My life in books

The first volume of the comics featuring Black Bolt, Black Bolt Volume 1: Hard Time, written by Saladin Ahmed and illustrated by Christian Ward, is up for a Hugo award, so naturally I read it. And, although the quality of both the writing and the illustrations are solid, I bounced right off it.

Perhaps it’s just that, way back when I was a comics reader, in my youth, I was always more into the DC comics than I was their rival, Marvel. And there are some stylistic differences, though I’m not sure I can pinpoint them. But I just found no point of connection with Black Bolt, and that made reading the comic a rather intellectual exercise, rather than one of identification and enjoyment.

I did not find the story particularly compelling, which is odd, because usually, one way to get me emotionally invested in a character is yo have them treated unjustly, which one assumes is the background to the opening set-up. Black Bolt, King of the Inhumans (whom I gather are some sort of mutant or possibly a human/alien hybid), wakes up in a prison, with his power, which is to destroy with the sound of his voice, gone. He escapes, his initial confinement, only to find himself in a large prison with other not particularly human inhabitants, who want to fight him. So he fights some people, and then he allies with them, and they go on to fight more creatures, go after the jailer, and despite some success, end up imprisoned again. Then they escape again, and go after their jailer again. In between, there’s a lot of dying and being reborn, and some dark brooding on his former life, which apparently involved getting imprisoned on a variety of other occasions. If anything, I found myself more engaged with one of his enemy-turned-allies, Crusher Creel, also known as the Absorbing Man, because we get a coherent backstory on him, and it is the sort of ‘young boy with horrible family life gets no breaks’ story that does create some empathy.

It looks as though it’s going to be a redemption story. It’s pretty clear that Black Bolt, intentionally or not, has done a lot of unpleasant things, and has a lot to seek redemption for, and the whole prison experience of this first volume has been about underlining that for him, but... in the end, I just don’t care quite enough to find out more. Others who are more into this line of the Marvel universe may differ.

An Ancient Peace is the first book in a new series by Tanya Huff, featuring Confederation Marines Gunnery Sergeant - now ex-Marine Gunnery Sergeant - Torin Kerr. Torin is a true hero, with many hard missions under her belt, but the thing she’s most known for is that no matter what the situation, she always brings her people home. Not always all of them, but she survives, and those with her survive, far more often than you’d expect of someone with a gift for getting into the worst situations in the galaxy.

No longer a Marine, Torin and her lover, former salvage operator Craig Ryder, have put together a small team of specialists, most if them ex-Marine, all of them with special skills, and take on unusual jobs - Torin can’t stop thinking of them as deployments - for various Confederacy departments.

This time, it’s the Justice Department. They have evidence suggesting that someone has located the ancient grace planet of the Elder Race of H’san, and is trying to break into the tomb that holds the weapons they buried millenia ago when they gave up the idea of war. The mission is a secret one - Humans, like the other Younger Races, are in the Conferation on sufferage, with many of the Elder Races thinking they are still too primitive and warlike to be trusted in galactic civilisation. So Torin’s people have been ordered to go in quietly, track the grave robbers to the secret planet of the ancient dead, and solve the problem by whatever means necessary.

I’ve loved the Torin Kerr stories from the beginning. They started out as some of the best milsf in the genre, and have slowly developed into something that’s still full of action and adventure, but represents a mindset that’s developing beyond warfare. A more evolved set of ethics that defends, but doesn’t conquer.

In An Ancient Peace, Torin and her people finally set the military mindset behind them. Oh, they’re still kickass in the very best ways, but Torin’s allegiances are shifting. Once she was all about her duty to the Marines, and to her people. Then ‘her people’ grew into a larger set, to humanity and the other younger races who’s been used and manipulated by external forces. And now, she’s thinking about peace, and the whole of Confederation, as her people. And she always brings her people home.

John Scalzi’s Head On is a stand alone sequel to Lock In, his powerful novel about people rendered completely immobile by the disease known as Haden’s Syndrome, and the society that develops around them once technology finds a way for Hadens, as they are known, to transfer their consciousness into mechanical robots called threeps.

