It’s almost too easy to write a vampire YA romance. Real authors tackle the hard romances, like mummies. How does a clumsy teenage girl fall for a thousands-year-old mummified but reanimated corpse? You’ll have to read Unwrap My Heart to find out.

Disclaimer: I received a free copy of this book because I am a Meat Buddy, i.e., I have pledged a small amount of money every month to Read It and Weep, the podcast that Alex Falcone and Ezra Fox do along with Chris and Tanya Smith. And even if their podcast were not a highlight of my week, this book alone makes that pledge well worth my money.

Fox and Falcone have put their years of reading bad books and watching bad movies and TV on behalf of their listeners to good use. This book is just delightful. It walks the line between parody and an actual, heartfelt story in a way I wasn’t expecting. As with the material from which they drew inspiration (particularly Twilight), the protagonist, Sofia, is a klutzy and rather uninteresting character—but the side characters more than make up for that. Sofia’s dad is a mustache-sporting and laid-back fellow, except when it comes to the dangers of boys and salmonella. Sofia’s best friend, Duncan, is an amateur archaeologist who has already made a name for himself in the field before even graduating high school—and let’s not even mention his huge collection of cast phalluses. Hearing these characters’ backstories and seeing how they interact with Sofia is invariably hilarious.

There are so many good lines in here that if I quoted them all I’d probably be in violation of the copyright. I loved how Sofia’s dad explains why it’s always important for her to keep pepper-spray on her person: “Show me a problem that can’t be Maced, and I’ll show you a mugger with goggles”. Or, a bit earlier in the book, when he learns that a school project prevents her from going on a weekend camping trip, he says, “Ah, School Dad told you that? He’s worse than Strict Dad. Probably should listen to him”.

The thing is, these lines are meant to be funny (and they are). But exchanges like this, pervasive as they are throughout the book, also feel so real. This is how I have conversations with my friends, with my dad even. We’re funny with each other in a way that dialogue in many other YA novels (including Twilight) doesn’t capture. Maybe it should come as no surprise that a comedian like Falcone is good at coming up with one-liners. Nevertheless, it’s hard to land those lines so often, especially amid Real Talk™.

Take, for example, the exchange between Duncan and Sofia mid-way through the book. I love that Falcone gets to exorcise a long-running complaint of his on the podcast when it comes to the term “love triangle”:

“It literally never occurred to me that Princess Beige would ever be in a love triangle.”

“It’s really more like a love angle since Seth and I aren’t also dating. It’s just two lines pointing toward you.”

“That makes sense geometrically, I guess. Except Sofia’s 1st law is that no lines ever point toward me.”

“Sofia, you are so smart about everything besides judging people, and that includes yourself. You don’t have any idea how special you are.”

I love this scene, because even as Duncan is calling Sofia special because he’s trying to admit he’s in love with her (oh, it’s not a spoiler, like you didn’t guess that was coming from page 1), he’s also reinforcing the trope that Sofia is Special in that way only teenaged YA protagonists in paranormal romances can be. And, for what it’s worth, I agree with Falcone that “love triangle” is rather inaccurate.

Other things I enjoyed about Unwrap My Heart include the running gag that everyone mistakes Seth for a hipster instead of a mummy, as well as the suspiciously consistent denial that any other supernatural creatures exist. I liked that the villain was largely incompetent but that Sofia and friends had a hard time defeating him, at least at first, because they have about as much experience with fighting a supervillain bent on world domination as you might expect. Also, how everyone in Rock Ridge except Sofia seems to be part of a bird-appreciation club with weekly meetings.

Finally, let’s talk about sex. As soon as Sofia discovers Seth’s “secret” (that he is a mummy, if you haven’t already caught on), the very first thing she considers is how this will affect having sex with him. Which seems like such an honest thing for a YA protagonist to think about. Stephenie Meyer goes from skirting the issue in Twilight to having to explain it in … err … gory detail in Breaking Dawn. I love how proactive Sofia is, what with her searching the Internet for anything remotely useful. Similarly, I love the dream epilogue at the end and how it gives Sofia agency.

Reading this book is like listening to an episode of the podcast. It’s smart and funny and a relaxing escape from all the mellow-harshing reality we have going on in 2016. It takes a lot of work to write parody prose that is neither so over-the-top it implodes upon itself nor so clever it twists back on itself like an ouroboros of comedy and turns into legitimately good fiction. But you don’t have to be a Read It and Weep listener to enjoy this book or its jokes.

