You might as well subtitle this book Cassie Has the Worst Day Ever. Literally. Take a look at these totally not-at-all-made-up chapter titles to get an idea of how terrible Cassie’s day was:

Chapter 1: Cassie Quits the Animorphs
Chapter 2: Cassie Has the Most Awkward Exit Interview Ever
Chapter 3: Cassie Makes a Friend!
Chapter 4: Cassie’s Friend is Evil!
Chapter 5: Cassie and Friend Nearly Get Eaten by the Leopard
Chapter 6: Cassie and Friend Debate Moral Philosophies While Starving to Death in the Forest
Chapter 7: Cassie Allows Herself to be Infested by a Yeerk
Chapter 8: Cassie Agrees to be Trapped in Caterpillar Morph Forever
Chapter 9: Cassie Has to Explain Everything to Her Parents by Pretending to be a Minor Celebrity
Chapter 10: Cassie Goes Shopping!

(If you know Cassie, you know how terrible that last chapter must have been. She puts on a brave face, but I know that secretly, deep down inside, she was quaking.)

As before, I have to give Applegate credit for the intense philosophical discussions she puts into kids’ literature. Cassie and Controller!Karen basically stake out the human verus Yeerk sides of the debate. The whole character of Karen adds a huge dimension to the series. Until now, we’ve basically received a one-sided view of this story. Aside from the brief time that Jake played host to a Yeerk, we’ve had no exposure to the Yeerk mentality. Karen’s apology for Yeerk parasitism, and the way she talks about how Andalites meddle and make war, is a healthy criticism of the “good guys” in this series.

In this way, Applegate creates a narrative far more nuanced than you might see in some adult literature about war. She makes the Yeerk perspective sympathetic even though she doesn’t excuse their behaviour. The whole idea here is that in war it’s so easy to see the other side as evil and monstruous. And while I’d argue that what the Yeerks do is evil, Controller!Karen basically shows us that a Yeerk can acknowledge the harm it does.

But you can just imagine that if some poor Andalite scientist had a brain wave and invented a way for Yeerks to inhabit clone bodies or robot bodies or something, then Andalite high command would shut that down immediately. The Andalties are not about co-existing with the Yeerks, and a lot of what Karen says about them is spot on.

Oh, and Applegate just casually drops in a crash course on Yeerk reproduction in the middle of this conversation. So parents, make sure you talk to your kids about Yeerk sex before they read about it in books, OK?

Cassie has had crises of conscience before. The Departure is her big crisis, her supposed breaking point. I know it’s easy to minimize Cassie; her compassion and conscience always seem like downers when all you want to do is SMASH STUFF with your elephant/gorilla morph. I kind of feel like this book is in part Applegate’s attempt to blow that dynamic wide open, to explicitly acknowledge and deal with it and say, “Look guys, I know that it sucks that Cassie keeps raising valid points of order when all you want to read about is how the Animorphs are fighting baddies with their animal powers. But shut up and listen to another point of view.” It’s like she wants to build empathy or something. I know that’s not popular in the States these days; I guess that’s one reason the Animorphs relaunch didn’t do so well….

I also want to point out that this is the first time a regular book features multiple narrators, which should give you an idea of how special Applegate considers it.

The ending might seem like a huge cheat, but stop and think for a moment.

In addition to its commentary on war and growing up, Animorphs has always celebrated biodiversity. Applegate is at her best as a writer when describing the transformations in morphing and the sensations of being in a new morph. She understands and conveys this idea that being an animal is not just about being a different shape or being able to fly: animals see things in a different spectrum; they smell and hear things we aren’t aware of; they have alien ways of thinking.

Applegate reminds us how spectacular and wondrous it is that a creature like a caterpillar can, through natural means rather than a technology, transform into something as different from it as a butterfly. When we’re wrapped up with our ebooks and heated blankets and all that pumpkin spice stuff (hello, October) it’s easy to forget that there is wonder all around us.

The Departure also marks the end of the Second Age of Animorphs, which began in #9: The Secret. Next time, the Animorphs gain a new member … and it all goes horribly wrong.

My reviews of Animorphs:
← Megamorphs #2: In the Time of the Dinosaurs | #20: The Discovery →

I first heard about this on Quirks & Quarks from CBC Radio. Then Josie, one of my Canadian friends still teaching in England, was filling me in on how she went to one of Matt Parker’s stand-up events and how awesome it was. When I informed her I had purchased a signed copy of Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension on the Internets, she was suitably envious. Not, however, as envious as I was for her singular stand-up experience—I don’t like stand-up, but I’d probably watch math stand-up.

