THE SECRET CHAPTER, sixth Invisible Library story sees Irene and Kai in *Vienna

THE SECRET CHAPTER
GENEVIEVE COGMAN (The Invisible Library #6)
Ace Books
$16.00 trade paper, available now

NOW $1.99 on Kindle! Non-Affiliate Amazon link

Rating: The Full Five

The Publisher Says: A Librarian’s work is never done, and once Irene has a quick rest after their latest adventure, she is summoned to the Library. The world where she grew up is in danger of veering deep into chaos, and she needs to obtain a particular book to stop this from happening. No copies of the book are available in the Library, so her only choice is to contact a mysterious Fae information broker and trader of rare objects: Mr. Nemo.

Irene and Kai make their way to Mr. Nemo’s remote Caribbean island and are invited to dinner, which includes unlikely company. Mr. Nemo has an offer for everyone there: he wants them to steal a specific painting from a specific world. He swears that he will give each of them an item from his collection if they bring him the painting within the week.

Everyone takes the deal. But to get their reward, they will have to form a team, including a dragon techie, a Fae thief, a gambler, a driver, and the muscle. Their goal? The Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, in a early twenty-first century world, where their toughest challenge might be each other.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM MY LOCAL LIBRARY. SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARY!

The Invisible Library review–The Masked City review–The Burning Page review–The Lost Plot review–The Mortal Word review–The Dark Archive review

My Review: Glory be. This is an *epic* tale, taking us mere humanses out to the Deep End, tilting the deck, and saying, "whoopsie-daisy, hope y'all can swim!"

More thoughts after I can remove the oxygen mask and IV fluids the paramedics put on me. (That was written at the end of March after COVID withered my body and rattled my brain.)

Imagine meeting your intended's parents after rescuing her, being rescued by her, heisting multiple valuable items together, negotiating Multiversal Peace with her, and having them be like "~meh~ that's just life as a Librarian. Oh BTW there are some facts we've never told you, daughter dear, and there's this job...." Was it that surprising that a daughter of spies had developed trust issues? {Irene} thought wryly, as Author Cogman puts it. In conversation with her mother later: “Life was much easier before I had to worry about everyone else worrying,” Irene muttered. “It’s called growing up, dear. It comes with staying alive.” And that the extent of Mothering the lady can do! But "everyone else" includes a certain deeply treasured Dragon....

Kai, who is but a minor royal among Dragons in the Invisible Library's multiverse, isn't faced with many things that challenge him. His evolving relationship with Human Irene Winters is one. He loves Irene. Irene loves Kai. They are both fond of Peregrine Vale, largely absent from this book because they're spending most of their time in an alt-Vienna he can't be of much practical help in. They both fret a bit about him...I suspect Kai has a little crush on Vale...but there's a job to do and they needs must attend to the doing of it or Doom Will Follow!

You know, I actually believe it will, every time I read one of these delights. A somewhat cynical Dragon character says:

"... Our so-called history is a shared fiction, agreed to keep those who are in power where they are. There is no such thing as genuine truth, only received truth. The winners write the history books in all cultures, as it serves their advantage. Parents tell their children the stories which paint them as heroes. Enlightened self-interest is the best that anyone can hope for."

It's this level of insight and truth-telling that makes my suspension of disbelief function as smoothly as a Citroën's does. I know that Author Cogman sees the world as I do: "They did attempt to leave the European Union last year, but apparently that was prompted by demonic interference. A lot of politicians were subsequently tried for treason and beheaded at the Tower of London." Yes indeed. And from Cogman's keyboard to Nemesis's inbox.

What made this story stand out in my mind, plague ravaged though it was, was the main Big Reveal (there were several) about something I'd wondered if I twigged aright way back when Kai first began his Librarian training under Irene. The Dragons, no less than the Archetype-swiping chaotic Fae, want the Multiverse to bend into shapes they decide. There is a way that could happen; the story here brings it forward.

Irene will have to factor this huge revelation into her dealings with all sides. It's something she can't ignore as the Library's representative to her demandingly negotiated peace treaty...with the seductive, charismatic Lord Silver appointed as the Fae representative and who else but Kai as the Dragon representative...and still maintain the Library's vaunted neutrality. Without betraying the confidence of any of the sides to this attempt to reduce violence in the Multiverse.

Here it is, then. Six books into a long series (or so I hope) the stakes, until now personal survival at the forefront, have become so much more complicated and so much more fragile. And Irene's Librarian point of view, expressed simply and clearly, matches my own and reinforces the passionate interest I take in volume seven (due out the 29th of this month!):

“Stories matter - telling them, sharing them, preserving them, changing them, learning from them, and escaping with and through them. We learn about ourselves and the world that we live in through fiction just as much as through facts. Empathy, perception and understanding are never wasted. All libraries are a gateway into other worlds, including the past - and the future.”

