Mary Robinette Kowal’s The Calculating Stars takes place in an world that was much like our own, until a massive catastrophe - the fall to earth off the coast of the US of a meteorite last enough to precipitate an extinction level event (ELE) - changes everything. In this iteration of our world, the calculations that show the inevitable changes in climate that will make the planet uninhabitable within decades are accepted as scientific fact by the world’s political leaders, who decide upon a two-pronged approach - to try to ameliorate the effects of the catastrophe to save life in earth, and to colonise the solar system so that if necessary, humanity will have another home.

It’s lucky, in a way, that this catastrophe falls during the early post-war period, when science was respected and economies were still capable of being mobilised to meet goals. If Kowal had chosen to set such a novel today, I suspect no such response to a global catastrophe would have seemed realistic - but this was still the era of potential.

The narrative is focused on Elma Wexler, a former WASP - one of the Women Airforce Service Pilots who, as civilian pilots attached to the military, ferried airplanes wherever needed, including to the front, during the Second World War. Elma, now retired, and her husband, Nathaniel York, a scientist with the Manhattan Project during the war, and later with the fledgling American space program, survived the concussive wave that destroyed most of the east coast, and Nathaniel’s colleagues at Langley, by accident - they were on vacation in the Poconos, having flown out in Elma’s little Cessna - and were able to fly west out of the circle of destruction to reach an air force base that would temporarily become the centre of the immediate response to the meteorite fall.

It is Elma, who is not only a pilot but a calculator - one of the women whose mathematical skills enabled the pre-computer space program to determine how to get an object into orbit and bring it home, whose calculations prove that humanity is facing an ELE. Both Nathaniel and Elma become part of the international effort to reach space, but Elma has a secret goal - to be one of the astronauts that goes into space.

If you’ve read the original novelette that sparked the series, Lady Astronaut of Mars, you know what happens, in the broadest of strokes, in both the race to colonise the system and Elma’s personal quest to become an astronaut. But that doesn’t change the reader’s absorption in the details of the process here, told over the years as it happens.

But while Kowal tells us the story of a successful space program, and the frustrations of a fully qualified woman locked out of her dream of going into space, Kowal also gives us a look at the society of 1950s America that does not flinch from uncomfortable truths. Elma and her husband Nathaniel are Jewish; there are hints of anti-semitism, and echoes, in the deaths surrounding the fall of the meteor, of the devastating losses of the Holocaust. There is ample evidence of the high degree of segregation and the entrenched racism of the time, in everything from the choices made during the post-cataclysmic evacuation not to look for survivors in black neighbourhoods, to the bitterness of black women pilots, who can’t even hope, as Elma does, that they could get anywhere near the astronaut training program. Kowal does not forget the dynamics of the society she’s chosen to place her break in history within.

The novel also deals sensitively with disability. Elma has an anxiety disorder, brought on by the highly pressured and misogynistic atmosphere she faced as an early entrant - and a female ine at that - into a prestigious math and physics program at university. The disorder surfaces when she must take on public relations tasks as a part of her quest to open the astronaut corps to women, and she begins taking sedatives to deal with it - a choice that will jeopardise her position when women are ultimately allowed into astronaut training and she is one of the successful candidates.

The second of Kowal’s “Lady Astronaut” novels, The Fated Sky, takes up a few years after the first novel ends. Having made it to the Moon, and established the beginnings of a colony there, the next goal in the space program is Mars. The extreme climate changes triggered by the Meteor fall are beginning to have demonstrable effects - the temperature is rising, the cloud cover remains thick, adding to the greenhouse effect, and while it is possible that not all the earth will become uninhabitable, still, the need to provide a ew home for humanity is very real, and the Moon is not an ideal location for a self-sustaining colony. But not everyone is convinced that the space program is necessary, and protest is growing, especially among marginalised populations - specifically, in America, black people, who know that if the earth is left behind, they will be too.

