Women’s History Month series
Links to interviews (and transcripts) with Melbourne women who protested against the Vietnam War and the National Service Act.
(list continues below)
Continue reading →Stargate SG1 season 2
We go straight from defeating Apophis in the first episode (following a cliffhanger at the end of the last season!) – including truly hilarious CGI of NASA’s shuttle, and also the hilarious suggestion that the shuttle could be launched with zero notice – to Sam getting infected by a Goa’uld, and suddenly we discover the existence of the Tok’ra. Again, not something I remembered starting this early.
Across this season we get reference to “the System Lords” as if it’s something we’ve been talking about for many episodes, but I’m pretty sure it’s not. Plus I remain confused as to why Daniel is compelled to wear that ridiculous floppy hat while Jack and Sam get caps. I mean, I understand it’s meant to make him look goofy – it’s the sartorial equivalent of his equally floofy and floppy hair. But still.
“The Gamekeeper” is one of the more harrowing episodes so far – Jack and Daniel being put through the emotional wringer as a game. And then very soon after, Daniel being corrupted by the sarcophagus – it’s fascinating that he’s played as the most vulnerable of the whole team because of his depths of compassion. Of course, this gets more complicated in later seasons, and I do love it as a continuing exploration of his character. It’s also an example of Michael Shanks actually being a good actor – he doesn’t get much opportunity to showcase a range of emotion usually.
Poor old Daniel only gets a bit of personal development in the first half of this season: in “Gamekeeper” we learn his parents were also archaeologists or similar and they were killed in a museum accident; his wife is largely forgotten. Still that’s more than either Jack or Sam gets. Teal’c gets much more – the whole Rya’c storyline is interesting enough, although I don’t love it. And I can’t begin to say how much I loathe the fact Teal’c calls his wife “woman” – something about a heroic culture requiring misogyny?
… the problem with writing this as I watch, rather than at the end – so that I don’t forget these oh-so-erudite points – is that then things change completely: the episode after I wrote the above, we get an episode I had completely forgotten: Sha’re is back home, pregnant with Apophis’ child. Daniel has to decide whether he can still love his wife after she has been raped (happily, doesn’t take very long to choose Yes – which is an interesting difference from Teal’c, who struggles to deal with his wife having agreed to a new husband so that she and their son could have a decent life). Tragically, they only have a brief period together before the Goa’uld returns. (Daniel also gets to threaten Apophis when the SGC have him as a prisoner.) And we get Sam’s dad in the same episode, an Air Force general still trying to organise his daughter’s life while he’s dying of cancer. Both of these events – the child and the fact that Papa Carter chooses to blend with a Tok’ra – have enormous repercussions for the next few seasons… and further in personal lives. we keep playing on the loss of Jack’s son, too, giving him new sons to connect with (and lose).
Meanwhile, the SG1 must finally face some consequences of their actions: they destroyed the anti-Goa’uld defence system set up by Thor, and then that planet gets invaded, so SG1 goes back to try to help out. And hooray, we get The Real Thor! – another case of “already??” Plus they go to a planet where they fear they might have introduced a disease – and for the first time there’s concern that this is something that might happen when meeting new folks. Along those same lines, I appreciate that the show does sometimes examine moral quandaries. Like whether they should just shoot that snakehead Apophis out of hand, or take him prisoner and try to make use of him.
Remember those useless end-of-season recap episodes that occurred when you had 22-24 episodes dropping weekly? At least Stargate has so far been somewhat clever – last season, Senator Kinsey being an arse but nonetheless making some uncomfortably sensible points; this season, the team seem to be in the future but are actually being held captive, and made to remember some of the peoples they’ve encountered. Still, I forwarded through all of the recap bits (again). The joys of the DVD.
Further opportunities for actual acting: Daniel being inhabited by Marcello, Jack and Teal’c swapping bodies (mostly this is a Chris Judge opportunity, not so much for Richard Dean Anderson).
Costuming hilarity: there’s one planet where the humans appear to be naked, with body paint. It’s very obvious that they have zips up the back of their outfits; there’s also wrist and neck edges. (Most of the actors in this episode, though, are wonderful physical actors.) PLUS I am 100% certain the only reason for the episode “1969” is so that they could put the team into those ridiculous outfits.
Stats:
- Sam gets a raw deal for being female: 0 (hooray! Progress!)
