Elder Race (Tchaikovsky)

Elder Race
Adrian Tchaikovsky (2021)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a Pandemic Book Club pick for the month of September. A "novella" was chosen because many of us are teachers and September is busy.

This is a Tor.com book, but not one I'd heard of before. I might've seen a promo for it when it was first released as I'm on Tor's mailing list. I'm also part of their book club and have gotten many free books from their site.

The book tries to blend fantasy and science-fiction by telling parallel narratives. Lyn and Nyr are the two POV characters. Lyn is the Fourth Daughter of the current regent of her city/realm/whatever, and she goes to seek help from the wizard/sorceror on top of the mountain. She'd seen his castle once before as a child so she knows where to go. The wizard had helped her ancestor defeat another threat to the world once before.

Nyr is actually an anthropologist, formerly of Earth, who sleeps in a chamber waiting for the ship that dropped him to return and pick him up. He's supposed to be watching the people and taking notes, but it seems like he's been asleep since the last time he interfered with the culture, which has forgotten almost everything about where they came from. It's all just myth and fable now.

They have a hard time communicating because the language has changed and there aren't words to describe some of the ideas he wishes to convey. There is one chapter which has a side by side of what he's saying and what she's hearing/understanding. It is frustrating for him. He's trying to explain that there is no magic.

The story is good, but the ending was disappointing because it wasn't a case of magic vs science. The threat of the "demons" is real in a science way as well. Nyr doesn't understand what the portal is or why creatures are acting as they are. There are attempts to communicate, but he can't. Maybe this was done to show that it's more advanced than his science, so it's magic, but I don't think so. For one thing, it isn't shown to be more advanced, just different, like two computers that can't talk to each other. So far all the talk about there being no demons and no magic, this was essentially both, and the primitives were "correct" all along.

I did enjoy it, but I did tire of Nyr's "woe is me! no one will ever return for me! I shouldn't have interfered. I'm a terrible anthropologist!". I finished it two days ago, and I don't even remember if he went back to sleep or tried to live happily ever after with Lyn. The problem with the latter is that she had been expecting the wizard to name his price for his services, which she assumed meant that she would have to become his bride or his consort. So such an ending would confirm her fears.

Lyn didn't quite get her moment to shine. When Nyr is attacked, she prepares to go through the arch to do battle with the demon. However, Nyr tells her that there is no "through". She would be "unmade" as soon as she passed the arch. So she doesn't get a battle, but she does get to strike something else.

Update: The overwhelming response of the book club was positive, and they didn't mind that Nyr didn't have all the answers and that there was something that was so beyond him that it might as well have been magic. Except, to me, it was something that was contacting him, so there could've been more of an answer.

Harald's Adventure Wares (Redd)

Harald's Adventure Wares
A story of one man's greed, and a goblin
by D. G. Redd (2022)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was a book from Free Ebooks on Reddit. It's a short novella, which Goodreads says is part of some other world. The plot is pretty much summed up in the subtitle, which is why I included it even though it doesn't appear to be on the image of the book cover.

So Harald runs a shop selling stuff to adventurers, generally the dumber kind who are easier to swindle. Occasionally, a real hero will come to town, and he'll still try to get the best deal he can. It's amazing his lived as long as he has.

There's a problme in that there's a goblin outside of town that's making it difficult to gather up the mushrooms needed for making potions and magic items, but a single goblin is beneath the notice of a real hero and yet proves to challenging for wannabes.

Harald finally teams up with the potion maker and the innkeeper to find the goblin themselves. He worries the entire time that the other two are damaging the weapons and armor he loaned them. They capture a goblin and are about to kill it when it pleads for its life and promises gold. No tricks, it produces a lot of gold. Rather than take it, Harald wants to go into business with the goblins.

They reinforce the goblins' lair so it will be a challenge to adventurers, who will attack the goblins, and then the goblins will take all their money. (Oh, and they might die, but adventurers die, right.)

