Jukka Särkijärvi
That's quite a flex. Not many people can brag they've read the entirety of the Marvel Universe, all 540,000 pages of it, or thereabouts. The numbers are staggering and illustrate how easily large numbers exit the sphere of easy comprehension. I figured I was well-read, but even with a generous estimate, I cannot claim to have put away more than maybe 2,000 of the over 27,000 issues that Wolk reads into the story of Marvel.And he discusses it as a single story, from a perspective that is quite likely unique. And while it's possible there's someone else out there who has achieved this same feat, they didn't write a book. Wolk did. He also hastens to note that it is not something you should be trying at home. It is not meant to be consumed in that fashion. You can pick up more or less any issue and though you will have missed things, you will get on board pretty quickly. That's how they're written. You will not know everything, and all those of us who grew up with these people who wear their underpants on top of their tights learned to deal with it.The book's chapters, after the introductory pleasantries are done, alternate between deep overviews of specific characters or groups, and interludes laying down historical context. In the overviews, Wolk explains things like Spider-Man's confusing story from that first spider bite to present day, focusing on key issues and using them as springboards to expound upon overarching themes. The text is lively, with a wry humour. Even banal observations, such as Spider-Man's early rogues' gallery being populated with faulty father figures, are lent weight by Wolk's perspective. And let's face it, there are a lot of banal observations to be had here. While there is such a thing as a subtle superhero comic, it has never been a hallmark of the genre and especially so in the early days. Nevertheless, it's entertaining to read and sometimes it's comforting to be told what you knew already by an authority.More insightful is Wolk's unpacking of the metafictional dimensions and storytelling sleight-of-hand in Jonathan Hickman's Avengers and New Avengers runs, or the Trump-before-Trump of The Dark Reign. The book truly shines where he tracks the callbacks and the connections between issues and runs, from decades apart, noting things like Riri Williams belting out a few bars of a song from a 30-year-old issue of Dazzler. The chapters describing the origins of the Marvel story were genuinely moving to me, such as an interlude about March 1965, when for the first time, stories in different Marvel comic books affected one another in permanent ways. It is a description of the birth of something new, a beginning that from five issues of comics printed on cheap paper led, more or less directly, to someone 50 years down the line being able to make a movie that spends its entire three-hour runtime running laps in honour of itself, and not only does it work, it is the cinema event of the year.And that's what makes this important. We are not used to analytic discussions of storytelling at such sheer scale. Sure, there's been books about superhero comics before, but nothing that I know that has taken the view that it, all of it, is one, single story. Nothing else comes close, though there are several other media properties big enough to be nigh-unapproachable. DC's comics are an obvious one, and several role-playing game properties, especially ones that were around in the heady years of the 1990s, are in the same weight class. I would argue we need more of this, more work by people who can take a look at a reading list spanning a thousand interrelated titles, fearlessly hit the stacks, and come back to tell the tale.Though a work of this magnitude can only be a labour of love, Wolk is not uncritical of his subject. He rightly notes when the treatment of women or minorities has been lacking, both on the page and in the bullpen. There is an entire chapter on Shang-Chi, which notes the many things it did right, without shirking from the fact that there's a big old racist caricature Fu Manchu right there in the middle of things. A voice is also given to Bill Wu, an Asian-American fan – and in later times, the SF author [a:William F. Wu 48897 William F. Wu https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1537705215p2/48897.jpg] – who was a constant presence on Master of Kung Fu's letters page, expressing his affection for the series while constantly criticising its racist caricatures.Reading all of the Marvels is a flex, but clearly, you cannot read that many Spider-Man comics without internalizing that with great power comes great responsibility. Wolk throws the gates wide open, with the message that superhero comics are, and should be, for everyone. While the obvious starting point for the Marvel story is Fantastic Four #1, and another the aforementioned March 1965, Wolk also presents an alternative preceding them, the deep cut of Linda Carter, Student Nurse, whose run had zero to do with superheroes, until much, much later, she did. Here, too, were Marvel's first crossovers, with the characters of these career girl comics appearing in one another's titles – including one Patsy Walker. This is, at least to Wolk, the true beginning. (Also worthy of note, of course, is Captain America #1, because it should not be forgotten that before Avengers, before Fantastic Four, and before X-Men, there was the lone soldier Captain America, and his first appearance was punching Hitler in the face.)As he keeps hammering home, however, nobody can read it all and the book is not “1001 Marvel Comics You Must Read Before You Die”. He suggests strategies, starting points, ways to find out what you like and how to find more of it. The throughline in all his advice is clear: read what you want.It's not as though you're going to run out.
“Avatar: The Last Airbender as grimdark fantasy except the protagonist is a genderflipped Mao Zedong” is a hell of an elevator pitch.This one got the middle book syndrome real bad. [b:The Poppy War 35068705 The Poppy War (The Poppy War, #1) R.F. Kuang https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1515691735l/35068705.SY75.jpg 56364137] was an exceptionally strong debut. As an allegory of 20th-century Chinese history, it's got the kind of content and tone that makes me hesitate to say I loved it, but it was very good at what it did. This is not it. The Dragon Republic putters around a bit, characters go places, then they come back, there's the author grappling with the problem that the protagonist is a WMD unto her own right, and then we've filled enough pages to have a book between the beginning and the end of a trilogy.The other thing that interferes with my enjoyment is that it draws from both the Chinese legendarium and Chinese 20th-century history, both of which I know just well enough to be able to tell that this is a thing that is happening, or that this or that thing is a direct reference, but not well enough to understand what the references mean. This is, of course, a problem with me, not the book, but it does point toward a certain curriculum to complete before hitting the final title.
A straightforward history of gambling. This particular edition is apparently particularly focused on the history of the casino, which I suppose excuses a bit of how it is relentlessly Americentric once the narrative reaches the 19th century. Once it hits the 20th, it's mostly Reno and Las Vegas and Atlantic City, and Frank Sinatra popping up everywhere.
The book is a splendid, resource on the history of the casino, but I think branding it a history of gambling is inaccurate, and claiming it The History of Gambling is the kind of hubris that gets you cleaned out at Caesar's Palace. It is a frustrating gaffe, since it focuses the attention on what's not there rather than what is.
Fortunately, the book is written in a readable prose and despite being a bit of a chonk, it went by quickly.
This is a nicely brief and approachable yet academic rundown of the recent discourse in the field of video gaming about who's a “real gamer” or making “real games”. The events described are hardly new to anyone who's been paying a modicum of attention since nothing blows up quite like videogames on Twitter, but Real Games does a splendid job of drawing together different events and digging into what was said and how.