- Someone falls madly in love Sam: 1
- Sam reciprocates: 0
- Jack gets seduced: 0 (impressive! or sad, take your pick)
- Daniel gets seduced: 1
- Sam gets seduced: 0
- Teal’c gets seduced: 0
- The team brings dangerous stuff back to Earth: 7 (urgh Linea) (I’m including black hole gravity)
- Something timey-wimey happens: 4
- Daniel apparently gets killed: 0
- Jack apparently gets killed: 0
- Sam apparently gets killed: 0
- Teal’c apparently gets killed: 0
- This lack of dying is truly impressive across this season. Made up for by…
- Jack gets replaced / becomes an alien avatar: 3 (including swapping with Teal’c, etc)
- One instance of which basically turns him into MacGyver, I realised on this viewing)
- Sam gets replaced: 1 (inc. Jolinar)
- Daniel gets replaced: 2 (ish; can we count the whole multiple-sarcophagus-use experience? I say yes)
- Teal’c gets replaced: 1 (by Jack, etc)
- Sam and Jack have A Moment: 2 (sometimes they’re really brief but I see them)
- Maybourne gets thwarted: 1
- Extra special episodes where it’s not Maybourne: 1
- Specific human cultures represented:
- Native Americans (I don’t know enough about the history of representation of Native Americans to know just how racist this portrayal is… I suspect it’s a combo of somewhat progressive – they’ve got technology! they keep their culture despite the changes! – and racist: the costuming, apparent naivety… plus their spirits are “actually” aliens: which is true for every other culture too; is it worse to do this to a culture still living today? I suspect it might be)
- Goa’uld encountered:
- Apophis and Klorel (poor old Skaara)
- Heru’ur
- Amaunet
- Sokar (kinda)
- Hathor (my girl! that wig is so impressive)
Mayday (Reynolds/Branagh)
A Canadian plays an American and an Englishman plays a Russian in what is basically propaganda for “can’t we just all get along?”
… does that make it Canadian propaganda? I don’t know enough about Canadian jokes to see it.
Anyway, I enjoyed this ridiculous movie.
The opening scene is riffing directly off The Martian.
The first ten minutes or so is riffing so directly off Top Gun that I would not have been surprised if shirtless men playing volleyball had suddenly appeared. I was expecting a pick-up line/ singing moment in the bar Reynolds and his buddies are heading to.
And then they made loving Top Gun an entire throughline. So self-aware, much hilarity.
It can’t entirely decide what movie it wants to be: is this an homage to Hot Shots and its ilk, with a plot hidden in a spoof? Is it a lighthearted action film wearing its antecedents on its sleeve? I’m not quite sure. And I’m not sure it matters. It is certainly more successful than the first Expendables movie (which is so much worse than Expendables 2 I remain amazed it ever got made; that movie made Expendables 3 possible, though, so I am forever grateful. We do not mention the fourth movie).
Reynolds is basically playing himself, which is fine – it’s what I went in expecting. Branagh… I dunno, folks, this seems like such an odd choice for him. Has he got to the point where he’s just picking films that will amuse him? Maybe! And I’m happy for him if that’s the case! Do I wish that they had cast a Russian in the role? Of course I do. Would Apple have got as much mileage out of the stardom of both leads if they had? No they would not (and that’s leaving aside current political issues.) Reynolds’ character isn’t quite 2D, but pretty close. I don’t even remember his name (no wait, it’s Troy. I guess they thought Chad would be too much). No backstory! Just flyin’! At least they didn’t shove a tragic childhood in there. Or mess up 30 minutes of cool flying with a boring romance (looking at you, Top Gun). Branagh’s character, Nick, has slightly more depth – commentary on it being illegal to be queer in the USSR was, uh, not subtle.
Is it fun? Heck yes! Is it memorable? Not especially! Is it subtle about promoting the idea that the world should be better? Not in the slightest. But what’s fascinating is that it doesn’t come off entirely as American propaganda. Troy confronts at least some of the (Cold War era) failings of the USA… and many of the things he sees as being good about the US are questionable right now, to say the least. So is it actually propaganda? I mean, kind of. If the agenda is “be nicer to each other.”
… maybe it really is Canadian propaganda.