I’m a little disappointed that Falcone and Fox did not include a helicopter named Charlie Tango, and I can only hope they rectify that in the sequel.

Speaking of sequels, if they don’t want to do a direct sequel to Unwrap My Heart, I’d love to see their take on a time-travel story—maybe Chris would have some input on that, given the amount he and Alex have discussed time travel. Or perhaps the next Completely Legitimate Publishing novel could involve a pro wrestler turned actor turned action hero…. Or will we finally see the prose debut of Space Shark? Whatever it is, I would also love to see some LGBTQIA+ characters. Spoofing hetero YA romance is all well and good, but I know Falcone and Fox can find a way to make their parody romance more inclusive.

Whatever the next adventure is, I will be there.

In my previous review I talked in broad terms about why I enjoy Supernormal Step, because I just wanted to outline why it’s worth spending your precious time on a new webcomic/graphic novel.

In Volume 2 (Chapters 4–6 of the webcomic), Michael Lee Lunsford broadens our understanding of Fiona and the main cast, but not before Fiona temporarily leaves them behind in search of solitude. (Hint: That does not work out well for her.)

Despite this being a serious story in many respects, humour is replete in this comic, and the opening to Chapter 4 is a great example. Fiona is just coming to terms with her “hero status” in the small town she fled to in Chapter 3. So, of course, it's a major inconvenience when she gets waylaid on her way to work one morning and asked to fight an mad scientist’s robot creation. Britta’s polite, meek apologies for disturbing Fiona at an awkward time contrasted with her thirst for battle and desire to capture Fiona, per her orders, are truly hilarious.

However, this volume is probably most notable for the amount of backstory Lunsford gives us. We learn more about Fiona’s relationship with her father, as well as the relationship between her father and Jim, who is also from her world. (I should point out that, while it’s easy to assume that Fiona comes from our Earth, Lunsford doesn’t come out and say that in the comics. It’s possible Fiona comes from an Earth that’s similar but also parallel to ours.) Van tells us about how he was raised in adolescence by a blood mage who wears a skull on his head (but hey, let’s not be prejudiced) until he fell in love with a vampire with a thick Scottish brogue.

And then things come to a head with Henderson. It’s becoming clear that there are more pieces at play than anyone thought—Van and Jim did not pull Fiona here by accident, despite their believing it was a mistake. But who is really pulling the strings? We’re just as much in the dark as Fiona, even though we have the benefit of seeing some things she doesn’t. But I love the suspense, the knowledge that there are plots hatched in the dark, and the idea that Fiona will bring them to light one way or the other (but at what cost?).

This volume ends on a downer for Van, in a way (and a wake-up call in others). But Fiona and troop as a whole now have a direction, a sense of purpose. Fiona’s working relationship with Henderson remains … tenuous at best; he hasn’t exactly threatened her so much as waggled his eyebrows gravely in her direction. Although we’ve seen the products of Henderson’s skill and power, i.e., the invincibility and irascibility of Hall and Eva, he has yet to demonstrate his own power “on screen.” (That being said, we are led to believe he took down a vampire and his goons single-handedly.) We know he’s not quite on the level though, what with Hall’s suspicions and now Fiona’s incentive to go digging.


My reviews of Supernormal Step:
← Vol. 1: Runaway | Vol. 3: Power Struggle →

It has been over a year since I last reviewed a volume of Supernormal Step, the fantastic webcomic by Michael Lee Lunsford about Fiona, a girl with blue hair who has been sucked into a strange, parallel universe where magic is real and that’s really freaky. Fiona has long been on a search for a way home, and while she doesn’t get much closer in this one, she does learn more about the mysterious Cavan Henderson and makes closer allegiances. The question remains: will Fiona find a way home, and if she does, what price will she pay to get there?

I’m going to spoil lots of plot points here, because I want to talk about them. I’m going to try not to talk too much about developments beyond this volume, but my future knowledge might seep in.

Supernormal Step Vol. 3: Power Struggle collects Chapters 7 to 9 of the comic. We pick up with Fiona somewhat upset with Van and Jim, who prefer to party instead of, you know, helping her. Akela is all too eager to help, of course. I love how Lunsford telegraphs Akela’s crush on Fiona with the “meanwhile in Akela’s brain…” panels. Then later Akela has a conversation with Van about her crush, and I love that for once in his life Van is serious and sensitive and actually gives Akela good advice: “That’s a bad road to go down…. Think about it. she’s on this mission to go home, to another world. Are you prepared to go with her? Is this real or just a crush, Akela?” I know from having read the comic online, of course, that Akela and Fiona will finally have a real conversation about this in the next volume … but that, of course, is for another review.

