ergative's reviews
925 reviews

Review forthcoming on Nerds of a Feather. For now, Fuck Yeah.

 Structurally, I really liked what this book was doing. I liked the conceit--I really, really liked the conceit--and I liked the obvious affection for profession and location that made its way into all the descriptions of antiquarian maps, book expos, the NYPL, and the philosophies espoused by all the various map-affiliated people. The mystery of the gas station map as presented at the start of the book worked really well; it was very engaging as a hook. The problem is that, as the mystery unfolds, it depends on two intertwining timelines, and the execution of intertwining was dreadfully clunky. The bits of the story that Nell manages to squeeze out of the various people she encounters in her quest are too conveniently and exactly chronological. Every person who finally decides to share their bit of what happened conveniently picks up where the last person left off, and sometimes the pauses for storytelling are awkwardly positioned in between conversations that go something like, 'there's no time. Leave now. Drop it. You've got to leave. There's no time. Go away. [insert incredibly long reminiscence]. But there's no time to say more. You've got to go. Now. Leave.'

Also, the story of how the Cartographers were formed and then fell apart is such a frustrating example of a bunch of young people who are all their own worst enemies. Like, I understand the appeal of creating this cohort of friends for life, and then poking at the cleavage points and seeing how they break. But at the same time, I just wish the Cartographers could have been less--not flawed, because I understand that character flaws are necessary and good--but less stupid about acting on their flaws. Eve and Francis--jeez, kids, I have no patience for that kind of behaviour.

I also found the Haberson corporation unconvincing. I simply do not believe that a single company can become as big and influential as it has without diversifying out of mapmaking. I also don't believe its internal structure. It's the in-world equivalent to Google or Amazon, and yet the astonishingly briliant founder has time to reply to emails from his underlings? All of them? All tens of thousands of them? I don't buy it. Also, whatever is revealed about William Haberson in the end, I had already twigged to it quite early, because I was so unwilling to believe that the corporation was actually as virtuous as it presented itself as being. Maybe if this book had been written fifteen years ago, when Google still pretended to follow the 'don't be evil' mantra, I could have bought it. 'Imagine,' Shepherd is inviting us to believe, 'that there actually was a company that truly was what Google pretends to be.' But those days are gone, and today that what-if is flawed from its very conception. I was impatient and annoyed with all the bits about how great Haberson is, and the reveal about William Haberson at the end did not do anything to dispel my fundamental skepticism at that component of world-building. Yes, it's fantasy, but if the author is replicating the NYPL down to the details of which maps are hanging on which halls, then I'd expect them to have a bit more care about understanding how large corporations exist in a capitalist world.

I also find myself straining against the idea that a bunch of computer scientists would actually believe in the mission of 'construct a perfect map'. Like, sure, a billionaire CEO might think that such a thing might be possible, but surely people in computing science might recognize how flawed and unattainable such a goal is. How do you define 'perfect', anyway?

The Hab Map  that can just spit out answers to questions about where people might be based on ALGORITHMS!1!! might have struck me, before ChatGPT, as handwavy voodoo nonsense that bears no resemblance to how actual algorithms work. Now, I fully believe that algorithms exist that can take in info and spit out answers, but I strongly doubt that the programmers who created the algorithm would actually believe that those answers are correct. But then, there was some Google programmer who insisted that ChatGPT was sentient, so who knows. Anyway, it felt thin. 

This was fundamentally disappointing, alas. The author writes for Atlas Obscura, and most of this book felt like a series of Atlas Obscura articles: interesting notes that never go much deeper than an internet blog post. I learned very little that I hadn't already known from reading the perpetual articles about fatbergs that come out every winter; the occasional New Yorker article about biofuel creation; and of course the hive mind wisdom that everyone responsible for maintaining their own home's plumbing already knows: 'flushable' wipes aren't flushable.

The focus was almost exclusively London sewers and various US-based municipalities, with the occasional historical commentary on historical sewer systems--mostly in England--and some descriptions of architecture of waste treatment plants that do not include sufficient photographs to actually illustrate the text.