Among key examples are Farmville, frequently decried as “not a game” by those self-identifying as gamers, as it was free to play and didn't have exciting gameplay or spiffy graphics (Personally, I just thought it was just immensely tedious. A game, sure, but not a good one.); World of Warcraft, whose publisher Blizzard can do no wrong and gets let off the hook by “gamers” because they make big, impressive games that are mostly fun to play, except when they announced a mobile game because that was beyond the pale (and also when it turned out they had a persistent sexual abuse problem in the company, but that came out after Real Games); and Flappy Bird, which earned its creator so much crap for not having made a “real game” (and, let's face it, not being white), that he pulled it from the app store despite making bank.
In an ironic coincidence, World of Warcraft's latest expansion, Shadowlands, features a world quest that's a Flappy Bird minigame.
Real Games is a good, hard look at (gamer)gatekeeping, how it shapes the discourse, and who is targeted. Though I'd seen most of it before and have the thousand-yard stare to prove it, I appreciate this book for bringing it all together into one title that I can cite instead of trawling the Twitter histories of hideous men.
A splendid version.
To be clear, this review applies solely to the edition I read. The pamphlet that is Galileo Galilei's Sidereus Nuncius does not, in itself, make for a riveting read. It is certainly important, one of the most significant texts in the development of what now understand as science, but it also contains inaccuracies that the process of said science has since debunked. And let's face it, the man was famous for stuff other than his prose style.
To credit Professor Raimo Lehti as merely the editor does him a disservice, since he also translated Galilei's text and wrote a history of the pamphlet, of Galilei, and of the discourse around the discovery of Jupiter's moons and the early development of the telescope. It is erudite, informative, and even if a bit dry, exacting. It gives an excellent picture of what people were saying around Italy and the rest of Europe after Galilei published his work.
It also confines itself to the pertinent, and does not go into the circumstances of Galilei's famous trial and conviction. It is assumed the reader knows this. At one moment in the narrative, Galilei is looking up at the stars in Tuscany – the next, he is in house arrest. This is an interesting editorial decision, and one I approve of. Anyone reading this will know the deets, and they have been hashed and rehashed and reinterpreted over and over again elsewhere. This is a book about Galilei and the telescope, and it is content to remain such.
This is as basic as the theory of relativity gets, I think. Organized into about 100 two-page chapters, Professor Enqvist explains the theory of relativity one step at a time, one complete thought per chapter. There's no mathematics, and storytelling and colourful metaphors are used to drive the points home. “Bite-sized” and “digestible” are not descriptors one expects to find anywhere near E=mc², but there you have it.
It mostly works, I think. The theory of relativity is not an easy concept to grasp, as distanced from the day-to-day concerns of humans who are not physicists or sci-fi authors as it is. Very little of it is intuitive, though that is, of course, learnable. For instance, the description of red shift and the Doppler effect as an object approaches the speed of light felt familiar to me because I have seen it in sci-fi video games. This book articulated it to me, now also allowing me to more appreciate the work put into the games.
From the book I also learned the one everyday application of the theory of relativity that I carry around in my pocket. The atomic clocks on board GPS satellites, travelling very fast (which slows the clock down) in very low gravity (which speeds it up), must take the theory of relativity into account lest the GPS coordinates start drifting at a rate of over 10 kilometres per day.
I cannot say I can still wrap my mind around the theory, but I have perhaps made a start.
[Originally written for Facebook, hence the tone.]...or in English, “The Wild East: Finnish Kinship Wars and the Turning Point of Eastern Europe in 1918 - 1921”. It was a fascinating and frankly mind-boggling look into a period of our history that I recall my high school history books glossing over in about two sentences. It's about that sketchy, chaotic period at the end of World War I when the popular conception of history says that after the end of the Great War there was peace, but actually what we had was a bunch of more local wars without an overarching global narrative to tie them together anymore.One of those wars was the Russian Civil War, whose outcome at that point was still uncertain. We'd just wrapped up our own version and the country was still trying to figure out what kind of country it was gonna be. And then there were these just-minted war hero chucklefucks who thought now was a great time to liberate our Karelian kinfolk across the eastern border from Russian rule. So they recruited volunteer armies. Not state-backed, not only because of plausible deniability but because the Parliament wasn't particularly keen on them but also not yet strong enough to do anything about it, and these people clearly wanted to shoot at other people so it was maybe better if they did it somewhere else. Which they did. Multiple times.In the literature, this has been approached in a very romanticised way, painting the volunteers as patriots motivated by their love for the Fatherland and a selfless desire to save our brothers and sisters in the pure heartland of Karelia.Well, some of the literature. Their own propagandist [a:Ilmari Kianto 1431720 Ilmari Kianto https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1310809826p2/1431720.jpg] described a bunch of them as “half-gentlemen suffering from venereal disease”, and one of their leaders, war hero Elja Rihtniemi, as “a syphillitic soldier of fortune, drunk, and lecher”. In general, many of the volunteers were the type of people who could look at the past four years of Central European events and the incredibly bloody Finnish Civil War and go “moar plz”. Less surprisingly, many of the survivors later got involved in various National Socialist political projects.There was also a semi-colonialistic attitude to it all. Karelians were seen as this pure, ur-Finnic people, untouched by the decadent modern era, in basically our own version of the noble savage myth. This lasted about until first contact, because the Karelians were not all that interested in getting liberated, especially by these assholes. While mostly the volunteer armies ended up fighting the Red Army, they were also dealt one resounding defeat by a Karelian force armed by the British. Because of course the Brits were involved. The volunteer forces ended up resenting the Karelians for not living up to an ideal that nobody even bothered to send them a memo about.The military competence on display in the organization of the expeditions is described by the writers as “more metaphysics than strategy”, where ideology about a grand Greater Finland replaces definite objectives, military discipline, supply logistics, and general realism. One general's stated goal was to destroy St. Petersburg. Not conquer, destroy. A city with a population at the time of over two million.Another front in all of this is the Estonian War of Independence, which featured two different Finnish volunteer regiments (as well as one Swedish and one Danish), who were characterised by being good at fighting and bad at stopping, summary executions of prisoners, looting, and drinking a lot. One commander entertained himself by throwing hand grenades indoors at the hotel he was staying, and another wrote his name on the wall of the church at Valga. With a machine gun.A third storyline in the book concerns the German Freikorps also active in the Estonian war as well as the Latvian War of Independence, with the focus character of Major General Rüdiger von der Goltz, who connects this to Finland, and could most assuredly tell a Mauser rifle from a javelin, as he led the German Baltic Sea Division that captured Helsinki from the Reds in the Civil War. Unlike most of the others, he was a professional soldier with an understanding of military discipline, so his outfit was a dumpster fire mostly because, old aristocrat that he was, he decided to go entirely freelance in order to carve out a Baltic German state that would allow him to consolidate his forces and in the future march into Berlin to reinstate the Empire, which is some impressive mission drift.In the end, Estonia and Latvia got their independence, at least until WW2. Eastern Karelia stayed in the USSR and is today the Republic of Karelia.Fascinating book. it's easy to see why the events tend to be glossed over in briefer historical accounts, since the long-term significance was fairly minor, the details are all sordid, and the main cast ranges from credulous dipshits through homicidal adrenaline junkies all the way to proto-fascist war criminals, supported by various political opportunists, bandits, mercenaries, and in one colourful instance a certified psychopath from Denmark, who fortunately never received actual command.
