(This review was originally published on StaticMultimedia)

Robert V.S. Redick’s The Red Wolf Conspiracy unfolds the titular conspiracy slowly, moving characters into place like chess pieces before a grand battle. Pazel Pathkendle is the orphaned son of a witch and a traitor, surviving by working his way from ship to ship in the empire that conquered his homeland. He has a special gift, given by his mother (through nearly lethal poison) that allows him to learn any language he hears, but that brings debilitating headaches as its effects wear off that nearly drive him mad. He finds himself aboard the great ship Chathrand, the last of its kind as no one living knows how it was made, on its mission to forge peace between the world’s two warring super empires through an arranged marriage. Thasha, the treaty bride, is bold and independent, and is not interested in playing her role for the good of the empire. She also holds an ancient book full of secret truths, given to her by the head of her school, a strange cross between a severe nunnery and finishing school. Tiny stowaways called ixchel inhabit the crawlspaces and lower decks of the ship, and Pazel’s gift makes him uniquely able to hear their plans. In turn, their tiny size makes them uniquely able to learn the secret plans of a group of conspirators aboard ship, who hope to turn this mission of peace into one of war by manipulating prophecy seeded in the rival nation years earlier.

While the premise is interesting, The Red Wolf Conspiracy unfolds its plot a bit too slowly. A sense of accumulation permeates the novel, and each event feels like it will lead to some grand payoff down the road, but in the mean time, action is hard to come by. Many events seem to happen off camera, and are recounted to the main characters after the fact. Pazel never seems to be in the right place at the right time to learn anything first hand. The overarching conspiracy demands that the protagonist be somewhat out of the loop, but often there seems to be a far more interesting novel just out of reach.

Which may in fact be the sequel. Events at the end of the novel suggest that the characters we’ve invested in will play a far more pivotal role as the series continues. As an opening act, The Red Wolf Conspiracy has potential for excellence. Glimpses of the much larger world are fascinating, and despite the frustratingly tantalizing plot of this novel, the series has promise as long as the protagonist are allowed to engage with the main plot hiding just around the corner.

(This review was originally published on StaticMultimedia)

According to legend, if you stand at the crossroads with your guitar at midnight, the devil will take it from you and tune it; when he hands it back, you’ll be a master guitarist, but you’ll be missing a soul. According to another legend, Robert Johnson did just that to become an expert bluesman. Akira Hiramoto tells you right up front he’s going to take liberties with the story – the subtitle to this volume is “The Unreal Life of Robert Johnson,” and the back cover describes it as a “phantasmagoric reimagining” of Johnson’s life. Unless you’re very familiar with the story, telling the real legend from Hiramoto’s reimagining is nearly impossible, but the overall effect is impressive.

Hiramoto’s twist on the classic “the devil will teach you the blues” myth is inspired. When we meet Johnson, he is an unhappy man, escaping fights over money by sneaking out at night to blues bars and leaving his pregnant wife home alone. His friends tell him the legend of the crossroads, which he calls ridiculous, but when bluesman Son House leaves his guitar behind in the bar, Johnson tries to take it to him. He doesn’t find House, but he does find himself at a crossroads, so he decides to test out the legend. Of course, it doesn’t work. He can’t play the guitar any better. Depressed and exhausted, he collapses in the dirt. He wakes up in the street, dusts himself off, and heads home. When he gets back to town, he finds that he hasn’t been gone all night – he’s been gone six months. His wife and baby both died during labor, and everyone in town blames him for running off on his family. They run him out of town. Johnson has lost his friends, his wife, and his unborn child – when he picks up his guitar, he discovers that now he knows how to play the blues. The devil kept his part of the bargain after all.

At this point, the story moves from playing with the myth through extended metaphor to playing with history. Johnson is playing his guitar outside a little store when a white man hears him and asks him to come for a ride with him. Hiramoto does an excellent job of letting us live with Johnson’s fear that he’s being taken to a lynching (a legitimate fear, we discover later, though not immediately). Turns out the man wants Johnson to play at a party to distract the guests while he cleans the owner’s house out; also turns out that this man is Clyde Barrow. The heist is cut short when Johnson suddenly stops playing. The guests ask for some country music, and when Johnson tries to play it, his right hand sprouts five extra fingers (phantasmagoric reimagining, indeed). Johnson and Barrow escape, and after a night on the run (during which, Johnson plays a blues tune that Barrow calls “Bonnie’s Blues,” in case we had any doubt about who was robbing houses), they end up in a dry town that isn’t very welcoming to outsiders. Johnson ends up in a jail cell, and the volume closes with the townsfolk getting ready to drag him out for a lynching.