This book gathers together all of those tidbits of information and puts them between the same covers, but if someone is actually interested enough in sewers to read a whole book on them, that person is likely to already know much of what is in this book, and get impatient and frustrated while looking for the rest of the content that isn't there.

NB: I received an advanced copy of this book from Netgalley. Inasmuch as I can be sure of such things, I believe that this has not affected the content of my review.

A favorite remark of my esteemed mother is that a book would have been a better book at half the length. I don't think that this book would have been a better book at half the length, but I do think it would have been substantially improved by twice the content. It sprawled. It sprawled and meandered and said the same thing multiple times, took ten pages or half a chapter to make a point that could have easily been made in a page--or even a few sentences--and I got quite impatient before we reached the end of it.

For example: in the chapter on Vikings, Roberts takes five pages to meander through some thoughts she's had about linguistic similarities between English and Scandinavian languages that strike her as too extreme to be explained by Viking raids. She can read a menu in a restaurant in Norway! She has lots of thoughts about this ground-breaking discovery, that maybe the cultural and linguistic exchange between Norse and Old English might have been more extensive than previously thought. Previously thought? Previously thought by whom? Here I am, a PhD in linguistics, jumping up and down and screaming, we know this already!
 
She does, eventually, get around to saying, 'I then thought to ask some linguists and it turns out that they know about this already'--thank heavens for that, at least, but why did we have to spend five pages in her extremely uninformed head meandering through Norwegian restaurants if she always planned to tell us what is actually known about language contact? She is not a linguist. I don't want five pages of her feeling smug about having knocked down a straw-man misconception by the uninformed public. I want the actual information from the actual specialists. Chop the five pages of personal speculation, or at least interweave the personal observations in the context of telling us what linguists and actual specialists know about the history of Norse-English language contact!

It really feels as if Roberts had a contract that specified 'x pages of content, to be published by y date', and she wasn't ready to meet either clause. The key giveaway, as I see it, is the repeated, incessant, unending hype about the potential of archaeogenomics to answer all the open questions about migration and diffusion and whether populations displaced each other, or simply mixed around and in the process it was the cultural practices, rather than the people themselves, who gave way to the newcomers. Much of the book discusses these two ideas. At great length. Repeatedly. And always, always, she'll talk about how Dr So-and-So is doing ground-breaking exciting research into archaeogenomics that can shed new light on these old debates! Just wait! I can't wait! Archaeogenomics! Rah rah rah! Only a little while longer!

Except she did this in her previous book, too--archaeogenomics is very exciting! Much potential! Such answers! Wow! The first time she brought it up in this book I got excited, thinking that now we were finally going to get some of those results that she'd teased in her previous book. But no. Still coming! So ground-breaking! Much soonly! Very answers!

So: Roberts wanted, I think, to write a book in which much of the content was about archaeogenomics. But the results were not in by the time her contract specified she needed to turn in the manuscript, and so she had to fill up the required page count with something. And so we get unending blather that really feels like she got drunk and just rambled on to her bartender about her thoughts and feelings regarding burials in Roman and early Medieval Britain. 

'Have you ever really thought about a sunset?' she might ask a long-suffering bartender, whose name, we'll say, is George. 'So many people have watched the sun set, just the way we do! Moments and moments, repeating themselves. We're the latest inheritors, but each one of us will see a final sunset too.' 

George nods and pours her some water. She has a book deadline, he knows, and she's very frustrated that the archaeogenomics data  isn't available yet, and she's trying to make wordcount. Might as well spare her tomorrow morning's hangover. 

She ignores the water, though, and demands another Tennant's. She continues, 'What makes life meaningful, anyway? The finite span of a human life is what creates its meaning; we have limited time her, and that prompts us to reflect on how best to use this precious time, and what legacies we'd like to leave. I'd like to leave behind some books, but goddamn Colin over at Exeter just won't publish his fucking archeogenomics data and my editor is breathing down my ass, and I've still got fifty pages to write before the end of the month!  What legacy will I leave if I don't get this done? I want to leave behind something--something--' she hiccups--'something tangible. Maybe that's my mistake. Should I be thinking in material terms? Some of us think in material terms. But is that how I want to be remembered? How do you want to be remembered, George? Maybe it's not about material things. Maybe it's about the connections that each of us forms during our lives. All those points of contact with other human beings. Our close relatives--I haven't called mum in ages--our friends and acquaintances--hah, Colin's probably filtering my emails straight to junk--and with strangers, too. But you're not a stranger, are you George? We're friends, aren't we? Have you called your mum recently?'