The Book of Records
I feel like a fraud even trying to write a review of this book. I don’t think I have anything particularly coherent to say – I’m sure that since it came out last year, people who actually know something about Hannah Arendt and Baruch Spinoza and Du Fu have made all sorts of thoughtful, insightful, comments about how they’re portrayed there. And I’m sure literary critics have written fabulous words about how the book is structured; and philosophers have examined what it has to say about time, and love, and freedom, and choice.
I don’t really have anything to add. But I do want to add my tiny little flag, waving, to say that this is an amazing book and people should read it.
Somehow this passed me by last year – I hadn’t heard of it until I came across the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize 2026, for which the book was shortlisted this year. This prize is for a book that does clever things with nonfiction, and that’s exactly what Thien has written.
A young girl and her father, fleeing Foshan in China for environmental reasons, arrive at a liminal space called The Sea where people from across the world end up as they leave one place and go somewhere else. They stay much longer than most, however, because of her Lina’s father’s illness. As she tries to understand this new place, she has little to comfort her, except for three books her father snatched up as they fled: biographies of Arendt, Spinoza, and Du Fu. Eventually she meets three adults who are prepared to spend time with her, and tell her stories – especially when they see these books, because (and it’s a slight spoiler, but I already knew it going in and it actually improved the reading experience for me, so there you are) these three are Arendt, Spinoza, and Du Fu. And they share the stories of their lives and fill in what those books missed.
The choice of these three people is a fascinating one, and one that I am not fully equipped to analyse. Arendt and Spinoza in particular have some similarities that require more understanding than I have to untangle, in their approaches to life and philosophy – plus, Arendt studied Spinoza herself. The inclusion of Du Fu is probably a more surprising choice from the point of view of most Western readers… actually who am I kidding, lots of Western readers haven’t heard of Arendt or Spinoza either, or know basically nothing about them (and I know only slightly less than nothing, so I’m not exempt from this criticism!). Anyway, they all faced immense trauma – the Holocaust, the plague and being exiled from your community, famine and civil war – and all created art before, through, and after. One of the balancing acts Thien manages here is not minimising any of those horrors, but also not making the book only about them; instead she keeps pointing to the living that goes on around them.
All of this is also relevant to Lina, whose own life has been upended – her family torn in half – for reasons she really doesn’t comprehend.
This is, at best, a surface level explanation of the novel. It sounds weighty and I guess it is; there are definitely bits that I didn’t understand because I just don’t know enough philosophy. But it was still a remarkable book, and I hope lots of people will come to it.
Stargate SG1 season 1
I just realised I should have started this rewatch next year… for the thirtieth anniversary of season 1.
Across this season, many things have happened! There’s a lot of Teal’c background, which I find fascinating: we meet his mentor, Bra’tac, who will become much more important across the seasons; and also his son, Rya’c, and wife, Drey’auc. There’s a whole episode about whether Teal’c is responsible for the deaths that he caused in the service of Apophis, which is a rather remarkable focus for an episode of 1997 television. There’s Daniel’s pain at losing his wife Sha’re, which is an ongoing feature across this season – Daniel is driven by the desire to get her back. There’s also an episode on Jack and his pain at the death of his son Charlie. Interestingly we get basically no background on Sam: there’s a brief mention of her having a brother, and that she misses her nieces, but that’s all. No tragic backstory! Oh also Sam has an ex-fiance, but given he goes fully Kurtz on an ultra-UV planet, that’s no loss.
Meanwhile, the SG1 team destroy a Goa’uld trap in order to rescue Teal’c, challenge the legal structure of another society, and get totally condescended to by the Nox because humans are still incredibly juvenile (but they’re a lot nicer about it than the Tollans). A new sarcophagus is discovered – surprise, Egyptian hieroglyphs rather than Mayan ones! – and it contains Hathor, who proceeds to entrance every man on the base; it’s unclear whether there are no lesbians or bi women, or if Hathor is just regressive. Also we get an episode featuring Catherine, the woman who brought Daniel on to the Stargate programme in the first place – and she’s definitely got a little intergenerational crush on Jack. I appreciate this further nod to the film enormously. And this episode is when we properly understand there’s more aliens out there – there was earlier the suggestion of Thor and his kin, but here we see script from four races that sends Daniel into conniptions. And ah, the Antarctic episode.