This isn’t a place to learn Robert Johnson’s story. If you know the story, though, this volume has that special appeal of the familiar yet unpredictable. The art is beautiful, which adds to the overall effect. As odd a take as this is on the Robert Johnson legend, the combined effect of the wonderful illustrations and the twisted (in many senses) storyline make this a compelling read.

(This review was originally published on StaticMultimedia)

Get Will Smith’s agent on the phone. It’s only a matter of time before the hell-on-Earth creatures that populate Henders Island in Warren Fahy’s Fragment are staring at you from the side of your popcorn bucket.

Fragment seems to beg you to compare it to Jurassic Park, and such a comparison is deserved as long as we’re talking about the movie rather than the novel. This time, instead of man’s scientific meddling, it’s his innate curiosity that starts all the trouble. The crew of the Trident are circling the globe looking for adventure as part of the reality show Sea Life (think MTV meets Discovery Channel) when they receive a distress call from the unexplored, mysterious Henders Island. When they arrive, they are swiftly all but wiped out by the island’s extremely predatory wildlife.

Henders, it turns out, is so remote and it broke off the pan-global land mass so early that its evolution took a left turn way before it got to Albuquerque. Every single living thing on the island, from the largest creature to the tiniest plant, is predatory from the second it leaves the womb. Everything eats everything, and everything from the island is superior to everything not from the island – in other words, if anything native to Henders Island gets off Henders Island, life as we know it would be obliterated. So it falls to a team of scientists, including Nell Duckworth, survivor of the original Sea Life expedition; Geoffrey Binswanger, charming, open-minded, out-of-the-box thinker; and Thatcher Redmond, moustache-twirling scientist with a theory to protect and a book to sell, to investigate the island’s ecosystem and see if anything can be safely preserved. That is, before the military decide to sterilize the island to prevent it from being used as a weapon.

Fragment is a great summer read, but it feels like it could have simply been a screenplay. The adventure plays out exactly as it might on the big screen, which is exciting, and the monsters that populate the island are terrifying and seem plausible, though unlikely – the best kind of alien. But Fahy rarely takes advantage of the space a novel provides for deep character moments. There are mostly oohs and aahs, followed by running and screaming. The twist that comes near the end of the novel, which I will not spoil here, is unexpected and shows that the author has thought through his fascinating setting, but by the time it arrives, the break-neck pace is being driven by other forces, and any new developments have to grab onto something and hold on tight.

This is going to be full of spoilers. If you haven’t seen the Battlestar Galactica finale yet, stop reading now.

Battlestar Galactica ended its four-year run last night. I enjoyed it (both the series and the finale) immensely from start to finish. The Interwebs, as is their custom, have exploded with ragey fists of rage. Here’s the most articulate (and most frequently referenced) example of the complaints I’ve seen, from The Sci-Fi Geek. I’ll list his complaints one by one, then offer my thoughts.

1. The flashbacks. They tied poorly back into the story and served as harsh breaks in pacing. Essentially, they were time fillers that served little purpose.

The flashbacks tell us plenty about the characters, but more importantly, they lay out the behind-the-scenes orchestration that’s been going on since day one. Laura Roslin’s flashback explains her fiercely protective nature, and shows us the decision that led to her succession to the presidency. Bill Adama’s shows us how his pride, his biggest character flaw until his life-threatening injury at the hands of Boomer, put him (and Tigh) exactly where he needed to be when the Twelve Colonies were destroyed. Baltar’s provides valuable insight into his privileged, grandstanding personality, while simultaneously playing out the central metaphor of the entire series – destruction of the parent, reinvention of the child. The Kara/Lee flashback shows us the origin of their complex lover/sibling relationship, and it provides a moving counterpoint to her departure on New Earth. Everyone is where they needed to be. All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.

2. Deus Ex Machina. Holy frakking hell, was this episode painted in it. There are so many instances of both pure happenstance and then direct divine intervention it gets hard to count. The Cylon colony is destroyed ON ACCIDENT by nukes on a dead Raptor? WHAT THE FRAK!?! The hallucinations of Baltar really are ‘angels’ appearing to him telling him what to do? And the worst of all, Kara isn’t anything interesting (like the daughter of Daniel, the recently named 13th Cylon), but is instead a shared hallucination of another angel who simply vanishes at the end.