Chris Shane is a Haden, a former celebrity - famous as a child victim of the Syndrome and child of a rich American sports star - and now an FBI agent with responsibility for investigating crimes involving Hadens, along with partner Leslie Vann.

In Head On, Shane and Vann are investigating the suspicious deaths of Duane Chapman, a Haden and a professional athlete, a utility player for a team engaged in the game of Hilketa - a violent sport, played professionally only by Hadens, in which the object of the game is to score points by decapitating the threep being worn by the designated ‘goat’ of the opposite team.

Chaoman’s death during a game, in which he served as goat three times and was decapitated three times, leads Shane and Vann into a convoluted web of corruption in sport and in the arras of high finance that surround it, dealing with issues including manipulation of wins and point spreads for gambling, money laundering, performance doping, corruption in sponsorship deals, and just about everything else you can think of, including multiple murders.

I did not enjoy this as much as I did Lock In, possibly because sport isn’t a big interest of mine, but it’s a good, solid mystery, and the continued exploration of a society that is no longer tied to the body, thanks to advances that make it possible for all humans to make use of the same technology that Hadens use to function in the physical world, is fascinating.

Not only does Scalzi use these novels to examine disability issues and the nature of consciousness, he also looks at the ways that funding for accessibility for the disabled, or the lack of it, makes people vulnerable and desperate. As a disabled person, It makes me happy to see a major genre author dealing with disability issues in a significant way.

The Secret People was John Wyndham’s first novel, published in 1935 under his own name, John Benyon. A science fantasy of the Hidden World genre, The Secret People is set in Northern Africa, where the colonial powers have flooded the lower elevation regions of the Sahara Desert, creating a New Sea. Wealthy English tourist Mark Sunner decides to impress Margaret, the woman he’s recently met during a stopover in Algiers by giving her an airborne tour of the New Sea in his new rocket plane.

Naturally, there’s a mysterious explosion, the plane goes down in the middle of the Sea, and when our intrepid duo try to turn the cabin into a boat to sail it to shore, they are trapped by a whirlpool, where the weight of the water has broken through the ceiling of a vast cave beneath the former desert, and fall to the hidden depths below.

And of course, in the series of caverns below the desert, they encounter a civilisation of small, humanoid people. Of course, in traditional white man fashion, the first thing Mark does on encountering them is draw his pistol and shoot some of them, which does not turn out well for our imperialist gatecrashers. Mark is rushed and knocked out by the cavern inhabitants, and when he awakes, he finds himself without Margaret, but in the company of three men from the upper world, who tell him they have been trapped in the caverns, captives of the small humanoids living there, for years. It turns out that there is a colony of people who have blundered into the caverns over time, and their descendants, about 1,500 strong, and the little people have simply confined them in a lower part of the cave system from which there is no way out other than a difficult climb up which is watched and guarded. The outsiders are trapped, alive, with access to caves where they can grow food, but without any possibility of returning to the outside world and revealing the existence of their captors.

Naturally, there’s an escape tunnel being built, and traitors willing to expose it to their captors once they discover where it is, and factions within the captive population. Margaret has not been brought to the prisoners’ level, possibly because like the ancient Egyptians, the pygmy people see cats as gods, and Margaret had bought a cat with her into the caverns. There are plenty of plot twists before the final escape of our intrepid duo, with the cat and a few companions, just before the New Sea breaks through into the entire cavern system, bringing an end to the pygmy civilisation and their captives alike. It’s a decent enough adventure story of its kind, and show some signs of the writer that Wyndham would eventually become.

There’s also a great deal of casual racism directed against the Arab and black prisoners, and of course, the lost pygmy people. One of Wyndham’s virtues, which appears here in his first novel, is his ability to write believable female characters who are always much more than just the hero’s girlfriend. Margaret is resourceful, brave, and doesn’t faint any more than Mark does - and while she does scream, it’s deliberate, to draw the attention of people she knows are nearby and need to know what’s happening to her.

An interesting trip in the way-back machine.

