David Gillon

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Penric's Mission, Lois McMaster Bujold

The certainties of Penric's life in the World of the Five Gods have changed since last we saw him in Penric and the Shaman. He's now around 30, though still taken as younger, the Princess-Archdivine has died, medicine has lost its attraction, and he has moved on to a new Duke's court. His new lord has decided he might make a useful spy, which is quite a change for a Sorceror-Divine (and almost a doctor) of the Bastard. The change in role clearly excites Penric, but things don't go so well, and soon he's quite literally in a hole, with Desdemona, his inner demon, she of the 11 prior lives, all female, called on to perform a little life-saving self-surgery. Still, it's difficult to keep a good man, and his demon, down in a hole and Penric and Des manage to figure a way out. Which still leaves him overseas, in a city where he is visibly a foreigner, and there's the small matter of the man he was sent to meet, who will have been thoroughly incriminated by the documents he was carrying.

Penric is rather too late to prevent his contact's thoroughly Byzantine punishment, but his stubborn side, and maybe also the Bastard, mean he's not about to abandon him, or his interestingly widowed sister, even if that means taking up doctoring again. It's perhaps surprising just how dangerous a spy Penric could be, but he's constrained by his ethics as both doctor and divine, though of course that's a divine of the Bastard's order, and the Bastard's ethics are interestingly flexible (I loved the way Penric finance's himself). And only Penric could interrupt a duel to the death to tell his opponent 'look, you're doing it wrong' and deliver theological advice.

Grand Central Arena, Ryk Spoor

Ariane Austin is your typical space-racer pilot, bar the blue hair and the all-powerful AI in the box on her belt, in a post-scarcity society that has expanded to dominate the entire solar system, but can't make the jump to an interstellar society for some reason. Then up pops Dr Simon Sandrisson, who just happens to have figured out a jump drive, but can't get it to work as all the automation fails the instant his test probes jump. So he needs a pilot, and the rest of a crew. Cue crew assembly montage, mostly focused on power engineer Dr Marc C DuQuesne, who is More Than He Seems.

The jump drive is based on the everything's closer in warp space principle, what they hadn't bargained on is warp space being full. There is a mini Dyson sphere for every star system, and at the centre of everything is the Arena. It's sort of the Babylon 5 scenario, but rather than a beacon of hope, all alone in the night, the Arena is a beacon of full-contact sports, where everything is up for challenge. The Arena is old, and ruled by what is presumably an AI, but no other AI works in Arena Space. Nor do nuclear reactors, which is a bit of a bugger when you need your fusion plant to recharge your jump drive. The Arena is also the meeting place for the various factions of Arena Space, and the medium of commerce is betting on formal Challenges. But that's okay, Humanity is a society of insane risk-takers by Arena standards. (Of course we are, got to have that human exceptionalism) So it's up to Ariane, as newly designated leader of the Faction of Humanity, to figure out a way to refuel their ship.

Obviously this means Humanity variously bonding, having scientific meet-cute, or thoroughly annoying all five main factions in no time whatsoever. The Molothos are your typical aggressive xenophobes, the Vengeance think it's all an alien plot, the Faith are the Arena's version of B5's Vorlons (the cuddly Kosh version, not the fascist planet destroyers of Season 4), the Analytic are scientists and the Blessed to Serve are the biological slaves of an AI dominated society. And then there's Orphan, clearly the same species as the Blessed, and leader of the Liberated, a faction of one, who serves as their guide to the Arena. And lurking in the backgroud are the Shadeweavers, the polar opposite of the Faith, with more than a touch of B5 techno-mage about them.

And it's up to Ariane to win the prize of a trip home.

If you imagine Babylon 5 crossed with Golden Age SF you'll get the right feel for this, it's space opera on a grand scale, with all humanity's fate in the hands of Ivanova Ariane, backed by a certain power engineer whose name is a flaming banner he's more than he seems.
 

Spheres of Influence, Ryk Spoor

The sequel to Grand Central Arena. Ariane and the others have been back to the Solar System, to explain why Humanity is now at war, and the politicians and diplomats are Not Happy. But it's time to head back to the Arena ahead of the official mission, but with a new recruit to the crew. Marc thinks Ariane needs a bodyguard, and he has just the 'man' for the job, Sun Wu Kung, the Monkey King.

Meanwhile, back at the Arena, everyone is plotting, especially those factions Ariane managed to humiliate the first time around. And the plotting gets worse with the arrival of two human diplomats, and a wildcard. But Ariane was difficult to beat the first time around, and this time she's got the Monkey King backing her.