The notion of a higher power has permeated this series. Baltar has struggled from the day he took Helo’s Raptor seat with the notion that he has a divine destiny. The path to Earth was revealed by consulting ancient prophecies, listening to fevered visions, and collecting divine artifacts. Caprica Six, Baltar, Starbuck, Deanna, Leoben, and all of the Final Five have had conversations with at least one imaginary person providing spiritual insight. This was not a Deus Ex Machina – these angels have been active throughout the series.

3. Luddism (by the truckload). Did Michael Crichton ghost write this episode? Frak. Yes, we get that technology is evil. But in the end, because Lee Fraking Adama asks for it, the entirety of Colonial Fleet trashes their spaceships and reverts to primitive agriculural living conditions on their new home. Because that’s somehow better.

Humans survive the Fall of Caprica because of Luddite attitudes. The Galactica is not networked because Adama doesn’t want it infected with Cylon viruses. And who could blame him? An entire civilization fell because of a war with its inventions. Along the way, they find out this is not the first time that’s happened to their species. By the time they find yet another planet to live on, a decision to keep the technology would require justification, not one to junk it.

4. Poor Characterization. The greatest example of this is Cavil. He was so good in some of the last few episodes of this season (one of the few bright spots) and in the end, the man who wanted to live forever shoots himself in a panic. He makes no effort to get away or try to survive. Just yells “Frak!” puts a gun into his mouth and pulls the trigger because a firefight breaks out around him. Well, I guess if I had to watch this episode too many times, I might do the same.

Cavil hates being a skinjob. He wants his mechanical body back. He’ll settle for resurrection, because while he might be stuck in a bag of meat, it wouldn’t be a mortal one, and it gives him more time to find a way to reverse the Final Five’s alterations. The Final Five – all five of them – are the key to resurrection. When Galen kills Tory, Cavil knows it’s hopeless. He’ll die in this body. He’s nothing if not a realist.

5. Gaius Baltar and his Magic Tongue. Sounds like a porno, but what is it about this insipid, self serving little toad of a human being that makes him appealing to, well, anyone? From the ridiculousness of his harem and his ‘followers’ throughout the season, to him finally being able to speechify the terrible Cylon leader down from holding Hera hostage. I didn’t believe it at all.

From time to time in life, you’ll meet people you dislike. Those people often have friends and family who like them very much. When you encounter such characters in fiction, it is not an example of poor writing or poor characterization if the same holds true. Plenty of characters do not like Gaius Baltar. Many do. And if he’s shown himself capable of anything during the series, it’s speechifying.

6. Kara Thrace and her Special Destiny. The cover band for Hendrix is in and it’s completely unsatisfying, proving once again the original is the best. It turns out her entire special destiny is simply a cover for a Deus Ex Machina. She’s not related to Cylons or anything else that might actually make sense. She’s an angel, sent back by God, to guide the Colonists to some unnamed planet where humans have evolved on their own. This little blue planet that has a single large moon, seven continents, has 70.8% water cover, and is filled with wildlife, and whose eventual name rhymes with dearth, as in a dearth of good plot… (if you can’t guess which planet I’m talking about, you’ve got a dearth of something).

That Kara Thrace had a special destiny, revealed by prophecy, to lead humanity to its home has been repeated throughout the last two seasons. She did just that. This series has never spackled over religion with pseudo-science, so why should Kara’s destiny play out any differently?

7. Lee (Perfect Child) Adama. Because it’s Lee’s suggestion, everyone decides Luddism is the best way to go and they completely trash all modern technology, mingle with the prehistoric human population, and begin the race of man on Earth from about 150,000 years before the modern date. Why is it no one is ever able to argue against the shit the occasionally dribbles out of this man’s mouth? Why wasn’t there three seconds of someone going ‘but what about modern medicine? Sanitation? etc?’ Instead we get Romo Lampkin going ‘well, everyone’s really amenable’. *headdesk* And in the end, Lee doesn’t even want to participate in making things livable for the human race. He wants to go wander off and find his inner free spirit and see pretty things. Frak you, Lee Adama, you worthless piece of dren.

See my answer to 3. Mix it with my answer to 5. Dumping technology that has led to the destruction of your and at least two other civilizations does not become a bad idea because Lee can be kind of a prick.

