The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday

 
The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday
by Saad Hossain
TorDotCom

2019

 

 

In The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, we start the story with the deposed djinn monarch Melek Ahmar waking up waking up inside a coffin after something like 4000-5000 years of imprisonment and slumber. At the height of his prehistoric power, he had a lot of honorifics, including the titular Lord of Tuesday, but no one remembers him or particularly believes in djinn any more.

 
The first person Ahmar meets is Bhan Gurung, a former gukha soldier, now living as a hermit in a cave outside Kathmandu. Gurung bring Ahmar up to date. It's some time in the future, the Earth is polluted and depopulated, the atmosphere is full of toxic nano-robots, and all humans have cybernetic implants that connect them to the internet and generate good nanites every time they exhale. (This whole set-up seems unduly complicated for a 100ish page novella, but whatever, the implants also give people constant instantaneous medical care.) 

 
Kathmandu is run by a supposedly non-sentient, non-conscious AI named Karma. Karma gives out free food and housing, and runs the economy by setting a fair price for all transactions, and paying people for deeds that benefit the public good. (The only currency left is karma points.) Ahmar wants to be a king again, and Gurung wants revenge on one of the richest men in the city, so they set off to make trouble.

 
The duo briefly try raising an army of malcontents, only to discover there basically are no malcontents - Karma's version of UBI includes free beer, so even the gamblers and layabouts are basically happy to not rock the boat. Next they set up in a garden and start granting wishes. People can already get almost anything they want, so all the wishes are for very anti-social stuff. (Or so Hossain tells us, the only example actually we get to see is a woman wishing for an earthquake to destroy her neighbor's house.) 

 
Ahmar can in fact grant wishes, because he is literally made of magic, doesn't show up on camera, can't be predicted by algorithms, and breaks all the tech around him. Karma is understandably worried, and brings in a human investigator to figure out how to make the djinn go away. The investigator figures out who Gurung wants revenge on and why - the guy got rich kidnapping people and selling them to cities with too low a population to ward of the bad nanites, Gurung's family was among the victims.

 
So the gurkha and the djinn go to confront the rich guy, and the investigator 'betrays' Karma by helping the outcasts get justice / revenge. The pair set off on a road trip, and in the aftermath of the rich guy's death, Karma and Kathmandu are both transformed, setting up two possible sequels. 

 
This thing definitely feels like a small part of a larger project. There's just way too much worldbuilding, and it's way too complex for a book of this size otherwise. There's a second teenage djinn who doesn't serve much purpose in the story, and the whole wish-granting interlude doesn't actually seem to advance anyone's plans; it just kills time for those characters while the investigator figures out the truth about the evil rich guy.

 
The depiction of the Karma AI was the most interesting part of the book for me. Hossain's depiction feels like it's in conversation with Westworld and Person of Interest about what an AI-run society would look like. Despite the way the initial set-up of Karma is implicated in the evil rich guy's human trafficking scheme, it Hossain's version seems considerably more utopian than the others. (I can't tell which, but Karma's behavior in the last section is either a failure at consistent characterization on Hossain's part, or a hint that Karma IS sentient and has been keeping that secret from the humans.)

Goldilocks

 
 
Goldilocks

by Laura Lam

Orbit

2020

 

 

The briefest possible description for Laura Lam's Goldilocks, though not entirely accurate, might be Interstellar meets Handmaid's Tale.

 
Set maybe 15-20 years in the future, Goldilocks presents us with a hot, crowded Earth, a planet of rising sea levels and mass migrations of climate refugees, and an America with a redpill misogynist president, and women's life chances restricted in a way that's more like the 1950s than like Gilead. But Lam's realism is effective. Her story benefits from her insights about how small the changes would need to be to make life nearly intolerable.

 
Billionaire tech girlboss Valerie Black and her adopted daughter Naomi (orphaned by a California wildfire), along with three other women who also trained to go to space but had their careers thwarted by a NASA that increasingly reserves its best jobs for men, launch a private rocket into orbit, where they steal a long-range NASA ship, and set off for Mars. Valerie has been a decades-long advocate for human migration to an exoplanet, and this is her attempt to make her dream a reality.

 
In Lam's telling, humans have discovered a habitable world 10 light years away, dubbed 'Cavendish,' and haven proven and tested space-warp flight to make the journey possible. There have been unmanned probes to Cavendish, bringing back seeds that botanist Naomi has figured out how to grow under simulated exoplanet conditions. But humans still haven't used the warp drive themselves, and no human has visited Cavendish. Valerie, Naomi, and the others aim to change that.