Best of Everything is a self-published pdf-only anthology of short stories (some very short) by sff author Ahmed Khan (the collection is available from the author, who can be contacted via his Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/ahmedkhanwrites/ - at the time I acquired the pdf, the author was asking a donation of one dollar for the compilation)

Khan has a definite gift for writing stories that challenge expectations - you think they are going somewhere, but they end up someplace quite different. His stories are, generally speaking, fun to read, but his endings - now those can be quite thought-provoking indeed.

I often feel when reading one of his short stories that his style has been heavily influenced by oral story-telling traditions. He’s not one for lush description, or complicated proses. There is a deceptive simplicity to his style, something that often makes me think of his stories as parables, or fables - and yes, his work often carries with it a moral of one kind or another, as parables and fables are wont to do. Sometimes, however, I feel that this tendency to write in parables tends to sidestep the ethical complexities of real life, and present things which are multi-hued as though they must be black or white.

There’s often a touch of dry satirical observation in Khan’s writing, which I find quite delightful. An example:

“Earth people live like animals. Our conquest will be a blessing for them in disguise," said the Commander, as is typical of so many commanders all over the universe.
"How true!" murmured his men, as is typical of commanders' men all over the universe.

Bits of writing like this make me smile, and sometimes even giggle.

Among the stories in this collection that I particularly enjoyed were:

“Close Encounter of the Preposterous Kind,” in which an attack on Earth is foiled by a most unusual saviour. The story combines the tropes of two very different genres of speculative fiction to produce an unexpected ending in a way that strikes me as quintessential Khan.

“Face It” is a science fictional in-joke - but it’s also a comment on rushing into things you know little about. A plastic surgeon convinces a man disfigured in an accident to participate in an experiment to test the premise of physiognomy - with a result that will leave every long-term science fiction fan nodding in recognition.

“Knock, Knock” is perhaps my favourite of the stories collected here. Khan notes that the piece is inspired by the work of Urdu novellist Qurratulain Hyder - and after reading this piece, and reading about her on the Net, I’m going to have to see if I can locate any of her works in translation. It is, I think, a definitely non-western story in its approach. Deeply lyrical, it places importance on the journey rather than the goal, the state of mind more than the specific achievement. It spoke to me in profound ways about the standards we use to assess the value of a life.

“Mynah for the King” is a teaching parable of leadership and governance - but though it speaks about what kinds of things should inform the policies of a ruler, it is also applicable to the ways in which we make our own decisions, reminding us that wisdom and creativity can be better guides than pragmatism.

“Veils” is a story about a young woman who learns that judging the value of others by their outward appearance and sweet words leads to disappointment, while looking behind the surface to the real feelings and actions can be a much better way to discovering the real value of a person.

Several of the stories here are very short - a paragraph or two at the most, and it is in these that Khan’s playfulness shows most strongly - most notably in “Infringement.” But inherent in the word play are ideas worth thinking about seriously.

A few stories rather missed the mark for me, though. This feeling was strongest in the story, “How To Write a Fantasy,” an otherwise clever piece of metafiction, Khan describes the sole character in the story as “A man-hater of the variety who would like to decimate all the men from the face of the earth and spend the rest of her life making love to machines.” As a feminist who has ben described so many times as a man-hater, and seen so many other feminists described the same way, this shook me right out of the necessary receptive mood. I don’t know if Khan intended this to evoke the idea of a feminist, but it’s such a common insult, and one that many men as well as women would interpret as referring to feminists, that the impact was to turn what might have been an ironic twist into a something that felt like a nasty revenge fantasy.

Two of the stories in this collection would appear to rely rather heavily on the idea that consensual sexual activity outside of marriage is intrinsically wrong - a belief that I do not share, and that made my appreciation of these two stories, “Seventeen” and “The World, The Times, and The Unicorn,” less than complete. However, in both stories, it is possible to engage in a somewhat subtextual interpretation, in which the moral failure is not so much the physical fact of having sex, as it is the reasons and choices leading to it. Read this way, both stories are, in different ways, about choosing the spirit over the world.