THE LIGHT YEARS, debut SF novel that feels more heartfelt than any other I've read this year

THE LIGHT YEARS
R.W.W. GREENE
Angry Robot Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$6.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Hisako Saski was born with her life already mapped out. In exchange for an education, better housing for her family, and a boost out of poverty, she's been contracted into an arranged marriage to Adem Sadiq, a maintenance engineer and amateur musician who works and lives aboard his family's sub-light freighter, the Hajj.

Hisako is not happy with the deal. The arcane branch of physics it requires her to study broke off a thousand years before, and she is not keen on the idea of giving up everything she knows to marry a stranger and move onto an aging spaceship.

Onboard the Hajj, Hisako soon learns her dilemmas are overshadowed by the discovery of ancient secrets, a derelict warship, and a chance at giving the survivors of Earth a fresh start.

I RECEIVED A DRC OF THE BOOK FROM THE AUTHOR. THANKS, ROB!

My Review: I wasn't eager to read this book...I don't like being mean to people, and a first novel about relativistic space travel wasn't likely to excite me in a good way...but Rob asked me to read it in an unrefusable way: "I'll take my chances."

Major respect for that, dude.

So here I am reviewing it and recommending it for #Booksgiving. That's unusual for a first novel. A first novel with a casually bisexual male lead, a culture of selling unborn brides to traders on sub-light freighters that function like planets with clashing cultures. And I'm recommending it?

Yes. It's trenchant. I sat still for a minute after reading the teenaged ruminations of the bride bought for male lead, Adem, on learning the boy she was about to mess around with was her unmet fiancé's fanboy. That needs a bit of unpacking....

Adem messes around in his offtime from being a trader, the son of the captain of the ship, and a bored (sort of) twentysomething horndog by recording and broadcasting ancient Earth songs he's discovered. The City of New Orleans, A Boy Named Sue, that kind of thousand-year-old cultural relic. Hey, we have the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields so this isn't remotely far-fetched. Add to that the fact that there are literally thousands of broadcast hours of Earth music...well, something is going to survive. Maybe even some good stuff, though I wouldn't bet on it. And those lightspeed broadcasts have reached his bride's planet, Gaul, where she is about to take A Big Step with one of her fiancé's fanboys. (Her virginity wasn't required for the marriage contract to be honored.)

That's a moment, a passage from one part of life to another, that is frequently accompanied by music. Not usually that of one of the parties' intended marital partner. And that union set to occur quite a long time (a decade, almost) in her future. About which contract she's been aware since she was twelve...and the groom was twenty-six when it was contracted and will arrive on Gaul about twenty-six still because near-light-speed relativistic travel makes your brain hurt when thinking about its social consequences.

That brain-bending reality the two main caracters live in is really the reason I want you to read this. In the best possible way, this novel resembles a novel of manners set in a society where the people getting married come from two different worlds. What can possibly be better described as speculative fiction than that?

There are numerous caveats and addendums to the basic story, of course, though none of them involve explicit sex or even serious romantic entanglement. Again the echo of the novel of manners...and while the publisher's marketing push might lead one to expect something more on the salacious side, it will only bring disappointment to go into the read expecting this.

Don't think it's not involving, don't imagine it's got no narrative tension! Remember how utterly engrossing and un-put-downable The House of Mirth was? Lily Bart's rise from nothing is a lot like Hisako's...but there is so much fun to be had in following the path Author Greene is marking out for you that I'll avoid spoilering it for you. Developments don't stop with the inner worlds of the characters...in a late-stage capitalist future that accepts prenatal marriage contracts (shades of 1300!), you can bet there is a lot of Evil to be done. Quite a bit of it is done to/by Hisako's poet-father.

A keen eye was cast on the twenty-first century and a report card was issued in this novel's background. It wasn't an F, exactly. The room for improvement noted was pretty sizable.... As I'm in sympathy with this point of view, it was largely invisible to me until I started a second read-through. Many abuses of people, living people in your polity, are no better than the extremes posited here. And they need to be addressed. If this plague year has done nothing else good, it's made that fact clear to more people than were clear about it before.

But Rob...srsly my dude...NO MORE W-BOMBS.

DARK MATTER, or "Home is Where Your Multiverse Door Opens and This Time You're Glad to Be There"

DARK MATTER
BLAKE CROUCH
Ballantine Books
$17.00 paperback, $12.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

Republishing my 2016 review here because we're getting a TV series of the book! It's a long one...settle in.

When I first reviewed the book in 2016, I posted a mild bleat of confusion regarding it on Goodreads:
I have no idea how I am going to review this book without spoilering every-damn-thing.