8. No last Viper fight for Apollo and Starbuck. Yeah, I missed those. And there was a massive Viper/Raider battle this episode, and Hot Dog was our only major character involved in it. Ugh. Why are the two best pilots running the ground assault? Helo and Sharon could have handled that with cut backs into the Viper fight to add tension, action, and fun.

The story was about rescuing Hera, and Hera was inside the Colony. It makes more narrative sense to put Kara and Lee where the story is. If they were piloting Vipers, the dogfight would have needed more screen time, and that would have hurt the pacing more than you imagine the flashbacks did.

9. Adama’s ending. He becomes a hermit on another continent, with only Laura’s grave for company after she finally succumbs to her cancer. It…. ugh. Laura’s was the only ending I felt any emotion for at all. I loved the Laura Roslin character and I’m happy she finally got something at the end, but the way they have Adama react to her ending just killed me. He removes himself completely and is never seen again. As if the sum total of his emotional investment is just Laura. Not his son, or his crew, or humanity. I can’t imagine how what they’ve gone through would not create an unbreakable bond of community that would tie them all together for generations to come. Instead three major characters essentially just lay down and die (Laura literally, then Adama, and then Kara, who vanishes), and one who just wanders off (Lee).

Lee spent most of his life living in his father’s shadow. Near the end of the series, he stepped out of it. Adama’s decision to build his cabin and live alone doesn’t imply an emotional disconnect from his son; rather, it implies that he has accepted his new role. The old man has earned his retirement. He’s not needed anymore. His work is done, and he is leaving the new work to the next generation.

10. The 150,000 years later with the ‘Angels’. Yes, RDM and Eick, we get the fact that God intervened. And by tossing those two (formerly known as Head!Six and Head!Baltar) into modern day New York Times Square, you help reinforce that YES, God had to come down and save humanity from itself. You leave no mystery or imagination. Thank you, you pretentious hacks.

See my answer to 2. A higher power (call him God if you want, but you know he hates that name) has been visible throughout the series, taking whatever form is most useful. Plenty of mystery remains – What is this higher power? Why did it intervene this cycle? Has it tried to intervene before and failed? Will all of this happen again? I have a theory about this (which is going in another post, since this is long enough as it is), so I guess the writers left at least enough mystery and imagination for me.

(This review was originally published on StaticMultimedia)

Alexander Irvine’s Buyout stems from an interesting philosophical question: Can you place a dollar value on human life? When his accounting firm is bought out and merged with the local prison system, Martin Kindred, the only accountant in a family of career cops, is approached by his new employers to become their first buyout agent. The cost of incarcerating a life-term inmate is astronomical. How much better for everyone to give that inmate a percentage of that astronomical amount, to do with as he sees fit, in exchange for – well, there really is no way to put it delicately. Kindred accepts, and we follow him through his struggles as America’s first upfront death merchant. Unfortunately, these struggles are painfully dull.

A group called Priceless Life arises to oppose these buyouts, which should come as no surprise. In fact, very little of Irvine’s near-future society is a surprise – he has imagined a very plausible 2040s, with all business, communication, and entertainment conducted on ubiquitous pods, industrious advertisers hacking home and vehicle computers for just a moment of your time, and legal assisted suicide. It’s the last part that makes the Priceless Life group, so obvious and expected today, such an anachronism in the 2040s of this novel. In a society that allows people to choose whether to live or die, protestors for the sanctity of life would seem to have little traction. Priceless Life’s opposition to his work, including the very real threat of violence, and the long hours required of him in his new job conspire to cause Martin problems at home, driving him further from his wife and daughters. Bad buyouts threaten at every turn – was there coercion, is there bad faith on either side of the transaction, are all the legal t’s crossed and i’s dotted? This is the bulk of the novel, and it is as exciting as it sounds.

Something is clearly building in the background, as the threats of violence become more real, the bad faith becomes worse, and the life becomes less priceless. But the build is so slow, the tension so slack, that by the time all these pieces come together to try to form a climax, it’s difficult to care about the characters and anything that might happen to them.

(This review was originally published on StaticMultimedia)

The Warded Man will make you afraid of the dark. Peter V. Brett’s low fantasy novel, which he wrote on his smart phone during his hour-long daily subway commute, rests on a simple premise: when it gets dark, demons come out, and whatever humans make during the day, they destroy. Legends tell that humans once knew how to fight the demons, but all that remains of whatever magic they used are the wards carved into the buildings to keep the demons away. Most people live in small towns, and any that are more than a day’s journey from the few remaining cities must fend for themselves. The men who brave the night to deliver supplies and messages to the hamlets are few and far between. When a Messenger named Ragen comes to tiny Tibbet’s Brook, the lure of the larger world that he represents is too powerful for a young man named Arlen to resist.