In “Seventeen,” a young man meets a girl who seems to him to embody innocence and hope, but after he spends an evening in a casual sexual encounter, he feels unworthy of her affection. I’m not comfortable with the idea that sexual ‘purity’ equals innocence and sexual expression is a loss of innocence. But the choice he makes, can be seen as one of greed, of wanting everything without regard for the feelings of another. In “The World, The Times, and The Unicorn,” a man is offered a choice between great wealth, and a fantastic journey to an alien land. He chooses wealth, but is stymied when, in order to achieve that wealth, he must find a virgin within a specific period of time, and he fails. Here, I choose to read the fault as a choice of materialism over the chance fir new experiences and deeper understandings. When he chooses wealth, he dooms himself to an unfulfillable condition, not because the world has no virtuous women in it to give him what he wants, but because his own greed traps him. I’d like to think that the author would not object to these readings.

Taken all in all, there’s quite a lot to enjoy in this collection, and I’m glad that the author assembled these pieces and made them available.

Laurie King’s The Murder of Mary Russell is not, in fact, about Mary Russell, and - not that anyone will be surprised to hear this - while Mary Russell is indeed feared to be dead by various people for a portion of the book, she is quite alive the whole time.

This is something much more interesting, it is a book about Mrs. Hudson. King has invented a detailed and fascinating past for Holmes’ apparently long-suffering landlady, drawing on bits and pieces from the canon, particularly the early case of the blackmailing of his friend Victor Trevor’s father which was connected to loss of the Gloria Scott at sea. In order to tell her tale, King posits that the conclusion to the case, which Holmes tells Watson and Watson then writes about, was a fabrication to conceal the connection between the blackmailing sailor in the case, James Hudson, and his seemingly unimpeachable landlady Mrs. Hudson.

I’m not going to go into much further detail here, because it is a truly fascinating, if rather improbable backstory for Mrs. Hudson, and the manner in which she became Holmes’ landlady, and watching the whole thing unfold and finally knit together is the greatest pleasure in reading the book.

Suffice it to say that Mrs. Hudson’s past - and Holmes’ initial involvement in her life at a very crucial point - comes back to haunt her, Holmes, Russell, and even Mycroft, and ultimately leads to a parting of the ways between two characters who have been bound together by a shared secret for over forty years.

This is, I think, the best book in the Mary Russell series in quite some time.

Charlie Angus, politician, author and journalist, is a longtime socialist, social justice activist, and Indigenous ally. His book, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada’s Lost Promise and One Girl’s Dream, arises out of these multiple threads. Angus takes a hard, journalistic view of the way that Canadian society, government and institutions have failed Indigenous children, giving his account a strong centre by focusing on young Cree activist Shannen Koostachin, a member of the Attawapiskat First Nation, and her fight for equal access to education for the students of her community and for all Indigenous youth across Canada. Angus has a personal connection to this story - Attawapiskat is a part of the riding he represents in Parliament, and he knew and supported Shannen Koostachin in her campaign, but he treads carefully in writing this account, avoiding sentimentality and never injecting himself needlessly into the narrative - rare restraint from a politician.

Shannen’s story is short, inspiring and tragic. At 13, she challenged the federal government to build a new school in her community to replace the mould-filled portables sitting on toxic, contaminated land that had been the only educational facility available to the children in her remote community for years. Her drive, her charismatic presence, called out to other youth across the country to support her. Even after her death in a car accident, the fight she started continued until the government finally was forced to recognise the demands she and her supporters made. But as Angus says, Shannen’s story is emblematic of a problem that affects Indigenous communities across Canada.

“And this is where the story of Shannen Koostachin takes on larger political significance. The story of the inequities faced by students in Attawapiskat provides a window into a world that most Canadians never knew existed. It has opened a political and social conversation about how a country as rich and inclusive as Canada can deliberately marginalize children based on their race or, more accurately, marginalize them based on their treaty rights.

What Shannen’s story shows us is that, though the conditions in Attawapiskat might have been extreme, they were by no means an anomaly. All over Canada, First Nations youth have significantly fewer resources for education, health, and community services than those available to non-Indigenous youth. Certainly, there are many reserves with proper school facilities. But other communities make do with substandard schools or condemned schools or, in some cases, no school at all. It is the arbitrary nature of the delivery of education that speaks to its inequity. What all these communities have in common is systemic underfunding for education by the Department of Indian Affairs compared with communities with students in the provincial school systems.”

