SALVAGIA, super-plausible drowned Florida technothriller

SALVAGIA
TIM CHAWAGA
Diversion Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.95 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A near-future, sci-fi mystery reminiscent of Kim Stanley Robinson's New York 2140 and inspired by John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, in which a salvage diver discovers the body of the most infamous man in the Florida yoreshore, putting her in the crosshairs of both feds and corporate mafias.

Triss Mackey was flying just under the radar, exploiting a government loophole that let her live quietly on the Floating Ghost—her rented, sentient CabanaBoat. In exchange, she merely had to dive for recycling recovered from the underwater, formerly-coastal cities. If she happened to find some Salvagia—nostalgic salvage, valued artifacts from the beforetime, which is to say our present—well that's just between her and the highest bidder. It's not a glamorous life, but it's not so bad.

That is, until the federal government begins pulling out of the Florida coast and retreating to their OrlanDome. The corporate mafias are poised to seize power, none more so than Mourning in Miami, led by the legendary Edgar Ortiz, owner of the Astro America megahotel. Triss needs one last score, something worth enough to buy the Ghost outright and keep her free from both the feds and the corporations. And she needs it now, before the Ghost is sent to a watery, insurance-scamming grave.

But when she discovers the chained up, drowned corpse of Ortiz on a dive, Triss finds herself stuck between the investigating government agents and the Mourning in Miami elites until Riley, Ortiz’s son, offers her a third if she can help him unravel Mourning in Miami's conspiracy and solve his father’s death, they can track down a valuable piece of Salvagia, a score worth well beyond what Triss needs to save the Ghost and, maybe, find a new, better way of Florida living.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I knew I'd like the read when drowned Florida had something its floating inhabitants call the "yoreshore"...like today's foreshore, it's a liminal place, prone to change with the tides; named after the old, drowned shoreline. Triss is very clearly modeled on hardboiled Travis McGee, and I liked the sentient boat the Floating Ghost in an update of the Busted Flush of yore.

Like Travis on the Busted Flush, Triss wants nothing more than to be let alone to live in peace. Only we all know that ain't gonna happen, she's livin' in the loopholes of the dying society that clings harder than ever to control of its people. Travis was always buttin' heads with by-the-book sorts. Triss's boat life of salvaging the remains of our vanished lifestyle...called salvagia...is much the same: an affront to those who can't tolerate anyone not being like them.

Unless, of course, those people are playing ball and bribing Officialdom to look the other way while things happen that can benefit everyone. Like Edgar Ortiz, the "crime boss" indistinguishable from the officials unless you squint. Someone squinted hard enough to decide Edgar Ortiz didn't need to suck air anymore...and Triss, after locating excellent salvagia while dodging cyborg gators, locates Edgar chained up under the sea sucking water. "Dead" is so prosaic a term, no?

Chaos ensues, of course...not least because Riley, Edgar's son, is now with her...but also because the balance of power is wrecked. There's clearly something breaking in the world, and it's powerfully manifesting in what was once Florida...Church of the Invisible Hand, the Miami Mourners, Interluner Transport Haulers, and others are all carving out insane little fiefdoms and following looney belief systems in them. No wonder the remnant federal power preferred Edgar Ortiz.

Or did they? Triss is certainly in someone powerful's crosshairs and needs to figure out whose before they take a fatal shot at her.

You've all heard of the uncanny valley before. It's been used most often to describe the awfulness that is AI slop images. Here it is in novel form. This is Florida 2045, plausibly, and it feels really weird to think that thought. Triss is a real libertarian Florida gal, in her sentient henchboat the Floating Ghost. She wants nothing to do with the Authorities but has no choice while Edgar Ortiz's discovery is hanging over her. Her acquaintances thereabouts are motivated by Big Causes, things like climate justice and community formation and support...where Triss wants a score big enough to buy the Floating Ghost for her own, not live aboard at an owner's whim. Sure, she'll help out...but commit herself? To anything not her own?

No.

She is, then, our world's great survivor in her selfish focus. She's Travis McGee's great-granddaughter in spirit if not fact. It made her a bit hard for me to warm to; but I found the world she's in, the way she works that world for her own benefit, compelling reading.

Please don't emulate her, just read about her exploits and enjoy the dense worldbuilding. I suspect that, if you make it 10% or more in, you're in to stay. It's a fun place for you, your sci-fi adventure reader giftee, and the young STEM-interested teen in your circle to have a good Sunday's reading.

THE GOLDEN TOAD: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species, brothers on a mission to do good for Toadkind

THE GOLDEN TOAD: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species
TREVOR RITLAND & KYLE RITLAND
Diversion Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$30.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: The Costa Rican cloud forest, a mysterious amphibian killer, and a vanished species: with support from Re:wild campaign, twin brothers follow their father’s footsteps into the heart of the modern extinction crisis.