So, a compilation of the first three issues of Knights of the Dinner Table from the years 1994 and 1995. The strip itself is a bit older than that, starting in 1990 in the magazine Shadis, but those strips are in the Tales from the Vault collections.
So.
Um.
The comic tells of a gaming group in Muncie, Indiana. The Game Master is B.A. Felton, who'd like there to be role-playing in his game. Brian, Dave, and Bob are hack & slashers to the core, and will kill everything they meet. In the second issue, they are joined by Sara, who's also capable of diplomatic solutions. Nobody ever talks in character. I understand Bob, Dave, and Brian are based on certain people Blackburn knows, while Sara is a composite of many female gamers of his acquaintance.
It's been drawn once. There's a wide shot of the table and the players, a couple of close-ups, and some variation on these themes that's then copied and pasted into comic strips. These are short tales, a couple of pages long at the most, about how something goes wrong. Half the time the players threaten each other or B.A. with violence and in several instances they actually come to blows. It's like looking at some secluded tribe that never came up with the idea of non-violent problem solving. What I don't get out of this is why these people would spend time with one another or play role-playing games. They don't seem to be having any fun, ever. The strip is missing the love of the game that's intrinsic to the success of, say, The Order of the Stick.
The jokes are so worn that the stories would be disturbingly familiar even if I'd never read KotDT. The first story in the book is a retelling of “Eric and the Gazebo”. There's a larp story, where Dave and Bob go to a vampire larp and start dressing up goth and wearing makeup and piercings, because larping is weird. There's the story where Sara joins the group, Brian doesn't dare talk to a girl, and Dave is a tedious sexist. Sara solves the situation by threatening Dave with violence. There's a story where the players go play with the infamous Nitro Ferguson (or Furguson, or Fergueson – Blackburn never settles on a spelling) while B.A. is away. Nitro runs an adventure based on Deliverance and Bob gets traumatised by what his elf experiences. He no longer wants to play the character. This is played for laughs.
In the editorials and the collection's introduction, there's a running theme of fans finding their own experiences and their gaming buddies in the situations and characters of the comic. In a way, I kinda also do, but in these characters I see all those people I've had to ban from gaming clubs and online spaces. The image of gamers in KotDT is suffused with the self-loathing that characterizes American nerd media, which makes most of this stuff entirely unbearable.
Hopefully it gets better. I have around 250 issues more of this to read.
I read a book the other day. You'd be forgiven for having never heard of it, though back in its day it was immensely popular. It was written by H.G. Wells and it's called Mr. Britling Sees It Through. It was published in September 1916, and it's set at a large country house in Essex in late 1914 to late 1915. It's a depiction of life at the home front during the Great War and about as contemporary as you can get.
The focal characters are Mr. Direck, an American visitor, and the eponymous Mr. Britling, a famous author who appears to be a stand-in for Wells himself. Note that the United States had not yet joined the war at the time of writing. I also hesitate to call them protagonists, as neither has a great deal of agency or takes consequential action. Then, nobody does. Against the Great War, there's not much you can do. Instead the novel is a study of the home front experience from a perspective of people privileged enough to have time to sit around, think, and write about it.
And this has it all. The characters of Mr. Britling Sees It Through go through all the major political talking points of the day, the justifications of the war, arguments for and against, the Irish Question, fervent patriotism, and disillusionment and futile anger in the face of bereavement. There's Herr Heinrich, a German student schooling the Britling children, who must return home at the outbreak of the war. There's Belgian refugees. There's a zeppelin raid. There's a multitude of viewpoints on the war, and it has not aged a day.
Wells's perspective on the war and humanity is so broad, so all-encompassing, and his prose so modern that around a third of the way through the book I embarked on a research spree about the book to make sure this was not a cleverly crafted hoax from 2010. If it is, I can only conclude that the maker deserves to fool me. I did find out that Wells's American published paid him £20,000 for it, which amounts to slightly under 1,9 million euros in modern currency, and a Finnish translation released in two volumes in 1918 and 1919 as Mr Britling pääsee selvyyteen. That's also on Project Gutenberg. There is a current print edition from a publisher called Casemate, but without Project Gutenberg and the accessibility of public domain works – without the existence of public domain – I would never have read this.
It's a peculiar war book. There's not a single explosion on the page or a shot fired in anger, nor does it wallow in abject misery. Its tone is one of understated melancholy with a stiff upper lip, as one young man after another goes away and never returns. It is written as the war was still not only ongoing but also far from any kind of resolution, yet it is never mired in its present but speaks clearly through to the present day.
