Have you ever taken a good, long look at the Napoleonic Wars and thought, “These are cool, but they could really use more dragons”? Naomi Novik did, so she wrote a book about it.

That’s really all you need to know about the Temeraire series: if it doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, then it’s not going to change your mind about dragons or about the Napoleonic Wars. But if it sounds awesome, then you’re in for a treat. I originally gave this five stars when I added it to Goodreads, having read it before I joined the site. I’ve decided to revise this to three stars now that I’ve had the time to read and compose a proper review. While in terms of my sheer enjoyment and reading pleasure this is a five-star read, His Majesty’s Dragon still has flaws. Fortunately, having read much of the rest of the series, I know it just gets better.

Novik has imagined an alternative universe where humanity has been breeding and harnessing dragons for centuries, if not millennia. Her dragons are diverse, existing as various geographically-distributed breeds of different size, colour, mass, and of course, tactical abilities. In this alternative world, Britain has both a fearsome navy at see and an Aerial Corps of officers who lead squadrons of dragons into battle. A trained British dragon is a sight to see, for it carries into battle an entire crew of gunners and bombers—and a dragon itself is a formidable foe.

This series is essentially a “boy and his dragon” story writ large across an intricate historical backdrop. William Laurence is a successful Navy captain who captures a French frigate—and the dragon egg it’s transporting. When the egg hatches while returning to port, Laurence becomes the person who harnesses the dragon for England. This is a deep, personal connection that is difficult to transfer. Indeed, as Laurence comes to know Temeraire, he decides he does not want to leave Temeraire, despite the loss of his Navy commission—and his ship—that this entails.

The relationship between Laurence and Temeraire is the lifeblood of this series. At times it gets a little mushy, because Laurence and Temeraire are always going on about how fond they are of each other, and I can’t help but be creeped out by the thought that Temeraire is this giant reptilian cat. Thanks to the contrasts Novik presents in the way other aviators interact with their dragons, however, it becomes clear that Laurence and Temeraire are something special. While most aviators, with a few notable exceptions, are devoted to their dragons’ wellbeing, Laurence and Temeraire have a very unusual dynamic. This is partly the result of Laurence’s unexpected entry into the Aerial Corps: he doesn’t have any of the preconceived notions about dragons and dragon training that would have been drilled into him as a cadet. So he does things like reading books to Temeraire, or giving him baths, that the other aviators just don’t do. And in his own, unassuming way, Laurence upsets the status quo. This isn’t, generally, a good idea in a military outfit—less so when it’s the nineteenth century.

Temeraire speaks English (and French), learned from the shell. Indeed, I like how Novik’s dragons are a largely intelligent, self-aware bunch. The degree of that intelligence varies, from rather dull representatives like Maximus to the sharp and wise Celeritas. Although deadly in battle, Novik’s dragons are essentially people. This is a theme that becomes apparent in His Majesty’s Dragon and continues throughout the series. Even as she gives us exciting dragon-on-dragon action—by which I mean battle scenes—Novik also explores how we co-exist with another intelligent species in a very rich and profound way.

The battle scenes are not my favourite part of this book. I don’t visualize while reading, so Novik’s careful descriptions of the logistics of harnessing and flying a dragon or of the intricate chaos of aerial combat do little for me. It happens; it’s over; we go home. I’m much more enamoured with the scenes that happen between battles, the dialogue between Laurence and Temeraire and everything we learn about this alternate 1805. I’m not an historian, so I won’t comment on Novik’s accuracy. Yet she’s clearly enjoyed playing the what-if game of how the world would be different with dragon warfare. Of course, one has to give her the benefit of a doubt that even with dragons as a major game piece throughout human history, our nation states would largely have developed in parallel to what happened in our world. Otherwise, maybe Britain would still be ruled by a 19th-century Roman Empire! (But that’s for another story….) Indeed, from the perspective of His Majesty’s Dragon, it regretfully seems like this is little more than “nineteenth-century Europe … with dragons”—the most haphazard form of alternative fiction. I know that future books clarify this description and show how the world is far more interesting in its deviations from our own—but that’s for another review.

His Majesty’s Dragon is a fantastic combination of wit and humour with conflict and difficult decisions. Laurence leaves everything he has known and loses the woman he plans to marry in order to be Temeraire’s captain. Temeraire discovers his origins and his potential even as he realizes that dragons are treated as far less than citizens in English society. And behind all these personal stories hovers the spectre of Napoleon himself. As another reviewer pointed out, this book is a strong fantasy entry because it lacks a clichéd “dark lord” character manipulating everything from behind the scenes. Instead, Novik lets the larger events of the time take that role, and they serve admirably.

There are some issues with pacing here, and Novik’s characterization leaves a little to be desired. Some of the characters are well done, and their relationships are varied and interesting. In particular, I appreciate the evolution of Laurence’s relationships with Rankin and Granby. Clearly Novik knows what she’s doing here; she just chooses to focus so much on Laurence and Temeraire and lets them carry the story to the extent that sometimes other characters seem to suffer for it.

I love the Temeraire series, and His Majesty’s Dragon is an excellent piece of historical fantasy with a military edge. For the most part, it’s well-written and imaginative, with heroes, epic conflicts, and twists and reversals that literally make me cheer out loud. It’s that kind of a book.