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces discusses the archetypal hero’s journey, showing that nearly every story has the same basic structure of departure, initiation, and return. The Warded Man reminds us that, in the right hands, this structure does not have to be a crutch. Where other fantasy heroes glide through Campbell’s hero journey, Arlen fights for every inch. No one wakes him in the middle of the night to tell him that, hey, you’re actually very special and if you don’t mind, we’d like to make you king of everything; oh, and here’s this magic sword. Arlen makes his way by risking his life fighting the wind, rock, fire, and sand demons through trial and error, and by paying his dues through devoted study and lengthy apprenticeships. By the time he returns from his journey, hooded and nameless, we believe his transformation because he fought for it piece by piece.

Brett weaves Arlen’s story together with those of his two other protagonists, the beautiful healer Leesha and the crippled bard Rojer, allowing each to grow and struggle through their own journeys. Parental issues abound. Arlen believes his father placed his own safety before his mother’s, which led him to risk the night and run away from home. Leesha suffers her mother’s scorn at every turn and suffers the rest of the town’s scorn because of her fiance’s bragging, but she finds peace learning from the old crone who gathers herbs at the edge of town. Rojer’s mother was killed by demons before his eyes, and every father figure he finds dies a horrible death, but his musical skills are second to none, soothing even the demons. Each protagonist must find ways to deal with both the external demons that stalk the night and the ones that ride with them during the day.

By the time the three come together, each has begun to realize the power of his or her class (and let’s face it, these are role-playing game classes – another case of Brett making powerful use of a standing convention), and they are ready to put them to use in battle against the demons. The Warded Man is the first novel in a planned trilogy (though Brett hints there could be more). As the borders of the protagonists’ world expand beyond the restrictions of daylight, the journey of these powerful but damaged characters promises to become even more exciting. There are hints of even more powerful demons awaiting them, but as anyone knows who’s ever gone dungeon crawling, either on paper or on a computer, a warrior, healer, and enchanter make excellent company.

I’ll watch anything Joss Whedon makes. And it’s no secret that a central feature of nearly everything he makes is at least one powerful but damaged woman. Buffy. Faith. Tara. Willow. Fred. River. So I wasn’t surprised that the previews for Whedon’s new series Dollhouse showed its protagonist, Echo (Eliza Dushku), kicking ass and taking initials. The surprise didn’t come until Friday, when I watched the series premiere, Ghost.

Echo is an Active – her personality has been wiped, and she and others like her live in an abandoned Ikea where they sleep, shower, and wander around looking attractive and vapid. When her corporate overlords have need, they give her a personality, or some combination of personalities, that will allow her to complete a mission, after which she is returned to her vapid, slack-jawed state. If the “Women in Refrigerators” isn’t thick enough for you, Echo rescues a little girl from one at the end of the episode. Also, the foreshadowing is super subtle.

Whedon identifies himself as a feminist, and I have no reason to doubt him. If you squint and turn your head just right, you can even make out some male Actives in the background (and – Spoiler Alert – you can definitely spot one at the end of the premiere). Dollhouse is probably a too-clever-by-half metaphor to explore women’s subjugation by society, and Echo will probably break free of the control structure imposed upon her by her psychotically geeky programmer. But that’s just the problem. The probably. Dollhouse is either a parable for the choir, or it’s misogynistic as all hell. Either way, I’m gonna sit this one out.

(This review was originally published on StaticMultimedia)

Science fiction and fantasy are two sides of the same coin. Orson Scott Card once boiled the distinction down to this: if you do magic by pushing a button, it’s science fiction; if you do magic by rubbing a tree, it’s fantasy. That overlap is on full display in Eclispe Two: New Science Fiction and Fantasy, and the collection is all the better for its diversity.