 
The prologue to the book depicts Naomi returning to Earth without ever having left the solar system, so we know from the beginning that the plan will fail. The question will be how. An accident? What kind? Sabotage? Who and why? The first half of the book is concerned with realistic problems that might confront a small crew trying to pilot an unproven ship on a pioneering mission. There's a growing sense that Valerie is keeping secrets, which comes to a head, and then drives the action of the second half.
Also, Naomi finds out she's pregnant.

 
Valerie initially seems like a 'good billionaire,' until Lam systematically attacks the idea that there could be any such thing. But my one qualm about the book is that some of Valerie's secrets come off as almost cartoon villainy that seems at odds with the restraint of the rest of her worldbuilding. Then again, have I seen our actual billionaires? 

 
Anyway, Naomi is pregnant, tensions among the crew are high, truths are revealed, and then there's a devastating pandemic back on Earth. Goldilocks was published in May 2020, so Lam must have finished it in 2019. I won't spoil exactly what happens, but as we know from page 1, the ship returns to Earth instead of going onward to Cavendish.

 
With the exceptions of Interstellar, and maybe the fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson, I think most recent works about human migration to another planet is subversive or deconstructive. It accepts the premise that we might try, but also treats those attempts as naive. Goldilocks ends with an epilogue set 30 years later, sometime in the 2060s or 70s, that is slightly more hopeful than the rest of the book, but overall, I'd count Lam among the pessimists who doubt the very premise of outrunning our problems on Earth by moving to another planet.

Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told 2

 
 
Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told 2
DC Comics

2007

 

 

Reading the second volume of Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told finishes off that DC series for me. As in volume 1, we get at least one more retelling of the origin story, and one more story about Robin (almost) dying. 

 

This volume is more focused on Batman stories that expand his fictional world though. The origin story is for the Batman of Earth-2. Robin appears to die because a villain puts a bunch of Robin mannequins into death traps just to mess with Batman psychologically.

 
We get a golden age story where Batman mows down monsters with a gatling gun. In another featuring Kathy Kane Batwoman and Bette Kane Batgirl, the heroes all get teleported to alien planets, and Batwoman kisses Batman and Batgirl kisses Robin. Huntress (Earth-2 Batman's daughter) shows up to help Earth-1 Batman solve a cold case about his dad funding the mob. We get a retelling of a chapter of Barbara Gordon Batgirl's origin story where Batman brings her into the Batcave for training. 

 
And while most of the stories in all these collections tend to be shorter, they found room to include a 56-page double issue where a whole lot of Batman's enemies team up to kill him, and where Jason Todd Robin first dons his mask.

The Plastic Magician

 
The Plastic Magician

by Charlie Holmberg
47 North

2018

 

 

I read Charlie Holmberg's first magician book, The Paper Magician, back in grad school. It turned into a trilogy, although I never read the second or third entries. Now Holmberg has started a new trilogy with new characters, set in the same world. Holmberg was mentored by Brandon Sanderson when she first started out writing, and it shows in the way she treats magic in these series - as a rational system with knowable rules that can be studied and applied much like science.

 
The Plastic Magician tells the story of Alvie, an American magician who just graduated from magician college, and gets accepted to a prestigious apprenticeship in England. Alvie and her supervisor, Magician Praff, are 'polymakers,' or plastic magicians. In Holmberg's world, magicians can each bond with a single man-made substance, and then imprint spells on things made from that substance. There are magicians who work with paper, glass, metal alloys, rubber, fire, and plastic is the newest man-made material to get a branch of magic. It's the late 19th century, and there's a Magical Industrial Revolution underway. Praff is an inventive Edison- or Tesla-like figure, and so Alvie's story is all about the thrill and competition of new discovery.

 
In short order after arriving in England, Alvie meets Magician Ezzell, Praff's biggest rival, the handsome young Bennett, a fellow apprentice studying paper magic, and Ethel, Bennett's sister who recently lost an arm in a factory accident. She also learns that someone has been burglarizing plastic magicians around London. Praff wowed the world a couple years ago with a plastic dome that projects images inside, but is in a bit of a creative rut. Alvie suggests making a plastic prosthesis for Ethel, and we're off to the races.

 
Praff wants to show off the prosthesis at the annual Discovery Convention, but first they have to figure out how to make a prosthesis that works, which includes studying anatomy, hydraulics, and inventing a new spell. Alvie also very tentatively starts dating Bennett, although they both keep getting interrupted by work, and the whole crime mystery ... which isn't really that mysterious, since there's only one suspect, and Alive, at least, suspects him immediately.