My reviews of the Temeraire series:
Throne of Jade →

Agents Books and Braun are back. Aftering solving their case in Phoenix Rising in their “off hours”, the unlikely duo get involved in a new rash of abductions of suffragists from around London. These abductions involve strange, lightning-like teleportations. Braun knows one of the leaders of the suffragist movement—in fact, she used to date the leader’s son, back in New Zealand. Meanwhile, Books continues to struggle with keeping his military past and skills from Braun. Oh, and Lord Sussex and Bruce Campbell continue to plot nefarious plots about the future of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences.

Just another day at the office.

Phoenix Rising was pretty much what one would expect from a first novel in a steampunk series. It was grandiose and larger-than-life, with a typical odd couple pair of protagonists in a fascinating alternate London. The Janus Affair is pretty much what one hopes for in a sequel, then: Ballantine and Morris raise the stakes, introduce new enemies, and revisit old ones. Books and Braun’s relationship evolves over the course of their new investigation, and we learn more about this steampunk world.

Ballantine and Morris continue to eschew fantasy but definitely not the fantastical. After all, the main plot device in The Janus Affair is a teleportation device! There are also bicycle-like helicopters (lococycles), which we can’t really even master today, and the automata we see are quite advanced in terms of their behaviour and functionality. I’d be curious to discover how this nineteenth-century England is so much more advanced than our England of the same era—what sort of inventions helped them along?

Meanwhile, we learn more about both Books and Braun’s pasts. I enjoy how Ballantine and Morris integrate these revelations into the plot itself rather than relying on awkward exposition. With Braun in particular, they use the classic convention of an old flame who has relevance to the case of the day. Douglas Sheppard is an awkward chap: an adventurer, son of a suffragist, and nominal supporter of women’s rights … but he’s also a bit of a chauvinistic boor. Once again, Ballantine and Morris demonstrate a deftness for developing even minor characters. Douglas is neither sympathetic nor entirely unlikable. It’s easy to see how Eliza once fell for him, and easy to see why she reacts the way she does when they are reunited.

Books’ past, on the other hand, was a little less shadowy already. We knew he had been in the military and had rejected that lifestyle when he rejected his father’s strict upbringing. But Ballantine and Morris round this story out with a few more details, and Eliza finally learns Wellington’s secret. I like that they chose to have Eliza find out so soon into the series. I love that they had Eliza and Wellington end up together by the end of the book. Some authors would have played a “will they or won’t they” game for books upon books—but no, Books and Braun are a little more than a team as they head off to America.

The Janus Affair offers compelling characters and a great story, even if the plot itself isn’t as good. The mystery here is not very gripping. The Culpeppers are dull villains with generic, religious zealotry that seems to come from nowhere. And I’m disappointed that the Maestro remains—literally—in the shadows. We get it: he’s dangerous and terrifies even normally cool customers like Sophia and Sussex. So what? He’s too much the cipher, and that makes him less interesting than he should be.

It’s a fun series. That quintessential ingredient that would push it from “fun” to “fucking amazing” is still missing. The combination of humour and sobriety isn’t quite balanced yet: I laugh, and I cry, but not quite in the proportions one might want. The Janus Affair is a novel in a series still finding its footing. Fortunately, it is fun enough despite its flaws to make it and any more sequels worth a look.

My reviews of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences series:
← Phoenix Rising | Dawn’s Early Light →

So, there are monkeys in South America and in Africa. How did they get there? That’s essentially what Alan de Queiroz wants to answer in The Monkey’s Voyage: How Improbable Journeys Shaped the History of Life, albeit in a roundabout way.

If you’re a creationist, especially a young-Earth creationist, you don’t have to worry too much about this. The answer is “God did it!” (Or possibly, “God did it, praise Jesus!” if you are feeling particularly devout at the moment.)

Alas, I am not a creationist, so I have to look to science for an answer.

In school, I learned that the continents move. I know, right? But it’s a real phenomenon, called continental drift, and it’s powered by this even cooler phenomenon called plate tectonics. Unlike the way we learned it in school, though, the discoveries of drift and plate tectonics didn’t go smoothly. There were a lot of bumps in the road, as de Queiroz recounts.

But what about those monkeys? Well, the problem is that South America and Africa were last connected millions of years before the New World and Old World monkeys became separate species. What’s up with that? Did they pull a human-migration and come down through a Siberian land bridge? Why aren’t there any monkey fossils in Canada, then?

Because they floated on tree rafts.

Mind. Blown.

I’ve said it before; I will say it again. Science is awesome. Science does not remove wonder from the equation; science amplifies the wonder. If there is anything more wonderous than the ponderous million-year movements of continents, it’s the image of intrepid animals, clinging to an impromptu raft of floating trees and soil as the currents carry them towards another continent or an oceanic island far offshore.

This is essentially the sentiment de Queiroz tries to convey with The Monkey’s Voyage. He certainly shows off his own passion for science and wonder for nature in his personal anecdotes about trips to New Zealand and throughout the United States. His narrative is complicated by the fact that, unlike, say, plate tectonics or global warming, this theory of biogeographic long-range dispersal through things like rafts, birds, etc., is not yet a consensus. There is still a strong contingent of scientists who believe that long-term dispersal plays no role in the distribution of species and support an all-out theory of vicariance—distribution via continental drift and more conventional, shorter-duration dispersal.