Later, when she gets home, she realizes that she left her phone on 'Record', and in listening back to her conversation with George, she discovers that here was some good stuff in it, and as we've established, she was desperate to make wordcount, so she just lifted the good bits and plopped it in to pad out the end of Chapter 8 (pg 293, if you want to check it out).

Anyway. Her first book was better.

Fuck, I just love these books so much. I don't think this one was as *good* as previous 5-star books, but it gave me so much pleasure I can't rate it lower. 

I love in particular in this one how the entire plot springs from Frey being an utter dumbass--not just an unlucky bastard who stumbled into something bigger than he realized, as in previous books, but genuinely doing something completely stupid in a way that is entirely within character for him. And yet--because of the work done in the previous two books--it is equally believable that his crew would go with him to try to fix his mistake, partly out of loyalty to him, but also--because they are who they are--out of a certain selfish understanding that they have a good thing going for them on the Ketty Jay, and it will all fall apart if Frey can't fix his problem. This isn't found family here; this is an effective crew who work despite all their flaws, and yet still retain their own bits of privacy and their own secrets. Silo's personal struggles with leadership and the way he compares his own approach to repeated failures with Frey's approach works extremely well. Crake's developing relationship with the Century Knight mirrors Frey's (slightly boring) maturing understanding of how he wants to relate to Trinica, right down to how they each do something unforgiveable in service of the main quest.

Speaking of the main quest, this book was brilliantly constructed of set pieces, each of which had its own goal, and all of which contributed directly to plot: the opening gambit (with Frey getting completely spanked by Ashua for most of that chase--attagirl, Ashua); the train heist; the Firecrow race (wonderful little bit of mercy for Harkins there); the escape from the warrens (btw, the gols were DEFINITELY inspired by gollum); the prison break, and the eventual climax in the Axryx city (btw, the eventual demon-wranglling set-up was DEFINITELY inspired by ghostbusters)--all of it was so nicely integrated with the plot and the various characters arcs. Even Pinn's brief attempt at being an inventor gets a chance to play into things. Silo's arc especially I found the most moving. He's been rather neglected in the previous two books when it comes to backstory, but he got a very good one here.

Anyway, great fun. Great ride. I immediately started the next one.

This is very hard to evaluate. It has the vibes of Gormengast without any of that profoundly disagreeable mockery of everyone and everything that made Gormengast so unpleasant. There was a certain amount of wit in the construction of the dramatis personae and the glossary, and a real sureness of touch in doing what it was doing. The author did know what he was about. But at the same time, I'm left a bit cold. For all the lip service given to sympathizing with the plight of the slum-dwellers, Pheby sure seems to rack up an enormous body count in pursuit of his vibes (although the bit about pigs and pig-men in the glossary would not have resonated as well as it did if he hadn't been quite so ruthless). Yet on the level of the individual character, the people seem more archetypes than people. They are grotesqueries, as in Gormengast, and although they are not presented as pathetic objects to gawk at in their grotesqueries--not quite--yet they still don't feel quite like people. Nathan's rampage with Dashini doesn't really feel set up properly: he's angry at the Master, yes, but why is he not also angry at Dashini after he learns the secret of the Book? He's angry at Gam and Prissy sure, but does he have to destroy the entire city? That bit of the book never really worked for me; it felt like Pheby was trying to invent reasons to motivate Nathan's eventual destruction, but the reasons didn't feel organic. They felt forced, and I didn't really believe it.

Also, I could have really done without Bellows's repeated descriptions of how female oestrus smells so disgusting. I get that it was the Master--who is a baddy--behind it all, but I shouldn't have to wait until pg 350 to find a woman who is not presented as an object of disgust or sexual attraction (or both), and I really shouldn't have to go digging into the glossary to learn why the Master pretends that oestrus disrupts his magic. We can have retro-feeling vibes without the misogyny, Pheby! Jeez, you're a creative fellow; please don't be lazy here.