And then you get Senator Kinsey, asking questions about the Stargate programme – and for all he’s presented as a bit venal, a self-serving politician who cannot possibly understand the heroics of SG1… it’s hard not to see that he kinda has some points about military secrets, and the military wanting to spend money on fun new toys, etc. My goodness why am I now half on Kinsey’s side?? Do I miss this sort of filler episode? I really do not. Do I understand why they made them back in the day? Sure.
We learn there are more women in the SGC than Sam, Janet, and a few nurses!
Maybourne arrives!
Chris Judge’s downturned mouth gets more and more ridiculous across the season!
And in this season Richard Dean Anderson is the age I am right now.
Stats:
- Sam gets a raw deal for being female: 1
- Someone falls madly in love Sam: 1
- Sam reciprocates: 1
- Jack gets seduced: 2
- Daniel gets seduced: 1
- Sam gets seduced: 0
- Teal’c gets seduced: 0
- The team brings bad stuff back to Earth: 3 (sorry Cassandra)
- Daniel apparently gets killed: 2
- Jack apparently gets killed: 1
- Sam apparently gets killed: 1
- Teal’c apprearntly gets killed: 0
- Jack gets replaced: 2
- Sam gets replaced: 1
- Daniel gets replaced: 1
- Teal’c gets replaced: 1
- Sam and Jack have A Moment: 2 (not including alt!Sam & Jack)
- Maybourne gets thwarted: 1
- Specific human cultures represented: Mongols, Mycenaean, Minoan, Norse
- Goa’uld encountered:
- Apophis
- Hathor (dec.)
- Nirrti, indirectly
- Things I hadn’t realised turned up this early:
- The Nox
- Replicators
- Teal’c’s cap
- Daniel’s bandana
Merryll of the Stones
Apparently I last read, and reviewed, this in 2012. Most of the reason for that is that my sister had my copy for some reason, and she’s just returned it to me.
This was published in 1989, and there are aspects where that definitely shows: Lots of Capitalisation to indicate Importance, plus some pretty weak naming – the Power, the Gift, the Families. There’s also the very… old-fashioned reference to Aboriginal people – it’s definitely not intended to be derogatory, and if anything there’s a nod to including the Dreaming within the big idea that Caswell is setting up here. Still, it’s there. Poor Kylie and her being on the ‘wrong side’ of eleven stone… but also there’s Tieu, the refugee from Vietnam, who has made friends with Megan and Kylie: this aspect of 1980s Australia I approve of.
Merryll is sent into the stream of time for her own protection when her father, the king (obvs) is killed. She is born as Megan – born in Wales, moves to Australia with her family at 2 years old, moves back to Wales when her parents are killed in a car crash, in the aftermath of which she starts have distressing dreams. Meanwhile Emlyn, living in the same Welsh village, Megan goes to, is also having weird dreams and is obsessed with Welsh mythology and history. There’s a bitchy cousin and difficult school transition, as well as the mystical elements of time travel and the existence and use of magic.
Would this book appeal to a 15 year old today? Absolutely no idea. I do know that I devoured it whenever I got it, presumably in the early 90s. Is it a classic example of far-too-smart-for-15-year-old characters? Absolutely, but I would argue that this sort of too-smart is part of the reason that kids like I was (read a lot, often feel uncomfortable with their peers, can’t fully explain their ambitions, etc) read books like this.
Also it’s 250 pages long and only took me a few hours to read. Caswell’s writing style is straightforward, while still carrying the beauty of the Welsh landscape and some of the terror Megan/Merryll confronts. (Although I do think one of the things lacking is appropriate acknowledgement of the grief Megan would be feeling for her dead parents.) I have no regrets for having read it again.
Stargate SG1 s1, e1-4
So I’ve finally caved. It’s been on the cards for a long time, but now seems to be the moment.
I’ve started a rewatch. How long will I last before I give up? How often will I watch? These are not questions I can answer – although I do have a big knitting project to complete…
The things I remembered from ep1: the tissue box; Sam making the comment about reproductive organs. I knew Charlie got a Goa’uld early on, but I forgot it was in the pilot.
So, things we already get in the first three episodes:
- The entirety of the early cast, including the dude in charge of the iris. I don’t remember whether the medic is the same one for a while or not. (But Janet appears in ep4 already, which I’m watching as I type.)