Angus begins his acount with the signing of Treaty 9 at Fort Hope in .Northern Ontario on July 19, 1905. He recounts the promises - all lies - made to persuade the Cree to sign, the guarantees that their way of life would not be threatened and the offer of education for their children. And he describes what followed - the concerted attempt to destroy Indigenous culture and assimilate Indigenous children through indoctrination, humiliation, violence and terror at the residential schools. He quotes Duncan Scott Campbell, architect of Treaty 9 and head of the Department of Indian Affairs: ““I want to get rid of the Indian problem. . . . That is my whole point. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.”

Angus focuses his narrative on one of the Canadian government’s key strategies for elimination the ‘Indian question’ - the horrifying system of residential schools in which children were taken from their families and communities, forbidden to speak their language or practice any aspects of their traditional culture, and frequently subjected to psychological, sexual and physical abuse. As many as one-third of children in the so-called care of the residential school system did not survive their experience. Far too many of those who did, left the schools with no connection to their culture, traumatised in ways that would mark their communities for generations. And in examining the system of deliberate cultural genocide and attendant abuse that was the hallmark of the residential school system, Angus pays particular attention to St. Anne’s Residential School. This school, run by the Catholic Oblate order, was situated in the region that Angus represents, and was thus, for Shannen Koostachin and the Attawapiskat First Nation community, part of their lived experience. I’ve read other accounts mentioning the situation at St. Anne’s, notably the courageous memoir of Chief Edward Metatwabin, Up Ghost River, which is cited by Angus here. The picture that emerges from the testimony of survivors of St. Anne’s s one of an utter disregard for the health and dignity of the children entrusted to the institution’s care, combined with outright racism, abuse, and violations of the children’s rights as human beings, and the parents’ rights to even so much as be informed of what happened to their children. It is a picture of deliberate, racially motivated genocide.

Even with the closure of the residential schools, the deliberate attempt to forcibly assimilate Canada’s Indigenous people by destroying families and cutting children off from their communities and culture continued - and continues into the present day. Indigenous children were, and still are, placed in white foster homes on the flimsiest of pretexts, away from their parents, their homes, among people who knew nothing about their foster and adopted children’s languages or cultures, and had no interest in allowing the children placed in their care to learn about their Indigenous roots.

“The huge number of children taken from their parents under this agenda has been named the “Sixties Scoop.” Theresa Stevens, who works in Indigenous child welfare services in Kenora, Ontario, was recently interviewed by the National Post on the devastating impacts of the Sixties Scoop in her community of Wabaseemoong (Whitedog First Nation) in northwestern Ontario. She said that child welfare workers would arrive in the community with a bus that they filled with local children who had been apprehended. The children were then flown to another isolated community and given away to strangers. “When the planes landed at the dock, families there were told they could come down and pick out a kid,” she stated. So many children were taken from her community that teachers at the local school were laid off because there weren’t enough children left to be taught. Stevens said that the process continued until 1990 and was only stopped at her home reserve when the band members openly defied the child welfare authorities. “They stood at the reserve line on tractors with shotguns saying, ‘You aren’t coming into our community and taking any more of our children,’” she stated.”

In 1976, the Attawapiskat First Nation finally got their own school. But there were problems from the beginning. The construction of the facilities, including residences for teachers, failed to take into account the climate conditions in such a northern region. Within a few years, the freeze and thaw cycle cause shallowly buried fuel pipes to buckle and break, resulting in leaks that seriously contaminated the soil on which the school was built. Health problems developed among students and staff. Some attempts were made to remove contaminated soil, but the leaks continued, adding to the load of toxic diesel fuel in the ground and the health risks to the students. The school, which was under the jurisdiction of Indian Affairs, not the provincial educational system, continued to operate. Finally, in 2000, the band declared the school as a condemned building and demanded that a new school be built. One was promised, but no action followed on that promise. Instead, classes were taught in portables set up near the old school - still close to the source of contamination, cold in winter, lacking in facilities to support the basic educational program, and screaming “slapdash solution to a serious problem.”