Several hours of hard thinking later:

Okay…what I can think of is this:
In anyone's life, there are decisions that have no correct answer. We make them and move on. Reading this book I revisited a few of mine, and luckily for me, I didn't feel I'd gotten them wrong.

And that's where I am, but now I'm going to spoiler every-damn-thing because if you're joining me here, you've made an effort to in full knowledge that everything's on the table.

I got a review copy of Dark Matter shortly after it was published. I'd requested an advance review copy, but wasn't approved. I was mildly piqued, but I've got many dozens of books sent by many other publishers to assuage the sting. Having mostly forgotten the whole incident, imagine my pleased surprise to receive the finished book! In a sign of just how much Crown, his hardcover publisher, thinks of Crouch and his chances to make a bestseller of this title, it was packaged in a black shiny bubble-mailer, with a specially printed and super-spiffed-out label with the book's title interrupted by a cartouche where my name was printed in fancy colored ink. Yowza! Anything for the guy with the TV deal, said my cynical inner blogger. That mouthy bitch got mouthier when the book appeared…handsome object…with the usual publicity sheet (whatever happened to the ONE-sheet? Now it's double-sided AND there are two of them) plus what used to be called a "compliments card" from Author Crouch hisownself. It read, in part, "I'm sure you get a lot of ARCs vying for your attention, but please know that I put everything I have into this novel." Oh good, gloated Inner Bitch Blogger, now I can wail on you without guilt!

You would think that, after the best part of two decades reading in order to write reviews and over 50 years reading an average of a book a day, I'd know better than to pre-judge my own reading experience. But noooooo, as Steve Martin said how-many years ago on Saturday Night Live. Still makes me giggle.

I read the book in a sitting, as so many readers seem to do. Five hours of rushing to find what happens next with pauses to piddle and stretch out the experience. Part of that celerity is down to Crouch's staccato writing style:

He says, "Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse? I built something that could actually eradicate regret. Let you find worlds where you made the right choice."

Daniela says, "Life doesn't work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don't cheat the system."

That's either a reason to move quickly or it's a reason to put the book down. I was torn. In the end, I moved at a good clip there wasn't anything too awful terrible much to slow me down, line by line; this story's effect is cumulative.

That effect is, or was for me, to start another reverie on alternate dimensions novels I've read over the years, and how they've formed my sense of myself as an actor in my own life.

Time travel novels came first for me, starting with Michael Moorcock's wondrous The Warlord of the Air which I found one deeply boring to teenage me Watergate summer at The Book Stall, a used book emporium that my mother took me to one Saturday a month so I could feed my biblioholism. Since she shared that trait, it wasn't pure pain for her. But Oswald Bastable, hero of The Warlord of the Air and its two sequels (The Land Leviathan and The Steel Tsar), sleeps his way from a 1902 British Army defeat in Afghanistan (do people never learn? There is absolutely no point in trying to conquer the damned place if Alexander and Ashoka and Queen Victoria and the Soviet Union and now the USA have tried and failed) to 1973.

It's not our 1973, but it's still 1973, which makes the rest of the story into a time travel novel. The other two books are alternate dimensions of the 1973 Bastable bobs through, growing older but much faster than the lucky sods who live single-line lives in the novels, and the whole series is called "The Nomad of the Timestreams," a reference to Bastable's unmooring from his typical-human single track life. It was hugely influential to my teen self. My adolescent exceptionalism was strong, fueled by my position as my mother's sex-toy. There were obviously versions of me in a multiverse, too many to count, living lives that reflected better and more satisfying outcomes than my unhappy present. Unfortunately they all began with the present me, and stemmed from choices I *would* make in coming days, weeks, years. It wasn't rescue, it was hope that somewhere someone split off MePrime wasn't experiencing the special hell of maternal incest plus increasing same sex desire. The future on my own timeline wasn't a given to me, so this kind of action wasn't my favorite.

Later, though only a very short time later thanks to a with-it young man who had a strong pash for me who worked at The Book Stall, came the deeply romantic Time and Again by Jack Finney. It seemed like forever that Robert Redford was reported to have the rights to make this meet-your-soulmate-in-the-past tale into a feature film. Nothing from him or from any other quarter on that front in more than 40 years, and what a pity that is. The premise is a simple love triangle set in 1882 Manhattan spiced up with Si, the main character, being from 1970 New York.

Si's travails in living this bifurcated by time's arrow love affair said a lot to me, young as I was at the time (all of 13). I'd already had two requited love affairs. Neither was in any way unpleasant, except in the usual angst-ridden adolescent ways. My weirdo of a girlfriend took an inordinate pleasure in taking my virginity, so I had no heart to tell her I'd already done the nasty with a guy in my junior high classes, and wouldn't admit for almost 25 years what Mama was doing to me. Si and 1882's Julia had nothing on the intensity of passionate connection and mattress-igniting sex that we had. Along came the older store clerk and it was the 1882 love triangle! That made me feel both sophisticated and glamourous. And a life-long pattern of loving men, loving women, and telling all of them all about it was born.