But this is a brand of exciting in itself. So many science books present scientific discoveries to readers as a fait accompli: “Look at this wonderful shiny theory! Look at all this evidence we have! All the other competing theories have bitten the dust!” And then there is much champagne-opening and sexy partytimes. (Except there is no sexy partytimes, because scientists do not get invited to those sorts of parties.) Instead, The Monkey’s Voyage involves some very cutting-edge, very much “of the moment” science. De Queiroz is obviously confident enough in disperalism to have written this book, but he diligently presents both disperalist and vicariance views, as well as the many and sundry perspectives within these camps. (I should mention that de Queiroz isn’t saying that dispersal or vicariance exclusively explains the distribution of species. Rather, he chronicles the changing opinion within the scientific community from primarily-vicariance to vicariance-and-dispersal.)

De Queiroz says that he hopes “to explain what this dramatic shift in thought tells us about both the nature of scientific discovery and the history of life on a grand scale”, and in this respect I think he succeeds admirably. I’ve read a lot of history of science books, and they often explain how scientific exploration and discovery has changed over the centuries (usually by using words like rigorous). They seldom paint a good picture of what it was like to do science in the twentieth century, however, by which time philosophies of science and the scientific process were well-entrenched, sometimes dogmatically. With occasional shout-outs to Popper and Kuhn, de Queiroz looks at how people’s attitudes towards scientific discovery have coloured their own approaches to this biogeographic discussion. He challenges the myth that science is a monolithic thing; at the same time, he shows how all scientists are still working within a common, loose framework and towards the same goal of knowledge validated by evidence.

Still, I hesitate to call The Monkey’s Voyage a popular science book. It gets far more technical than I would expect the average lay-person to want to follow. I consider myself a fairly literate person, in terms of science, and I found de Queiroz’s explanations hard to follow at times. It isn’t just the jargon—which he acknowledges as a potential obstacle and tries to minimize—but also a problem of organization. He chunks things like a scientist, anticipates counterarguments and carefully comes up with ways rebuttals, until the result is a little too convoluted. The actual eponymous monkey chapter is buried far towards the end of the book and quite short compared to the rest.

Don’t let this deter you from reading the book if the subject still interests you. Despite the higher barrier to entry, it remains fascinating and well-written. It’s about a subject that is contemporary and still developing within the scientific community, and I think that’s very exciting. De Queiroz encourages us to think about how life has evolved along with the changing face of the planet, and that’s a very intriguing idea. It’s definitely worth a book or two. If all you are after is a light, pop sci read, then The Monkey’s Voyage will not hold your attention. But if you really want some meaty biogeography for your weekend, then Alan de Queiroz has got you covered.

That spoiler warning is live, people. I am not joking around here. I am going to talk about the twist that, though fairly early in the book, is unmentioned or unhinted at in any of the cover copy or introduction. Because Darwinia is a far deeper rabbithole than its simple alternative-history wrapper promises. I understand why it got the Hugo nomination (and also why it didn’t win). With Darwinia, Robert Charles Wilson has written perhaps the alternativest history of all.

So don’t say I didn’t warn you, because I have. Three times now. Turn back if you don’t want this book spoiled.

(Are they gone? Good. I can’t stand those people. Don’t tell them I said that though.)

Darwinia feels like a strange mash-up of Julian Comstock and Spin, Wilson’s two other novels that I’ve read, along with a far better scientific explanation for a phenomenon similar to what happens in Fragment. Alternative-history Wilson meets hardcore science-fiction Wilson, and the results are genuinely original and exciting. And also underwhelming.

So let’s talk about this twist. Wilson takes the simulation hypothesis to the extreme, along with the Tiplerian Omega Point proposition that we will simulate all possible futures as well as the past at the end of time. This is one of those really fascinating ideas that makes science fiction so cool, in my opinion. The idea that the universe itself could effectively evolve to be sentient is … it’s almost intoxicating in how mind-blowing it is. I don’t need to do drugs; I just read science fiction. It’s how I get my high.

Speaking of high, another thing Darwinia reminds me of is J.G. Ballard mixed up with Philip K. Dick. It has Ballard’s matter-of-fact, lone archetypal heroes set in a world that could have come from the imagination of PKD. And I’m pretty sure both of those guys got high when they were writing their SF. (And if Ballard didn’t, PKD got high enough for the both of them.)

Anyway, the twist is one of the few ways in which the Darwinia phenomenon makes any sense. Prior to that I was thinking it was some kind of weird alternative universe transposition, and we’d find out that our Europe ended up on a Darwinian version of Earth, and all those people had to survive against a frankly terrifying otherworldly planet. Instead, Wilson abandons the Lost World-esque angle of exploring alternative evolutionary paths in favour of an End Times scenario mixed with technobabble.

Unfortunately, Guildford Law—whose parents clearly did not love him enough to give him that first name—is one of the blandest protagonists ever. I understand why Caroline left him. And even when he discovers he is virtually immortal, he does nothing badass with it. The same goes for pretty much every character in this book. Wilson wants us to get excited about the war happening within the very fabric of our world, but the most I can do is a meagre “meh”. Like Guildford, I don’t see the big picture that his ghostly future-past-alternative-self tries to paint. If it’s true that there are a million other people like Guildford across the entire Archive who are being enlisted by their ghost!selves to fight the psilife, why, Mr. Wilson, did you pick the most boring person to focus on for this story?

