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The umpteenth Harry Dresden novel by Jim Butcher follows up on the previous one titled “Changes” by exploring that changes made in the universe in the last installment. Harry’s back, but after being assassinated he’s back as a ghost, with the task of solving his own murder as well as helping his friends with the fallout from his previous apocalypse. Things have got darker in Chicago in his absence, and his friends are not faring so well in this not-so-brave new world. Meanwhile, most of them can’t see Harry and even if and when they can, they don’t all believe in his identity and/or good intentions. I’ve seen some criticism of this from people who feel the series has jumped the shark but I think he’s dealing well with the inevitable levelling up that Harry’s been going through n the previous books, setting new challenges, all tied in to earlier plot threads that he’s dropped along the way.

A one-off collaboration between Steven Brust and Megan Lindholm. A mixture of police procedural in Lakota, Ohio and Gypsy/Celtic mythology. Written well before the modern trend for urban fantasy, though after De Lint’s Jack the Giant Killer and Drink Down the Moon. An interesting set of authorial voices (a both Burst and Linholm tend to create) combine with a deep twisting of European folklore in a lovely little tale of murder, good, evil, temptation and redemption.

This is one of those books that’s sat on my shelf unread for many years and I’m glad I finally got round to it.

A recent (very) occasional strip published in 2000AD comic, the two so far are collected in this somewhat overpriced Graphic Novel (GBP12 for around forty pages). The title of the volume is that of the first of the two stories. This is a Cthulhu-mythos-inspired tale of an upper class gentleman and his servant (a bit of Lord Peter Whimsey and a bit of Bertie Wooster) who go around investigating and fighting incursions into our reality by elder things. There’s a shadowy government conspiracy lurking in the background but no real details on that given in these two tales, just its introduction. A fun little read if you like the Mythos, reasonably well-done and the characterisations aren’t derivative per se, though it’s difficult in such a short selection to really distinguish them from so many other 20s/30s pairings of post-war upper and lower-class former soldiers. Decently drawn to reflect the settings and action.

Another Simon R. Green romp, this time the latest in his Bond-ish (in title at least) urban fantasy about the Droods,  the secret agents with sufficiently advanced technology (strange matter) help that they look like magical creatures. The titles are drawn from Bond but are sometimes little really to do with the actual subject matter. This latest one sees Eddie Drood recoving from being dead (hmm, shades of Butcher’s Ghost Story, there – pun intended) and taking on a cthulhish cult. More excellent modern urban pulp fantasy churned out by the bucketload by Green who hit his stride with Something from the Nightside and has been running along nicely since.

Simon R. Green channels P. J. Hammond in this third installment of adventures with the ghostfinders of the Carnacki Institute. This is a fun little romp of a Sapphire and Steel plot but with Green’s wisecracking reference-filled style laid on top. There’s some good progress on the ongoing plot arc of the series together with a neat little closed-world plot that chunters along steadily, with chills and spills along the way. Modern pulp urban fantasy at its best.

The front cover has a quote from “The Denver Post” (that well-known literary reviewing journal) that this “succeds on making cyberpunk fun again.” I wasn’t aware that it had stopped being fun when it was well done. Unfortunately, for me at least, this one isn’t well done. It read very much like a first novel, althoughit’s the author’s sixth published novel. There’s a decent plotline underlying it with an interesting idea, though i’m not sure it’s really cyberpunk. It seems to teeter on the edge of being parody/humour without reaching into being funny, but with the bizarre edge ruining thenormal suspension of disbelief. For me, humour like Surfing Samurai Robots or Aprin’s Phule series (review to come soon, I read them this year but haven’t reviewed them yet) allows for a greater suspension of disbelief since things are meant to be absurd. When you approach this line without being funny, the absurdity breaks the disbelief.

It isn’t the main plot that’s the problem for me, but the characters. They all seem like they’re out of central casting, with their requisite background of craziness. ex-cop, former mental patient, spritualist, antiques thief with Asperger’s Syndrome, abusive criminal boyfriend, conspiracy theorist waiter and on and on. The constant sexual undertones of the main character’s interactions with the females in the book would be spot on in a hard bioled detective parody, but this isn’t such a pardoy, or if it is, it doesn’t parody hard enough.

The HP Lovecraft Historical Society seems to have missed this one, so I’ve filled it in for them.