The glossary is very interesting. It adds an enormous amount to the world-building, and some of the entries are quite funny--e.g., carrots, pigs--but it is over 100 pages of detail that is not fully necessary to understand the book. I read the book before reading the glossary, there were definite moments where I came across details which clarified certain confusing bits in the narrative, I also appreciated how the glossary expanded the world-building beyond the cities of Mordew, Malarkoi, and Waterblack. I suspect if I were to read the book again, knowing now what I know about the Atheistic Crusades, I would probably catch all sorts of references that went past me the first time through. But there's also an enormous amount of theology about how magic and gods and Spark and material and immaterial realms and angels and demons which would be an awful slog to have to wade through before getting to the story. I repeat--it's over 100 pages! I think that if you really, really enjoyed the book, then the glossary is a terrific addition. It has all of the narrative personality that characterizes Pheby's prose, and there are offhand comments and remarks there that line up beautifully with the main text. 

Hmph. Don't know how to end this. I'm glad I read this. I'm not fully sure I'll read the next.

 I don't normally consider myself much of a crime enthusiast, but these books just do it for me. The setting, the history of medicine, the plotting--everything really works. My prediction about whodunnit that was laughably wrong because I neglected to consider the fact that the various plot threads would, in fact, have to dovetail in the end. Silly me. 

 Just as much fun as the first! It does suffer, just a smidge, from the token-girl-must-be-awesome trope, but the male characters are profoundly flawed in so many entertaining ways, while each having their own distinct strength to contribute which just barely makes them more an asset than a liability (but only just barely). I quite enjoy how everything the Ketty Jay does is basically lurching from one fuck-up to another, to the point that any time something is going just barely right for just a moment, I know that in the next line there's going to be an explosion, or a betrayal, or something's going to go catastrophically pear-shaped. Yes, fine, so it's predictable, but so enjoyably so! 

 Fundamentally fluff, beset by daddy issues that usually irrirate me, but I read it in one sitting, laughed out loud at a lot of the banter. Not between the leads, who were mostly angst and uptightery, but the bits involving side characters--especially Alex and Miffy---were pure gold. I also really liked how we got to see Luc being good at his job in multiple points. He's such a hot mess everywhere else that those scenes where he's talking to donors and showing really strong people skills to soothe over hurt feelings and squeeze the rich for charity cash by knowing exactly which pressure points work for which types of people, were vitally necessary to balance the self-loathing. I also enjoy the friend groups. Strong, supportive friend groups with individual, well-developed personalities (usually because they need to introduce characters for later books in the same series) are a real strength in the romance genre. 

 It's harder for me to evaluate novellas than novels. If I felt like the characters were a bit removed, is it because the characterization was lacking, or because a novella inherently allows less space for characterization and I must adjust my expectations accordingly? If I felt like backstory of a primary antagonist seemed quite skimpy--a figure, rather than a person--was it because he was not properly set up, or because a novella inherently allows less space for backstory, and I must adjust my expectations accordingly? 

I think, in this particular case, it's the latter, and Griffith's approach worked very well to minimize these issues. The mythic feel of the tale, its Arthurian resonances, suit the more limited characterization, and justify Peretur's superhuman excellence at all things--an excellence that would become irritating in a more grounded tale, but are entirely appropriate in a folkloric hero's origin story. I really enjoyed the way Celtic folklore and Arthuriana were woven together, culminating in a quest for the grail that wasn't actually about the grail, except for where it was; and how everyone's approach to the quest revealed the complex interconnections between historical movement of peoples and cultures in early medieval Wales. Really, it's a very skillfully done work. I almost wish it were longer, allowed room to breathe more fully, given the Hild treatment. I don't generally much care for Arthurian retellings, but this one feels like we're getting an actual, historically grounded story underlying the Arthur tradition, rather than a retelling that builds further on top of it. Griffith is really good at early medieval storytelling.