And that’s really the downfall of Darwinia. It doesn’t matter how cool your concept our worldbuilding is: if your characters or conflict don’t strike a spark, then the rest of the story is dead on arrival. This is simultaneously one of the most thought-provoking, conceptually exciting books I’ve read this year and one of the dullest, from a story point of view. I make no apologies when I say that story has to come first. (I had a similar problem with Julian Comstock, although in that case, Wilson rescued it through incredibly quotable dialogue between characters who weren’t as boring as wet rags on an unpainted bench. Even though the story lacked lustre, there was enough decoration for it to pass muster.)

Wilson also sets himself up for failure with this galaxy-sized conflict set on an individual scale. He virtually guarantees being unable to deliver a satisfactory resolution, and that’s borne out by the twee, somewhat philosophical slant to Darwinia’s denouement in which Guildford gets to grow older.

In an alternative universe, or perhaps a simulation of this universe corrupted by semi-sentient algorithms, this book might have been a big deal for me. I can see that potential within it. But in this timeline at least, I didn’t get very excited.

The robot apocalypse pops up all the time in science fiction, and with good reason. Humans are generally bad at getting along with each other; sharing this planet with intelligent life of an entirely different variety would probably not go down well. Isaac Asimov, of course, famously developed three laws of robotics that were designed to avoid android armageddon. All of them were designed to sanctify human life, to make it inviolable in the eyes of robotkind. Then, Asimov proceeded to demonstrate how such laws could go horribly wrong.

vN reminds me a lot of Asimov’s robotics stories. It is the journey of its protagonist, Amy, as she figures out who (and what) she is in a world with both robots and humans when she, a von Neumann robot, discovers her anti-human-violence failsafe doesn’t work. Instantly a pariah and a fugitive, Amy goes on the run and winds up in the company of an itinerant vN. Oh, and she has the memories and personality of her grandmother inside her … because she ate her grandmother. Yeah.

Of course, unlike Asimov, Madeline Ashby is great at women characters. It really shows with Amy, who makes or breaks the book. In the first chapter, where the narration follows the human Jack and his concerns for his vN daughter, I was still ambivalent about vN. I was wondering where it was going and when Ashby would start providing some more background into the history of vN and the terminology she was subtly slipping into each paragraph. After Amy’s confrontation with and consumption of Portia, I was hooked. It became difficult for me to put vN down, because I needed to find out what Amy was going to do next.

I like Amy. The entire world turns against her, and she doesn’t whine. After accidentally getting involved in a jailbreak, she goes on the run with Javier. He iterates (the process by which vNs spawn smaller copies of themselves that will grow into new people as they absorb vN food), and his son Junior is injured while they escape capture. They get separated, and Amy finds herself with Junior in her care. So she assumes a false identity and starts making money to rectify what she perceives as her fault.

And this is where it gets really interesting, because Ashby uses Javier to remind us that vNs aren’t human and to demonstrate that Amy is special. Javier doesn’t really care that Junior has “bluescreened”—he’ll just iterate again in a few months.

I love it. I love that after spending so much time convincing us of the veracity of Amy’s vN emotions, Ashby challenges that perspective by showing us Javier’s transparent lack of compassion for his own progeny. Thanks to his failsafe, it is impossible for him not to love humans, to harm humans, to watch humans get hurt. But he couldn’t care less about other vN, even his own children, and he is brutally honest with Amy about his conception of vN emotions. He knows his are simulated—and he points out that human emotions are also simulated, chemically—and therefore doesn’t view them as real.

The conflict between Amy and the government, as well as the one between Portia and Amy, speaks to that tension between humanity’s need for homeostasis with the vNs and the vNs’ very sucky position in society. Portia’s methods are reprehensible, but her cause might be just. vNs aren’t exactly slaves of the Cylon variety, but they are not respected and not treated fairly by the vast majority of society; the term second-class citizen comes to mind. Since Amy is both our protagonist and a vN, we are largely encouraged to feel empathy for their plight (or at least, I was)—but I don’t think it’s that simple. Thanks to the actions of Javier and other vNs, it’s possible that Amy is an exception rather than the rule—maybe vN aren’t really ready to be free after all.

Thanks to this complexity, Ashby avoids turning vN into anything so banal as a “message” novel (aside from the hopefully self-evident message that hunting people down because they are different is wrong). There is plenty of room here for interpretation: maybe vN aren’t people so much as very well-programmed simulacra. (Then again, what are people?)

Amy is special though, and several characters point out at different times that Javier seems to have accompanied her because her behaviour and emotions are so human-like. Is this why she doesn’t seem to have a failsafe? Or is that a result of absorbing Portia? Ashby unspools the mystery behind Amy’s estranged grandmother and the future of vNs quite slowly. I wasn’t satisfied with all of her explanations (and by that, I mean I didn’t really understand parts of the ending!), but I really enjoyed the ride.

I also wish that vN had more tangible antagonists. This seems to be a common problem with fugitive fiction: the enemy all too often manifests in the form of minions, police officers and troopers and bounty hunters sent to pursue the fugitive. With no scenes in the evil lair, all we know is that “the government” is out to get Amy. It’s an effective but rather lazy crutch of storytelling in what’s otherwise a very well-designed story.