In this volume, Akela and Fiona go on adventure to snoop around a secret Henderson lab. Surprisingly, they run into Hall, who is himself suspicious of Cavan Henderson and ready to do some snooping of his own. The plot twists Lunsford reveals here are the kind that showcase the power of the graphic novel format. If this were a book, it would be difficult or at least very clunky to communicate, for example, that Inga Jorgenson looks just like the creepy evil twins that Fiona battled previously. Her throwaway comment to one of them, later, “Also, you’re probably a clone or something … so have fun letting that sink in” is perfect and funny.

And if I can digress for a moment, I think we need to talk about how Fiona deals with her status as a “hero” in this story. Fiona is a hero in the legal sense of this world—she has a “hero license” and costume, etc. But she is definitely not heroic. She is the protagonist of our story, but she isn’t really a hero in the traditional sense. She reminds me, both in situation and in character, quite a bit of John Crichton from Farscape. Whereas Crichton was an explorer suddenly stranded on the other side of the galaxy, Fiona by no means asked to be pulled into this world. Nevertheless, she finds herself wrapped up in the politics and society of this world, much like Crichton was—but she does not feel bound to honour or abide by its various conventions. That scene where she refuses to engage a fight is powerful, because it reminds us that she is not here for heroics. She fights and stands up for people when it’s the last option on the table, but really she just wants to get home.

Back to the Henderson lab and its second revelation, that of the “imperfect” Hall and Eva. Essentially this seems to imply that the Hall and Eva we have previously met are clones, perhaps second, third, or even later iterations on the process. Through flashbacks, Lunsford hints at an even weirder past, one where “Halland” and “Evangeline” live in the mid-1800s, and Halland is courting a shyer woman named “Lexia.” Why has Henderson been cloning these people? Why does he clone Lexia as a blind super-scary fighter chick?

Tune in next time…

Fiona, much to Akela’s delight, also cements her relationship with the Nameless in this volume. Through some interesting scenes happening without Fiona or Akela’s knowledge, Lunsford reminds us that most of the characters in this story are out for themselves rather than a single, higher ideal. This is one of my favourite things about Supernormal Step. For all that its sprawling cast of minor characters can make a headache when trying to read the comic one page at a time on the web, when you go back and read it at a chapter at a time like this, you really get to see how everyone’s actions come together. I loved the little spread mid-way through the volume, where we see people with whom Fiona has previously interacted getting interrogated by Hendersons (THOCK!).

Supernormal Step remains one of my favourite webcomics. It has magic, a rich, multi-layered storyline, awesome art, and very unique and well-realized characters. You should check it out.

My reviews of Supernormal Step:
← Vol. 2: A Fine Ado | Vol. 4: Anxiety Attack →

Just last year, Microsoft announced success at experiments with using DNA for storage, and just this past month, a group of researchers stored an operating system in DNA at a density of 215 PB/g. (It’s hard to put that into context, but you could store the entire book collection of the American Library of Congress thousands of times over in that single gram, not to mention a copy of your own genome.) I’ve kept my eye on this interesting avenue of information storage ever since I read The Dervish House, wherein this scheme forms a central plot element.

In Hello World, Tiffany Rose and Alexandra Tauber have taken this idea and expanded upon it. The corporation UltSyn employs humans as “Human Information Drives” or HIDs by rendering them mute, erasing their memories, and then writing sensitive corporate data to their brains in place of those memories. Got some incriminating files you can’t destroy but don’t want falling in the wrong hands? No problem: UltSyn will, for a hefty price, write them to a human brain for you and then keep that human safe and secure until you need the data back. So we have something that’s part–Dervish House and part–Johnny Mnemonic.

Scott is a hackitivist looking for his sister, whom he believes has become an HID. To this end, he is using his hacker powers to create as much chaos for UltSyn as possible. The book opens with Scott ambushing an UltSyn car to kidnap an HID. In the process, he shoots and kills several people. As the story goes on, Scott and Sonia, the HID, develop a bond. Communicating through sign language, Scott and Sonia agree to go after UltSyn together, to find Scott’s sister and find information on Sonia’s life from before she agreed to be a hard drive. The trouble, of course, is that when you go digging, you have to be prepared that you might not like what you find….