As young boys, Trevor and Kyle Ritland were fascinated by the magnificent golden toad of Costa Rica, a brilliant species their biologist father showed them in his projector’s slideshows. Native to only one wind-battered ridgeline high on the continental divide above the cloud forests of Monteverde, thousands of golden toads would congregate for a few weeks each year in ephemeral pools among the twisted roots to mate, deposit their offspring, and retreat again beneath the earth. But from one year to the next, the toads disappeared without a trace; the last of them vanished more than thirty years ago. Since then, only rumors remain—alleged sightings by local residents, which beg the question: Could the golden toad still be alive?

In The Golden Toad, Trevor and Kyle set off to investigate an environmental mystery with unexpected revelations, a story that speaks to our own collective and uncertain future. Guided by Costa Rican naturalists—including the last person to have seen the golden toad alive—Trevor searches for survivors while Kyle hunts the killer. Their paths lead them through an imperiled forest, a deadly pandemic, and a changing climate, finally intertwining at the site of the golden toad’s last emergence deep in Monteverde’s Bosque Eterno de Los Niños.

The toad’s demise becomes a haunting foretelling of approaching ecological crises, but with a gold lining on the horizon. The Golden Toad changes the conversation around extinction, climate change, and conservation while exploring environmental grief, resurrection, and hope in a changing world.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: If a conversation ever needed changing towards hope in dark times, it's the one around the worldwide amphibian extinction. In point of fact there aren't too many subjects that we do not need to find ways of discussing that include hope, hopefulness at the minimum.

The Ritland siblings found a way to do that. They have not found any surviving populations of the golden toad, but they have contributed a lot to the information store about the fungal enemy of amphibiankind that is globally decimating the world's population of all amphibians.

A family inheritance of curiosity and wanderlust, plus a strong grounding in biology and science more generally, sent this pair to a global biodiversity hotspot, Costa Rica, to do anything they can for the decades-missing golden toad. I know the story here is factual but it reads like a fictional adventure. The men are the kind of competent and driven people that make compelling reading; they are traveling in a landscape so replete with unique life as to be alien to sedentary US readers; and they encounter so many people intent on their own business who either help the men in their quest *because* of the quest, or in spite of it, or try to influence them away from their golden-toad search. It's a bit, well, repetitious at times. I don't think that's surprising at all. There is a great deal of information important to understanding the way things need to unfold to accomplish the needed tasks. It naturally will require periodic refreshers of facts readers most likely won't have fresh in their minds.

Still takes time and energy out of what was from the start a very propulsive narrative style, so I can't honestly award a fifth star to the reading experience. As a story told, it gets all five stars, however, so that explains the compromise half-star I polished up for the Ritlands.

Batrachochytrium dedrobatidis is a terrible, fatal scourge, one unleashed in its scope of havoc-wreaking by our changing climate. Anyone who contributes to the knowledge base regarding it, its impacts, and ultimately the ways and means of its future control or eradication, should be celebrated and praised. The Ritlands are large figures in this world-wide effort. Please help celebrate their passion and their contribution. Get a copy, give a copy, read a copy. It's definitely not time wasted.

CAPTAIN KIDD: A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal, past as prologue?

CAPTAIN KIDD: A True Story of Treasure and Betrayal
SAMUEL MARQUIS
Diversion Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$34.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The breakneck adventure of war, romance, politics, and betrayal, where noble gentleman privateer William Kidd becomes a scapegoat, and Crown and crew sink to unfathomable depths to brand him pirate enemy #1.

Captain William Kidd stands as one of the most notorious “pirate” outlaws ever, but his notorious legend is tainted by a bed of lies. Captain Kidd has captivated imaginations for over three hundred years and inspired many stories about pirates, but was he really a criminal? Just how many ships did he plunder, how many men did he force to walk the plank, and how many throats did he slit? Or is the truth more inconvenient, that he was a buccaneer’s worst nightmare, a revered pirate hunter turned fall guy for scheming politicians?

In Captain Kidd, his ninth-great-grandson, writer Samuel Marquis, reveals the real story. Kidd was an English-American privateer and leading New York husband and father, dubbed “trusty and well-beloved” by the King of England himself and described by historians as a “worthy, honest-hearted, steadfast, much-enduring sailor” who was the “victim of a deliberate travesty of justice.” With honors far more esteemed than the menacing Blackbeard or any other sea rover at the turn of the seventeenth century, how can Kidd be considered both gentleman and pirate, both hero and villain?