The Delirium Brief is the eighth novel of The Laundry series, Charles Stross's comedic take on an espionage agency taking on the unspeakable monsters from beyond the stars. Some other works to have explored the same topic are [a:Tim Powers 8835 Tim Powers https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1373471978p2/8835.jpg]' novel [b:Declare 190554 Declare Tim Powers https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1436628634s/190554.jpg 937379] and the role-playing game Delta Green. Stross is the only one who cracks jokes in between the sanity-devouring horrors, often about the sanity-devouring horrors of civil service bureaucracy. Though the series began as parodies of the styles of significant spy thriller authors, such as [a:Len Deighton 31234 Len Deighton https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1359135015p2/31234.jpg] and [a:Ian Fleming 2565 Ian Fleming https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1364532740p2/2565.jpg] and then did a couple of studies of fantasy and sci-fi genre tropes viewed through a Lovecraftian lens – winning a Hugo Award with the unicorn novella [b:Equoid 18211306 Equoid (Laundry Files, #2.9) Charles Stross https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1380030802s/18211306.jpg 25632901] – with The Delirium Brief it seems to be stepping out of those molds into full CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN territory and what looks to me like the endgame for the series.These are not standalone novels, and though one of the earlier works was written as a mid-series entry point into the series, you're better served starting from all the way back in [b:The Atrocity Archives 101869 The Atrocity Archives (Laundry Files, #1) Charles Stross https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1440461724s/101869.jpg 322252]. The Delirium Brief hinges itself on a series of characters and plot elements that were introduced in books 3-7, and is set up by the previous novel, [b:The Nightmare Stacks 24997064 The Nightmare Stacks (Laundry Files, #7) Charles Stross https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1448811411s/24997064.jpg 44666642]. Though outbreaks of superheroes and vampires could be kept hush-hush or at least plausibly deniable, the invasion of Yorkshire by elves could no longer be kept under wraps, the agency's secrecy is blown, and now they're subject to the court of public opinion and the whims of politicians facing an election and needing to be seen doing something. And that's why the book starts with Bob Howard being grilled by Jeremy Paxman on Newsnight.For extra amusement in reading, one can always pull up the roster of the Cameron-Clegg government coalition (the novel is set in 2014) and try to guess who's based on whom.The Delirium Brief is a fine addition to the series, and one of the finer marriages of the Cthulhu Mythos with political and espionage thrillers that Stross has managed. It really has it all, from spy procedural to political intrigue to eldritch horror to bureaucratic minutia. Though the end of the world is nigh and eldritch apocalypse is basically done with looming and is kinda here, we still get the threat of dread privatization, and though on one hand, the government's ass-grabbing incompetence here feels slightly unrealistic, that feeling is tempered by the knowledge that had they not been veered off-course by nameless horrors, largely the same bunch would have in two years enacted Brexit. The roman à clef elements of this get a pass for the believability requirements that fiction is subject to.The cast of characters is large. Though Bob is the viewpoint character once again after Mo and Alex had their turns in the saddle, basically every major player from the outfit who's still alive at this juncture makes an appearance. There's Persephone Hazard and Johnny McTavish! There's [SPOILER SPOILER]! There's even Boris! No, not Johnson, he was not in the Cabinet.It's also reliably Stross in other ways. A few months ago, I had a conversation with my SO about parasites, and talk turned to the tongue-eating louse. We speculated other extremities that such a parasite might eat and replace, say, south of the border, if you catch my drift. It then occurred to me that it sounds terribly like something out of a Charles Stross novel and if I happen to run into him at a convention in the near future, I must bounce it off him and see how he reacts.Before managing that, I read this. Great minds think alike? Also, gross.It also turns out that for the first time since [b:The Fuller Memorandum 7149287 The Fuller Memorandum (Laundry Files, #3) Charles Stross https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1262645028s/7149287.jpg 7414342], I'm all caught up on The Laundry. Good book, waiting eagerly for the next one.
The Stockholm cruise is something of a cultural institution in Finland. The ferries − perhaps more aptly described as “floating shopping malls” − take passengers between Helsinki or Turku and Stockholm, with a brief stop at Mariehamn to get the alcohol sales exempt from the famously high Nordic alcohol taxation. The cruises themselves are dirt cheap, and discount vouchers and special offers are the norm rather than the exception. I've had a cabin to myself for 15 euros.
It is a very comfortable way to travel between Finland and Sweden, if one has the time to spare. The ferry companies can undercut even the cheapest of discount airlines, because they are far better positioned to sell their passengers food. And alcohol. Especially alcohol. My view is from the Finnish side, but the only way the Swedes seem to look at the concept differently is that they call it the Finland boat.
There also exists the concept of the 23-hour cruise, where the ship stops at each end of the trip just to let out and take on passengers, who then disembark the next day at the same port where they stepped aboard. The trip itself is the destination. The boat is the attraction. Though there's stuff to keep children occupied, overall the air is of an adult amusement park. Booze is cheap, there's karaoke, a fine selection of restaurants, and the promise of meeting people you will never meet again. What happens on the Stockholm ferry stays on the Stockholm ferry.
This also means you can't get out. There's a wealth of horror fiction about the Stockholm ferry.
I took Ristely − “The Cruise” − as my reading just before a student cruise, finishing it in the bar waiting for the boarding to start. I was far less interested in the cruise after that.
It's ostensibly a vampire novel, though because of how Strandberg's interpretation of vampirism works, I would rather classify it as a zombie story, with the exception that there are a pair of clear villains, a child vampire and the has-been night club singer.
The story is told in chapters from the points-of-view of its different protagonists − a child with an unhappy family, a former employee who brought his boyfriend to see where he once worked, an older woman who booked the cruise on a lark, a younger woman out to party, the nightclub singer, and most importantly, the ship herself, Baltic Charisma. The ship is the most interesting of the lot. The book's description of the cruise experience is loaded with bile in a way that had me nodding my head. There's the buffet restaurant that's not quite as high-end as it's letting on, complete with customer-operated wine taps. There are the violent drunks, the barf in all the wrong places, the passengers thinking it's glamorous, the worn-out and faintly dirty cabins whose bathrooms invariably smell of death.
It's a far too familiar ship.
Throughout the first half of the book, the people engage in their personal problems, while the vampire infection still spreads unnoticed. Then it can no longer be contained and the rest of the book becomes a zombie story, and people start dying left and right in graphic ways that veer very close to splatter without, I think, quite crossing over. This part of the book is much less interesting, but the first half quite makes up for it. The characters are interesting. Zombies I have never found interesting.
Strandberg's vampire mythology also comes with a suspension of disbelief issue. Vampirism is extremely easily transmitted and turns the victim initially into a rage zombie that then, over days or months, would reclaim a personality. There's just no damn way I can see how something like that would be able to uphold a masquerade for any length of time. It works for the length of a single novel, though.
Overall, Risteily was a fun book, and someone who dislikes zombies less than I do would probably enjoy it even more. I especially appreciated the cruise descriptions, which felt far too true to life. I was already feeling done with the Stockholm boat, but Mats Strandberg may have delivered the coup de grace. This is not a bad thing.
Its voice, finally, was the sound of ice breaking at the bottom of the world and all the starlight of a universe, which I had never known lurked far below me, rushing in and a drill, like the serrated, mile-wide cock of Satan, plunging into my people's holy land.
If the above offends you, this is probably not something you want to read.
Royden Poole's Field Guide to the 25th Hour is a bit difficult to pin down. It's kinda like short stories except not really, and a bit like excerpts from a novel but actually no. The author himself describes the texts within as “floating chapters”. The work also apparently is somehow related to the novel [b:The Hole Behind Midnight|12479437|The Hole Behind Midnight|Clinton Boomer|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1314754598s/12479437.jpg|17463962], which I have not read.
It's urban fantasy of the kind that would be grim and gritty if the grime wasn't ridiculously over the top. To draw comparisons, Warren Ellis's [b:Crooked Little Vein|43717|Crooked Little Vein|Warren Ellis|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1402408304s/43717.jpg|2640005] is very close in tone. The role-playing game Unknown Armies has a similar theme of magic users being deeply fucked up people who (presumably) have no place in polite society.
As stated, this is not a collection of stories. Rather, they are vignettes and sketches, texts that get by on the strength of the prose and the jokes, not the plot that they hint and tease at but never resolve.