I’ve raved before about how much I love the “hard” SF, those stories that go on to no end about the technobabble explanations behind the tech du jour. Ashby doesn’t do that. This might not be great news for me, but I think it helps make the story more accessible to people who are more tentative about robot fiction. It’s not quite possible to read vN as an ordinary story about a girl on the run—but in many ways, that’s what it is. She just happens to be a robot, and a quirk of her robotics happens to be why she’s on the run. Ashby’s focus on the social implications—for Amy and her family and the world—of Amy’s run help to make vN a more welcoming and appealing book. Hard science fiction certainly has its place, but it’s nice to see that someone can do robots-with-feelings without all the extra vocabulary and still produce a good story.

When it comes to writing about robots, it has, in the end, kind of all been said and done. vN manages to dust off the old tropes and give them a shiny new coat of paint, however. There is probably a line between human and robot emotions. Hell if I know what it is.

My reviews of the Machine Dynasty series:
iD →

In vN, Madeline Ashby provides a refreshing take on the idea of robots on the run. She tries to bottle lightning a second time in iD—and she succeeds. The second Machine Dynasty novel raises the stakes and allows Ashby a chance to explore both the backstory and future of this world where Asimovian robots have been reified. It’s not quite a full on apocalypse, but the world appears to be holding its breath.

I’m going to assert that you needn’t have read vN to read iD; and, if you read this one, you could still read vN without that story being too spoiled. I read vN almost exactly two years ago, and consequently I remembered very little when I started in on this book. Ashby, to her credit, spends very little time on a recap or exposition—but this assumed familiarity will be a help rather than a hindrance to a newcomer, because there is actually very little you need to know about this world to get up to speed. Organic robots called vN—short for von Neumann machines, because they can self-replicate—exist as second-class citizens. They are supposed to have a failsafe that prevents them from harming humans (and, in fact, is so striden they can’t even watch simulated human violence, like movies). But the failsafe seems glitchy now; one vN named Portia has gone on a rampage stopped by her own granddaughter, Amy. And now Amy has flounced off to an artificial island refuge for vN, and the United States government is freaking the hell out.

iD actually doesn’t follow Amy so much as it does Javier, her sometime-lover-not-quite-husband. That’s another reason why reading the first book isn’t as necessary: almost all of Amy’s involvement in this book happens behind the scenes, so you don’t need to be too familiar with her character. And after his involvement in the first book, it’s nice to learn more about Javier’s backstory. We come to understand his relationship with his father and how that affected his own iterations. And Ashby uses the nature of vNs, as well as Javier’s own clade’s existence as sex workers, to explore the spectrum of sexuality and sexual behaviour. iD is a very inclusive, very expressive book, and that’s really interesting.

Javier’s relationship with Amy is defined almost entirely by the same unique aspects that have led to her celebrity. Amy is paradoxically both the most and least human-like vN: her lack of a failsafe means that she can hurt, even kill humans; but unlike humans, she doesn’t feel or experience pain. She has formed the kind of wariness and hatred for certain humans that few vN manage (I’d argue Javier is another), yet she also has some very startling and alien qualities. She swallowed her own grandmother’s memories, and now she is in constant communication with some kind of semi-sentient artificial island, mulling over the long-term survival of humans and vN through increasingly elaborate probability projections.

For Javier, though, it’s simpler: he loves Amy, and he thinks she loves him, but she doesn’t seem to invest the same amount of emotional commitment into their relationship. And he wants her to hack him, to rid him of the failsafe too—but she refuses. She hedges as to why, citing consent issues. This allows Ashby to tacitly interrogate the thorny ideas of consent within an otherwise stable relationship. Science fiction has the cool ability to use new technologies to amplify the consequences of what we do already. We are, all of us, trying to “hack” each other—help each other develop better habits, make good impressions when we meet new people, etc.—and we have tricks for doing that. Imagine if you could literally reprogram someone though … and make them a killer.

For a robot apocalypse story set in the probable near future, there is very little sense of “future” in this world. There are no flying cars, jetpacks, or asymptotic Moore’s Law processors. The Internet is largely the same. So aside from vN, it’s hard to understand how else this world has changed. This world lacks the otherness that characterizes similar stories, notably Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. I’m not sure this is a bad thing, but I feel like iD loses some sense of dimension without it. The antagonists certainly feel very flimsy (I count Holberton in this camp).

One particularly interesting and also annoying aspect of iD is the near-constant plot derailment. I feel sorry for Javier: literally every plan he makes goes sideways the moment he starts implementing it. He has this big plan to go seduce Holberton so he can get access to a backup of Amy’s … and that really doesn’t work out. In any way. And every other plan he makes falls apart, forcing him to improvise madly. On one hand, this is realistic and refreshing. It’s boring when a protagonist comes up with a plan, even a really clever one, and then the plan goes off without more than minor hiccups. On the other hand, Ashby’s fondness for these twists means that Javier is almost constantly reacting rather than acting. There is little sense of momentum. And then the ending comes, and we meet up with Amy again, and it all turns out not to have mattered much….

iD is a really fascinating story about robots and humans and love and sex and life. If even one of those things interests you, you will probably like this book. (Imagine if two of those things interest you! Logically you would like it twice as much. Or four times as much if the relationship is not linear but geometric!) Ashby hints at even cooler things to come in subsequent (hopefully) books, at the possible solutions to the nascent human–vN divide. I say “hints at” because she has an almost uncanny knack for saying very little outright but drawing the blanks in such a way that you can fill them in yourself without much difficulty. Keywords like “generation ship” or “Stepford solution” dropped into the conversation are viral thought-bombs, exploding in your brain and generating a virtual panoply of narrative forks that eventually converge in the actual, but unstated, truth behind the story.