 
So, they invent a working prosthetic arm, Alvie and Bennett successfully confirm their feelings for each other, and it's time for the Discovery Convention. The final major bit of plot involves the mysterious criminal sabotaging Praff's car to stop him from getting to the convention, and stealing his trailer of inventions to present as his own. The criminal accidentally kidnaps Alvie because she was checking on the trailer, and locks her up in a basement. Alvie escapes, makes it to the convention, alerts the police, the police handle things competently and correctly, and the day is saved! Alvie also does a bit of magic that's supposed to be impossible while escaping, and so the fire of discovery is lit within her. I'd guess she'll finally figure it out in the eventual third book in this series.

 
Alvie is a fun character. She wants to wear pants instead of skirts, which Holmberg talks about somewhat too often. Alvie is good at focusing, good at mental math, and bad at 'turning it off' to interact socially. She's also really interested in discovery in a way that's easy to root for.

 
Holmberg treats the world of her stories as a basically just world. There's no reexamination of real historical inequalities associated with industrialization, and despite the wonders that magic can produce (including some paper magic that works like texting) the technology level is basically the same there as in the real Victorian England. It's light reading in that sense. An eventual third trilogy about "The Atomic Magician" would probably be too dark to fit in with the others, though perhaps "The Silicon Magician" about magic computers is an eventual possibility.

A Quick and Easy Guide to Asexuality

 
A Quick and Easy Guide to Asexuality

by Molly Muldoon and Will Hernandez
Limerence Press

2022

 

A Quick and Easy Guide to Asexuality belongs to the same series of short graphic nonfiction as the guide to they/them pronouns I read a couple months ago.

 
Muldoon and Hernandez define asexuality, explain the 'gray ace' spectrum and the 'split attraction model,' discuss growing up asexual and having adult romantic relationships, and delve into cultural representations of asexuality and (mostly online?) anti-ace discourse.

 
Muldoon and Hernandez define asexuality as not feeling sexual attraction or desire. They acknowledge that the amount of attraction people feel varies from individual to individual with some experiencing a lot, some none, and everyone else somewhere in the middle. 'Gray aces' experience some attraction, but still identify as asexual. Given the spectrum, what makes someone ace? M and H don't exactly say, but I would suggest that if someone feels enough less sexual desire than their peers that they feel excluded or isolated by the difference, then an asexual identity might help them understand themselves.

 
Muldoon and Hernandez also include 'demisexuality' as a kind of asexual identity. Demisexuals are people who only feel sexual attraction to someone after they already have emotional attraction or intimacy first. I would guess that this is actually very common, and might be true of a majority of people - but that's just a guess, and I might be wrong.

 
M and H distinguish between sexual attraction and sexual behavior to explain that asexual people sometimes (often?) voluntarily have sex, and that being in a sexual relationship doesn't mean you have to give up your ace identity.

 
One of the key experiences of growing up asexual seems to be feeling different or worrying about being 'broken' because you feel less sexual attraction than your peers. Muldoon and Hernandez say this is very common, and I wonder if it might be the defining experience that makes someone feel like as ace identity 'makes sense' for them. (I think almost everyone who hits puberty later than their peers experiences this feeling for awhile, but for asexuals, it's not temporary.)

 
M and H also seem to suggest that aces are very attuned to depictions of sexuality in the media, because they feel alienated by their own difference from those depictions. Indeed, it seems that some ace people may feel that our media are pushing a pro-sex agenda that is hostile to asexuals. Ironically, I am also aware of a number of voices claiming there is too little sexuality in the media, and that our culture is hostile to realistic depictions of sex and desire.

 
The 'ace stereotypes' M and H discuss include the 'asexual male genius' character in movies and on tv, very vocal hostility to the idea of asexuality in various comment sections online (which often threaten rape as a 'cure'), and ambivalence from some queer people about whether or not aces should be considered part of the queer community. They don't mention it, but I suppose that aces might feel especially bothered by the same 'when are you getting married? when are you having children?' pressure that a lot of people hate being on the receiving end of.

 
Muldoon and Hernandez also spend a lot of the book reassuring other aces that their identity is real and valid. While I do feel like I learned something from reading this, I think other aces are the primary audience for this book.

The Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City

 
The Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City

by Brandon Leach
Secret Acres
2016
 

 

After enjoying an excerpt in Best American Comics, I decided to seek out the complete Pterodactyl Hunters in the Gilded City. I enjoyed reading it, but also found it disappointing, because it's too short.
 