Here’s my secret when reviewing math books: don’t focus on the math. Because, you know, anyone with a math degree can write about math. Writing about math is not hard. It’s making math accessible that’s hard. Now, that’s not because math is somehow more difficult for the average person to comprehend than any other highly-specialized field. We only have this perception as an unfortunate side-effect of our industrialized education system, which has traditionally insisted that we should learn math through rote memorization of rules.

Matt Parker rightly embraces a much more flexible idea about how we can learn math. Specifically, he champions recreational mathematics. That’s right, people: doing math for fun!

If you’re sceptical, I don’t blame you—see my point above about school systems. It’s really unfortunate we break people and squash their love of math so early like this. If I were better with young children I might consider becoming a primary school teacher to rectify this. As it is, my head stuck up here in the calculus clouds, I can only evangelize recreational math from afar.

See, we mathematicians know what people with a warped idea of math do not: mathematics is a creative discipline. Someone had to find the Fibonacci sequence, and they didn’t do it by looking at nature. Someone had to devise and name different dimensions of shapes. And mathematicians do this by investigating, by looking at what we already know and finding the gaps. Yes, they do this is a systematic way, and they have to do it rigorously before other mathematicians will agree with them. But a lot of mathematical discoveries have literally come about because of mathematicians just playing with numbers and shapes and ideas.

This idea pervades Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension, which is organized in such a way to progress from basic ideas about numbers to very abstract ideas about functions, dimensions, and infinity. You’re not going to understand all of it, and that’s OK. Understanding everything is not the goal of reading a popular math or popular science book—getting a glimpse behind the curtain, understanding why it’s important, piquing your interest to learn more; these are the goals. (I’m trying to pump you up and help you be more resilient here, because I won’t lie to you and pretend it’s easy to follow everything, either in this book or in others like it.) Don’t worry though, because the author will always be around to help you out. Parker writes with a sense of humour that’s only to be expected considering his comedic career. (Britain really does seem to have cornered the market on funny mathematicians….)

There are also lots of practical exercises too. And I don’t mean questions you need to calculate and answer. I mean activities, templates for you to cut out and puzzles for you to consider. Parker is very proactive in demonstrating some of the practical ramifications of even the most esoteric ideas, from calculating digital roots to knitting 3D projections of 4D shapes. I could easily see some of this stuff working in a classroom setting if, you know, you’re not the kind of math teacher that thinks we should just memorize it all.

Really, when it gets down to it, this is how we need to be teaching and learning math. Reading a book about math is all well and good—I love doing it. But you need to learn by doing math. You need to try these things yourself, to investigate a problem until you hit upon interesting and sometimes unexpected results. This is one of the greatest things about mathematics: you can, in theory, verify every math result ever discovered by someone else. And you don’t even need specialized equipment: most of the time you just need a ruler, some scissors, and some paper. (And maybe a calculator or a computer for the recent discoveries!) This is DIY math at its finest.

I learned some neat things in the chapters that Parker devotes to higher-dimensional shapes. This is not an area of math I’ve studied in much detail, and conceptualizing higher-dimensional shapes is, of course, very difficult! Yet he explains it clearly. I also appreciate how much he uses computer programs to help him investigate relationships and ideas. As someone who also enjoys writing Python scripts, I’m always happy to see my interest in math and computers come together.

On the flip side, I know a lot about graph theory and enjoyed his section on that. He doesn’t really do anything new when it comes to talking about old chestnuts like the Four Colour Theorem and its infamous proof. Nevertheless, this is one of those areas of math that people never hear about unless they go into university, despite it being so interesting and widely applicable.

Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension is a lovely and informative book. It’s a great example of how to write well about doing math for fun. Parker is ever-encouraging, ever-understanding, ready to make fun of math, mathematicians, school, and himself—and yes, my dear reader, you as well. This is a safe book in that sense: you’re not going to be judged for not liking math or not having much luck, so far, with it. But thanks to Matt Parker, you can roll your own math and enjoy doing it. We need more books like this! Until then, read this one.

For the three and a half of you who don’t know already, Unlocked is the companion novella to Lock In, John Scalzi’s thriller set in a future where Haden’s syndrome leaves millions locked in their bodies, conscious but incapable of voluntary movement. Where as Lock In was a mystery set within this world, Unlocked explains how Haden’s developed and how the technology and culture around Hadens sprang up.