So, it's a lot of description upon description, as in the quote above, which was yoinked off a much longer paragraph. One of the chapters is nothing but weirdness for the sake of weirdness, descriptions ostensibly of groups of mystics, actually of insanity, sexual perversion, strange people and details that somehow manage to be incongruous even in the strange contextless dimension that these exist in. When actual outer beings are described, even moreso. It's like everything Lovecraft never said.
So, I don't really know what the fuck I just read, but I'm pretty sure I was entertained and I laughed out loud a few times.
Full disclosure: I received a free review copy from the publisher.
Stockmann Yard is a peek behind the curtains of Stockmann, Finland's answer to Harrods. Specifically, it's the memoir of one of their store detectives, a profession that in this day and age of private security contractors is found at no other place in the country. They're not card-carrying security guards or subject to the laws they are, and operate solely within the rather expansive bounds of everyman's right to detain. This is a fascinating phenomenon, a whiff of a bygone era, one of those relics from a time when there was such a thing as a servant class and they were only allowed in when accompanied by their master.
Antto Terras, with eighteen years of work experience, lays out the details of what he does, what the shoplifters do, and most amusingly has a segment of advice on what the shoplifters should do if they want to maximize their profits. While not being caught is an important part of this, there are also such considerations like not trying to grab too much at once, because shoplifting can be settled with a fine but for theft you can go to jail.
There's also lectures on the differences between Finnish, Estonian and Russian shoplifters, an overview of the expansive surveillance systems of the department store itself (they see basically everything except fitting rooms and toilet stalls, often from multiple angles, and what they record of the outside would not even be legal if it weren't so damn helpful to the police).
The book is organized according to themes, such as the grocery section (Herkku), the bookshop, internal affairs, naughty bits, and so on. This is all peppered with loads of anecdotes, some of which work on their own and some are forced into working through background information and colourful language. The most interesting anecdotes cover creative and innovative shoplifters and are shot through with a clear appreciation for these would-be Napoleons of crime that bring new and interesting challenges to his daily grind. There's a suggestion that Stockmann attracts a better class of criminal, one that can only be captured by cunning and intelligence. The more dismal anecdotes are usually about celebrities that he cannot name who engaged in mundane shoplifting or late-night same-sex peccadilloes that got caught on tape.
Terras is also a stand-up comedian, which shows in the style. Stockmann Yard is written in this cheap imitation of Sam Spade. This mostly works, but the too-cool-for-school attitude gets wearisome especially when he talks about employees of other departments at Stockmann. Another blemish on the book is its evidently quick production schedule – the afterword is dated in last June and the book came out in August, which is fast for a major publisher. An explanation for such dexterity may be found in the selection of typos and grammatical errors that were uncaught by the editorial process.
Stockmann Yard is an interesting and humorous look at a fascinating profession whose existence I was not even aware of. The writer's prejudices and attitude prevent it from being treated as an entirely reliable source when it discusses the department store itself and the typos are frequent enough to be annoying, but the cleverness carries it over the finishing line, if only just.
It took me a while to get to this book, probably because it was marketed as something for younger readers, and of course us grown-ups can't have anything to do with that.
But I have matured since then and I needn't have worried. It's Terry Pratchett, he knew his stuff, and back when he wrote this he was at the top of his game. If I could give this 4,5 stars, I would.
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents has a thematic clarity fitting a book written for younger readers. It explores topics like responsibility – the burden of leadership, the responsibility one has a member of a society, the responsibility one has as an intelligent being – prejudice and the acceptance of difference, and the nature, necessity and purpose of stories.
You know, easy and lighthearted stuff for kids. Along the way it gently takes the piss out of Beatrix Potter and tweaks the noses of Brothers Grimm. The villain, though appearing rather out of the left field, is genuinely creepy.
This, then, is all packed up into a clever, though rather straightforward, plotline. Being Pratchett, it's also funny, to a degree that makes me rather happy my apartment has solid soundproofing because fits of giggles from behind the wall at 3 a.m. do wondrous things to neighbour relations.
Highly recommended. To everyone.
Velhojen valtakunta is an anthology of short stories in the classic tradition of sword and sorcery. The title comes from Clark Ashton Smith's “Empire of Necromancers”. The book is a mere 165 pages in length, but in that modest page count it serves as pretty much the best cross-section of the genre that I have read.
I do admit to a strong bias, in that this was also, sometime in the late 90s, my first introduction to the authors showcased.
The collection proceeds in a rough chronology through the development of the genre, from Lord Dunsany's seminal work, through the pulps of Clark Ashton Smith and Robert E. Howard, to the postwar classic Fritz Leiber and finally the deconstruction of the hero with Michael Moorcock. Curiously, they all in their own way bring to mind the famous line in Howard's “Beyond the Black River”: Barbarism is the natural state of mankind. Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph.”
I am, for the time being, ignoring the presence of L. Sprague de Camp.
“The Sword of Welleran” is the first tale of the book, a short story by Lord Dunsany, one of the forefathers of the modern fantasy genre and the title piece of its own collection. The story itself is in public domain, being originally published in 1908. It is a dreamlike tale of an early age in a distant land, in the twilight years of a high culture slowly falling to decadence, yet still when push comes to shove, capable of of producing a hero to lead its defenders to victory. Dunsany's writing is poetic, as a tale told by the fireside, and lends itself eminently to being read aloud. I am happy to say that the translation of Leena Peltonen preserves this quality. This is text that must be savoured.
The next one is Clark Ashton Smith's “The Empire of Necromancers”, the title piece of the collection. It is also the piece that kicked off his Zothique Cycle. It is also a beautifully written tale, also best read aloud, though rather more macabre than the previous work. Again, the poetry of the piece is preserved in translation, this time by Ilkka Äärelä. Here, the civilization has already fallen, to be raised anew into immediate decadence and inevitable fall by a pair of wandering necromancers.
It's followed by “Shadows in Zamboula” by the father of sword and sorcery himself, Robert E. Howard, starring the quintessential protagonist of the genre, Conan the Barbarian. He's mercenary, cunning and violent, and leaves a trail of red half a mile wide. While I don't think this is among the best of the Conan tales (“Tower of the Elephant”, anyone? “Queen of the Black Coast”?), it is rather representative and far from the worst Bob put out in his lifetime (let alone afterwards). The tale takes place in the Eastern city of Zamboula, a home of a civilization ancient and wicked, a slave economy whose chattel are cannibals that roam the streets at night and eat the unwary.