The story is set in New York, 1905, in a world where the city is besieged by pterodactyls that eat people. We follow Declan, an apprentice hunter, who spends his nights in a watchtower, while his older brother Eamon patrols the skies in a hot air balloon.

 
In the opening scene, Eamon kills the next-to-last pterodactyl in the city. Then he and his increasingly unreliable balloonmate Alfie spend the next night unsuccessfully hunting the last one. Declan spends the book wishing he could get a chance to hunt, wondering what he'll do for a job after all the pterodactyls are dead, and pining after Bridget, who has become a nun ... but maybe likes him too.

 
Declan prepares Eamon's harpoon guns, and when one misfires and blinds Eamon, he feels guilty. Alfie seems to think it was deliberate sabotage. Declan gets to take his brother's place in the balloon, he and Alfie find the last pterodactyl, and the book ends abruptly on a question - can Declan get over his nerves to take the shot and kill the monster, or will he hesitate or miss and let it get away? And either way, what will happen next?

 
While I guess technically the story is complete, I found this ending unsatisfying, and I also felt like Leach did too much set-up to have the story end there. Alfie and Bridget in particular seem to have their own stories in motion that are cut short.

 
I really like Leach's art. It's sketchy and loose, but full of life. None of the buildings he draws stand up straight or have any right angles, but he covers them in period details, and his backgrounds look like a neighborhood of tenements in turn-of-the-century New York. The pterodactyls seethe with anger. And the style really fits the story. Declan is kind of mopey and uncertain, feels like he hasn't accomplished anything, and doesn't know what to do next. The neighborhood is poor and has suffered from years of predation. The slightly shabby quality of the art suits that.

 
I just wish the thing was longer! The story can end there, but I don't think it should.

The Medieval Machine

 
The Medieval Machine
The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages

by Jean Gimpel

Penguin

1977
 

 

My introduction to the central idea of The Medieval Machine arrived via the television series Connections, which I loved when I was a kid. Connections talked about the productivity increase achieved by replacing human and animal power with waterwheels to mill grain, process cloth, saw wood, pump bellows, and hammer iron. Gimpel makes it all sound more interesting than I do, and it turns out, this is just the first chapter.

 
Gimpel also covers innovations in agriculture (using horses instead of oxen and 3-field instead of 2-field crop rotation), mining, and labor conditions. He notes the accidental over-use of wood and various forms of industrial pollution. And he talks about the rise of reason and science from around 1100 to around 1300, including the translation of Greek and Arabic texts into Latin. The pinnacle of Medieval science was the mechanical clock to replace the water clock. Invented to track the movements of the sun, moon, and planets, it accidentally produced uniform hours as a byproduct.

 
Gimpel notes that this period of growth and progress ended in the 1300s when famines, Black Death, and wars reduced the European population and turned both the Church and the general public toward mysticism (with anti-witch violence representing official mysticism using torture and murder to suppress popular mysticism.) Some of the perception of the Renaissance as such a contrast against the so-called 'Dark Ages' is because of the poor conditions in the 1300s, which were much worse than in the preceding 200-300 years.

 
I wish that, in his epilogue, Gimpel hadn't chosen to claim that 1975, when he finished his text, was at or near the 'end of an era' for the West that would be similar to the end of the Medieval industrial revolution. Let's start with the obvious reason first - computers. At the same time that Gimpel was claiming that the inventiveness of Western minds was spent and no new important inventions would be coming along to significantly change things for perhaps hundreds of years, computers were already transforming the operations of business, and home computers and the internet were only a few years away.

 
My second reason is that Gimpel's claim is based on the idea of historical cycles of what we'd currently call 'vibes.' Maybe it's my sociological training in grad school, or maybe I'm just 'vibe-blind,' but I'm deeply distrustful of predictions made on the basis of moods or cycles. 

 
Yes, anything that rises or falls must eventually peak, and either plateau or reverse. But societies aren't just one thing. Every society has its progressives and traditionalists, rationalists and mystics, authoritarians and liberals. Their numbers may change, and the balance of power, but they are all always present and always pushing for their preferred vision. They are all always winning in some respects and losing in others. I don't believe in the inevitable rise or decline of anything. The future will be determined by people competing to make their ideals win out, not by impersonal historical cycles. And whatever happens next won't be the end of anything, because there will always be another 'next' after that.