This is billed as an “oral history” and comes across that way. It’s snippets of transcribed interviews. Imagine a documentary featuring mostly expert interviews, minus any connecting narration from a host (which would have been cool). Each part covers a specific aspect of how the world has changed, from the time-course and effects of the disease’s spread to the response of world governments. There are “characters” in the sense that many people get interviewed more than once, and they come across as having somewhat distinct personalities. But I wouldn’t say there are protagonists or antagonists. This is not so much a story as it is a collection of related anecdotes.

Unlocked is more an exercise in glorified worldbuilding than an expansion, prequel, or what-have-you to Lock In. It’s as if Scalzi made a wiki for the Lock In universe and then compressed it into a series of in-character articles. Don’t get me wrong: I love delving into the wikis for favourite series; I’ll spend hours reading TVTropes and Memory Alpha and the Mass Effect wiki. But it’s a different type of reading than reading a novel.

For that reason, I wouldn’t herald Unlocked as an essential companion to Lock In. It’s nice. I bought the Subterranean Press edition, mostly because I like Subterranean Press. Molly Crabapple’s cover is gorgeous, but I’m sad there aren’t any illustrations within the text. Anyway, this book provides more depth into the origins of Haden’s. It gives Scalzi an outlet for showing he Did the Research without infodumping too much in Lock In, and if anything we should just all be grateful for that. I wish more authors took this approach.

If you approach Unlocked with the idea that it’s a companion and an infodump, albeit a cleverly-disguised one, then you’re going to enjoy it. Not on the level that you would enjoy a novel. Similarly, I think you need to retain some interest in the world of Lock In—if you didn’t enjoy the novel, then this isn’t going to change your mind.

But.

There is one thing that makes this stand out from some of its less impressive peers: I got a little teary-eyed. As they were recounting the way that President Haden was grief-stricken for his wife, the way he stayed by her bedside and asked her what he should do, I teared up while reading this at lunchtime at work. I didn’t expect this book to get to me in that way.

So make of that what you will. Unlocked is fun and interesting in its own way. It’s not required reading to enjoy Lock In, but it’s a companion in the same way a fan-wiki might be to other books.

What is this I can’t even.

#21: The Threat strips away any remaining pretensions that this is a “children’s” series. This is YA at its grittiest. Long before we had people volunteering themselves as tribute and running through mazes and choosing which Personality House they belong to, we had David the Traitor betraying the Animorphs because he is a terrible human being.

We’ve seen this theme before in the book. Applegate reminds us that humans have the capacity for great acts of courage (see: the Animorphs) and cowardice (see: Chapman in The Andalite Chronicles). It’s this fluidity that fascinates and frightens us. And one of the most important realizations for the Animorphs in this novel is how incredibly lucky they were that Eflangor happened upon them. (Thanks, Ellimist.) I mean, yeah, they aren’t perfect—but it’s not like David is unique in his instabilities or psycopathy.

It makes so much sense that this is a Jake book, too. Marco was the perfect narrator for David’s introduction: naturally these two butt heads, because Marco’s role as the group clown means he is a keen observer of his fellow humans, and David sets off alarm bells from the start. But in The Threat, as it becomes clear that David is just not going to work out, it falls to Jake to deal with David’s betrayal.

I feel like Applegate is also finally dealing with a lot of issues that, until now, have been side-stepped or conveniently avoided. David is basically a great example of what not to do as an Animorph: don’t use your powers for personal gain; don’t be a jerk to your friends; don’t act like you’re better than everyone else; don’t get into unnecessary fights. There are some grounds for compassion here—unlike the other Animorphs, David no longer has a home to go to, nor can he return to school. He’s like Ax and Tobias, except he’s still in human form but can expect none of the creature comforts humans want and need. So some of his positions are understandable. Let’s remember he is still a kid, and maybe the remarkable thing here is not how much David freaks out about his situation but how the other five have managed to remain sane and on-task for this long.

That being said, David is a little shit, and he deserves what he has coming to him. And if you were in any doubt of that, then I will point at the last chapter of this book, and if you still want to argue, then come fight me IRL.

We end on yet another cliffhanger, and it’s tense. This is the first time the Animorphs have come to blows like this—and I know David never felt like an Animorph, but the fact remains that he’s a kid like them who has morphing powers like them and, for a very brief moment, was a member of the team. Bad idea or not, he is now their responsibility—Jake’s responsibility. As are all the actions David takes, including … yeah … Tobias. Wow.

And as much as that last chapter is a masterpiece—I’m eating my words about Applegate’s simplistic writing from my first few reviews, by the way—my favourite moment comes earlier in the book. As the Animorphs fly away from the resort after narrowly escaping Visser Three’s trap, David starts strutting his stuff and plumping his ego. And you can feel Jake’s feathers crawl. You share that sinking feeling in his stomach as he realizes that David is a Problem, and that he needs to find a Solution. And we get to watch as the other Animorphs pull away from David, surround him in a bubble supporting his fantasy. It’s incredibly powerful.