That opening scene surprised me and stuck with me for the entire book. While no action hero, Scott is somewhat more physical than your stereotypical hacker. I can’t say I liked him all that much (and it isn’t just the gun violence). But that might be more of the situations we see Scott in than Scott himself. Like many thrillers that take place over a short period of time, Hello World jolts from one high-adrenaline sequence to another, with little enough time in between for breathers. When Scott and Sonia aren’t criss-crossing Europe to infiltrate UltSyn compounds, Scott’s back at his batcave, doing something clever with hardware and software and the help of his AI, Hallie. I do love Rose and Tauber’s careful descriptions of Scott’s actions rather than hand-waving “he hacked the thing” type of actions. There’s a certain level of practicality to the narration that grounds what could otherwise easily become a Jason Bourne–style near-future SF thriller that drifts ever further away from our reality.

Sonia, who gets a few POV chapters, is just as sympathetic and probably more likeable. Initially I didn’t like her passive role, even if it made sense as part of the story, so I was happy to see her grow and get more to do, even saving Scott a few times. Her character shows more visible change over the course of the book, which is perhaps why she satisfies me more than Scott. While ending kind of reminded me of Chuck (and is just about as weird or creepy) I think it’s an appropriate kind of price to extract from the two of them in exchange for their overall success. The thing about a relationship, be it sexual or platonic or romantic or some mix of the three, is that it is seldom a cut-and-dried “yes” or “no” kind of thing. Relationships are complicated and messy business involving two or more people, which means so many variables and potentially mixed messages. As a result of this complexity, Hello World subverts, just barely, the typical “Hero rescues Very Special Girl Who is Totally a MacGuffin” trope of this thriller subgenre.

Alas, Hello World doesn’t quite invite me to become immersed into its strange dystopian world in the same way that Gibson pulls one into the Sprawl. This book has more the dimensionality of a play, in that the scenes feel like sets on a stage: the immediate action is visible, but you know that just behind the plywood wall there’s an entire backstage devoted to making the production look good. Scott’s immediate motivation to take down UltSyn and rescue his sister is all well and good, as are the various minor characters he encounters along the way. But I don’t get much sense of the wider world in this story. UltSyn is the generic evil corporation with evil, capitalist motives that hires generic black ops mercenaries to secure its generic facilities of doom. Scott’s friends with a bunch of hacktivists who want to take down these corporations, etc. These are all very familiar ideas here, and while their themes certainly appeal, there is little in the way of memorable description or worldbuilding.

Rose and Tauber kick around a few interesting ideas that I wish had more page time. The HIDs themselves are so fascinating, and I wish there had been more exploration of the intersections between losing memories and losing humanity. Similarly, Scott discovers or deduces some secrets about UltSyn’s ultimate management structure that, while not really original, are fascinating to think about—but they come up fairly late in the book and are sort of put aside in favour of resolving the action.

I guess Hello World ended up being heavier on the “thriller” than the “science fiction” part of “science fiction thriller” and that balance is always a shaky proposition at best for me. I picked this up because of its touted asexual protagonist, as I had been following/chatting with Rose on Twitter. Indeed, if like me you’re looking to read more books with representations of marginalized identities, then this isn’t a poor choice. Scott’s sexual and romantic identity is a complex and layered thing, with great emphasis placed on distinguishing between one’s identity/attraction and one’s choices/actions. I appreciate the care with which Rose and Tauber craft both the actions and the conversations in this respect, particularly around consent. This is the kind of thing that should be in every book, and it’s great to see on the page here.

Hello World has a cool factor to it, with smooth writing and well-rounded protagonists. When I’m reading about hackers and dramatic computer stuff, I want the kind of writing that I got here, with great descriptions and a kind of slick awareness of the speed and style with which hackers pull off their exploits. On the other hand, the story and world are less my cup of tea.

I have been wanting to go gradeless for a while now. Assigning numbers to students’ work has always felt very arbitrary. Even in a system as steeped in rubrics as Ontario’s, I still don’t have any confidence in marking work—particularly English, but also math—and giving it a number. Really, at the end of the day, what is the difference between an 82% and an 83%? Or an 85%? It’s so silly. And by putting a number on the student’s work, you are basically guaranteeing they won’t look at anything else, at any of the other meticulous, descriptive feedback you’ve put on there because your assessment standards tell you that you should be doing so.