That’s enough to convince me that Ashby is a writer of the first class, although iD itself might not fall into such a category. I love the ideas she’s tapping into and the stories that she tells with these characters. Despite dissatisfaction with some of the vagueness of setting and antagonism, I still found myself, as with vN, not wanting iD to stop, and not wanting to put it down.

My reviews of the Machine Dynasty series:
← vN

Last year around this time, I read Adam Bede, George Eliot’s first novel. It’s fitting that when I was rummaging around my to-read box, I found Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s last novel. I wanted a meaty, socially-conscious novel with a diverse cast of well-realized characters. Eliot does not disappoint, and Daniel Deronda captivated me to the point that I began scribbling some notes in the margins of my lovely used copy.

I love George Eliot so much. Sooooo much. Let me make this clear: George Eliot is a god.

(A friend suggested I should use the word “goddess”, but if we don’t call women actors “actresses” or “murderesses” any more, I’m going to phase “goddess” out as well.)

Eliot’s ability to transport me to her contemporary Europe is nothing short of wizardry. It’s easy to complain that fiction from a hundred years ago is too difficult to read because of changes in style or too difficult to comprehend because of cultural shifts, but Eliot’s command of imagery and characterization transcends all such barriers. In the previous novels of hers that I’ve read, Eliot replicates the atmosphere of rural England as the echoes of the Industrial Revolution reverberated across its emptying fields. Now in her last novel she gives us a glimpse of the emerging middle class.

The book is called Daniel Deronda, so readers are excused if they are confused by the fact that, for the first third of the book, Deronda appears in one chapter before Eliot turns all her attention on Gwendolen Harleth. The story is as much Gwendolen’s as it is Deronda’s, and it is only towards the very end of the book that Deronda’s narrative seems to take precedence. I understand why the back of my Wordsworth Classics edition claims “Eliot breaks new ground for the English novel with the unusual form and content”, for at first it seems like these two protagonists’ narratives are utterly unrelated. Yet each is enhanced by the other, and by the parallels one can draw between them.

Gwendolen is an interesting protagonist because she is unlikable—but sympathetic. She is spoiled (a fact that is not, itself, a spoiler, because the very first book is called “The Spoiled Child”) and sheltered and possibly Eliot’s way of digging at the shallow creations of fellow Regency and Victorian novelists who completely missed the point of Austen and the Brontë sisters. Gwendolen is in fact an excellent case study of how to write an unlikable character, because Eliot’s omniscient narrator explores the events that have shaped her as a young woman. When confronted with her mother and sisters’ penury (money matters and the loss of money being a favourite motif for Eliot), Gwendolen’s initial reaction is hilariously naive: she announces she will pursue a career as a famous actor or singer. Eliot, through the slightly stereotypical figure of Hans Klesmer—suffering German artiste—shuts Gwendolen down and hard! The schadenfreude as Gwendolen’s cognitive dissonance works overtime to process Klesmer’s complete and unrelenting criticism of her proposal is lovely, all the more so because, thanks to earlier scenes and interactions, we see it coming while Gwendolen remains her oblivious, egoistic self.

Ego is, of course, at the core of both of this novel’s stories. Gwendolen is not really used to anyone saying “no” to her. (Deronda is so enigmatic to her in part because he is probably the first person to do this when he aborts her ruinous gambling streak by returning her necklace.) She basically rules her mother through a combination of genuine affection and latent guilt on her mother’s part over her father’s desertion of the family. Gwendolen’s half-sisters are never fleshed out beyond being set pieces, to the point where I don’t remember their names. Eliot portrays her as far more self-possessed and self-determined than the typical young woman of her time. This is evident from her thoughts on marriage, illustrated by this, the first of many quotes I felt the need to underline:

Her observations of matrimony had inclined her to think it rather a dreary state, in which a woman could not do what she liked, had more children than was desirable, was consequently dull, and became irrevocably immersed in humdrum.

(From there, Eliot goes on to explain that Gwendolen “desires to lead”, building her up as an ambitious and calculating woman who belies the somewhat foolish girl we see in the first chapter. Gwendolen is inexperienced but intelligent.) Eliot’s own complicated views on love and matrimony are on full display here, but even better is the biting critique of a patriarchal society that infantilizes women. She conjures even more powerful imagery to this effect slightly later in the novel, with Gwendolen’s riposte while verbally fencing with Grandcourt:

We women can’t go in search of adventures—to find out the North-West Passage or the source of the Nile, or to hunt tigers in the East. We must stay where we go, or where the gardeners like to transplant us. We are brought up like the flowers, to look as pretty as we can, and be dull without complaining.

Wow. You go, girl.

It’s tempting, especially with a cursory knowledge of Eliot’s life, to conclude that the above sentiments are an all-in-all indictment of marriage. Eliot is short-circuiting the Romantic tropes that dictate that marriage is the inevitable destiny of the female lead. However, the critique here is a little more complicated, because Eliot isn’t railing against marriage so much as the more subtle fact that for women in Gwendolen’s position, marriage is essentially the only respectable option. Eliot gives us a look at several women who are content in marriages, like the redoubtable Mrs. Meyrick. What she opposes is the pressure to marry and the social cost to women who do not marry, or who marry the wrong person. Eliot further underscores this double standard through Grandcourt’s illegitimate children with Mrs. Glasher: even those few men, like Sir Hugo, who think he should probably have married Mrs. Glasher do not even bother censuring him. Women don’t have that option, and that makes Eliot furious. (I haven’t even gotten started on the number of times various men and women describe Gwendolen as being a “coquette” or “coquetting”—yeah, they gerunded that shit—during her interactions with Grandcourt. I just … seriously, if you’re at all interested in a feminist look at Victorian England, you need to read George Eliot.)