Elma has been spending half her time piloting shuttle rockets between colonies on the moon, and half her time on Earth. On one of Elma’s return trips, the rocket is highjacked on landing by a group of black activists protesting the money spent on space that could be better spent on improving conditions on earth. Elma, using her celebrity status as the “lady astronaut” - even though there are a number of female astronauts by now - persuades the activists to release all the other hostages, who are suffering from gravity sickness, which she manages to pass off to the activists as potentially infectious ‘space germs.’ Once again, the lady astronaut makes the news.

To counteract adverse publicity and shore up faltering financial support, Elma is asked to join the the first Mars mission. She accepts, not realising that another astronaut who has been training for the mission with the other crew fir months is being pulled to make room for her. The atmosphere of the mission is compromised from the minute she arrives, and it dies not get any better when the government, suspecting a conspiracy behind the recent highjacking, places pressure on the two black member of the Mars crew, one of whom had been, like Elma, on the rocket when it was taken.

As the novel progresses, we begin to see more and more clearly that Elma, who we are primed by literary traditions to see as the hero, is actually a very flawed character, naive and thoughtless, the perfect example of the white liberal who wants to do the right things, but never actually thinks from any point of view save her own, and ends up making matters worse until she learns to sit back and let those most directly affected by the injustices that anger her take the lead in strategising. She has no idea of how she appears to others, being wrapped up in her own view of herself as both victim and saviour. But the stresses of the journey to Mars become a journey to maturity for her, and by the end of the novel, when she and a handful of other colonists stand on Mars, we feel that she has become something even more important than a hero - a woman who has fulfilled her dreams, and come to know herself in the process.

These are fascinating books, both for their examination of a path to the stars that we might once have followed, and for their uncompromising look at the deep flaws in our society which really have not changed much since the days in which the book is set. We’ve lost the stars, but at the same time, we’ve done little to fix what we have here on earth. It’s this that makes these books a poignant illustration of what might have been.

But at the same time, these are inspiring novels about women in science, and women in space, and my God, I needed to read something like this just now.

It’s hard to deny that the United States is teetering on the edge of becoming a theocracy, in fact, if not in name. The religious right, a minority among American citizens and voters, holds an undue amount of influence over one of the country’s two main political parties, and its purported values influence the national conversation on social policies to an extent much greater than its numbers would warrant.

Many words have been written about just how this has come about, that a nation founded by religious dissenters who, informed by their experiences as a disadvantaged religious minority, sought to create a political system that embraced the separation of church and state, has become by far the least secular of the developed, democratic nations. A commonly accepted analysis points to the alliance of politicians and evangelicals in the late 1970s, that made abortion a key issue dividing the country into two political camps. However, in his book One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, historian of religion Kevin Kruse places the turning point much earlier, during the Eisenhower era. In his Introduction, Kruse notes:

“In his acceptance speech at the 1952 Republican National Convention, he promised that the coming campaign would be a “great crusade for freedom.” As he traveled across America that summer, Eisenhower met often with Reverend Billy Graham, his close friend, to receive spiritual guidance and recommendations for passages of Scripture to use in his speeches. Indeed, the Republican nominee talked so much about spirituality on the stump that legendary New York Times reporter Scotty Reston likened his campaign to ‘William Jennings Bryan’s old invasion of the Bible Belt during the Chautauqua circuit days.’ On election day, Americans answered his call. Eisenhower won 55 percent of the popular vote and a staggering 442-to-89 margin in the Electoral College. Reflecting on the returns, Eisenhower saw nothing less than a mandate for a national religious revival. ‘I think one of the reasons I was elected was to help lead this country spiritually,’ he confided to Graham. ‘We need a spiritual renewal.’ “

Indeed, as one reads Kruse’s account of Eisenhower’s inauguration, it’s hard to argue with this. Eisenhower was the first to encourage his entire cabinet to attend religious services with him before the inaugural ceremonies began. He chose to be sworn in on two separate bibles, each opened to a verse chosen by Billy Graham, about Christian stewardship. He offered a prayer if his own writing following the taking of the oath. The inaugural parade opened with a float that, while ecumenical in nature, proclaimed that “In God We Trust.” And four days later, Eisenhower attended the first ever National Prayer Breakfast. None of this was traditional in the event.