Then comes Fritz Leiber's Hugo- and Nebula-winning “Ill Met in Lankhmar”, as we come to a period that's not freely available online. It is not the first adventure of the pair to be published, but it is the tale of how they first met – and true to form, it's a drunken escapade that leaves bodies by the cartload. Nowadays it's known as the final quarter of [b:Swords and Deviltry|57950|Swords and Deviltry (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, #1)|Fritz Leiber|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347418591s/57950.jpg|449577]. Lankhmar is perhaps the father of the modern fantasy city, a model to such later classics as the City of Greyhawk and Ankh-Morpork, cosmopolitan and corrupt and stinking to high heaven. Here, we also see a breed of hero that is far more fallible than the mythic hero of Dunsany or the Übermensch of Howard. Fafhrd and Gray Mouser are capable at what they do, but they are human in their foibles.
Then there's “Ka the Appalling” by L. Sprague de Camp, the obligatory blemish in an otherwise faultless anthology. While de Camp is a significant figure in the genre, his merits are as a publisher. Though this is among his better work, it still reads as a Conan knock-off. It is further brought down by the absolutely horrendous translation, which preserves English capitalization of demonyms and titles and contains what I am pretty much certain is the earliest occasion of the classic genitive declension by colon mistake that I have ever seen. De Camp's story of a barbarian showing up and getting into a “let's found a religion” fraud has its moments, but is mostly amusing for having been written only a couple of years after L. Ron Hubbard started up his own little scam. In any case, there are a dozen better stories from more capable authors that could have occupied this slot, like C.L. Moore's “Black God's Kiss”, or something from Robert Lynn Asprin, or even Lovecraft's “The Doom That Came to Sarnath”. I feel it is somewhat telling than when I picked up this book again after 15 years, this is the only story I had no memory of.
Ending the collection on a high note and bookending the theme of civilization's decadence and fall, we have Michael Moorcock's “The Dreaming City”, the first tale of Elric of Melniboné, the tortured anti-Conan and proto-Raistlin. He treads the jewelled throne of his own homeland beneath his feet, lives by his sword in an unsettlingly literal way, and ends up destroying everything he loves. Though he is mighty in battle, his power comes from sorcery and a magical blade that eats souls, not the iron thews of a barbarian. Without them he is positively sickly. Unlike Dunsany's Merimna, the city of Imrryr is too decadent to survive and can only wreak vengeance.
Only one weaker text among five classics and masterpieces is not a bad score for a short story anthology, which are often far more uneven. I readily admit that there is a certain amount of nostalgia in my score, but only insofar as I had forgotten “Ka the Appalling”, which I shall doubtlessly accomplish soon once more.
As the title tells, this is a collection of John C. Wright's nominated short fiction for the 2015 Hugo Awards, a total of three novellas, a short story, and an essay on writing that's actually off his also Hugo-nominated essay collection [b:Transhuman and Subhuman: Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth 22041971 Transhuman and Subhuman Essays on Science Fiction and Awful Truth John C. Wright https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1415240589s/22041971.jpg 41365076].That's a crapload of Hugo nominations for a single year, and should make you suspicious. Indeed, originally there was even a sixth story of his on the ballot, but it was disqualified after it turned out it had been originally published in 2013. This abundance of nominations is the result of Wright's publisher, the far-right Castalia House, doing a bit of terrorist marketing in the form of the Rabid Puppies campaign that exploited a loophole in the Hugo nominations process to push in a slate of their own work and exclude everything else.Their fig leaf is that Wright and the other authors on the slate have been ignored in the awards due to their political views and that the awards have been taken over by leftist “message fiction”.Having now read all the spaghetti that they threw at the wall, at least in Wright's case the explanation might be much simpler. He's not a very good writer. What we have here is a selection of fundamentalist Catholic message fiction that could've used an editor. The novellas, “One Bright Star to Guide Them”, “The Plural of Helen of Troy”, and “Pale Realms of Shade”, are bloated with unnecessary exposition and gratuitous description. Tightened up into actually readable work, they'd be novelettes, or in the case of “The Plural of Helen of Troy”, a short story.The two stories that start out the collection, “One Bright Star to Guide Them” and the short story “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds”, read like attempts at doing C.S. Lewis. The first one feels like an attempt to continue off [b:The Last Battle 84369 The Last Battle (Chronicles of Narnia, #7) C.S. Lewis https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1308814830s/84369.jpg 1059917] except even worse, and the latter is an experiment along the lines of “what if C.S. Lewis had written the Left Behind series?”“The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” is an especially annoying read, since it is ostensibly written as a parable and is clearly going for the register of a fable, but the execution is clunky and the tone is off. A story like this lives or dies on its language, and it's just not there. Wright's grip of style is weak, and it is nowhere more evident than here.Then there's the writing advice essay “John C. Wright's Patented One-Lesson Session in the Mechanics of Fiction”, for which I can say that it does not put forth any obviously moronic ideas and even contains the only good fiction in the collection, in the form of a fragment that is used to illustrate getting the reader hooked. Then, the essay also contains the following lines: I am so totally not kidding: if you want to learn kung fu, you must learn to break bricks with your head. If you want to be a fiction writer, you must learn to stare at a blank page with nothing but your name on the top without flinching, without weeping, without getting up to get a beer to fortify your faltering courage.These two are not equivalent. Headbutting bricks to bits is what you get into when you're well on the road to learning kung-fu. Getting over the feat of the blank page is the bare minimum of embarking on the way of the writer. Amusingly, both Wright and his alleged editor pride themselves on logic.Then we get the time travel story “The Plural of Helen of Troy”, which is an interesting failed experiment in telling a story with a reversed chronology. It fails because though the sequence of events is reversed, it's still written in a linear fashion. The reader is explained things as they come along, which undermines the entire conceit of the structure and destroys the reader's joy of discovery when there is nothing to discover. It's like the writer was so scared the audience couldn't figure out the genius of his work that he explained it all away, and destroyed his own damn story. The ending, where we're explained not once but twice what we just read, borders on an insult to my intelligence.Finally, there's “Pale Realms of Shade”, about the ghost of a supernatural private investigator seeking redemption. This is a fascinating work in that it presents an interesting postwar world where two-fisted detectives combat the supernatural, and then instead of exploring that world and the implications of such a setting, proceeds to tell the intensely personal tale of a ghost who seeks absolution.The problem with this is that for such a tale to work, we'd need to care about the ghost. We don't, because he's boring. His partner and his wife are also boring, and their problems are boring. The attempts to give us something to care about are feeble and the characters remain undeveloped. (And there's probably something to be said about how Wright writes women. That something is not particularly flattering.)This is actually a thing in all the longer stories. Wright appears to have the talent of dropping hints of an interesting world in which his stories are set, which then pisses off the reader when the world is not utilized to its potential. “The Plural of Helen of Troy” comes the closest to working, but is ultimately brought down by its structural problems and bloated prose.And then there's the Catholicism thing. Each and every one of these stories is intensely religious, and “The Parliament of Beasts and Birds” and “Pale Realms of Shade” load all their stakes and payoff on points of Christian theology.Since I'm not religious, they cannot work for me. This is not to say that they'd work for everyone who is, either – the stories have sufficient nondenominational weaknesses to take care of that. For me, it's stuff I don't care about and mostly serves to remind me that these are written by a dude whose personal interpretation of Christianity is some of the most toxic ideology I've encountered in a while that's not directly involved in a war in the Middle East. (For those of you unacquainted with it, if you take every negative stereotype about Catholics except the predilection for molesting children, shape them into a man and put a fedora on him, you'll have a fair approximation of John C. Wright. He's essentially a caricature of himself.)The obvious counter-argument is that as an atheist I am not in the intended target audience, to which I can only note that this is the stuff the author and his publisher forced upon the Hugo ballot. I was most specifically targeted.And it's not even that this kind of thing can't be made to work. C.S. Lewis, on a good day, made it work. G.K. Chesterton made it work. Evelyn Waugh made it work, though probably not how he intended it. Arguably, Tolkien made it work, and Gene Wolfe continues to make it work. There are two tricks to this, I feel.The first is not force-feeding the religion.The second is knowing how to write.