I liked this just as much as the first, but there are two major flaws. The first is it loses a little focus on what makes the Arena so attractive a storytelling venue, the second is the real problem, the story seems to be missing about it's first sixth. There's a back-story summary that includes about a page of 'and what happened in between' that's actually fairly important to the plot. I'm not certain whether that means it was written as a separate novella, was a late editorial deletion, or what, but it should definitely be there at the start, and it isn't. It's still a thoroughly entertaining story, but it's a flawed entertaining.

Shadow of Victory, David Weber

I'm a fan of the Honorverse, and Weber in general, but I found this seriously irritating. That's not to say I didn't also thoroughly enjoy it, I read all 800 pages in under 24 hours, but it has some serious issues. This is the latest in the Shadows sub-series, which concentrates on the exploits of Admiral Michelle Henke and Captain Aivars Terekhov and his crew in the newly annexed Talbot Cluster (because Honor is now far too senior for the ship-to-ship stuff), and the main problem is it's a thematic repeat of Shadows of Freedom, the previous book, with walk-on parts for A Rising Thunder, the last mainstream Honor Harrington novel and Cauldron of Ghosts, the last novel in the Crown of Slaves Zilwicki/Cachat sub-series. Essentially we're getting three years of history we've already seen three times over, from a fourth perspective.

Shadows of Freedom was the Mesans (slave-creating, ubermensch, behind-the-scenes manipulators) using agents of the Solarian League (the 800lb gorilla of oppressively corrupt bureacratic states) as puppets to set up local liberation movements/terrorist cells to oppose the Manticoran annexation of the Talbot Cluster (never mind the overwhelming majority of Talbot cluster residents being firmly of the thank god you got here before the Sollies, where do we sign up to be imperial subjects opinion). Victory has them repeating the same stunt, but in Solly territory, telling the liberation movements on various Solly client states that they're the Manticorans, here to help them break free of Solarian oppression, and that the Navy will be there when they do rise up to keep the Solarian headbreakers off their backs - the operational concept is for all these efforts to fail and tarnish the Manties' rep.

So you have the Polish planet with its football-based liberation movement, the Czech planet with its party-based liberation movement, the Celtic planet with its forestry-based liberation movement, the US planet with its redneck liberation movement, and the other planet with its non-denominational liberation movement. All expecting Mantie help and the Manties none the wiser. Results are varied, for values of varied ranging into circa 10 million dead. (I'm not convinced having both Polish and Czech liberation movements was wise, I got thoroughly confused as to which character belonged in which movement).

There aren't actually that many new characters. A couple of Solly intel types who are beginning to figure out the Mesans are manipulating them (of course we already had a couple of Solly intel types who are... etc),  a new Mesan junior spymaster and his sociopathic deputy, and Aivars Terekov's wife Sinead, who is A Force of Nature - a significant chunk of the book is Sinead flattening anyone who stands between her and her husband after he's redeployed after precisely two nights at home. For fan-service Ginger Lewis finally gets her own ship, but having built her and it up, she and it aren't even present for the culmination of her own arc. And at the end of it all the overall series narrative has moved on a whole 12 hours from Cauldron of Ghosts.

Irritating.

Other observations. Not having read any Honorverse in a while, the relative lack of familiarity rather beat me about the head with just how keen Weber is on tall, thin female officers with 'exotic' looks. Here including a literal catwoman. And his mainstream characters do seem to be rather predominantly Western. Oh, Manticore's Queen Elizabeth (and her cousin Michelle Henke) are black, so it's not the white man's burden, but anyone of Asian background is overwhelmingly likely to get exotic hung on them (this includes Honor and her mother). I don't think we've seen an Asian-derived society in the entire series, while even the Czechs now have a star-system to call their own. The non-denominational liberation movement does have a Thai family involved. They run a Thai restaurant where the coup leaders meet, and the family patriarch goes by Thai Granpa. Seriously?!

ETA I remembered last night that the Honorverse's Andermani Empire is ethnically Asian, but culturally it's explicitly modelled on Prussia. *Headdesk*

Anno Dracula, Kim Newman

I've now read the last two books (to date) in the series, Dracula Cha Cha, Cha, and Johnny Alucard, but this is big enough already, so I'll save those for a separate update,

Up Next

Not certain, I'm tempted to re-read the entire Eric Flint/Ryk Spoor Boundary series, I'm probably 30 pages into Boundary, but might settle for just Castaway Planet, which is the next in the series after the two I've read. It's a shared setting, rather than a related plot, so the re-read is optional.