Marquis’ biography clears the foggy haze of five centuries of legend and British propaganda to illuminate the seafaring adventurer and civic leader. He scrupulously recreates Kidd’s perilous world of explosive naval warfare, the daring integrity he exemplified as a pirate hunter, and the political scandal that entangled Kidd in British-American history, rocking the New World and the Old and threatening England’s valuable trade with India.

Captain Kidd is both thrilling and tragic. Behind the legend is a real man woven into the tapestry of early America, rendering him a unique colonial hero and scapegoat, whose life story was fascinating, exciting, bizarre, and heartrending.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: From "privateer" (government-endorsed pirate) to "pirate" (privateer who pissed someone powerful off), Captain Kidd really comes alive in his ninth(!)-great-grandson's retelling of his biography. It's quite a tale indeed. Even sticking to well-attested facts in court records and sources of like stature, it reads like a novel.

That is not an indictment of the author's veracity but a comment on his story's narrative flow. The endnotes, hugely extensive, are not included in the ebook. They are redirected to the publisher's website via a link or a QR code, both of which I followed to be sure they went where I expected them to go. I'm mildly disgruntled by this.It is a decision that, I suppose, stems from the publisher's presumption that most people don't give a toss about endnotes, so why not...what? does it cost less to do it this way? is the same thing done in the print book?...anyway, it cost the book a star.

While the horror of what happened to Kidd was in no way acceptable to modern eyes, neither were his actions. A privateer might be commissioned by the government of the day to do damage to others' economic well-being, that kind of mercenary fig-leaf is seen in today's world as dishonest whole and entire. It still happens, especially where official government involvement in an activity would cause major PR problems (as ICE is demonstrating very capably right now), but we can ignore it until someone gets pissed off who has the power to make the one they're mad at suffer the consequences widely spreadable.

Any of this ringing some bells?

Kidd's execution was awful to read about, again because the author's storytelling chops are very much on display. It is amazing how much documentary evidence, anecdotal or not, still exists about Kidd. Author Marquis has, I am morally certain, clapped eyes on every single extant source for this grisly tale. It is a feat that took decades, and determination far greater than the ordinary, to accomplish. That he is a descendant of the man unjustly accused, and hanged—twice!—no doubt turbocharged his natural-to-writers research skills. What made it fun to read was both the subject matter...what little boy, however old he may be, isn't delighted by a pirate story?...and knowing while reading it that the author's telling a true family tale.

Maps, and notes, added to the text and I'd be warbling my fool lungs out about the story. as it is, I/ recommend you procure one if you're a superannuated pirate-loving kid like me, or if your dad/grandpa is, or if you're in the market for a story of government-by-grumpiness story to make today feel a tiny bit less unprecedented.

You might not feel better but knowing it's happened before has much to teach us.

NORTHWEST SMITH, collected pulp tales by C.L. Moore, charming and a little pervy

NORTHWEST SMITH
C.L. MOORE
Diversion Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$7.99 ebook platforms, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From C.L. Moore, the legendary pioneer of classic sci-fi, comes the collected adventures of the iconic space outlaw, Northwest Smith.

First published in Weird Tales in the early 1930s, C.L. Moore’s Northwest Smith stories, especially SHAMBLEAU, were hailed as some of the most imaginative and vivid science fiction stories ever to come out of the golden age of sci-fi. At a time when women were heavily underrepresented in the genre, C.L. Moore was among the first to gain critical and popular acclaim, drawing comparisons to contemporaries like H.P. Lovecraft and Fritz Leiber.

Northwest Smith, now recognized by many as the archetypal space smuggler and gunslinger, is an adventurer in the classic sense of the word, and these thirteen stories chronicle the bizarre dangers, interstellar wonders, and titillating romances that captured the imagination of a generation.

My Review: C.L. Moore was a phenom. She was a popular pulp goddess in an era that welcomed not the talented female, not even the grudging welcome of the feminist awakening time or the offhand occasional kudo of today's dismal cultural landscape. She muscled her way through the door of a paid writing career on talent, nary a "feminine wile" or a compromise in her integrity to be seen. It's true that she married...Henry Kuttner...and that she and her husband frequently collaborated, as they together earned more than she did alone on a per-word basis. But that seems a quibble as, in this our good day of the 21st century, women still earn almost 1/3 less than men in identical jobs. Why this should be is, was, and always will be a complete bafflement to me. No one has ever given me a remotely sensible answer to the question of why this should be true, now especially but really ever.