Gwendolen isn’t the only facet through which Eliot explores the restrictions on women. After cousin Gwendolen spurns him, Rex resolves to move to Canada and “build a hut, and work hard at clearing, and have everything wild about me, and a great wide quiet.” (I love this scene all the more because when Rex mentions Canada, Eliot’s narrator parenthetically remarks, “Rex had not studied the character of our colonial possessions.”) Anyway, what’s interesting is that while Rex is imagining this brave frontier life in Canada, his sister Anna is all gung-ho about joining him as his housekeeper. Initially this just seems like an attempt to show how Anna is devoted to Rex as a sister. However, Gwendolen’s later remark about how women are restricted from having adventures casts Anna’s eagerness in a different light: maybe she secretly yearns for adventures herself, and this is the only way she can think of having them.

Much like the book itself, I’m well into this review before returning to the character of Daniel Deronda. I was just so captivated and moved by Gwendolen’s story, the arc of the tragedy of her compromise with Grandcourt, that I needed to express all of the above. My feelings about Daniel are less complicated, and they tie in with some misgivings about the structure of his plot.

I enjoyed how Eliot provides a sympathetic portrayal of Jews and Jewish culture even while the majority of her Christian characters are thumping bigots. She deftly shows her Jewish characters to belie the stereotypes at every turn: the pawnbroker Ezra Cohen proves to be an upstanding citizen; Ezra Mordecai has a heart far too big for his weakened body. At the same time, otherwise nice and intelligent people like Hans and his mother, or the Mallingers, make the type of offhand comments that exemplify the institutionalized anti-Semitism so endemic to English life.

Deronda takes the revelation that his Jewish surprisingly well. This has something to do with his growing love for Mirah, of course. Perhaps, also, he appreciates that his Jewish identity equips him with a rich heritage and, thanks to Mordecai’s Zionist influences, a sense of purpose and importance. Instead of merely being Sir Hugo’s foster son and protege, Deronda is now a Jew hoping to reclaim his heritage, both figuratively and literally by travelling to Jerusalem.

Towards the end of the novel, Eliot allows the Zionist elements of Deronda’s story to become expansive, devoting page upon page for Mordecai to explain his vision. I think this might be somewhat a case of wanting to show her work (TVTropes) and just getting a little carried away. As a result, Daniel Deronda’s philosophical elements are more overt than they are in some of Eliot’s earlier novels. She has a lot of ideas and differing perspectives that she tries to reconcile, and she isn’t always successful. (I have similar misgivings about the oddly convenient appearance of Deronda’s mother at the end of the book.)

At first, I thought that this meant I should give the book four stars. I did love it, but not nearly as much as Middlemarch or The Mill on the Floss. It’s far from perfect. If I reserved five stars for perfect books, however, that would be miserly indeed. Daniel Deronda an impressive work; its flaws are merely the signatures of Eliot’s ambitious scope for storytelling. This novel’s portrayal of late–nineteenth-century England from the perspective of impoverished middle class women and a rich but heritage-less man trying to find a purpose. It is another fine example of Eliot’s talent for creating memorable and amusing characters of varying degrees of depth, and for her truly stunning command of language in encouraging the reader’s empathy.

Guys, Pocket is back!

I heard about this book ages ago, then promptly forgot it existed, and rediscovered it at my library. (Libraries are awesome that way.) My first reaction was, “Ooh, a Christopher Moore novel I haven’t read.” My second reaction was, “Bloody hell, it’s a semi-sequel to Fool!” (No English accent though. Two years in England and I still can’t do a decent English accent. *sigh*)

Fool was the first Christopher Moore book I read and in many ways one I consider the funniest. That’s probably because I love metafiction. If you don’t, then neither Fool nor The Serpent of Venice are for you. Moore once more takes a metafictional approach to the stage; this time he combines Othello and The Merchant of Venice with an Edgar Allan Poe story I haven’t read. With a Chorus as the narrator whom everyone seems to overhear, we plunge into fourteenth-century Venice, where Pocket is killed, rescued by the eponymous serpent, and gets to serve up some sweet, sweet revenge.

Of course, as exciting as a sequel to Fool might be, I was also a little worried. What if it wasn’t as good? What if it ruins Pocket? These might be silly worries, but I think most fans of a novel that gets a sequel much later down the line can understand it. It’s akin to the worries fans of the original Star Wars had about the prequels, though in their case, they unfortunately turned out to be right.

To be honest, The Serpent of Venice isn’t quite as bright a spark as Fool. It’s difficult to bottle lightning once, let alone twice. But Moore takes a fair stab at it, and the result is still a very good book. Not every Shakespeare play is a King Lear, and even Shakespeare’s good plays are still, in some ways, great.

My favourite thing about this book is just the richness of the language. And by language, I mean the profanity. Moore uses words such as “bonkilation” and “fuckstockings”—and of course, don’t forget “holy ripened fuckcheese!”—without any hint of shame or irony. Moore doesn’t pass up the chance—ever—to shoehorn in a joke as an aside. When Pocket is posing as a young Jew seeking employment from Shylock, the merchant asks him if what languages he speaks:

“Latin, Greek, and English, plus a smattering of Italian and fucking French.”