But then came a game-changer, a book whose effect on my evolving awareness that this here-and-now is obviously not the only here-and-now possible or probable or present in the moments we live. Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen follows the career of Cpl. Calvin Morrison of the Pennsylvania State Police after he is moved from his marginally satisfying life to a reality existing at the same moment as his that bears no real resemblance to his familiar world's history or present. Pennsylvania's long history of resource-extraction based economy has left truly permanent marks of its passing, signs Calvin does not see in his otherwise familiar surroundings. Calvin spends several hours coming to terms with this self-evident fact and its inevitable conclusion: that he has been moved not up into a post-apocalyptic future, nor down into a pre-European past as the people he sees are clearly like him, but to the side across time's infinite tributaries.

Erwin Schrödinger first introduced the physics-based concept in 1952, and it has been a staple in science fiction ever since. In fact, it goes back much farther than that as a fantasy, and its survival as well as its scientific explanation (insofar as anything this vast can be explained) sit very well with most average people. It makes intuitive sense. The physics of it is dauntingly complex and also suffers from a testable-hypothesis deficit, but that doesn't detract one iota from many people's sense that it's just *right*. And for Calvin Morrison, it is a life-saving reality. His quick wits, political savvy, military prowess, and social conscience are perfectly suited to his new circumstances. His rise to the pinnacle of power is inevitable, and his character and knowledge base make him a dream ruler by local standards.

This book, another of my hippie bookseller supercrush's finds for me, perfectly reflected my sense of being wasted in my own life. I talked with him for hours about how there had to be, somewhere out there, a timeline/timestream/alternate reality perfectly suited to me, to him, to every other misfit we knew. How to find it? How to access it? Naturally we reached no conclusions, but we had a great time talking about it.

Since those early discoveries I've encountered grand-scale alternate histories by , as well as more intimate and personal ones like Kate Atkinson's widely read 2013 novel Life After Life. As much as I ended up admiring Atkinson's wonderful tale of the extraordinary fate of Ursula Todd, it wasn't on the same moral-compass heading as Dark Matter. The latter is a deeply personal Grail quest, an Odyssey whose modern Ulysses is physicist Jason Dessen. There are, as we all know by know, an inifinty of Jasons who have done almost the same things with varying degrees of success. Our point-of-view JasonPrime is the happiest man around because he's chosen to focus his energies on being a family man, fully present in his life with Daniela.

For her part Daniela gave up a burgeoning artistic life to bear and care for Charlie, further derailed by severe post-partum depression. For his part, JasonPrime lost focus on a potentially world-shattering quantum superposition technology that would have made him both rich and famous. One version of JasonPrime made the opposite choice and unlocked the secret to making macro quantum superposition, the key to travel across the multiverse. What he didn't have, and what Daniela didn't have, is Charlie, or a relationship; both feel the pull to make that decision again in this or another life. So Jason2, with his full-sized quantum superposition apparatus, decides he will be the next person to use it after a string of failed test subjects who didn't return. His colleagues don't know it, but he has no plans to return either. He is in search of his polar opposite, the Jason that kept Daniela and raised Charlie and was brilliantly successful at it. Instead of killing JasonPrime, he assuages whatever serves him for a conscience by making sure the prime gets to Jason2's luxurious and glamourous life.

Except that's not what the prime wants. And he fights and fights and struggles and fights some more to get home, Home, that one place where you *know* you belong, is just…there, and he'll stop at nothing to get there.

It's startling to me how much that resonates with me. I've always been in search of Home. Lots of near misses, but honestly I no longer expect I'll get there this time around. Where I am, who I am, what defines me as me…good enough. Plenty good enough. I experience long stretches of contentment, bursts of happiness, and significant amounts of pleasure.

But like JasonPrime's many visits to many Chicagos, it's not *quite* home. It's my talent to make do without fuss. But sometimes, it's past the periphery of my awareness and I wonder, what if….
Read this book for a propulsive, pounding joyride through spaces and places you didn't know that you didn't know you wanted to visit. I give it five stars of five and a strong push to buy it now.

ELYSIUM, a fan-damn-tastic first novel from a writer who we need to hear more from soon

ELYSIUM Or, The World After
JENNIFER MARIE BRISSETT
Aqueduct Press
$7.95 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A computer program etched into the atmosphere has a story to tell, the story of two people, of a city lost to chaos, of survival and love. The program's data, however, has been corrupted. As the novel's characters struggle to survive apocalypse, they are sustained and challenged by the demands of love in a shattered world both haunted and dangerous.