Kruse goes on to say: “All this activity took place in just the first week of February 1953. In the months and years that followed, the new president revolutionized public life in America. In the summer of 1953, Eisenhower, Vice President Richard Nixon, and members of their cabinet held a signing ceremony in the Oval Office declaring that the United States government was based on biblical principles. Meanwhile, countless executive departments, including the Pentagon, instituted prayer services of their own. The rest of the Capitol consecrated itself too. In 1954, Congress followed Eisenhower’s lead, adding the phrase “under God” to the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance. A similar phrase, “In God We Trust,” was added to a postage stamp for the first time in 1954 and then to paper money the next year; in 1956, it became the nation’s first official motto. During the Eisenhower era Americans were told, time and time again, that the nation not only should be a Christian nation but also that it had always been one. They soon came to believe that the United States of America was ‘one nation under God.’ “

It is Kruse’s thesis that this was the consequence of a campaign begun during the 1930s by industrialists concerned over the effects of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ‘leftist’ New Deal policies on what had been up to that point relatively untrammeled capitalism. Having tried, and failed, to convince the public directly of the benefits of minimally regulated free enterprise, corporate interests took a leaf from Roosevelt’s own book, which promoted his reforms with biblical references and the preaching of a social gospel, and began to develop their own theological argument in favour of free enterprism, Christian libertarianism. One of the leaders of this theological movement, James W. Fifield Jr., went so far as to label the vaguely socialist reforms of Roosevelt as “state paganism” and likened them to Germany and Italy under the fascist totalitarianism of Hitler and Mussolini. This argument was based in a concept of parallelism between free enterprise and Christian salvation - that just as capitalism rewarded the individual efforts of the capitalist, Christ rewarded the individual efforts of the penitent with salvation. Policies that aimed at collective good sought to replace individual striving toward both wealth and grace with dependence, replacing Christ as the giver of all good with the state.

Funded and supported by wealthy industrialists, politicians and public figures such as former president Herbert Hoover and Hollywood celebrities Cecil B. deMille and Ronald Reagan, Fifield and others, among them his long-time friend Norman Vincent Peale, conducted wide-ranging campaigns to bring as many clergymen - mostly Protestant ministers, but also some conservative Catholic priests and rabbis - across the country into the fold, persuading them that the New Deal was just one step away from a rejection of God and an embrace of National Socialism. Their organisation, Spiritual Mobilization, would eventually claim over ten thousand “minister-representatives” prepared to “....exalt the dignity of individual man as a child of God, to exalt Jesus’ concept of man’s sacredness and to rebuild a moral fabric based on such irreducibles as the Ten Commandments.” The equation of Christianity with individual freedom, and the construction of the welfare state as the enemy of both, ensured that policies ranging from taxation to pensions for the elderly were identifies as not just liberal, but immoral, against the natural order as created by God.

Advocates of Christian libertarianism also sought to bring political and economic leaders into their movement. One key tool was the promotion of prayer breakfasts across the country, and particularly in Washington DC, where prominent men of government and industry were invited to meet with their peers, pray, and discuss the ways in which partnering with God - and rejecting government interference - could improve their business prospects. Soon both the
Senate and the House of Representatives hosted regular prayer meetings, largely attended by conservative politicians already opposed to New Deal policies.

By 1949, the gospel of Christian libertarianism had been taken up by a charismatic young preacher, Billy Graham, who fed on the anxieties of an America that was no longer the world’s only nuclear power to promote the message of individuality, reliance on God rather than the state, and free enterprise as the answer to the threat of Godless communism.