This is Applegate holding up a mirror to the Animorphs, saying, This could have been you. This is a watershed arc within the series. I mean, the supposed A-story of this book concerns the Animorphs trying to prevent infestation of world leaders—and that’s just completely subsumed by the David drama. Although David is the eponymous threat, in some sense this is a reminder of the fragility of the Animorphs’ very existence as a guerrilla group. All it takes is one betrayal, or one innocent and well-intentioned misstep, and suddenly the Animorphs are exposed and vulnerable. And as we are going to discover, there are some things you can’t come back from.

Speaking of things you can’t come back from … next time, Rachel has to deal with the David Problem. Poor Rachel.

My reviews of Animorphs:
← #20: The Discovery | #22: The Solution →

So, this was bizarre.

Horrorstör is a wacky horror novel. It's set in an American knock-off of Ikea called Orsk. This particular Orsk store is haunted, however, and three employees stay overnight to get to the bottom of it. Grady Hendrix attempts to enhance the novel through a number of artistic gimmicks ranging from the chapter titles/descriptions to the entire design of the book.

As far as the design goes, it's a nifty idea. It would get annoying fast if every book did this, and to some extent I started ignoring it towards the end. Just give me the story, damn it! However, it creates some nostalgia for kids' books. At some point along the way, my novels stopped trying. When I was younger they were shiny and glittery and full of bonus games and pop-out cardboard figures and holographic covers. Then gradually, the sheen faded and the glitter receded, leaving only the most minimalist and "professional" of designs. It says something interesting about our society's aesthetics around reading and books that what Hendrix attempts here is somewhat unusual.

Of course a gimmick is usually a way to prop up a poor story. I don't think that's the case here. The story actually has everything it needs to be engaging: a diverse ensemble cast with clear motivations, a clearly-defined threat and conflict, and plenty of twists and turns to keep people guessing. Indeed, the characterization in particular impresses me. All the main characters get a fair amount of development. Amy, the protagonist, is not all that likable (but is still fairly sympathetic). And while Basil begins the story as your stereotypical "I drank the Kool-Aid" manager, we eventually see there are other sides to him.

Where Horrorstör begins to lose me is the attempt to blend different tones of humour in with the horror. As the novel opens, Hendrix wants to satirize the emptiness of working day-in/day-out for a massive furniture retailer. Elements of this satire persist throughout the story. Meanwhile, we also see parodies of everything from ghost-hunting reality TV shows to the subversion of the "kindly, quiet middle-aged woman" trope.

The book just puts so much on the shelf, to borrow an improv term, and it doesn't always come back for some pay-off. The ending in particular feels like a let-down (but then again, what ending to a horror story isn't?). After a lengthy, somewhat confusing, but definitely intense journey inside Orsk, the survivors emerge ... and then leave? And then some time passes before the novel implies a Horrorstör 2 is about to happen.

Smash-cut to artsy credits while a rock song popular in the early 2000s plays.

I would make this review longer (maybe), but I'm writing this in Windows and am seriously missing my Compose key for inserting these accented characters.

Horrorstör brings it. I don't know exactly what "it" is, but it's at least brought. I'm not sure there's a clear audience for this--is it for horror fans? Horror parody fans? Parody fans? Furniture store fans? I shrug. It doesn't really achieve top marks in any category, but I stayed engaged, and I enjoyed the ride.

Serial webcomics are hard. Pacing and scheduling are a must, and even we readers can have trouble keeping plotlines straight. I completely understand why some people don't follow a comic regularly but instead binge every few weeks after a chapter has finished.

Supernormal Step is one of my favourite webcomics and one of the few serial webcomics I read regularly. It's about Fiona Dae, a woman pulled into a strange parallel universe where magic exists and all sorts of non-human creatures co-exist … um … not so peacefully at times. Fiona finds herself with power of her own, but more importantly she becomes an object of interest to certain powerful people. So she quickly find herself on the run even while she tries to figure out how to get back to her world.