“Fucking French, you say? Well …”

“Oui,” said I, in perfect fucking French.

Or, a little later:

Shylock repointed his twitching, accusatory digit at his daughter.

“You do not say such things in my house. You—you—you—you—”

“Run along, love, it appears that Papa’s been stricken with an apoplexy of the second person.”

This is where Moore truly establishes himself as a skilled writer. Anyone, really, can rip off jokes and rip off plots (Moore points out that Shakespeare did this himself all the time). But it takes cleverness to come up with a turn of phrase like “an apoplexy of the second person”—and even if Moore happened to lift that from somewhere else, it takes skill to then embed that phrase in an appropriate context. It wouldn’t work just anywhere. For a book like this, the author needs a sense of comedic timing down to the paragraph.

This is a book that is unrepentantly trying to be funny to the point of absurdity, and I love that. Iago is still a cunning bastard, but he’s also a raging misogynist who accuses everyone of having slept with his wife. (She is, practically, but that’s beside the point.) Pocket, once again, is a frustrating combination of annoying yet perceptive, somehow managing to win over tough customers like Shylock and his daughter, Jessica, who don’t really like him but seem to grow dependent upon him. I love the evolution of Jessica from a love-struck, fairly small-minded woman into a pirate. I mean, that’s just awesome.

And the plot of The Serpent of Venice?

The setting of The Serpent of Venice is fascinating because…

… no, I’m not avoiding talking about the plot.

Fine.

The plot is probably the weakest part of this book. I think the best way I can describe it is as a “romp”. It’s supposed to be Pocket’s tale of revenge, but Moore has to juggle subplots like spinning plates. Everything culminates in a drawn-out and very unsatisfactory court scene that should have been far funnier than it was. The resolution is nominally satisfactory, but at the end of the day it feels like Pocket didn’t really “win”. I suppose part of the theme to this book, as well as the first one, is that Pocket doesn’t fit the standard protagonist pattern: as his job and his nickname of Fortunato suggest, he survives on luck and trickery and jest. The essence of Pocket’s success as a hero is that he isn’t heroic, and indeed, I suspect that he finds all this heroism he ends up doing by accident quite exhausting and bad for his health.

Unlike Fool, which had the benefit of being able to ride along the rails of King Lear, even if Moore took … liberties, The Serpent of Venice is a mash-up. Consequently, Moore has to figure out how to resolve the book on his own—and although he tries to allude to the endings of the original stories in some ways, the tricky part is really combining them together to make a satisfying ending to this story. I don’t know if he succeeds fully, but I did like how this ends for Pocket and Jessica, if that makes sense.

As with many of Moore’s books, this one made me laugh out loud. It’s a perfect read if you need something hilarious and very irreverent, especially if you’ve just come off a Shakespearean Lit course and your brains are still crammed full of Shakespearean insults and plot points. You will feel right at home with Moore. You definitely don’t have to read Fool first—but you should read Fool, at some point, because it’s awesome. As much as I would like this book to be it, it’s not—but it’s certainly no Phantom Menace, know what I’m saying?

I thought that, having actually visited Amsterdam, I would get more from The Miniaturist. I would enjoy Jessie Burton’s descriptions of Amsterdam scenery as it would have been in the seventeenth century—and while most of Amsterdam has modernized, this is set within the old part of the city which has retained a lot of its historical elements. But that’s not what happened. I was disappointed by how little description Burton puts into the setting. You would be forgiven for having very little idea of what Amsterdam is like, aside from having canals, having finished this book.

The Miniaturist reminds me of a stage play. It has a small cast of characters and a very limited number of sets. The plot itself works as a series of acts and scenes, even, if it helps to think of it that way. Although Burton has obviously done her research and steeped the book in its historical setting, her sparse details mean that you really only have the characters’ actions and dialogue to go by. So you have to become invested in Nella, Cornelia, Marin, et al to get a lot of enjoyment out of this story.

That didn’t happen so much for me. Burton puts us in the position of empathizing with Nella, as a fish out of water in her new marriage and new household, which is terrorized and ruled by the enigmatic Marin. And I empathized—to a point. But Burton spends a lot of time trying to draw us into a house full of mysteries that don’t seem all that mysterious.

And then there’s the titular miniaturist, who was the biggest disappointment of all. Nella is supposedly obsessed with identifying and meeting this miniaturist so that she can confront her about all the strange, prophetic miniatures that Nella has received. But the miniaturist’s role gradually gets sidelined in favour of drama surrounding Johannes’ sexuality and relationships, and then a twist involving Marin that sets the story off in yet another direction. The mystery of the miniaturist returns as a bookend to the story, with Burton wrapping it up the same way she does everything else … rather unsatisfactorily.

I’m just not sure how to feel about this book. Each element considered individually should work. Nella’s discomfort over her new house and her uneasy relationships with her husband, his sister, and the maid should be genuinely fascinating. The conflict between Johannes and the Meermans should be riveting. And, of course, the mystery of the miniaturist should be captivating. But Burton never quite gets the ratio right.

The Miniaturist is a good attempt that falls somewhat short. Unlike similar historical fiction, I don’t even get the benefit of immersing myself in a richly described period setting either. While there are some positives here, none of them stand out against the messy blandness of the setting and plot.