So here we know that Harald is not just a bad person but a little bit evil as well. You can imagine how things will turn out when you're in business with goblins. It doesn't turn out well for two of the three, but Harald, like Thenardier of Les Miz, lives to see another day. And it's business as usual.

I Almost gave up on this early because it wasn't exactly well-written, but there was a sense of a story to come, so I stuck with it. It did read more for people who play fantasy games than read fantasy books. Not the worst free book I read, but I'm glad it was only a novella.

Steampunk Leap Year / Steampunk New Year (Lucci)

Steampunk Leap Year
by Jessica Lucci (2019)

Steampunk New Year
by Jessica Lucci (2020)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

These two steampunk collections were included in a recent eSpec Books Kickstarter campaign. I'm still fairly new to Steampunk, as a reader as well as a writer, so I can appreciate short stories that hit different aspects of the genre.

I read the two of them back to back, each one having 12 stories or poems, and all quite short. (My experience with the second book might've suffered for this.) In the first book, the stories should've corresponded in some way (some more obvious than others) to the month of the year. In the second book, I couldn't tell if this was still an overall theme or not.

The stories in the first book were:

• Steampunk Leap Year: on old man kidnaps a young baby. It's the old year and the baby new year. The old man has a mechanical heart which is supposed to be removed and implanted in the baby.
• Stupid Cupid: Cupid has a mechanized harness and if you're shot with his arrows you may find love or you may bleed out. At this point, we are 1/3 of the way through the book. The rest of the tales will be shorter.
• Mr. Caibleir: Until I just typed that, it didn't dawn on my that it was 'cobbler', or for that matter, close to 'Keebler'. It's a retelling of the cobbler and the elves, but with Leprechauns and a downer of an ending. The steampunk element feels almost tacked on at the end, almost replaceable with a different ending.
• Steamy Stpring: The steampunk elements are there along with flying mutated pigs, Persephone and Hades. Weird.
• Each Other and Your Mother: A lot of candles and blood. I have no idea what was going on in this one.
• Summer Vacation: The idyllic town of Gustover has robots taking care of everything so the townpeople can enjoy their leisure. They have two problems though: children getting underfoot during summer vacation (and the school marm won't reopen the school), and the rats from developing the town. An absurdist pied piper retelling that takes care of some of the town's problems.
• Parade: A photographer at a parade trying to get a picture of the young girl who is dressed as the Statue of Liberty. I read this on the moring subway so maybe I missed something here.
• Last Lobster Rolls: A submarine and lobsters. What could go wrong?
• Silver and Orange: A girl with a magical wand (or a steampunk-y wand) and an inversion of Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater.
• Cheaper By the Dozen: A man buys a rose every day. The florist tells him that they are cheaper by the dozen. That refrain will come back later.
• Over the River and Through the Woods: A poem, which could be sung to the title tune, which I know thanks to the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving special. This version has "hover the smokestack and blast the past..."
• Steampunk Little Christmas: Amy is in 5th grade and she's embarrased by her little clockwork sister.

Overall, I enjoyed more than I didn't, and there were only a couple that I just didn't get. (I can't say I couldn't get through any of them since they're so short, but they might've left me scratching my head. Not enough to dwell on them though.)

I didn't fare as well on the second book and, in retrospect, I probably shouldn't have read them back to back. It's lighter on the steampunk elements and doesn't keep to the monthly format of the first book.

The lead story has 3 girls, A, B, and C, along with dragon fire and steam trains, and is a retelling of Cinderella, which the exception that the Queen is looking for a bride for the princess. The next has a submarine which becomes and airship which gets caught by a black hole and leads the crew on a trip to eternity that ends a little abruptly. The next is about humans and dragons coexisting in the Scottish Highlands until Baron Von Rectom ruins it. A poem (or song) Thundersnow follows. And then more. I won't go through them all because I've forgotten a lot about them. There's a Chupacabra Choo-Choo with a character named Chupie. A coronavirus poem. A trio of guys who could be the 3 Stooges (and who fare as well as you might expect.) It ends with a "Festivus" story as a real holiday, not just people celebrating it from TV. It took me a couple mentions to realize that Santina was actually Santa (no last name). Jack Frost and the Grinch have supporting roles in this Festivus Eve tale.