Michael Lee Lunsford has created an impressive world here. The very first chapter starts in media res, with Fiona already having spent some time with Jim and Van (and already quick sick and tired of them, naturally). As comics are wont to do, we're right in the thick of it, with magic battles and larger-than-life characters dominating each page. It's confusing at first, sure. But it gets better once you understand that you really only need the basics: Hendersons, heroes, magic, curses, and portals, oh my! Once you accept that, hey, some people are penguins or robots, and yeah, that Mr. Kite is up to no good, then you’ve pretty much got the gist of what’s going down. The true pleasure then comes from seeing the hints of depth to Lunsford’s world. There is so much more story to Supernormal Step than meets the eye, and Lunsford does an excellent job implying it with every panel and speech bubble.

And then there are the characters. Fiona is gutsy and opinionated, strongly influenced by her homeschooled upbringing by her father. She can hold her own in this world—but at times it’s very clear how close she is to just freaking out and shutting down. In this way, Lunsford portrays her as more than just “a badass girl”—she’s three dimensional, vulnerable as well as strong, sympathetic as well as sassy. It's tempting to describe her arc as kind of following the Hero’s Journey, but that wouldn’t be accurate—while Fiona is increasing in power and command of her abilities, her journey is much rougher than the straightforward progression the traditional Hero’s Journey implies.

Van and Jim are excellent supporting characters. As with how he presents the world itself, Lunsford heavily implies that both have deeply checkered pasts we’ll hear about in the future. Jim, of course, is a superpowered badass levels above Fiona—when he isn’t forced into the form of a stuffed bunny by a temperamental, unseen judge who punishes him for bad deeds. Some of the almost overwhelming aspect of Supernormal Step might come from the sheer number of characters Lunsford introduces so he can populate this world; he makes it seem like every character, no matter how minor, has secondary motivations or is running games on the side. From Cecilia to Akela to Hall and Eva, there’s just so much going on here. This first volume isn’t so much, “Gee, whiz, look at that!” as “Gee, whiz, I can’t wait to learn more about this!”

I don't talk much about the art when I review comics/graphic novels, because I'm not much of an artist or art critic (despite hanging around an art gallery for nigh-on ten years now in return for minimum wage). One of the pleasures of reading a long-running comic like this is seeing how the artist’s style evolves. Indeed, if you start from the beginning or pick up this volume, you’ll see that the first chapter has a very different style and feel to it from subsequent chapters. (Alternatively, Lunsford remade Chapter 1 and summarized the rest of Part 1 of the story at the end of Part 2, which might help new readers.) I love watching Lunsford do new things with his panels and character poses.

Perhaps my favourite thing about the way he draws is his ability to convey so much emotion with his characters’ arms/stances. Even from a distance or in a silhouette, a character’s posture says everything about what they’re feeling. This talent allows him to save on text and use it to convey other information, and it results in some beautiful panels. My favourite example from this volume is this page, where Daisy throws up her arms, yelling, “Ah! Massive downer! We need to fix this ASAP!” and then continues to talk in a quick, clipped manner in the next panel as she practically forces Fiona to her hairdresser. Love it.

The nice thing about a volume collecting a webcomic is that you don’t have to take my word for it; you can just read it all yourself, for free. I bought the hard copy version because I wanted to support the creator, I hate reading one page at a time on a screen on the website, and I can’t take an ereader into my bath with me. As far as the physical book goes, it looks and feels just like you’d expect any trade edition of a graphic novel to feel. (It’s also available as an ebook, though, if that’s your fancy.)

Next up I’ll review Volume 2, and I’ll share my thoughts on Fiona’s arc, Henderson, and the backstories Lunsford reveals.

My reviews of Supernormal Step:
Vol. 2: A Fine Ado →

I’m trying to be sparing with my five stars in this series, but oh man … Rachel. Applegate just always breaks my heart with her, and The Solution is yet another perfect example. In the conclusion to the David trilogy, Rachel is instrumental in implementing the titular “solution” to the Animorphs’ problem. It is ironic that a human enemy, rather than a Yeerk one, forces the Animorphs to be at their coldest yet.

Let’s just catalogue what Rachel has to endure in this book.

Jake tells Ax to “get Rachel” instead of anyone else. This haunts Rachel for the length of the story: why did Jake send Ax for her, specifically, rather than Cassie or Marco? When she confronts him, he claims he needed the firepower of her morphs—but they both recognize this is a thin excuse. In actuality, Rachel has a ruthlessness that the other Animorphs lack. This is not the first time Applegate has drawn our attention to it, but it is the first time Jake, as leader, has taken tactical advantage of it.

Rachel crosses a line. Until now, the most morally dubious action in this series, in my opinion, is what Tobias and Ax conspire to do in In the Time of the Dinosaurs. And that was a much more utilitarian decision than Rachel’s actions here. Having seen the lengths to which David is willing to go, Rachel snaps. She threatens to kill him. She threatens to take down his family. Rachel shows that she is prepared to cross any line to deal with David. It’s scary. And it scares her.