- Sam is already faced with the challenges of travelling while female, and the team are completely fine with her going along with the sartorial expectations. They do at least immediately interfere when they learn she’s going to get raped that evening.
- I won’t deny that I’m 100% here for the sexual tension between Jack and Sam (and yo, Primitive Sam trying to jump Jack’s bones in e4 is hilarious and I’d forgotten it already started at that point) (and I’ve changed this to be e4 not just e3). However, my delight in the Daniel/ Jack dynamic knows no bounds, and we already have that in spades.
- There’s a MacGyver reference in the very first episode. I giggled.
- There’s interesting questions about racism and misogyny in the show. On the one hand: out of four of the SG1 team, one is a black man and one is a woman. That’s good! There are a few black marines/ other SG personnel, and a few folks of Asian descent on base as well early on. There’s Dr Janet, and some of the nurses are women. But there’s no other women on SG teams – in fact I don’t think there ever is. Of the planets the team visits, there’s the excuse that the Goa’uld nabbed people from different regions on Earth, and that explains their general ethnic homogeneity. I don’t have a clear enough memory of the series to recall whether there’s something to be said for the planets they visit over all… but the Mongol-based planet is pretty primitive, with regressive patriarchal attitudes as well as simplistic clothing and ways of living; and then the Minoan planet is a lot prettier – amusing, and unsurprisingly, a distinct lack of bare boobs.
- Speaking of misogyny and boobs: when Apophis is choosing a new bride, he brings first the white, blonde woman – and we see her bare back, and that’s it. Sha’re, though – a brown woman – we see naked, full frontal, for a moment, and her boobs several times. It’s an interesting choice.
- The Jack / Teal’c dynamic is also delightful. Honestly most everything about Teal’c is a delight at this point.
- Episode 4: the first time the team brings back a disease and they Do Unexpected Things. I think this might be my favourite trope of all – definitely more than the “let’s visit a planet and fundamentally challenge their way of life.”
I’m not regretting having started this rewatch. Some of the stories, at least, definitely hold up. Can’t say the same for some of the prosthetics….
The Old Drift
I believe I bought this when it won the Clarke Award, so late 2020. I didn’t read it then – I think I assumed it would be too heavy for that particular year, and then that assumption has coloured my way of thinking about it ever since. I finally picked it up this week: partly gesturing to my endeavour to at least read the oldest books in my TBR pile.
This is not the book I expected it to be, given the Clarke Award. It definitely has SF elements towards the end, when it’s projecting into the future – and goodness it’s weird, in 2026, reading a book that was published in 2019, therefore written the few years before that, and/but has significant things happening in 2020 that are not Covid.
Rather than feeling like “a science fiction novel,” the connections I more strongly made for The Old Drift are the works of Edward Rutherford – his place-based historical novels that followed a few of families through many, many generations. Serpell does that here, following three main families as they interact across four generations. The central location is (what is today known as) Zambia, and in particular Lusaka. As befits modern Zambia, some characters are descended from pre-colonial inhabitants of the area; some are descended from British migrants, some Italian, and some Indian. Some of the actions happens in England, some in Italy, and some in India, as well as a couple of other sites in Zambia.
Across the novel – around 550 pages – Serpell traces the fortunes and misfortunes of the families. Marriages and births, infidelities, education, employment, tragedy – and only rarely triumph; illness (the last third or so revolves significantly around “The Virus”) and cleverness and revolution. Some of what Serpell portrays is based in truth: Edward Nkoloso plays a role – a real figure in Zambian independence, who proclaimed the country would send “Afronauts” to the moon and Mars; and one of the characters is Matha Mwamba, one of those Afronauts. Percy Clark, one of the progenitors and an early British colonialist, was real; and the fictional characters interact with some other historical figures. I don’t know much about modern Zambian history, but I know that a lot of the moments that appear in the background – like the issues around Northern Rhodesia becoming part of the Federation and then eventually getting independence; “Rhodes Must Fall,” the fight to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Cape Town University – are real.
What Serpell does in this novel is show both how individuals can be deeply affected by larger historical moments, and how sometimes personal issues are far, far more important. And neither of those experiences de-legitimises the other.
It’s fair to say that this isn’t an easy read. None of the characters do not spend their lives in comfort and ease, with no problems beyond what to have for dinner. They experience heartbreak and personal tragedy; families are difficult, opportunities are lost, life simply doesn’t go the way they hoped. Racism and misogyny play enormous roles – unsurprisingly. While there are moments of triumph, and doggedly continuing despite setbacks, Serpell has not set out to write inspiration porn. It’s much more real than that.