The Paranet Papers is the third book of the Dresden Files RPG by Evil Hat Productions. I received the PDF as a review freebie.
It's an impressive piece of work, much like [b:Our World|8029972|Our World (The Dresden Files Roleplaying Game, #2; The Dresden Files, #10.11)|Leonard Balsera|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1278292310s/8029972.jpg|12629435] and [b:Your Story|8029973|Your Story|Leonard Balsera|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1278291689s/8029973.jpg|13406233] were. The book is sort of a general accessory that mostly focuses on delivering different settings that explore alternative ways of building a campaign from the ways given in the core books, but also includes a load of new rules items and updates material from Our World to include material from [b:Turn Coat|3475161|Turn Coat (The Dresden Files, #11)|Jim Butcher|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1304027128s/3475161.jpg|3516480], [b:Side Jobs: Stories From the Dresden Files|7779059|Side Jobs Stories From the Dresden Files (The Dresden Files, #12.5)|Jim Butcher|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1269115846s/7779059.jpg|10351697], and [b:Changes|6585201|Changes (The Dresden Files, #12)|Jim Butcher|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1304027244s/6585201.jpg|6778696] (Dresden Files book #12; the series is now at #15). It's also a big book, with 378 pages of stuff parceled out in eight chapters. Incidentally, this review will contain SPOILERS for that book.
For those of you unfamiliar with the game, the DFRPG books are presented as “in-universe” documents, a role-playing game that one of the characters, Will Borden, is designing to sneak information about supernatural threats to the general public (in the novels, Dracula was a similar work and led directly to the spectacular collapse of the Black Court of vampires). The game books are editing drafts of the final game books, with editorial notes in little post-it notes and a lot of highlighting pen work. This allows the books to include big secrets kept by the characters, usually with an “oops, I'll remove this in the next draft” from Will, while simultaneously presenting a lot of data as mere speculation, with no obligation for the novel series to follow it. Where in the first two books, the comments were by Will, Harry and Bob the Skull, here they are from Will, Karrin Murphy and Waldo Butters, dealing with Harry's apparent death and sniping at each other with pop culture references that usually at least one of the three doesn't get. The illusion is broken only by the absence of “see page XX” notes – the real page references tend to be among the last things you can insert when laying out a book.
The Contents
Let's see what this fat bastard's eaten, then.
The first five chapters are descriptions of different areas of the world that act as campaign outlines and also as case studies of different ways to do city generation and campaigns in Dresden Files.
The first of these is Las Vegas, more or less an exercise in standard DFRPG city-building. It's a city with a long-standing supernatural status quo that was contingent on a very powerful Red Court vampire. Then Changes happened, and now there is a power vacuum and the big players in the city are all getting ready to make a grab for it. The situation is not yet at a boiling point, but it is simmering aggressively. There's some wyldfae, and some Skavis, and the local cops, and the mafia, and a cult of Ishtar, and a bibliomancer at the University, and some dude who may or may not be the actual Charon hanging out at the Venetian, and loads of other things. It's a very complex, juicy situation, presented in a lovely, creepy manner. Like all the campaign ideas, it also notes which of the NPCs in the city are suitable for use as PCs.
The next chapter is Bloody October, set in Russia... in 1918, with the Civil War in full swing. The city they picked was Novgorod, a very old but much smaller city near St. Petersburg and Moscow. It's an example of a historical setting, but also one that is based around the different mortal power groups in the city rather than locations and their themes. It's also a place where the shit is currently in the process of hitting the fan and spraying everywhere. The Russian Civil War is one of the great clusterfucks of the 20th century. I remember the historian James Palmer once commenting on another game product set in the era to the effect that the goings-on were so gonzo already that a high-level fantasy adventurer party in the middle of Siberia would be just par for the course.
Of course, Rasputin is here, lurking in the background. Baba Yaga also makes an appearance, as does Koschei the Deathless. My personal favourite, Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg, isn't represented, but then again, his theatre of operations was thousands of kilometres to the east. Oh, and the local Cheka supervisor may or may not also be the Winter Knight. The Novgorod chapter is really cool stuff, though one of the NPCs presented is a Karelian Jew named Svetlana, from the lands of an evil Baron, which seems somewhat off to me. My cursory search couldn't find references to East Karelia's adminstrative division under Imperial Russia, but a Jewish village outside of the , in an area that never had a large population and most of that urban, seems kinda weird. The chapter is sourced from some old letters by a friend of Czar Nikolai II who also happened to be White Council and whose apprentice bumped off Rasputin (It didn't take. It never takes. You'd think anyone killed that hard would stay down, but nooo...)
Bloody October is also mostly illustrated in a style resembling old Soviet propaganda art, which helps set the atmosphere. I like it.
The third chapter is Neverglades, or Okeeokalee Bay, a town in the swamps of Florida, home to the actual Fountain of Youth, where about a third of all inhabitants have some mystic ability or skill and the existence of the supernatural is more or less public knowledge, taken as just one more thing. Hell, the town sheriff is a changeling and the chapter is narrated by a weregator who also doubles as the town's tourist guide. Okeeokalee Bay is an example of a tightly-knit community, which is organized around the people instead of locations in a system they call the Neverglades Twist. We get several faces for a theme, and characters who can be the face of both a location and a theme, and so forth.