When storming the resort to prevent the Yeerks from making world leaders into Controllers, Rachel encounters the President of the United States. She’s in elephant morph, and she’s not doing too well:

I swear I had to fight down the urge to say, “It's an honor to meet you, sir.” But blood was flowing down my face and I was feeling dizzy. The bullets had done some damage.

I keep saying this, but I’ll just reiterate: these aren’t kids’ novels any more, if ever they were. Applegate doesn’t pull punches. These fights are visceral—earlier, she talks about Jake in tiger morph lying in a pool of his own blood. Let’s not even mention all the times she has to morph quickly in hostile environments—she nearly drowns here when she’s trying to get into dolphin morph. Rachel is going through experiences that I, as an adult, probably wouldn’t be able to get through.

Finally, Applegate reminds us that Rachel’s relationship with this war is only going to get more troubling. Jake likens it to an alcoholic with booze and expresses regret for his role in enabling Rachel’s warrior passion. Jokes about Xena aside, there’s definitely something to be said for Applegate making the stereotypically blonde-haired, blue-eyed “pretty” and fashion-obsessed Rachel the warlike one.

But what breaks my heart is just the knowledge that this is the beginning of Rachel’s descent into darkness, not the nadir. It gets worse! And I say this not just with the foreknowledge from having read this series long ago but thanks to Applegate’s foreshadowing in this book. Rachel will always have to live with her role in eliminating the threat of David, in condemning him to a face that, in some respects, in much worse than simply killing him. I feel so sorry for the Animorphs that they have to make these decisions, and for Rachel in particular. While her guilt shows that, unlike David, she is not too far-gone, that guilt itself is a burden she should not have to bear.

My reviews of Animorphs:
← #21: The Threat | The Hork-Bajir Chronicles →

I didn’t go to the Vinyl Cafe Christmas Concert this year, because I was feeling burnt out and wasn’t interested in going out that weekend. It turned out to be the last concert of the year, because Stuart McLean announced a melanoma diagnosis and cancelled the other shows. He seems positive and upbeat so far. I thought I’d dig into this, one of the more recent Vinyl Cafe collections of Dave and Morley stories, and share some thoughts on why McLean is a celebrated Canadian author.

I love the Vinyl Cafe and listen to it regularly, in podcast form. It was particularly important to me during the two years I lived in the UK, because it was like a link to Canada. I would walk through the Bury St Edmunds market every Saturday morning, listening to the show and enjoying that sense of connection. McLean introduced me to a lot of Canadian musicians I wouldn’t necessarily know about, particularly the more folksy ones who don’t get a lot of airplay. But, of course, the Dave and Morley stories are the highlight of every episode.

It would be easy to claim to identify with Dave, who is always getting into incredible scrapes and situations based on a combination of hapless bad luck and awkward enthusiasm. That would be reductive, though. It’s more accurate to say that I identify with elements of Dave, Morley, Stephanie, Sam, and all the other characters in McLean’s world. That’s why these stories are so powerful and compelling: these characters are archetypes for a type of modern mythology.

Sorry, was I getting too literary and CanLitty there? I’ll rein myself in. Let’s try that again.

I had heard pretty much every story in this collection, some of them rather recently, and enjoyed them to varying degrees. Like any short story collection, this one has some favourites and some ones I’m not likely to revisit quite as much. If you don’t enjoy “Attack of the Treadmill” then you are weird, and if you don’t get a little teary-eyed at “Rosemary Honey” or “Annie’s Turn”—stories about boyhood and growing up—then I’ll shake my head in wonder. But some of the stories, like “The House Next Door” or “Curse of the Crayfish” are funny in their own way but can’t really compete on an emotional level with the other players.

Then, of course, there are the really big guns, like “Le Morte d’Arthur,” probably one of the seminal Dave and Morley stories, for all that the title implies.

I get more emotional with Vinyl Cafe stories than I do for many other, perhaps even objectively “better” stories. It’s easy to parody McLean’s laconic, expansive performance style, but when you get right down to it, his actual writing is simple, clear. It’s in the twists and turns, the way the characters act and react to each other, that he manages to grab hold of you and wring from you both smiles and tears.

One sentence jumps out at me now as I’m writing this. It’s from “Rhoda’s Revenge,” a story that’s kind of middle-of-the-road for this collection: it’s a good story, and I totally get if you like it, but it’s not one of my favourites. Anyway, the sentence is this: “Ten years went by.”