Fortunately there is a better way, and in Hacking Assessment: 10 Ways to Go Gradeless in a Traditional Grades School, Starr Sackstein provides ten practical suggestions to facilitate this process. This is a book I needed. I don’t need to be convinced of the benefits of going gradeless; I did need practical suggestions for what that actually looks like. We are programmed, during our training, to refer to everything in terms of grades and standards. What does gradeless feedback and assessment actually look like? More importantly, what do I do for that final grade we need to report at the end of the class?

I’ll give a little context: I work in adult education right now. It’s a high school; we grant Ontario Secondary School Diplomas. But our students are adults who were not successful in regular high school, for whatever reason. Their ages vary greatly. Classes are mornings or afternoons, five days a week, for seven to eight weeks. So my teaching environment is somewhat different from your typical secondary school teacher. As such, some of Sackstein’s tips don’t directly apply—I don’t need, for instance, to get parents on my side. Most of Sackstein’s tips, however, remain relevant.

I’m not going to go over all ten tips. Instead, I just want to highlight a couple of my favourites, and positive points about the book as a whole.

Firstly, Hacking Assessment is short. It’s about 130 pages, and those pages are crammed full of practical advice. Teachers have a lot of demands on their time, and few of us want to give up some of our precious free time to reading a bulky book full of case studies and other “helpful” educational knowledge. I want to learn professionally, but I want to do it in a smart way. This was a good investment of my time.

Secondly, the structure of every chapter makes it easy to read, absorb, and refer back to Sackstein’s tips. This is my first time reading a book in the Hack Learning series, but I’m given to understand this a staple of the series. The sections are as follows: The Problem, The Hack, What You Can Do Tomorrow, A Blueprint for Full Implementation, Overcoming Pushback, and The Hack in Action. I like it. It acknowledges so many of the realities of teaching: we need tips we can use tomorrow, not at some vague point in the future when we have time to revamp our entire course; we need help when people (colleagues, parents, students) push back at our experimentation; and we need success stories and reflection on failure too. The structure is so useful.

Anyway, some of my favourite hacks?

Hack 3: Rebrand Assignments as Learning Experiences resonated a lot with me, as a teacher of adult learners. So many learners come into class with an attitude that they just need to do some worksheets, get some marks, and move on. I understand where this attitude is coming from. But I want to help re-awaken their appreciation of education and lifelong learning; to do that, I need to deprogram them from what they learned in school was the only way to learn (and at which they were, ultimately, unsuccessful).

Hack 4: Facilitate Student Partnerships is something I am struggling with in my environment and need to keep working at. We like to use the word “empowerment” often without thinking about what that looks like in our specific classroom situations. I know I’m not fully succeeding at this yet, but I want to get better at it. I want my adult learners to step up and take the driver’s seat more often and help each other with the learning, so I can truly step back to be that guide on the side.

Hack 7: Track Progress Transparently is so important to me. I want to stop hiding behind a gradebook full of such arbitrary weights and numbers. I want my students to know, at any given moment, how they are doing a course because they themselves are the ones keeping track. Portfolios are an essential tool for this, and improving my portfolio-fu is one of my next, ongoing goals.

Hacks 8 and 9, Teach Reflection and Teach Students to Self-Grade, are inter-related. I want to get better at teaching reflection, particularly in math, where the prevailing attitude is often one of “did I get the right answer?” instead of “oh, that’s an interesting problem, I wonder how I can solve it”. Similarly, in situations where evaluation based on a standard is necessary, I want to help students do this themselves. They are adults, after all; they’ll need to evaluate themselves constantly outside of the classroom.

I ran two gradeless classes in May/June after reading this book, and my two summer classes are also gradeless. I’m not going back. I’ll work on a blog post at some point that goes into more detail about my experience so far; I’ll link that in this review when it’s out. For now, suffice it to say that nothing is ever perfect the first time, or the second time, or probably even the tenth time. This is a process and a journey, not a switch you can flip in your teaching.

If you have seen the light, and you want to go gradeless too, Hacking Assessment will help you do that. Bottom line: it’s a worthwhile book.

The Bloodline Feud is an omnibus edition of the first two books in Charles Stross’ Merchant Princes series. You can read about the origins of the omnibus from Stross himself.

Suffice it to say, even though I already read the first two books, I decided to pick up this one and start reading the series in its rebooted form. I don’t remember enough of the original books to catch what (if any) substantial changes Stross has made here; the overall story feels very similar though. I wouldn’t say you have to read this one if you’ve read the first two books and want to pick up the new version of the series for the rest of them—but I want all the nice covers on my shelf!