Angus carefully details the campaign originated and driven by the students of Attawapiskat, and the shameful responses - obfuscations, denials, diversions and outright lies - of the government of the day and the various Indian Affairs ministers, who held the portfolio during the Harper regime.

He also paints a powerful and painful picture of what Indigenous children, particularly those living in remote and isolated communities, deal with. The poverty, lack of resources, lack of housing, schools, community infrastructure, social programs. He speaks about the epidemics of depression, apathy, suicide, that have swept through indigenous communities. The problems faced by Indigenous youth taken from their homes and placed in foster care or in institutions. The endless wasting of talent, potential, and lives that would never be tolerated if these children were white.

The basic truths that Angus speaks are these: that the federal government, regardless of what party currently forms it, has never paid attention to the real needs of Indigenous communities, has never listened to the people it abandoned, has never wanted to spend the money necessary to ensure the most important supports: safe, clean housing; medical care; essential infrastructure; education comparable to that provided by provincial authorities; social programs with a goal of keeping families together, children in their communities, and indigenous cultures strong; economic development to enable communities to be self-supporting. That white settlers stole their land, tried to erase their very existence and gave them nothing but empty promises. That the colonial project of genocide continues to this day. And that the resistance to this project is alive and growing.

Nnedi Okorafor has described the arc of her Binti trilogy as: “African girl leaves home. African girl returns home. African girl becomes home." Which is to say, that this is not a narrative in which the important things are what Binti does, but rather, who Binti is, and who she becomes.

By the time we as readers embark on the final volume of the trilogy, Binti: The Night Masquerade, Binti has already become much more than she was in the beginning. She starts out her journey as an African girl, of the Himba people, a marginalised group within the area she grows up in, which is dominated by the more numerous and far more aggressive Khoush. She is a harmonizer, someone who can sense and use the currents of energy in its very broadest sense - emotional, physical, cultural - to bring things into harmony with eachother, a peacemaker. But she longs to be more.

She travels to an ancient, galactic university, surviving a massacre of her shipmates by the non-human enemies of the Khoush and entering into an exchange of genetic material with her attackers in order to bring about a measure of truce. She becomes friends, perhaps even more than friends, with Okwe, one of the Meduse who attacked her ship, and in the second volume, when she returns to Earth and Himbaland, Okwe accompanies her. At home, she discovers that she has grown beyond the limitations placed on her by the traditions of her people, and learns that through her father, she has a heritage communion made many generations ago between sone of her people, not treated as outcastes, and an alien race, the Zinariya. And yet again, Binti becomes more, as she chooses to join the outcaste community, having her alien DNA activated. Bonding with Okwe gave her the ability to communicate at a distance with the Meduse; becoming Enyi Zinariya opens her to a gene-based technology that permits long-distance communication with all others of her kind, and access to a racial history.

But at the opening of the third novella, Binti is in dire circumstances. Still struggling to adapt to the changes in her ways of thinking, perceiving and communicating brought about by the activation of her Zinariya self, she learns that the Khoush have attacked her parent’s home, seeking to kill both her and Okwe. Having failed to find either, they have set fire to her family’s house, and all her relatives, who sought safety in the deep roots of the ancestral structure formed from a massive tree, are believed dead. And Meduse ships, summoned by Okwe, are en route to avenge the attack and open up a new chapter of the long Meduse-Khoush war, on a battleground of the lands of the Himba people.

Despite her deep personal loss, despite being rejected by the other Himba for what and who she has become, Binti tries to use her skills as a master harmonizer to bring about peace between Meduse and Khoush.

And here is where it is vital to remember that this is a story about who Binti is becoming, not a story about what Binti does. Because despite her efforts, she is betrayed, and the peace fails. And everything that follows after is about what Binti will become, and not what happens to the Himba, the Khoush or the Meduse.