Great Cthulhu’s Coming to Town (lyrics)

You better watch out
You better keep an eye
Better not doubt
I’m telling you why
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town
Great Cthulhu’s is coming to town
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town

He’s making no list
I’ve checked this out twice;
Gonna find out Who’s tasty and nice
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town

He sees you in your safe place
He knows if you’re alive
He doesn’t care if you’ve been bad or good
Just to stay sane you must strive!
O! You better watch out
You better keep an eye
Better not doubt
I’m telling you why
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town
Great Cthulhu’s coming to town

Great Cthulhu’s Coming to Town (Lyrics) by Andrew Alexander Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://blog.a-cubed.info/?p=637.

Last one today, I promise (for those whose friends-list is filling up with my book blogging). I’m determined to catch up on a Cherryh kick I went through a few months ago but didn’t get around to blogging.

Yet another of her Alliance/Union books, this is one of the Merchanter-based ones, though it also includes the Fleet. It’s a fairly late on in the post-Company Wars era, so still directly linked to the events of Downbelow Station rather than much further down the timeline.

This is the coming-of-age story of a young man whose upbringing has been screwed up royally by his screwed up mother and her complacent self-satisfied family, on a classic Merchanter family trading ship. Conceived in a rape but as we eventually find out one which while the victim didn’t deserve (no one ever does) the victim was hardly a sensible and sane woman to start with.

We get Cherryh’s over-the-shoulder third person trademark on multiple characters in this story and as with a number of her other books she remarkably manageds to make some really screwed up and nasty people really work as main characters. It helps that the main character Joh Bowe Hawkins is as sane and positive a character as he can be given his background. His coming-of-age is the main point of the book, behind which is an explanation of some of what happened to the Earth Company Fleet after Downbelow Station. Wonderfully ethically-grey as much of Cherryh’s writing is, this explores some of the darker sides of the human character and comes out with a message that even the most screwed around can posibly find somewhere to fit in.

A nice addition to the Merchanter set and one of my favourites of that subsqeuence, along with Rimrunners.

The long-awaited (approximately two decades) sequel to Cyteen. This picks up mere months after the events in Cyteen and all takes place over a few months time. Compared to the timescale of Cyteen which follows the death of the first Ariane Emory and the growth to early adulthood of her clone, this is a breakneck pace. There are some retcons in here, such as the xeplanation of the inconsistent numbering of some of the Azi in Cyteen, and the introduction of a few Azi who didn’t appear in the first, giving all the Reseune natural born senior people at least one Azi companion. There’s also an attempt to deal with the outdated computer terminology and the introduction of more advanced computing systems. Other than that the basic set-up remains the same and the storyline continues on where Cyteen left off in both personal and political terms. The mystery of what really happened to Ariane Emory I is revealed, though it’s a little bit of a violation of the law of Chekov’s gun. This is a nice read, but sadly not up to the masterpiece qualities of Cyteen. Then again that was always going to be a hard act to follow and twenty years on even more so. It’s clearly written with scope for another sequel, but whether it will get one is, I think, doubtful. It’s less demanding of one than Cyteen, possibly because  Cherryh has an honesty towards her fans and so leaves things open enough for an interesting further installment without leaving so many juggling balls up in the air it leaves one slightly unsatisfied (as the slightly abrupt ending of Cyteen did for me, being it’s only major flaw, I think) given how long this took to get commissioned. Definitely worth reading if you like Cyteen.

What to say about this Hugo Award Winner? It was a masterpiece at the time and remains a classic of the genre. Some elements of it have not dated well, unfortunately, in particular the terminology surrounding the compters. The constant mention of Tapes is slightly dated even for 1989 and the lack of graphical interfaces likewise. These niggles aside, though the strengths of the book in protraying  a monstrous main character as sympathetic, in two “incarnations” while weaving politics, psychgology, sociology, economics and personal vendettas together is absolutely wonderful. Her trademark alienation is more overt in some ways here as she explains Union’s “Specials” as people with a vision of something int he universe that only they can see, but that is important to humanity for them to articulate in a way that will eventually allow others to comprehend their vision and assimilate it fully. Perhaps even more relevant today as the pace of technological change continues to increase while the social fabric struggles to cope with those changes.

I remember being in one of Cherryh’s GoH programme items at Bucconeer where she was asked about if and when she’d write the sequel to Cyteen (it was clearly crying out for a sequel and written with one in mind). Her response was that she’d write it as soon s a publisher was willing to pay her for it to be written (as a pro, she wrote to contract and it was on offer but no one was picking it up, at least not for what she was willing to accept for it [my subtext]). I found this bizarre at the time that no publisher would pick up the contract for the sequel to a Hugo Winner (by a multiple winner of the Hugo for best novel). Luckily, eventually someone did pick it up.

If you haven’t read this and have even a vague liking for science fiction, go read it now!