Fantastic Four: Grand Design

 
Fantastic Four: Grand Design

by Tom Scioli

Marvel Comics

2020

 

 

I've read a lot of good graphic novels this year, but I haven't had the best luck with my superhero picks. Fantastic Four: Grand Design is Tom Scioli's attempt to do for the F4 what his colleague Ed Piskor did for the X-Men. In my opinion, he's not nearly as successful, either at creating a sense of overarching narrative, or at telling a comprehensible story on a panel-by-panel basis.

 
In addition to the story of the Fantastic Four, spanning roughly from their 'creation' in the ill-fated space flight to the birth of Reed and Sue's son, Franklin. We also see the Watcher, the Inhumans, Galactus and the Silver Surfer, Black Panther, Namor, and of course, Doctor Doom. There are a lot of other characters, mostly villains, who show up for a single panel here and there. 

 
Because I watched reruns the F4 cartoon as a kid, I at least recognize some of them, but the effect is less like a summary than like watching something on fast forward and just catching glimpses of key frames as you speed through. I don't think this is solely the fault of the Grand Design format; I had a similar experience reading Scioli's Transformers vs GI Joe a few years ago.

 
The book collects both issues of Scioli's miniseries, and the art is notably worse in the second issue. Scioli also does the same thing as Piskor with his colors, where everything is muddy and fuzzy to imitate the look of opening a decades old comic today. But Scioli's colors are muddier, and he never takes advantage of the off-white background to have 'special effects' visually pop in real pure white. This seems like a missed opportunity in general, and especially considering the nature of the Invisible Girl's powers, plus all the various cosmic energies getting invoked. 

 
Scioli's one really big change to the original art is to draw Sue, whenever she's invisible, as having her eyes, skeleton, and internal organs visible to the audience (but not the other characters), like one of those old Visible Woman anatomical models.

 
Even Fantastic Four fans are probably better off skipping this one.

Giantess

 
Giantess
The Story of a Girl Who Traveled the World in Search of Freedom
by JC Deveney
art by Nuria Tamarit
Magnetic Press

2022

 

 

I purchased Giantess from Kickstarter. It's a recent French graphic novel that tells a fairy-tale-like fantasy story about Celeste, a giantess who goes on a long adventure trying to learn about the world, find a place in it, and live in a gender-egalitarian community.

 
The story opens with a family of farmers with six sons finding a giant infant and adopting her. As they grow up, the sons all go off to take their place in the world. Celeste wants to see things too, but her parents want to protect her. As a young woman she's already 20 or 30 feet tall, and I think she may keep growing throughout the book.

 
So, Celeste sneaks off with a traveling peddler to see a festival. She damages a building and runs away. She meets a knight sent to arrest her, who takes her to his castle. During the months of her pre-trial imprisonment, he falls in love with her. She decides to go home, and repels a foreign invasion along the way. She's rearrested, and placed in a dungeon with other woman, who are all being punished by a cruel inquisitor, who believes they all serve a witch. The inquisitor tries to burn them all at the stake, when they are saved ... by the witch!

 
The witch leads the women to the swamp, where she teaches them medicine and encourages them to teach others. Eventually Celeste leaves with an actress and joins her troupe. She falls in love with the tightrope walker. The troupe is invited to perform in a Venice-like city, then to stay. Celeste falls in love with the prince, and marries him, but cannot give birth to an heir. To save the royal face, she's sent to a convent, where she temporarily loses herself to religious fervor.

 
Eventually she escapes again, and goes to live on Greek-like island. She hears of a shipwreck, and goes to investigate the rumors of mermaids. She finds an island of women, but eventually learns it's as unequal as the wider world, in its own way. She escapes with the men and children, and they go to make their new home in an inaccessible valley near her original home.

 
Throughout the book, Celeste is portrayed as curious about the world, fond of books, and profoundly respectful to the tiny people around her. She learns medicine and uses her knowledge to help the poor. She observes the ways men and women are treated differently in traditional society, and longs for equality. In each of the places she stops, it's easy to imagine her becoming legendary, because she disrupts the local customs and forces them to do something new.

 
Celeste's movements through tbe world are often prompted, not just by her curiosity, but by love and her family. In each place she goes, she eventually re-meets one of her brothers, and their familial loyalty to each other is part of what prompts the changes she sets in motion in each place.

 
The art is very pretty, and the story feels at once classic and contemporary. Perhaps 'timeless' would be the right word. There are a lot of details that make Celeste's world feel like a playful reimagining of the real one, like almost Venice, or the mention of 'The Ulyssiad' as a source of mermaid stories right before Celeste sets of for the Themyscira-like island of women. Buying this one was probably the only way I was going to get to read it, and I'm glad I did.