the moment.

As they say on financial prospectuses, past performance is not an indicator of future results. Humanity's track record for dodging the universe's efforts to knock that smug look off our collective face only goes back a few hundred years. That's slim to the point of being non-existent when held up against a geological (let alone a cosmological) time table. The universe has plenty of time on its hands. It plays a long game. 

Such a long game, in fact, that human thinking goes a bit wobbly when we try to play on the same temporal game board. It’s hard for humans to take seriously threats that haven’t occurred within living memory, or that come at us so slowly and incrementally that our short-game brains dismiss them. This is why, against all common sense and scientific evidence, we have anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers, and the 'raw water' craze.

Science fiction, of course, has been tossing around the apocalyptic football for well over a century. With little required by way of pesky science, one can remake the world pretty much as one pleases in order to deliver a cautionary tale, moral message or post-apocalyptic theme park. The end of modern civilization is prime real estate for issuing doleful cautions and commentaries on the shortcomings of modern society and its institutions. Or for positing better worlds that might bloom from the ruins were apocalyptic upheaval to hit the the civilization reset button.    

  

Still, for all our noodling over the end of the world as we know it, science fiction’s post-apocalyptic societies of late seem, more often than not, surprisingly familiar places. They tend to reflect mindsets and moralities that have emerged during humanity’s moment of relative security. It is ironic that we raze our civilization to the ground so often and so blithely in our flights of fancy these days, yet seem reluctant, even a bit squeamish, when it comes to acknowledging the degree to which such events would also remake who we are.

Rachel, the protagonist of Jeff Vandermeer's Borne, for example, is presented as a hardened scavenger under constant existential threat. She lives in a devastated city situated on the banks of a toxic river, and afflicted by a giant flying bear who gobbles humans by the pawful. The city is chockablock with lethal traps and pitfalls. Sudden death lurks around every corner. Yet Borne's violence tends to occur offstage or at a far distance, rendering the humans who suffer death and dismemberment comfortingly anonymous. As a result, Rachel's character renders more as a twenty-something liberal arts grad living in a transitional urban neighborhood than as the hard-bitten survivor of a cruelly dystopian city.

In part this is endemic to story-telling. Audiences enjoy a tale more when they can admire or sympathize with an author's characters as they confront mutants, zombies, and roving gangs of apocalyptians® with perfectly horrible table manners. That's difficult to do if the chords of reason or emotion struck by the characters don't resonate with the audience. Stories that reflect the target audience's cognative biases are much more likely be successful than those that challenge them. Authors who peddle safe, comforting stories rarely want for work.

However, social media seems to have exacerbated this tendency, narrowed the spectrum of character with which it's acceptable to engage. Genre fiction in particular has become prone to literary ethnocentrism, with authors and audiences self-selecting into isolated cultural pockets, each confident in its own superiority and speaking only to its own. We have become dabblers around the edges when it comes to cultural collapse. The deeper waters are murky and have an unwholesome look. They teem with dark, discomforting ideas about who we are, and why, and what we are capable of becoming. Authors who enter the deep, who dare stir up such dangerous creatures, are rarely loved by those whose social paradigms they ruffle.

Yet, science fiction at its best dares those darker waters. It trades in unsettling ideas, gives witness to dangerous visions. It seeks to divine our essential nature: to look beyond the zeitgeist of our current cultural moment, pull down the mask of ought-to-be and catch us up in an unsparing glimpse of our own true selves. It forces us to grapple with our mutable nature, which is both curse and gift.

The universe, meanwhile, cares not a fig for our social paradigms. It merely subjects them to the relentless binary test it applies to everything: Will a given tendency improve your odds of avoiding extinction? That's it. Yes or no. Pass or fail. It will continue to shape us. At the margins for the moment, and wholesale should the institutions that protect us fail. Truths we think universal and immutable will be scoured away, and scoffed at by futures that (as most futures do) imagine themselves superior to the past.

Assuming there's anyone left to remember us at all.  