I GOT THIS BOOK FROM MY LOCAL LIBRARY (THEN HAD TO BUY ONE). SUPPORT YOUR LIBRARY, FOLKS.

My Review: The author, whom I follow on Twitter, commented rather sadly on some people in the blogosphere who took her to task for this book, which apparently was not to their taste.

It was to mine. I enjoyed it so much that, after reading the library's copy, I ordered one for myself because I wanted to have ready access to some of my favorite quotes to share with my Young Gentleman Caller. He's quite partial to this one:

"...You got wings now. You might as well learn how to use 'em. I'll teach you and then you'll come with me."

It makes me very happy to be able to share that with him, and have it mean something good to him, too.

But here's the thing, readers. Here's the central principle of this book as I understand it: Forget Reality. It doesn't exist.

As this idea bothers a lot of people, and some people more than is remotely justified, let me talk a bit (vaguely, sorry, spoilerphobes are every-damn-where like the Wicked Witch's flying monkeys) about why I think this is Elysium's core value. First, are the characters male or female? Straight or gay? Lovers, friends, family? The proper answer to this question is "Yes." Full stop. There are no binaries or trinaries (is that a thing?) here. There is a world beset by failure from within...the computer code between sections and chapters is you clue to remove linear expectations from your reading repertoire. You're not spoon-fed anything in this book, nor are you denied the clear and intentional signs of what the author wants you to know before continuing your read.

Antoine and Antoinette being one person, though not the same person, is an idea that frightens a lot of (mostly straight, though certainly not all) people. That these two names for one being, one soul as the more spiritually inclined would say, are frequently interchanged and in a constellation of ways in relationship to Adrian/Adrianne will confuse many. Which, I think, is part of the point. We're in a world whose worldbuilding includes the concept that this is all a malfunctioning program. And now the technophobes have checked out...no, no, no, no! It's not about a HAL-9000 programmed by an Australopithecus at a Cosmic Terminal controlling the Universe. Perish forbid Author Brissett be so uncreative, so bog-standard boring.

There is a point at which Hector/Helen, the relationship spoiler between the primary dyad Adrian/Adrianne and Antoine/Antoinette, becomes...repetitive...and a new role surfaces, a different means of being within the circle of safety that these connected beings represent. A sibling has a powerful position in a person's life. But here there must be room made for change. Partners don't often make that accommodation where siblings will. Now and then the relationship drama can feel overdone, but one is wise to trust a storyteller to make it all make sense.

The larger canvas, the backdrop of The World Ending, isn't overplayed, isn't made the blaring obvious focus of the people we're invested in's lives. It happens almost offstage, it's so much a part of the way the players play out their scenes. It happens, and it happens, and it happens; it is in this endless loop of recursion that the computer code "interruptions" become ligatures. The linking of all the worlds that are failing, losing, coming unstuck, is always being battled and resisted. Our main characters might not be the ones doing the fighting (note use of conditional), but they're at the forefront of the evolving disaster.

The disasters, regrettably, include a bit of characterization that I'd call transphobic. It was an uncharacteristically lazy slip-up. I'm not going to belabor the point because it's part of an overall branching exploration of dichotomy, a sense of making the characters (and latterly introduced characters as well) conform to standards that are slapped on with labels. That's not always comfortable to explore...but I believe Author Brissett, a Jamaican-British person resident in New York City, would be very much inclined to do. How many labels can one entity, one consciousness, support or bear or exemplify? All three main characters bear the entire range of them, and others determined by cultures only invented instead of observed.

Comes the ending. I was, at that point, hazy and a little tired; but the book's ultimate frame gave me the five-star glow. This ending makes every odd and jagged edge Right and Proper. I loved it, and was so very happy that it came to be.

But for the transphobia...that's the half-star off.

PIRANESI, the latest hugely immersive and fathomlessly involving Susanna Clarke novel

PIRANESI
SUSANNA CLARKE
Bloomsbury USA
$27.00 hardcover, $18.99 ebook editions, available now

Epigraph for this review: “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is - infinite.”—William Blake


Rating: 4.9* of five

WINNER of the 2021 Women's Prize for Fiction!

The Publisher Says: From the New York Times bestselling author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic new novel set in a dreamlike alternative reality.

Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house.

There is one other person in the house—a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known.

For readers of Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane and fans of Madeline Miller's Circe, Piranesi introduces an astonishing new world, an infinite labyrinth, full of startling images and surreal beauty, haunted by the tides and the clouds.

I GOT THIS BOOK FROM MY LOCAL LIBRARY. BLESS THEM ALL TO BITS.

My Review: When you begin this voyage into the unknown, you're lulled into a sense of Rightness by this author's almost-familiar archaic language...if one has read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, this feels similar enough to make the initial impression one of either familiar immersion in warm water or an icy-cold dash of horrified repulsion and fear and desire to escape.