Speaking of covers, this is a great example of how branding changes the reception of a book. The cover for The Family Trade looks like such a medieval fantasy book, when in fact this is an intense sci-fi thriller—The Bloodline Feud definitely gives off that vibe. So kudos to the new cover design, the artist, and the publishers who let that happen.

If you want to read my thoughts on the two books within this one, check out my review of The Family Trade and my review of The Hidden Family.

I have very little to add or amend about those reviews. Reading these a second time around, as a unified story like they had originally been, was, if anything, even more enjoyable than my first reading. This is smart stuff, like almost on the verge of Doctorow-level infodumpy at times, but it’s matched by such a fast pace. It really is a thriller—and I say that as someone who almost snobbishly pans thrillers, yet it’s a compliment here. If you like SF that dabbles on the economic side of things, you really should check this out.

My reviews of The Merchant Princes omnibus:
The Traders’ War →

I didn’t really know what to expect from this; I just requested it from NetGalley and Curiosity Quills Press on a whim from its description.

Brooklyn, our first-person protagonist, is cool under fire—literally, for she is a firefighter. She discovers that, courtesy of her estranged father, she isn’t fully human. She’s half-human, half … something else. Something that the uninformed would term “demonic”. It explains a lot about Brooklyn, about her past and her present attitudes. Yet it also opens up so many other questions, not to mention a little problem about the balance of the entirety of existence….

For me, this book is an easy one to like but a tough one to love. Cox’s writing style, particularly with regards to the narrator, never endears itself to me. Brooklyn is very expository but also very flat. She goes to great lengths to describe certain things, particularly the clothes she’s wearing, sometimes providing far too much information than I need for a simple scene. There’s a lot more telling, rather than showing, going on here. The same goes for almost all of the conversations: lots of information exchange, less so the character building. It’s convenient, and all, that Brooklyn and her dad can just hang out in an alley for minutes at a time after Brooklyn has just tossed someone out a window … but there were probably other ways to deliver the big breakdown of this entire fantasy world. Cox’s way is valid, just not particularly exciting or interesting.

This is a shame, because Nascent Shadow’s fantasy world is interesting. Magic is commonplace here, although not everyone has magical talent themselves. As such, certain technologies we rely on were never invented in this world—Brooklyn ruminates, at one point, how humanity would travel great distances if they didn’t have portals. And contrary to what I said above, when it comes to the workings of this world, Cox doesn’t overload us with extraneous information. Brooklyn just mentions things in passing, casually enough, like she assumes we’re with her on it, but with just enough context to help us figure things out.

Similarly, I love Brooklyn’s occupation. Not only is her affinity for fire related to her heritage, but her role as a firefighter involves her in the mystery that proves central to the book’s plot. With so many urban fantasy books featuring cops or private investigators as protagonists, this is the first time I’ve encountered one about a firefighter. Cox does a good job working this into the story, showing us both the emergency and non-emergency aspects of her job, without spending too much time on the details.

I wish, though, that the actual main plot and mystery had been more satisfying. There just isn’t quite the right balance between plot and subplots here. Although this problem is present throughout the story, it’s most glaring at the very end … in that the ending came extremely abruptly. Like, I turned the page, expecting a new chapter, only to hit the acknowledgements page. Um, what? So apparently the cryptic conversation Brooklyn overhears before she crashes the evil dudes’ party, and maybe her conversation with a possible ally, is the most resolution we’ll get in this book. Fine. Somewhere along the way, though, I lost the plot. I thought it was bigger, broader, but it turned out just to be … that.

So I’m left unsatisfied. Nascent Shadow has a lot of potential, some really great ideas. Yet its writing and plotting are uneven and embedded within exposition too excited to escape rather than lie low and bide its time before pouncing upon the unsuspecting reader. It lacks, as I stress to my students, unity. And so while I liked parts of it, overall I was left wanting more, but not in the good sense of the phrase.

Miriam Beckstein discovered that she can travel between worlds. In fact, she’s the lost scion of the Clan, a family of worldwalkers from the other world, which is at about a medieval level of tech development. Discovering the Clan’s monopoly on inter-world trade of devices and drugs, Miriam also stumbles into the middle of a Byzantine political situation. As matters rapidly deteriorate, The Traders’ War raises the stakes significantly for Miriam and friends: wedding bells, nuclear threats, and the watchful eye of Uncle Sam are only a few of the sphttps://www.goodreads.com/review/edit/20518905ectres in this second volume of the Merchant Princes omnibus series.