The one thing I noticed is that men don't fare well in the books with the exception of Father Time (the old new year) in the first book, and the Grinch in the last tale. The rest seemed to have sad or bad endings or just weren't nice people in the first place. Que sera. There's probably a reason for it.

Quick reads. On to the next books from one Kickstarter or another before I get back to the Book Club pick.

Hobbies for Androids (Fenn)

Hobbies for Androids
by Aurea Fenn (2023)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This book was from Free Ebooks on reddit. The image of the cat with the laser eye was confusing. Android cats didn't appear until halfway through and I don't care any having a laser eye. And if you think about it, it would've been popular with the kittens. Likewise, there aren't a lot of hobbies for these androids. They mostly have duties, even the one that paints. There was one that mused about having his own interests instead of performing anothers, but that turned into an android takeover story and not a particularly good one.

This is a collection of short stories, ranging from a few pages to over 30. The lead-off story was about a music promoter in debt so when he discoveres his star dead in bed, he has an associate ready an android to sing at the concert. They then conspire to hide the body for a while. It was a little disappointing for a lead story, but the second story continues the story line. This had me thinking that maybe it was going to be one story, which would've had me ligthen up a little on the first story. While the payoff for the second story was better, the two should've been combined into one. It wouldn't even have been the longest story had that been done.

My biggest complaint is that most of these stories are just scenes, or they have a primary scene that takes up the majority of the narrative. Once in that scene, it defaults to a lot of dialogue. Just a lot of talking, occasionally punctuated by an adverb or adjective to tell us what they're feeling instead of showing. I'm sure everything was clear in the author's head, but it doesn't always translate onto the page.

As for the self-publishing, minor errors that seep in that I hope I don't duplicate if I try to self-publish, but I probably will. That said, an editor might've found the grammatical mistakes (according to reddit, there was an editor), but they didn't suggest improvements to the stories. And they didn't catch all the mistakes. I nearly shut the book when a fellow was trying to get medical advice from a fortune teller machine (insert commentary about being unable to afford it). A worker tells the guy "you can't use that in a palace of medical care". I read that four times before it dawned on me that it should have said "you can't use that in place of medical care". A bit of a difference.

I stuck with it at 10%, 20% and 50%, points where I'd usually bail. After that,I found myself trying to power through it. It got frustrating when one story is about a gambler in a casino betting on horses using a combination of inside information and programming probabilities, and it's clear that the guy knows next to nothing about actual horse racing. This would be okay, but the waitress who serves him and works in the place seems to know just as little and can't figure out that he doesn't know what he's talking about despite the fact that he's winning and winning big, betting all his winnings on each subsequent race. Following the narrative, it becomes obvious that this is because the author knows very little about horseracing and imparts very little knowledge about it to the reader. What is shared suggests that the author assumes that the reader knows nothing as well.

One thing I do know: a bet for the horse to come in 1st, 2nd or 3rd is a bet to SHOW, not a bet to PLACE. A place bet is for 1st or 2nd only. And for all the races and all the bets, I think only one horse was every named, the rest are numbers, but numbers where? If someone was betting on a horse, they might mention the number 4 horse in the third race at Belmont, not just number 4. Nor would they mention about 30 horses running, because a) the betting form tells you the exact number of horses, and b) no race would have 30 horses in it. The Derby has 20 and that's a lot but it's the Kentucky freakin' Derby.

I didn't think I'd get this worked up over one story, but it was toward the end and the fact that it was so poorly written is so distracting. A good editor would've suggested some tweaks. (Sidenote: my editor asked me the name of a spaceship in one of my stories, and pointed out that I said it was the flagship of the line, so something that important should have a name. I spent as much time (or more) thinking about that as I did writing the first draft of the story.) Also, the ending is out of left field and not in a good way. Even after the part when the guy is forgetting about the woman calling and texting me and trying to run off with the waitress.

Anyway, some good ideas, but not very well executed.