When I read that sentence, I was reminded of the power that a storyteller has. Mere moments can last pages; or, as McLean does here, entire decades can go by with the stroke of the pen. This kind of economy of storytelling is immensely important. I remember when Battlestar Galactica jumped ahead three years at the end of a season. My initial reaction was one of shock and betrayal—how could they do that to me? Then I realized it was crucial, because the writers wanted to advance the plot to a point where they were interested in telling the story again—and in order to do that, they needed to skip a bunch of things that were important but not necessarily relevant to their point.

So it was here with “Rhoda’s Revenge.” After the set-up, McLean needed to jump ahead ten years. So he did. With a single sentence. That is power.

You learn a lot about writing by reading—and by reading anything. But if you wanted to learn how to write, you could do a lot worse than reading a whole bunch of Dave and Morley stories. McLean has his formulas and his themes down pat, and he continually applies them in new and fun and touching ways.

Ultimately, these stories are about close human connections, the connections between individuals. It doesn’t matter if they are separated by age or space or time; somehow, some way, we can form these connections—or re-form them if they have been broken. We have an incredible capacity, as a species, for making connections on a personal level. McLean reminds us that when we make these connections, we should do so with compassion, with a sense of levity, and with a smile.

Many of the most seminal dystopian novels are chilling for the extent to which they depict a “new normal” of human existence. By this I mean that these novels don’t just portray people oppressed or living under the thumb of a ruling class or technologically-imposed social structure—no, the best dystopian novels create a world in which people are happy, or at least satisfied, with the new status quo. Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451 all do this to some extent.

Fahrenheit 451 is particularly relevant in this case. It shares with Mockingbird the consideration that literacy is a cornerstone of our current human civilization. Now, in the former book, literacy was allowed—it was reading books that was banned; in Mockingbird, Walter Tevis takes things one step further and has humanity forget how to read or write at all. Whereas Bradbury preserves family structures, Tevis creates a collectivist, dysfunctional future in which people grow up as alone as possible while still together. They spend their days lulled into contentment by drugs and mood-altering videos until the emptiness and pointlessness of this existence compels some to unremarked, unmourned suicide. Meanwhile, the smartest robot left on Earth keeps things in New York humming along—but he too wants to die.

It’s all kind of a downer, really.

As far as dystopias go, Mockingbird’s is relatively plausible. Much of the technology that Tevis posits centuries from now when writing in 1980 is around, in some form, already. It’s believable that humans would find the prospect of a less troubling, more internalized life more attractive than the conflict of having to interact with one another. The idea that our civilization could be reduced to drug addicts managed by ill-maintained robots is troubling, but not all that far-fetched.

I'm a little confused about where all the people from the developing world are in this book. Spofforth talks a lot about “world” population and population controls. Technology creates dystopias through the unequal distribution of technology (and, therefore, power). Yet this scenario contains within it a paradox that would prevent that dystopia from becoming absolute: there are many places that do not have the technological infrastructure to succumb to the dystopian visions these stories depict. These stories tend to gloss over what happens to the billions of people not affected by this dystopia. Did they all get killed off? Or are there free humans happily living outside the United States, blissfully unaware of what’s going on there—or totally aware and very glad they aren’t addicts like Americans?

Like its setting, Mockingbird’s plot is also pretty decent. There are some standard “rediscovering civilization” tropes, with Bentley stumbling across a proper library for the first time, or reading the Bible, or making ironic remarks about how weird the way things used to be seem to him. Tevis plays it as slightly humorous for the reader but deadly serious for Bentley and Mary Lou—there is a very real, palpable sense of loss and anguish over how much humanity has forgotten. Thank goodness for books! As someone who is a voracious reader, and always has been, I couldn’t imagine being illiterate. But Mockingbird really underscores just how we take literacy for granted. Even if you personally don’t read a lot of fiction, you’re around enough people who do that you absorb a lot—we call this herd literacy (and by “we” I mean “I just made that up”). And there’s much more going on here than just Bentley’s quest for literacy, of course. There is plenty of commentary on everything from the nature of family, of privacy, of love, to the ethics around building artificial intelligences.

At times the plot let me down in the sense that I was kind of expecting a little more from it. Spofforth is a quixotic character. I half-expected him to be a bit more of a Xanatos mastermind, in the God-Emperor of Dune sense, if you catch my drift. But he seemed pretty haphazard with it all. And in the end, although I sympathized with him, I thought that Tevis could have exploited all his potential to better effect.