Indeed, I found it so simple, so direct, that I suspected a trap was being laid for me. My attention could wander among All the Capital letters, looking for Discrete meaning where there is general background clutter, furniture for The House. The House, you see, is the world. The Worldhouse is Piranesi's Place of Worship and Study, and is as close to infinite as Piranesi can conceive.

The enormity of this task sometimes makes me feel a little dizzy, but as a scientist and an explorer I have a duty to bear witness to the Splendours of the World.
–and–
The Beautiful Orderliness of the House is what gives us Life.

Life is exactly what Piranesi derives from the House. In the Drowned Halls our resourceful cicerone catches fish; in the Coral Halls, among other places, he finds colonies of mussels, and immense floats of seaweed; so the House feeds him at a most modest expenditure of energy and effort. The glorious visuals of this book are like eating Sachertorte

then black forest gâteau

then prinsesstårta

with cheesecake for dessert. The headiest are the moments we see the Drowned Halls and the Western Halls, the latter with their Statue of a Faun:

I dreamt of him once; he was standing in a snowy forest and speaking to a female child.

Could a clearer note be sounded to hark back to Lucy Pevensie and Mr. Tumnus? We're in a Story, laddies and gentlewomen, make no mistake about it. Not some run-of-the-mill novel, a Story, a myth made of sterner Stuff than a mere jeu d'esprit destined for an hour's-worth of pale pleasure. And like all those Stories we've loved and suffered through as we grew into our best selves (which, of course, we all have done like Piranesi has done), there must be An Other. Others are friends. Others are enemies. The Other, in the Story we are told here, is both and neither:

The Other believes that there is a Great and Secret Knowledge hidden somewhere in the World that will grant us enormous powers once we have discovered it.
–and–
‘Who or what is Addy Domarus?’ I asked.

‘A king. Long dead. Someone who possessed the knowledge. Or some of it at any rate. I’ve had success calling on him for aid in other rituals, notably for …’ He stopped abruptly and for a brief moment looked confused. ‘I’ve had success calling on him in the past,’ he finished.

The Other, then, is a Liar and a Manipulator. We see it, standing (more likely sitting, possibly reclining) outside the Story as we must, but our glorious cicerone does not. Or else why would we need his Story told to us?

Like any well-made Myth, the story expands the House and the Other into very odd, very frightening sizes and directions. Piranesi is a Naïf and we can't help but fear for him in his Eternal Present. But he is a scientist, and a methodical man, and he must needs follow clues and puzzle out Meanings in all the things he encounters. He makes complex calculations to determine when the Tides will make some parts of the House dangerous to him; he remembers the cycles of them so he can get food (a thing previous inhabitants...Thirteen of them, now reduced to bones that he cares for and speaks to and feeds offerings...could or did not master). His wanderings in the Halls are carefully notated in his Journals. But all his skills in this world will not stop The End from coming wearing a body he calls 16.

Author Clarke begins to crack open Reality and let in the pestiferous Mundane World, and Piranesi really, really Dislikes it. So do I, dear. Especially when the Other's Origin story begins to come clear, with the appearance of someone Piranesi calls the Prophet:

'You must have been well worth looking at before, you know … before everything happened. Ah, well! Old age happened to me. And this happened to you. And now look at us!'
–and–
'...I’ve never been very interested in what you might call morality, but I drew the line at bringing about the collapse of civilisation. Perhaps that was wrong. I don’t know. I do have a rather sentimental streak.’

But let's be honest. Not one word of this stuff feels false; it's like she's at it again, that Minx of an author, reinventing reality because there's no Reality in it. And then, when the superiority of Piranesi's fracturing Reality to our mere, meager reality is self-evident, the trap snaps shut:

The House is valuable because it is the House. It is enough in and of Itself. It is not the means to an end.
–and–
I went to the Eighteenth North-Western Hall and had a long drink of water. It was delicious and refreshing (it had been a Cloud only hours before).
–and–
Reality was not only capable of taking part in a dialogue – intelligible and articulate – it was also persuadable.

...and there one is, kettle not yet boiling and egg-salad sandwich congealing, longing to find, to be in Reality, and unable to wash the fog from one's eyes. Piranesi might not be a map of the journey, plain and notated onto paper, leading you to the House. That journey, Journey to be precise, is purely personal.

Don't kid yourselves; Susanna Clarke knows how to get there.

SLIPPERY CREATURES, first in a trilogy of post-Great War spy romantic thrillers

SLIPPERY CREATURES
K.J. CHARLES (Will Darling Adventures #1)
KJC Books (non-affiliate link to Amazon)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

30 November 2022: It's FREE for a limited time at this link.

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Will Darling came back from the Great War with a few scars, a lot of medals, and no idea what to do next. Inheriting his uncle’s chaotic second-hand bookshop is a blessing...until strange visitors start making threats. First a criminal gang, then the War Office, both telling Will to give them the information they want, or else.