And part of Binti’s becoming is learning to be her own judge and arbiter, not to accept without question the beliefs if others, which her own experiences have shown her are so often limited and blind. In becoming her own home, Binti becomes mistress of herself, unbound by the restrictions others have always placed on her, freed by the web of connections she has forged with others to be fully herself among them.

Lois McMaster Bujold’s novella The Flowers of Vashnoi focuses on Ekaterin Vorkosigan. The Vorkosigan holdings include a large area, still dangerously contaminated with radiation from the Cetagundan invasion, when the city of Vashnoi was destroyed by nuclear weapons, killing hundreds of thousands. Though the size of the contaminated region has shrunk a little over the many years since the bombing, most of what was once a major metropolis is still radioactive at a level dangerous to human health.

Miles Vorkosigan is determined to find a way to clean the soil and make Vashnoi livable again. Ekaterin has joined firces with another scientist to breed insects that are not only resistant to radioactivity, but are capable of eating soil, plants, and other organic matter, extracting the dangerous isotopes, and depositing them in concentrated packets that can be collected and dealt with as radioactive waste, leaving behind clean matter that can serve as fertiliser.

But when Ekayerin and her team start on-site trials, strange events interfere with the testing protocols. Half of the ‘radbugs’ disappear, and further investigation reveals that a small group of humans have been living - and dying - inside the contaminated area. Mostly children born ‘different’ and abandoned in the unsafe zone - since the war, Barrayar’s people have had both a higher than average rate of children born with genetic defects, and a culture that rejects imperfect children - generations have been nurtured, protected, and buried by a bitter woman who chose exile in the ruin of Vashnoi over execution for and her own unborn child.

Ekaterin’s dreams of creating a garden where Vashnoi once stood entwine with her hope to save the last of the inhabitants of Vashnoi’s ruins in this latest installment in the Vorgosigan story that explores the roles of both technology and human tenacity in the struggle for survival and rebirth.

There’s just something about Mercedes Lackey’s books - particularly her Valdemar novels - that picks me up when I’m in a bad way. So, finding myself in the middle of a nasty, smog-filled heat wave, it only seemed appropriate to dive into the latest of the Herald Spy novels, The Hills Have Spies.

It’s been some time since we last read about Mags, the orphan boy who grew up to be a Herald and the King’s chief spy, and his beloved Amily, now the King’s Own Herald. They’ve been married long enough to have three children, with the oldest, Peregrine (Perry for short), now 13 years old and showing great potential for following in the family occupation.

When the head of the Herald’s Circle receives word from an old friend, semi-retired Herald Arville, that there gave been strange disappearances in the region around the Pelagirs, Mags decides that he should go check it out, and bring Perry along with him, partly as a training mission, partly just to get to know his growing son a little better. So, disguised as prosperous traders, the two set out to see what, if anything, is going on in the wild places on Valdemar’s western borders.

This being the Pelargirs - though a part of them without a Tayledras Vale nearby - Mags and Perry encounter a variety of the non-human species, from unchosen Bondbirds to dyheli, and Perry meets and bonds with Larrel, a neuter kyree, who joins them in their search for the missing people, or at least, for whatever caused their disappearance.

But once they discover what is actually happening, the investigation becomes a trial by fire as Perry infiltrates the stronghold of a Serious potential threat to not only Valdemarians, but to the dyheli and kyree communities living nearby. In the guise of a simple-minded dog-boy, Perry uses his gift of Animal Mindspeech and the spycraft learned from his parents to find the information that Mags and his allies will need to deal with the threat. It’s standard Lackey storycraft - fast-paced adventure with magical horses and telepathic birds and nasty Mages and things that can’t always be explained, and a comforting ending where good actually does prevail, though not without cost, and doing the right thing has an eventual reward.

Mercedes does this kind of thing - the coming of age through danger story - very well, even if her approach is somewhat formulaic. If you’re in the mood for something entertaining and exciting, without too much ethical complexity to ponder, it’s a formula that works. Her positive characters, human and non-human alike, are easy to identify with, and while her major evil characters are often stereotypes, well, there are some things that are always the same at the bottom, and human callousness, greed and cruelty do tend to repeat themselves again and again. And it’s nice to see the good guys winning.