That’s something that generalizes to a great deal of the book, actually. Mockingbird has a great setting and a decent plot, but its narration and pacing utterly killed my interest. The narration jumps between Bentley, Spofforth, and Mary Lou. The chapters are uneven and often quite lengthy, though, and the narrative style is as dry as a package of irradiated lima beans. I much prefer it when books that take this route leave off on cliffhangers to keep you wanting to return to each character’s perspective as soon as possible.

So I guess I can see why Mockingbird is not better known or celebrated as some other dystopian novels from this era. It’s a shame, in a way, because it makes such great points. This could be a perfectly adequate movie to catch on AMC one day along the same lines as The Postman. I’m not sure I’d go so far as to recommend it (it really does feel like a slog most of the time), but it’s got interesting ideas.

It feels like just yesterday that Ann Leckie took the science fiction scene by storm with Ancillary Justice. I enjoyed her debut novel for what it was—a ripping good story set in a universe with just enough originality to make it fun and familiarity to make it conceivable. Now, suddenly, here we are at the conclusion of the trilogy with Ancillary Mercy. I'm all a-tingle!

Breq has come a long way since she was just an ancillary of Justice of Toren. Now an independent entity in her own mind, she strives to establish her identity. But no one is making it easy. A part of Anaander Mianaai that really hates her (as opposed to just mildly hating her) has shown up at Athoek and wants to take over the joint. Breq has to think fast to save as many lives as possible, but it’s not easy to come up with a solution that will please everyone. Indeed, Ancillary Mercy underscores the difficulty of reaching any kind of stability in the midst of a larger conflict.

Identity has been one of the longest-running motifs in this series, and it all comes to a head here. In the first book, Breq had to struggle with feeling like she was still Justice of Toren but greatly diminished. She finally comes to grips with that in Ancillary Sword, only to have to conceal her nature as an ancillary from everyone and pretend to be a human. Now in this book, everyone learns that Breq is an ancillary—just as she’s figuring out that she is more than an ancillary, or a fragment of a ship AI, but something different entirely. On a wider level, Leckie has Breq question the role that ships play in the Radch. It's not as simple as “ships are slaves” or “AIs are sentient and therefore need rights,” because the ships have been programmed to have certain desires (like wanting a crew and a captain). Breq is special in that she is the first to actually ask the ships what they want.

Most of the main characters undergo similar transformations. Seivarden continues to deal with being so out of time. Tisarwat is trying to pick up the pieces of herself following Anaander's imposition of her personality. And then there's the lovely zaniness of Translator Zeiat (who is not, as she first thought, Translator Dlique). You could spend a lot of time just thinking about all the different ways Leckie signifies and symbolizes identity, from modes of dress to ethnic categories to language.

There is a lot going on here, despite Ancillary Mercy being on the shorter end of novels. Leckie’s worldbuilding is tightly-packed, and that’s very rewarding. Of all the three books, this one also has the best pacing. I wasn’t a huge fan of the lengthy quest structure of the first book, and while I enjoyed the second book’s plot, there were points where it started to drag. None of the events in this book, in contrast, really overstay their welcome.

I suspect what will draw the most attention, however, will be the ending. There is a lot of pressure for Leckie to wrap up loose ends—and she never pretends that she will be able to do so. Breq would be happy to take down Anaander and the entire Radch. But that would be too neat, too simple—and if Leckie has demonstrated anything over the course of this series, it’s that events are seldom simple. Ancillary Mercy's focus remains narrowly on the Athoek system, and this works for it. Breq’s problems are already big enough.

Once again, Breq’s unique ability to perceive multiple perspectives concurrently allows for some slick narration. Instead of scene breaks to signal perspective changes, everything just flows smoothly together. This helps us understand Breq’s thought processes: for her, something happening elsewhere being relayed through Ship is just as real and present as something happening in front of her body. I find this fascinating, because we already practice this kind of split presence with the Internet. We can be online, in multiple chatrooms or forums at once, or having a video conference while also talking to people physically in the room with us. We might not be ancillaries, but sometimes we get close….

There’s so much to enjoy in this book, and I’m not sure what else I would highlight. If I have to make a sweeping statement about this book and this series—and I don’t, but I’m going to—it’s that Ancillary Mercy strikes a good balance between storytelling and theme. This is something that science fiction can easily get wrong—so much good SF overcompensates, privileging one or the other. Leckie manages to deliver novels that are complete, entertaining stories that also deal with important issues of identity, self-awareness, duty, and sacrifice. There is believable political intrigue. And there are characters who are unlikable but redeemable (like Seivarden) and likable but maybe not redeemable.

My reviews of the Imperial Radch series:
← Ancillary Sword