A connecting thread across the generations is a plural first-person narrator: mosquitos. Which, of course, have an important role to play in disease transmission; I’m fairly sure characters comment on their pesky existence in every section of the novel. Precisely why mosquitos are used as an almost Greek chorus isn’t entirely obvious, except for the fact that they’re ubiquitous – which I guess is enough.
The Old Drift is by turns bawdy, clinical, grim, lighthearted (occasionally), earnest, and reflective. It’s also beautifully written – while I wouldn’t say easy to read, it doesn’t require a quiet room and intense concentration to follow. I’m glad I bought it and have finally read it.
33 1/3 Africa: Graceland
I read this courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, Bloomsbury. It’s out today.
Graceland is a really important album to me. When I was in my teens, it was one of my favourite albums – it was different from other things I had been listening to, it had such a brilliant beat, I was already a fan of Paul Simon’s, and it just really clicked for me. Reading this consideration of the album – musically, historically, politically – has deepened and complicated (complimentary) my relationship to the album.
I had no real knowledge of the background to the album, aside from the fact that it’s Simon working with groups like Ladysmith Black Mambazo at a time when bands from Africa in general weren’t particularly well known outside of the continent (what am I saying, that’s still the case today). Dinh does a particularly good job of briefly setting the political scene – foreign attitudes towards the Apartheid regime, questions about the cultural embargo – and also refers back to related issues as they arise across the book.
I enjoyed the structure of the book a great deal. The introduction and first chapter set up the history – Simon’s experiences with African music, in particular, and his own musical history. Four of the next five chapters look at specific tracks from the album as a way of exploring how the album was put together in time and space, what can be understood about music and history and politics from both the lyrics and the music, and some of what is known about the personal experiences of the musicians. As someone who has read very little musical history, this approach was fascinating. It’s made slightly more difficult by the fact that Dinh wasn’t allowed to quote slabs of lyrics, due to copyright issues – which I frankly find amazing, that the copyright holders weren’t able to come to some reasonable agreement rather than charging standard rates, but what would I know. For someone like me, who basically knows the album off by heart, it wasn’t as annoying as it will be for folks who only know it in passing! The other chapter in this middle section looks specifically at South African popular music – about which I previously knew nothing, and now have some appreciation for the layers of influence going on there.
The penultimate chapter looks at “the politics of collaboration” and picks up on issues that have been touched on in other chapters too – about the power imbalance of Paul Simon, the white American pop star, working with lesser-known, brown- and black-skinned musicians, sometimes also American but many from various African countries. Dinh comes to no easy conclusions here: some folks have spoken up about being disgruntled for the way they were treated; others have remained steadfast in saying it was a good experience. Presumably both are telling the truth. I appreciated that across the whole book, Dinh is interested in neither maligning nor lionising Simon – or indeed any of the others. They’re just humans.
Finally, the last chapter looks at one of the weirdest aspects of the album – the cover art: St George. It’s always just been ubiquitous to me; I didn’t pay much attention to it as a kid, and as I got older it was just… the album. Now? Well, the image is based on a painting by a medieval East African artist, and George himself is an important figure across a sprawling set of cultures. So he does sort of make sense.
There was always the potential for a book like this to ruin a favourite album. It’s true that I can’t listen to it now without feeling a degree of discomfort, knowing that some musicians felt taken advantage of; that there were political questions around whether it meant Simon was crossing the embargo line; and some of the other political questions around the music. However, Dinh in no way wants to stop people from listening to the album – my sense is that he wants people to appreciate the issues, as well as many of the intriguing lyrics, more deeply. Which is good because I’ve had “Boy in the Bubble” stuck in my head for days.
The Jewel and the Comet
Read courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher. It’s out now.
This is a sequel to The Knife and the Serpent, although it’s not entirely necessary to have read that first; the narrator provides a “previously on” recap so you know what the state of play is: that the narrator is Glenn, except when she’s Gwen; he is dating Vivy, who is from another multiverse; Glenn is himself learning to be an agent, along with Vivy, for a group called the Interventionists; that Vivy is the domme to Gwen/Glenn’s sub; that Vivy’s spaceship, The Wreck of the Edmund Pevensie, is a bit of an ass and sometimes gets around in an android body.