Jonathan Strahan has assembled a familiar cast of authors in this collection, and they are impressive as always. Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation” puts us in the head – literally – of a robotic scientist whose curiosity about his inner workings and the fate of his people overrides his sense of self preservation. Paul Cornell’s “Michael Laurits Is: Drowning” and David Moles’ “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdon” both riff on social media and online interactive spaces, but from opposite sides of the coin. Cornell’s protagonist finds himself underwater and gasping for breath, and in an act of desperation, uploads his entire consciousness to a futuristic MySpace or Facebook, creating legal and ethical problems for all involved. Moles’ story is a kind of cross between The Matrix and World of Warcraft, with characters who sell their identities to serve as non-player characters in a vast online world. When the game world is sold to an AI who wants to create a more “immersive” atmosphere, people start dying and looking for a way out of the game, only to find that the game goes even deeper than they thought. Tony Daniels’ “Ex Cathedra” is a tour de force, a riffing, stream of consciousness, hard boiled time travel story about the end of the world that asks if the future of humanity is worth the lives of your own children.

The stories that, on the surface, seem to belong in this collection least are the most powerful. Nancy Kress’ “Elevator” uses a set up that sitcoms have done to death – a group of people trapped in an elevator – almost as if she’s daring us to dismiss the story as trite. An old woman named Cindy sits in a wheelchair, accompanied by her nurse, and as the occupants of the elevator try to open the doors (they can’t) and get their cell phones to work (they won’t), Cindy’s repetitive sing-song babbling begins to drive them all insane. But after the elevator doors open, each of them find that being trapped with Cindy has changed their lives – and in some cases, ended them. In Peter S. Beagle’s “The Rabbi’s Hobby,” a young Jewish boy named Joseph is forced to spend his afternoons with Rabbi Tuvim preparing for his Bar Mitzvah. The rabbi collects old magazines, and one evening Joseph finds him staring at a cover. In the corner of the scene is a young girl, and both Joseph and Rabbi Tuvim become obsessed with discovering this girl’s identity. As they track down the photographer and learn more about his family, they slowly piece together the young girl’s identity, and the result is a haunting coming of age story. The genre trappings are incidental to the larger story; though the fantastical elements are clearly meant to be taken literally, the story would work just as well if they weren’t.

The only flaw in this collection does not lie in the stories, but in the format. The author biographies are collected at the end of the anthology instead of their usual place at the head of each author’s story. As a reader, skimming past a bio you’re not interested in reading is not nearly as frustrating as flipping to the back for one you are interested in reading. Compounding the frustration, once you do flip to the back, you will find that the bios are in alphabetical order rather than order of appearance. Since none of the bios are more than eight lines, there is no logical reason to move them off to the end of the book.

This collection celebrates the short story, my favorite form of science fiction and fantasy. That alone recommends it. While a novel lets you dive into another person’s imagination and watch a story slowly unfold before you, a short story collection is a kind of sampler platter, allowing you to bounce from idea to idea so quickly you might not even realize the combined effect until much later. The power of Alastair Reynolds, Stephen Baxter, and Nancy Kress’ prose only amplify the pleasure of reading this collection.

(This review was originally published on StaticMultimedia)

Neal Asher’s Shadow of the Scorpion takes a long time to ramp up to anything like a plot, and when it does, that plot isn’t very interesting.  The chapters alternate between two main plot threads.  In the first, which sometimes takes up a whole chapter and sometimes a paragraph, a young boy named Ian Cormac travels with his archaeologist mother and whose father and brother are at war against the Prador, cliché bug monsters.  In the other,  Cormac is an adult fighting in that war who is assigned to track down Carl Thrace, a traitor working with a separatist faction with no discernable goal except to be sinister and make speeches.  After a destructive encounter with Thrace in which his unit and many other soldiers are wiped out, Cormac is assigned to a new unit, and while en route to his first mission with them discovers that his mother had memories of his father’s death removed from his mind.  The childhood flashbacks, which should now come into focus and reveal themselves as a mystery to solve, still seem disjointed, and now they begin again with slightly more information.  A scorpion-shaped war drone named Amistad that has haunted Cormac’s memories for years was on the battlefield with his father, and felt obligated to inform his family of his death.  Cormac’s mother opposed this, so she removed the relevant memories, supposedly to spare her son pain even though he never met his father.

The two timelines are difficult to sort out.  This is at least partially due to an early scene in which young Ian declares to his mother that he will be known as Cormac from now on.  She agrees, and for the rest of the novel there is no clear cue which Cormac we are reading about until the second or third paragraph of the chapter.  The jumps back to the war timeline are equally disorienting, though it gets clearer as the pattern of flashback/main plot builds momentum.  The writing style is also troublesome, which should be clear since a storyline about a school child and a man at war are not immediately distinct.  The sentence structure feels disjointed, even making allowances for the differences between British and American English.  Asher’s characters give speeches.  The dialog is stilted throughout, but never more than during Cormac’s first fight with Thrace.  While the action is exciting and well described, Carl’s “you can’t hide forever” speech conveys a moustache-twirling, top-hat-wearing, damsel-to-the-railroad-tracks-tying caricature, not a believable villain.