This is one of my favourite chapters in the book in how it presents a believable small community with an interesting variety of plots and tensions (there's giant bugs! there's the crazy blood-addicts of the deceased local Red Court dude! there's a Conquistador ghost! there's a love dodecahedron!). It's very self-contained milieu with a strong, somewhat quirky atmosphere that I feel would be easy to bring to life in actual play (the narrator makes some very casual remarks about disposing of bodies, for instance). There are also infoboxes about local traditions and sayings, the latter of which is probably handy for people who game in English.
Then there's Las Tierras Rojas. In both the first and third chapters, there's a key element in the setting resulting from the destruction of the Red Court in Changes. Well, Las Tierras Rojas, the Red Lands, or South America as the rest of us know it, is nothing but that. It's a treatise on the former lands ruled by the Red Court and how the area is dealing with the power vacuum (not well). It's narrated by an agent of the Fellowship of St. Giles, the vampirism-infected guys fighting the good fight, who also got decimated as a side effect of the Court's destruction, when all their vampire mojo left them. There's also someone who may or may not be Manco Capac.
Whereas Neverglades focuses on a very small area, Las Tierras Rojas is a very large one, and I'm not sure if it really works. I'm not getting a feel for the setting in here, and I feel it would have needed more geographic precision. I'm not an expert on South American geography, but I have a working knowledge of it and I still had to hit Wikipedia every couple of pages, such as when one of the locations is described as “a hill in Veracruz”. While it was very educational to go find out what Veracruz is (a state of Mexico on the southwest coast of the Gulf), I feel that “a hill in the Mexican state of Veracruz” would have been handier. In general, The Paranet Papers really doesn't seem to do maps.
Then we come to The Ways Between, a discussion of ways to get from point A to point B through the Nevernever, which also includes a ready-to-run road trip campaign, complete with pregenerated characters that it's more or less tailored for. Personally, I don't really get DFRPG's affection for pregenerated characters. I've had players categorically refuse to play even a one-shot where they didn't generate their own character.
This is a chapter with a lot of good ideas in the margins and at the edges, such as a lot of nifty and creepy Americana, urban legends come to life and supernatural hobo signs, but the actual campaign unfortunately does nothing for me. Then, I never made it past six episodes of Supernatural, either. The adventure locales seem too standalone and only a couple of them, like Concretehenge, a circle of stones in an abandoned quarry with a faerie guardian, and Old Man Oak, a tree that's a magnet for misery, looked interesting to me. Apart from those, there's a mysterious abandoned asylum, a demon-possessed mine, a safehouse in the middle of a forest inhabited by a gargantuan dream spider thing, and so forth. They feel like they should have been fleshed out more and most of them lack oomph. This isn't helped by most of the art in this chapter being fairly uninspired (one of the artists that worked on the book has an unusual view of human anatomy).
The rest of the chapters cover a variety of crunchy bits. The first of these is the Spellcasting addendum. Here we get new rules for soulfire, more in line with what was seen in later novels, and lots of other little additions to better model new material. There's a couple of pages on spellcasting in the Nevernever, several pages of expanded and clarified thaumaturgy rules and if that's not your thing, the simplified and streamlined “Cheer-Saving Thaumaturgy”. The name comes from Will's Arcanos group's tradition of “He who kills the cheer springs for beer”. Then there's a couple of pages on the philosophy of magic and the elements in the world of Dresden Files, which was interesting and felt like a welcome oasis between all the numbers.
I'm really, really bad at reading rules, if you haven't figured that out by now.
The final two chapters are addendums to Goes Bump and Who's Who, detailing new information about known creatures and characters as well as new acquaintances. This is pretty basic stuff. Having rules for the fomor is nice. The Who's Who addendum also covers “plot device” characters, who are characters so powerful there is no real sense in trying to model them in the ruleset. They've been popping up a lot more in the novels. These are types like the Leanansidhe, Donar Vadderung, and so on. We also get Harry and Karrin statted out to the end of Changes, as opposed to the [b:Storm Front|47212|Storm Front (The Dresden Files, #1)|Jim Butcher|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1419456275s/47212.jpg|1137060] stats provided in Our World.
The book wraps up with a comprehensive index. This is a good thing.
The Conclusion
It's a pretty great book. I'm not all that hot on all the material and the novel guide aspect of some of the latter chapters is probably an acquired taste, but it's written well and was an entertaining read. I especially like how the different settings are not just the setting, but also examples of new ways to create a setting under the DFRPG ruleset. That's handy, and even a chapter like The Ways Between that was distinctly my least favourite in the book, has stuff that I can put to use.
The Paranet Papers gets my recommendation. It exhibits the same skill that was used to put together the two previous volumes of the game, and the presentation as an in-setting roleplaying game is great. The release schedule for the game may be glacial, but the wait has been well worth it.
Snake Agent was a very entertaining novel.
Detective Chen is another entry to the ranks of the urban, mystical officers of the law, joining Peter Grant and Harry Dresden and I suppose Lord Darcy in turning back the dark with their brains. Much like Grant's a member of the London Metropolitan Police and Dresden hangs his hat in Chicago, Chen's home is Singapore Three.
It's not, as far as I can tell – and I may be mistaken – a real city or even the cognate of one. Snake Agent, while primarily being a supernatural detective story, is also near-future science fiction, where Singapore is founding franchise cities and information is transmitted on the bioweb.
Over all this, Hell exists as a superimposed world that you can cross over to at temples or via certain rituals. This being China, it's the Hell(s) of Chinese myths. There's a throwaway reference about the African Underworld suggesting that other places have their own similar circumstances.
I'm completely ignorant about the concept of Hell as described by Chinese folk myth, Buddhism or any other major religion other than Christianity that operates in the religion, so I can't gauge the accuracy of Liz Williams's depiction.
That said, the worldbuilding is the interesting thing in the book, the interaction of the world of the living with Hell and Heaven. The plot didn't really do anything to me, being a fairly basic “heroes deal with supernatural threat” thing, but the setting and characters are fascinating. One of my favourite scenes is when Seneschal Zhu Irzh, the vice cop from Hell, sits into a cab with religious crap and cruft like bobblehead Buddhas on the dashboard, and he has an allergic reaction.
Zhu Irzh is also one of the more interesting characters in the novel, being the wisecracker to Detective Chen's straight man. Another favourite of mine was the extreme Maoist demon hunter No Ro Shi, who's as badass as they come and likely also insane, as well as Inari, Chen's demon wife, who somehow manages simultaneously to be the damsel in distress, retain agency, and kick ass.
The prose and the plot did not grab me, but the world is something I want to see more of. It's only three stars this time, 3.5 if it was an option, but then, so was [b:Storm Front|47212|Storm Front (The Dresden Files, #1)|Jim Butcher|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1419456275s/47212.jpg|1137060], and look at where that series went. I'm looking forward to the next one.