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.

Television Review: Doctor Who Season Eight

by Mord Fiddle

So disappointing.

I thought we'd seen the last of Clara Oswald.  At the end of Death in Heaven I said to myself, 'Well self," ('self' being what I call myself when we're alone) "With any luck Moffat has finally cut loose the Clara Oswald sea-anchor and now Doctor Who's center of gravity can shift back to its titular character.  Now that every episode doesn't have to revolve around Clara, Capaldi will have the elbow-room needed to put his own stamp on The Doctor."

Then, Last Christmas, 2014s Christmas episode of Doctor Who, dropped a wagon full of coal on me.

I have dubbed season eight of Doctor Who 'The Fan-Fiction' season.  One could see it coming on.  Under Moffat's tenure, periodic fan-fic episodes have been a reality since the onset of season six.  He was restrained about it that year - an episode here and there, usually by a guest writer. However, with the arrival of Clara Oswald (a fairly blatant Mary Sue) Moffat's control began to slip.  Season seven was one long, slippery fan-fiction slope with Oswald's 'impossible girl' waiting for us at the bottom.

Since the arrival of Peter Capaldi at the beginning of season eight, episodes of Doctor Who have largely revolved around Clara Oswald.

To an extent this is understandable. During the Tennet and Smith years Doctor Who developed a strong romance-oriented following.  While Moffat and company wanted to cast the post-Matt Smith Doctor as an older, cynical and far less romantic Doctor, no one wanted to lose this new romance-oriented demographic.  In Deep Breath, season eight's opening episode, when Madame Vastra took Clara to task for recoiling from the The Doctor because he was no longer young and a potential love interest, Moffat was speaking to the part of the audience that viewed The Doctor through a romantic lens.  That plot-line was a careful threading of the needle, and while it was a self conscious plot-line that put the episode out of balance, it was a needed farewell to the Doctor as romantic interest

That done, I thought we could move on. Have a little fun, run a nice dramatic story arc or two, and save a few worlds without it having to do with Clara for a while. Sadly, season eight turned into all Clara all the time. Every single plot was Clara-centric. I'd venture that Jenna Coleman has had more screen time in Peter Capaldi's first season as The Doctor than Peter Capaldi. 

First it was Clara as love interest, coming to terms with the Doctor as a non-romantic figure, which meant they had to give Clara a new love interest (because god forbid Clara not have a romantic subplot in her life).

Then it turned into Clara as daughter figure, which meant her love interest must be someone the Doctor would disapprove of and who would disapprove of The Doctor so we could play up the father-daughter-boyfriend triangle.

And then it was all 'Ooh Doctor I so hate you (for no good reason, but it's in the script therefore), you must leave and never come back".

And then it was all "Ooh, Doctor, I'm all sad and conflicted because my loyalties are torn between you and my boyfriend, and therefore I must lie to you both in order to continue our adventures in time and space on the sly."

And then it was all "Ooh, Doctor, I'm so distraught at having distracted my boyfriend by pronouncing my complete and total love to him (over the phone) as he was crossing a busy street, thereby killing him. Bring him back or I'll destroy all you hold dear."

GAH! {Bangs head on keyboard}

Anyway (ow), with Clara and The Doctor apparently parting ways at the end of the season I thought we were done with Doctor Who revolving around this banal instance of Mary Sue flotsam. Oh, I knew she'd be back at some point for a visit during Capaldi's final season. Maybe for a special episode. I even half suspected that this Christmas episode might end up being a cozy farewell to Clara. Which I was prepared for.  Really. Totally cool with it so long as the Tardis would hie off after the closing credits, leaving Clara and Earth in the rear-view mirror for a while.

But no. Apparently no decent movie offers came in for Jenna Coleman and we'll be stuck with her for another season.  Clara Oswald, like sidewalk gum on a hot summer day, is proving a bit of a tough scrape to get off the bottom of the Doctor Who shoe.

Wake me for the 2015 Christmas special.