Anyway. Northwest Smith is, next to Jirel of Joiry, Moore's most famous character. Jirel gets more attention because she's a badass warrior queen in a fantasy setting, where NW is a man in spacer's leathers that Moore very lovingly describes more than once. And Moore also makes NW an object of desire, mostly for women but occasionally for men, and in one *very*memorable*story* even has ol' Northwest delivering a whole bunch of barely euphemised blowjobs to, well, to an unclearly described sentient and possibly even animate divine...thingy. No, not that thingy exactly, but a kind of numinous, umm, like cock-fountain-feeding trough thingy. Hell, I dunno, it's her kink not mine, but believe me when I tell you that the acts NW performs are most definitely and most lovingly described in such a way that any adult (even non-pervy ones, if you can find one to ask) knows *exactly* what she's talking about.

The coda in this book is what we today call flash fiction. A story called Song in a Minor Key that's about 500 words of homecoming nostalgia for Northwest as he at last returns to Earth after more than 20 years of exile in the alt-physics Solar System committing petty crimes and saving damsels in distress among the three inhabited planets of the inner worlds and one foray to the inhabited moons of Jupiter. It's a Golden Age Solar System for sure, everything has earth-standard atmospheres and earthly gravity or close to it; a naive world that she builds from her era's very different understanding of how the whole other-planets thing works. She even makes a nod towards the dawning realization among scientists of the unlikeliness of her premise in a story set on Earth's Moon. But I like the idea of reading about Otherness, and there's very little more Other than a Solar System with other human races on other worlds.

I don't think this collection will be for everyone. I suspect modern women will find much to sneer at in Moore's seductive enchantresses, mantraps to a woman. Stick to Jirel of Joiry, female persons. Men addicted to modern worldbuilding will buck and rear at the setting. But a few of us weirdos exist who want to revisit the dear dead days, and this is a means to do so; even though we can't undo modernity's death grip on our vitals, for some of us there is enough of the old-fashioned sexist racist unquestioningly accepting of that status quo left to resonate unironically with assumptions we no longer hold. All fifty of us should probably read this book.

Just not all in a gulp. It goes down easier in tapas-like savorings, best replicated by using the Bryce Method...story-by-story notes and ratings.

Shambleau hot damn! No wonder my memories of this collection are so...fond. Golden Age perversion of pleasure as Medusa's master pattern introduces Northwest Smith to delights so revolting that he can't stop himself from reveling in them while hating the perverse pleasures he's enjoying.

Black Thirst was daring stuff in the 1930s. It explicitly makes Northwest Smith into the object of a male-like alien creature's dark and hungry desire for male beauty. Shocking! And ever so humidly written.

Tree of Life is another "nameless horror infinite dread defeated by the steely honour of Northwest Smith refusing to be violated" story. Much of a muchness, in other words. Thag's little pocket universe is cool. The Botticelli grass is a great and lasting image.

Scarlet Dreams appeared in May 1934. They were more innocent times. This story, presented today, would only be published in one of those one-handed reading magazines. (Do those still exist or is wordy porn all on the web like visual is now?) Northwest gets completely hooked on tube steak, the literal only source of sustenance in a weird alternate dimension, and just loves it. A woman sacrifices her life to unhook him. *whew* This could easily be retitled "The B.J. Story." And now it has an illustration! Artist Gary P. DeSalvo painted a perfect atmospheric rendering of the story called Energy Source at Horror Sleaze Trash, which site one should put on the webtour of life.

Dust of Gods features Northwest and his Venusian partner in crime Yarol seeking the supercharged ashes of the Elder God Pharol (itals in the original, and always used in referring to this particular god) at the behest of a Peter Lorre-esque little smoothie, that he may...who knows, destroy the universe or summat, he seems like that kind of guy. Spoiler alert: They don't give the ashes to him.

Paradise Lost makes it clear that Moore's weird physics, allowing inhabited Venus and Mars, knows no limits save those of the Divine as Northwest in his atheism resists the Will of the Gods to astonishing effect.

Julhi has Smith spending a very long time in the Venusian Atlantis-cum-Brigadoon called Vonng. He is accompanied by a Venusian woman/seer and a totally wacked devilangel named Julhi who seduces him with what resembles closely the acid trips I remember from my misspent youth. Just as he's about to pay the bill for his ecstatic adventure, he escapes by committing a violent act. Comme d'habitude.

The Cold Grey God finds Northwest in a very unwilling near-death experience of battle with the titular god. While committing theft in service of an dead-ish pop idol, NW opens a gate for Mars's long-gone dread god to return after a million-year plus exile to resume its bloody rule. His steely mettle is tested from within as never before by expelling IT from his own body. Big fun.

Yvala places the Circe legend among the inhabited moons of Jupiter, a tropical paradise where Yarol and Northwest go on behalf of some slavers to procure women for the sex trade. Icky, right? But it's really evocative and atmospheric and I reveled in the ending, major ickiness aside.