Will has no idea what that information is, and nobody to turn to, until Kim Secretan—charming, cultured, oddly attractive—steps in to offer help. As Kim and Will try to find answers and outrun trouble, mutual desire grows along with the danger.

And then Will discovers the truth about Kim. His identity, his past, his real intentions. Enraged and betrayed, Will never wants to see him again.

But Will possesses knowledge that could cost thousands of lives. Enemies are closing in on him from all sides—and Kim is the only man who can help.

THE AUTHOR PROVIDED ME WITH A REVIEW COPY. THANK YOU!

My Review: If you remade Notorious with Steve Cochran

*swoon*
...opposite Cary Grant instead of Ingrid Bergman...

*double swoon*
...it would feel a lot like this read. And I hope y'all've been paying enough attention to me to know that I mean this as a deep and sincere compliment.

A lovely period piece in the vein of the above smoldering-hot film about finding Nazi spies. Will is the Ingrid character, damaged and fragile on the inside but a tough survivor. Kim is Cary's Devlin, a master manipulator. Kim is a man whose core principle is survival, and not necessarily yours, before love or friendship or even sex. (Imagine!) And he's not the least bit sure, when he meets Will, that he wants to alter his priorities. To his credit, Kim is clear that he is not reliable, and Will would do well to be cautious with his feelings around Kim. Since when has that ever mattered to a man in love, may I ask?

He had no idea what civilians, or civilised people, would say in these circumstances. Thanks for that, old chap, much obliged, perhaps? Ought he apologise for coming in his mouth? Would this be a good moment to restart the conversation about where Kim had learned to use a knife? Thank God they were British. He took a deep breath.

“Cup of tea?”

But there is, as one expects when one reads Author Charles's books, A Reason for Kim's dishonesty, dissembling, and frequent disappearances. He is a spy to serve his country, though not for ordinary reasons and not in ordinary ways. The secret is one you should discover on your own, but part of it is being gay in Edwardian England wasn't fun if it became too obvious or if it couldn't be politely ignored. Kim's used his upper-class manners and mores to keep problems from surfacing that could have terrible consequences for other people:

“I realise it’s none of my business. It’s just that there’s clearly something up, I liked the little I knew of your uncle, and mostly I am insatiably curious. It’s my besetting sin. So I will ask once more whether you’re really all right, and if I can help at all.” He raised his hands. “And if you say no, I’ll drop the subject.”–to Will early in the story
–and–
"...Kim says, Well, that needs to be dealt with, and he deals with it, and then you’ll be sorry. Whereas most people say, Oh, how dreadful, you poor dear, and they don’t do anything at all. Or they don’t say anything nice and they blame the person in trouble, so maybe Kim is kind by comparison even if he isn’t sympathetic in the slightest."–to Will from Kim's, umm, special lady-friend

Kim, then, is a Man of Action, if also a man of most pliable morals. And Will is a soldier, a man whose war was spent in the trenches, and a man in so far over his head in the peace that the additional stress of his late uncle's unknown-to-him secrets that bring Kim into his life almost sink his sanity as well as his badly needed and only way of making a living:

You couldn’t go out for a drink, you were ashamed of the shabby state of your clothes, you feared people might expect you to touch them for cash so you withdrew first rather than endure that additional humiliation on top of poverty’s many other insults. (US readers note that "touch" is used in the UK sense of "borrow")
–and–
He went through another box of his uncle’s letters at his desk, working mechanically, serving customers out of bloody-mindedness rather than enthusiasm. None of them seemed surprised by his attitude. Maybe he was getting the hang of bookselling.

Shades of Bernard Black! And such a very Will thing to do: His goddamned duty, no matter he hates it, no matter it makes no sense to him, D.U.T.Y. before all. In the end, that really is the thing he shares with Kim, as both men know what it is to do the right thing no matter the difficulty or personal cost:

"... But I’ll tell you this, young man, he asked me a few years ago not to believe anything he hadn’t told me himself, and I haven’t and shan’t. So if you want to know why he didn’t go home, it’s because not many people know him like his nanny, and them as should, don’t. But if I needed help, there’s nobody in the world I’d turn to before Master Kim. You remember that.”

Will, to his credit, does; Kim, to his credit, honors Will's trust with weird, off-kilter but effective help. It is a lovely and heartening thing to see, even if only on the pages of a novel.

This was as much fun as I can remember having in ages. And, as a note to lazier writers, I will point out that, at precisely no time did Author Charles drop a single, foul, heinously overused w-bomb. Not one. I assure you that the opportunity was present any number of times...I went back to re-read a certain bookstore scene to be quite, quite sure I hadn't simply elided the ghastly thing, it was so juicily ripe for one...but Author Charles never once depressed the giant red button.