Reading Charles Stross is like sticking your head in an encyclopedia, that is on fire, inside a cart, also on fire, hurtling over the edge of a precipice (into fire). It’s an exhilarating and edifying experience but may leave some doubt as to whether you’ll survive. The Traders’ War is a thriller in the most technical sense, but it is full of dense, gooey infodumps. I spent half my time enthralled by the sheer brilliance of the plotting and economic thought required to create this universe … and the other half kind of waving a white flag in surrender and wondering why the hell I chose to read this instead of another Animorphs novel….

In other words, caveat emptor and all that: this novel is both exciting and stultifying, and it’s going to be up to you to decide which one wins out for you. Obviously from my rating and forthcoming praise, it’s the former for me.

This universe (multiverse, I guess), is just so intricately detailed. It’s one thing to come up with the premise of worldwalking and another to explore it so doggedly as Stross does here—but that’s, you know, kind of his thing. He takes a series of knowns and unknowns and tries to extrapolate from there: given a, b, c and x, y, z, what’s the most likely outcome for the future? In this case, if you can flit between two (and then three) different versions of North America at varying levels of technological development, what does that mean? And if your family carries the recessive gene for worldwalking and occupies a fragile, envied economical niche in your home dimension, how is this going to affect royal succession politics?

Reading science fiction is generally immersing yourself in a huge game of what if, but Stross takes that and cranks it up to 11. In The Traders’ War, the US government gets involved. Thanks to the DEA and Matthias’ defection, they now know about Gruinmarkt and the Clan, and they are worried this means war. Stross gets to write his most paranoid, most clandestine take on US government operations, batting around all-caps codenames and extrajudicial imprisonment like it’s going out of style. It’s hard to remember, but these books are set in the Bush era, so you can kind of think of this as an alternative history novel in which the Bush administration fought interdimensional drug smugglers instead of terrorists. (But it’s still, as one character remarks, all about the oil.)

Stross also expands on some of the mechanics of worldwalking in this volume. The US government attempts to crack the science behind the genetics and neurology of worldwalking. Meanwhile, Angbard has finally decided to let a small team experiment with using the Lee family knot in our world to try to access a fourth world. This results in some discoveries that seem likely to overturn a lot of the established wisdom regarding worldwalking. As is often the case, however, this hasn’t stopped anyone from continuing to prosecute their private little wars.

Miriam is back, of course, and continues to be an irascible yet flawed protagonist. She is always on the move, always rebounding from the latest set-back, reactive and proactive. I’m not sure I actually like her, mind you—she has a way of not considering the collateral damage to her friends when one of her schemes blows up in her face—but damn if she isn’t a dynamic and fun protagonist! She’s the proverbial wrench in everyone’s carefully-laid plans, a kind of chaotic good, and she is a force to be reckoned with.

More so than in The Bloodline Feud (as far as I can recall), we get other viewpoint characters. We follow Mike Fleming, Miriam’s ex and a DEA agent wrapped up in this investigation. We see a little bit from Brill’s point of view (I love Brill!) and some other worldwalkers. Stross also uses the conceit of translated “transcripts” included at the end of some chapters, which drop tantalizing tidbits of exposition and plot development but require us to deduce the speakers from context. I wasn’t a huge fan, but I think they do serve their purpose.

Above all else, I just relish Stross’ ability to balance those intense scenes of exposition with equally exciting moments of pure, adrenaline-charged action. There are gun battles, swordfights, explosions—basically all the stuff you want in a thriller. It’s here, in spades, complete with the possibility of an atomic bomb going off and subtle hints that there is more to worldwalking than anyone previously believed….

I’m very much looking forward to wrapping up the original trilogy soon with The Revolution Trade so I can pick up the start of the new trilogy. As always, Stross is just the perfect comfort read when I want something that will make me think but also hit me with a nice dose of action. You’re best served starting with The Bloodline Feud rather than here, but once you’ve read the first volume, just know that the second volume is even bigger and better than the first.

My reviews of The Merchant Princes omnibus:
← The Bloodline Feud | The Revolution Trade →

The novelette offers an opportunity to experiment in a way that short stories and novels don’t often do. You have much more room in which to create a world than a short story, where a glimpse at the larger picture is often all that you can afford. On the other hand, unlike a novel, there is no requirement to have a lengthy plot. With “Fade to White”, Catherine Valente depicts a world torn apart by war and a society that has changed dramatically to compensate. She uses the length of the novelette to delve in and out of different parts of this world, even as she constructs a simple plot about coming of age after the apocalypse.