With that knowledge, you can go into the novel fairly easily, because while another character from the first novel does reappear here, their personality is explained well enough and their actions aren’t really related to anything important previously.
With the understanding that the novel’s universe is part of a multiverse, and that there are bits of the multiverse that can’t be accessed by humans or human-like creatures, the novel wonders what happens when there’s an incursion from outside the bit that functions like the universe we understand. And then somehow that piece of incursion attaches itself to a spectacularly amoral character. The answer, obviously, is Bad Things, and potentially Very Bad Things. Vivy, and then Glenn/Gwen, get pulled into the efforts to figure out what is going on, and what to do about it.
So there’s a lot of action, and some discussion about how places/ planets should govern themselves, and when/whether intervention is necessary. There’s also a lot about the people involved, and especially Gwen/Glenn, who is still working through their personal gender presentation preferences as well as working on their relationship with Vivy. (It should be noted that if you’re uncomfortable with the discussion of kink, this is not the book for you.)
Overall, this is a fairly lighthearted romp; there are serious issues and problems to resolve, but the overall tone is one of cheerful mayhem. There’s never any real doubt about whether a solution can be found – although the actual solutions were different enough that it was an enjoyable read.
The Mortons
Back in the mists of time, when Justine Larbalestier’s Liar first came out, we on Galactic Suburbia invented the Spoilerific episode just to talk about it in all its glory.
The Mortons isn’t as tricksy as Liar was. It is, however, a book to talk about, chew on, examine the bones of… and those metaphors get really uncomfortable when applied to this book.
The sprawling Morton family are not a family that ordinary people will have heard of. But if you have money, or power – or your family might one day have those things – you may well hear from them. They can help. They can get things done, smooth paths, remove obstacles. And all you have to do is sign a blank piece of paper.
The Mortons aren’t just killers, although that’s a significant part of their brand, if you like – just take a look at that cover. They also work in other ways to make the correct outcome occur; torture, accounting, social manipulation, and so on. They have been doing this for generations, because their children are taught – pretty much from infancy – how to Be A Morton. And sometimes they adopt children, too.
If you’ve Seanan McGuire’s InCrytpid series: imagine if the Price family were actually like the Covenant. And now make them the actual Covenant.
Jessica Morton is the prodigy of her generation. She is nearing the end of her schooling at Helshire College – along with her Morton cousins, the offspring of the other three legacy crime families, and a large number of children from wealthy ‘ordinary’ families… some of whom will end up being incorporated by the Mortons. She is eager to be blooded, and be acknowledged as an adult Morton. Fer first kill isn’t quite what she expected, though; and then her summer internship isn’t either. And then things escalate, and… well. Life can’t be the same again. Probably.
This is the author photo at the front of the book. When I first saw it, I thought it was Larbalestier and Westerfeld having a fun photo shoot. And it is. And then you get to a certain point in the book and you realise that they’re cosplaying, and it’s still a fun photo shoot but also just a little uncomfortable.
This novel is vicious. The characters aren’t spending their time asking whether killing is evil; the only questions are around motive. If you’re very squeamish, you’ll probably want to avoid it; there are a couple of bits that were a bit gruesome. Having said that: I read this very quickly. It was un-put-down-able. The writing itself is a delight: evocative, smartly paced, leavened with a touch of humour. The characters are really where it’s at. Jessica is an intriguing character to sit in the head of. She is completely committed to her family, and the family legacy. She has experienced trauma, and uses it to feed her desire to be excellent. Even when she is tasked with doing terrible things – things she actually doesn’t want to do – the family comes first. I had no idea where the authors could possibly be going with the story for a long time. When a change does occur, it blindsided me – it’s such a good twist – and of course it didn’t just stay as one thing, either. No, I am not going to put more spoilers here, this is a book where you do not want to know more than the minimum before going in.
The short version is that this is a brilliant book and I hope a lot of people read it. The main characters are in the late teens but I really hope it doesn’t get classified as ‘young adult’ – I might give it to a mature late-teen reader, but no younger than that. I would not recommend it, as noted, for those who are very squeamish (no shade!), or if you’re not prepared to read about children and adolescents happily considering (and undertaking) murder.