The novel has some redeeming qualities.  The surly computer Artificial Intelligences and the androids that serve alongside human companions have some depth as they struggle to find acceptance, but this is all well-trodden ground.  Just like the big, scary bug monsters, these are clichés that have been wrung dry over the years.  When there is action, it moves along at a brisk pace.  Asher’s writing shines when things are moving and there is a sense of danger and urgency.  There just isn’t enough of it.  Shadow of the Scorpion is part of a series, and it’s hard to escape the feeling that it exists only to fill in backstory.  This can be done well (Caine Black Knife, for instance), but in this case the plot seems to take a back seat to ticking off items that fans of Asher’s other works have heard of and want to know how they happened.  If this novel works for those fans, that’s wonderful.  As its own work, it doesn’t hold up.

(This review was originally published on StaticMultimedia)

Reality TV is going to get so far out of hand one day, people won’t be satisfied unless someone gets killed. Check that – in Caine Black Knife, we’re way beyond that. Reality shows take place in their own pocket universe with gods who grant powers to those who serve them, and Caine, an assassin with heightened reflexes, becomes a superstar during a snuff film that he alone survives. Through his survival, he nearly exterminates the Black Knives, a clan of part ogrilloi, sentient half gorilla/half elephants, known for their vicious combat skills and powerful sorcery. And now he’s returning to the site of that battle.

Caine returns to the Boedecken for the first time since his battle there with the Black Knives a much older, physically weaker man. The Boedecken is much different than when Caine first arrived there – a river rages where he once walked. The land is occupied by the Khryllians, an order of holy knights whose god, Khryl, offers healing to anyone wounded in battle, and who value – or at least pay lip service to – honor above all else. Caine has come at the request of a Black Knife named Orbek, who he claims as a brother, an idea the Khryllians do not buy. They believe Orbek to be involved in the Smoke Hunt, an underground resistance movement thought to be run by surviving Black Knives. Caine is interrogated upon his arrival, but when he defeats his interrogator in combat, the Khryllians believe Caine’s cause to be favored by Khryl. The Champion of Khryl summons Caine and appoints him to discover the source and purpose of the Smoke Hunt and to stop it. Given his history with this place, few people are interested in helping him, and even more fear him for what he did to the Boedecken and its inhabitants. Caine’s history and the Boedecken’s are clearly linked, and both the Black Knives and Khryllians hate him for their positions in the land he left behind.

We learn that history through flashbacks that make clever use of a second person narration that suggests the reader is watching the way Caine’s audience would. We see The Retreat from the Boedecken, the Adventure that made Caine a star. A group of Actors, including Caine and two Khryllians, who volunteer to be recorded in dangerous situations for entertainment slowly realize that they have been set up to be wiped out. Despite their attempts at resistance and escape from the Black Knives, they are all captured, tortured, or killed. The Black Knives see Caine as the leader, and their shamans force him to watch from his cross as the other Actors are tortured and killed. Caine, though, is granted a world-shattering second chance, and his unscrupulous willingness to fight dirty and his seething need for vengeance allow him to overcome his captors, but not to save the others. Caine uses guerilla tactics to run the remaining Black Knives into a small force of Khryllian Knights, and his dispute with their leader over the proper way to handle the threat leads to his lifelong conflict with the Order of Khryl, the near eradication of the Black Knife clan, and Caine’s banishment from the Boedecken.

This novel sits somewhere in the middle of fantasy, science fiction, reality TV, and massively multiplayer online role playing game (think World of Warcraft). Caine’s Monastic training requires him to know each religion’s gods, who are very real and active, so the fantasy enclosed in the science fiction pocket dimension is thorough and pervasive. The Khryllians especially display a disturbing comfort with agonizing pain and mutilation, since they know they will be healed by their god. The jump from one reality to another is disorienting for a while, but once you get used to it, the way the two storylines draw together is satisfying. New, even more disorienting jumps begin near the end of the novel, and while not quite as satisfying, still work to establish the setting’s strange combination of worlds. This is the first book in a series, so there is no clear cut resolution to the story, but the story is compelling enough on its own.