“Fade to White” is set in an alternate 1950s United States. This is a country recovering from the aftermath of nuclear warfare. McCarthy is in the White House. With much of the population infertile, those who can reproduce are valued for this act, elevated to the role of Mother and Father. Since fertile men are in much smaller supply than women, each Father has four households that he visits in a weekly rotation. Sterile men and women become civil servants, imbibing by order of the state a drug that suppresses their sex drives and makes them happy with their lot in life. Valente doesn’t give us much of an idea of the diversity of occupations in this society, but we spend a lot of time learning about how propaganda works.

The underlying irony of this story is simple: America won the war, presumably, only to turn into the very type of paternalistic, fascist state that they were fighting against. Mutually assured destruction was not so mutual, but it was definitely assured, and now the survivors are trying to pick up the pieces. The government has had to make a lot of hard decisions about how to keep the country together; I don’t envy the leaders who had to step up to the plate after whatever disaster befell them. Valente handles the horror of this world with a light touch, guiding us towards the realization of what has happened but not actively preaching against it. I found this to be a very effective and satisfying way of handling the story.

I’m not sure this novelette is experimental so much as it is a return to older forms. It reminds me of something that an author out of previous generations, someone like Bradbury, might have written. It has that same concern with using science-fiction to depict what society could become, if certain excesses occur. And it has the same dour tone mixed with a kind of dark but situational humour. Retro in feeling, this is a charming but also chilling story that I’d definitely recommend.

“Best of” collections can be fun, sometimes, because they might introduce you to authors you might not otherwise have encountered. I found Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition in a library sale and decided to give it a shot. Other Goodreads reviewers have already pointed this out, but I’ll echo them: rather disappointing to see Neil Gaiman and Gene Wolfe’s names on the cover but no stories from them in the collection. WTF? At least one out of three is … well, bad. And I didn’t even particularly like Peter S. Beagle’s story.

In fact, my overall impression of this collection is rather less than favourable. One or two of the individual stories are pretty good (I’ll talk about those later). For the most part, though, I just wasn’t interested. Indeed, I’ll own up to skimming and even skipping in a few places (I feel like this is a prerogative, particularly with anthologies—if a story isn’t working for me, I don’t need to read all of it). There’s a preface by the editor discussing his views on the year in fantasy and how he went about choosing the work. He talks about an upswing in superhero fiction—but then says he didn’t choose any superhero stories. He says there were more fairy tales and fairy tale–retellings—but then says he didn’t put any of those in here, although there are stories he considers fairy tale–esque in their “lyricism”.

This volume contains 16 stories but only 5 by women. Also—and this is just something that struck me, not something I necessarily look for when I’m reading these anthologies—these stories seem overwhelmingly heteronormative. I mean, I know that 2007 was a decade ago (dear god) and therefore A Different Time and all that. But so many of these stories involve romance and love (requited or unrequited) and desire and pursuit of happiness, and it always seems to be happening between a man and a woman. Where are my gay couples, my polyamorous groups, my aro/ace heroes, or my knight/dragon who live happily ever after instead of killing each other? My point here is that there is very little in these stories that strike me as overly subversive, and not just when it comes to romantic and sexual orientation, and that’s a disappointment. If this is truly a representative pick of 2006’s fantasy offerings (and I by no means assume it is), then 2006 was a shit year. I suspect, though, that this is more a function of the editor’s choices. One can only hope that in the elapsed decade more “best of” anthologies have started thinking about diversity and representation in the stories they choose to feature.

None of the stories in this book jumped out at me as favourites that will sit with me for years to come. However, there were one or two that I genuinely liked, and I should probably mention them. “The Water Poet and the Four Seasons”, by David J. Schwartz, is the kind of fantastical personification experiment that I like. It actually reminds me of some of Gaiman’s stuff. Geoff Ryman’s “Pol Pot’s Beautiful Daughter (Fantasy)” is weird as all get-out but also very interesting. “Irregular Verbs”, by Matthew Johnson, is another one of those neat thought experiments reified into a story, this time focusing on the nature of language and the way people form their own private little worlds.

Alas, I just wish I had been able to latch on to something in this volume, even just one story that could have made me go “wow”. If you read this and do, then all the more power to you. As far as I’m concerned, though, Fantasy: The Best of the Year, 2007 Edition was a bit of a bust. I’m going back to being a little more selective with my anthologies, I think, because there’s certain types of stories I want and certain types that won’t do much for me.