For that, and for the delights of Will and Kim's wounding word-play, I am most profoundly grateful.

WITH FLAMING SWORDS, "One voice is easily silenced."

WITH FLAMING SWORDS
CLEVE CARTMILL
Astounding Science Fiction Magazine, September 1942
free to read on the Internet Archive

Rating: 4* of five

When the estimable James W. Harris, a science fiction fandom monadnock, reviewed this obscure piece of SF's long and patchy history, I ran right out and found it. His review, linked above, wasn't a warble of ecstasy. It was more a muted fluting of appreciative indifference...the B-student's reward from the preceptor "some good ideas, execution needs work" about says it...though the, um, less-than-factually-grounded science (even for the era) gets a drubbing.

note the shiny gent in panel four...taken from Classics of Science Fiction, post linked above

What on this wide green Earth could lead this minor, forgotten writer's minor, forgotten 1942 story (anthologized precisely once) to merit a full four stars? I'm not even going to pretend I care for a single second about the junk science. Here is narrator Saint Robert Hanson explicating the whole rigmarole:

"Yes. Listen. Here is the truth. Nearly three hundred years ago, a new weapon was introduced into warfare. It was fired only once. The destruction was so great and terrible that nations by common consent outlawed it, for it destroyed friend and foe indiscriminately. Thousands were killed within the radius of its effect. It was silent death, for the gun was a ray gun. But listen. On the edge of that area of destruction, people were affected by that ray. Their germ plasm was affected so that male children born of those individuals were born with an aura...."

There's more, but the point is made. This ain't hard SF, or even particularly well-scienced SF. I don't know if, in 1942 as Author Cartmill was writing this, the term "social SF" had been applied or if that coinage was still in a goopier, sappier future. I'm looking at this marvy as someone fresh from the grindhouse that is the 45th Presidency of the USA.

What has happened to these glowy-boys? Some bright spark decided that the post-apocalyptic chaos could best and easiest be controlled by making the poor sprogs into objects of veneration. Thus quite probably saving their lives, since the hoi polloi are ever prone to killing those they Other...and these kids are Othered for all to see! A technocratic theocracy arises under the Saints, and ordinary men and women are enslaved to accomplish their will. Many fanciful things, like garageable planes for all, are commonplace under the rule of the Saints. But the cost to the average person is complete loss of freedom, and utter, bone-deep conditioning to accept that the Saints are Divine. Why, even the woman that Saint Hanson wants to marry still addresses him as "your Reverence" and takes a completely submissive stance in relation to him. An incel's dream, this future...at least if he glows it is. And like people from time immemorial, the status quo has no more staunch defenders than those who lose under its strictures:

"Please believe that you are wrong, your Reverence. Even if you're right, you're wrong. You will destroy faith. That's all we have, our faith. Take it away, and what will become of us? Have you thought of that?"

Thus does Ellen address him, though only at the behest of his enemy among the Saints which possibly explains her temerity in disagreeing with a Saint. And I've thought of little except that since 9 November 2016. The people who benefit the absolute least under the current system, not to mention the efforts of ephemeral intensifiers like the current Administration, are defending the system! At the ballot box! And no one can blast open their addled, misinformed, and downright feeble minds...the world isn't working for you, and if you need proof, look at this bloody pandemic!

So this story, like all good stories, is the story of how we mere mortals screw up and screw over any- and everyone and -thing. In order to maintain a myth of our own superior understanding of the mechanisms regulating our lives, we're liable to fall for the most absurd nonsense. "I don't believe you," cry the uneducated to the deeply learnèd subject-matter expert. It means we know better, you can't fool us! And that's exactly what The System, in this story and in 21st-century America, needs. Because then it's easy to manipulate reality, to say, "you have enough," to people who make the stuff of life and give it to the greedy elite.

We're driven to be "on top of the world" because...well, I'm not all the way sure why. I'm off that carousel and for the life of me I can't remember what made it so desirable to have more than I need and still want more. It's been a very long time that I've been off it, you see.

It's also the story of how a passionate band of like-minded freedom fighters (or a passionate band of scum-sucking wold-be slave-owners) can alter the course of history. Haven't we seen the evidence often enough to know it when it's right there? Does it take a Rosa Parks, a David Duke, a John Lewis, a Donald Trump, to prove *again* how vile people can be, and how the vile can be fought? At the end of this story, a confrontation takes place that's taken place innumberable times before. The powerless rise up against their oppressors when the passionate band show them that they can win, and gives them a reason to want to win.

For that reason, I give this pretty awkward and not remotely believable story four hope-twinkling stars. (Even though the victory is most certainly temporary.)