“In 1954, Graham offered his thoughts on the relationship between Christianity and capitalism in Nation’s Business, the magazine of the US Chamber of Commerce. “We have the suggestion from Scripture itself that faith and business, properly blended, can be a happy, wholesome, and even profitable mixture,” he observed. “Wise men are finding out that the words of the Nazarene: ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you’ were more than the mere rantings of a popular mystic; they embodied a practical, workable philosophy which actually pays off in happiness and peace of mind. . . . Thousands of businessmen have discovered the satisfaction of having God as a working partner.” “

Graham was instrumental in persuading Eisenhower to run for President, and while he did not openly declare his support, many in the Christian libertarianism movement urged voters to think carefully and choose the candidate God would want as president, and suggested issues to consider that strongly favoured the Republican candidate. The strategy was effective, Eisenhower was successful, winning with a strong majority in the electoral college. The prayer breakfasts continued, emphasising the essential connection between Christian libertarianism and political policy. “In February 1954, Eisenhower, Nixon, and several cabinet members returned to the Mayflower ballroom, along with nearly six hundred figures from government and business. Chief Justice Warren offered the main address of the morning. Speaking at length on the role of religion in American political life, he concluded that “no one can read the history of our country without realizing that the Good Book and the spirit of the Savior have, from the very beginning, been our guiding genius.” Looking forward, the chief justice urged the crowd to adhere to “the spirit of Christian religion” to ensure that the country remained strong both in spirit and substance in the days and years to come. In the end, Warren stated emphatically: ‘We are a Christian nation.’ “

Under Eisenhower, meetings of senior officials in the executive branch - many of them new appointments with ties to the corporate sphere - routinely opened with prayer, either silent or spoken. Employees were urged to attend services regularly, and to facilitate this, Protestant, Catholic and Jewish services were offered in several government buildings, including the Pentagon, on a regular basis.

While Eisenhower did remove many of Roosevelt’s regulations on corporate enterprise, he failed to kill the welfare state, thus losing some of the support of the Christian libertarian movement. He did, however, succeed in “sacralsing” government and linking the American ideal of freedom with the importance of religion. He made Independence Day a National Day of Prayer. The success of this movement to brand the United States as a Christian nation and to establish “faith as the foundation of freedom” was demonstrated when, in 1954, both Republicans and Democrats supported the bill that added the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance. Around the same time, the motto already found on most coins, “In God We Trust,” was added to the design of paper currency, and a very popular stamp bearing the motto was issued. In 1956, “In God We Trust” replaced “E Pluribus Unum” as the official national motto. In the public eye, the connection between religion and government was well established, though the principle of separation of church and state was still observed in the insistence on nondenominational language. Indeed, some stressed that the God of America was the God not only of Christians of all kinds, but also the God of Jews and Muslims. Only pagans snd atheists, it seemed, were unAmerican.

The reinterpretation of the founding fathers as intending to create a Christian nation, one based in biblical faith, grew common in public discourse, normalising a relationship between church and state that was in fact a relatively new development. A consortium of advertising companies, seeing the importance to their own industry of promoting the aims of the corporate movement to bring religion into politics to support their interests, began producing “public service” copy for newspapers, magazines, radio and television. These campaigns stressed the importance of religious institutions in American life, reminding Americans that “religious faith, cultivated by our churches and synagogues, is one of the foundations of our nation and of our dedication to human rights and individual liberty, as suggested in our national motto, ‘In God We Trust.’”

At the same time, the work of the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and the flood of anti-communist propaganda created a fear of ‘godless communists’ aiming to destroy both secular snd religious freedom by undermining the free and Christian nation they lived in. Using a trope many of today’s progressives would recognise, Americans were warned that a secular, socialist society would take away their freedom to celebrate Christmas. Anti-communist organisations, funded and supported by corporations who feared the impact of labour unions on their bottom line, produced propaganda and media spectacles, often featuring some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, all expounding on the evils of communism - which was often framed as anything much further left than the John Birch society.

And the people, their receptivity to this message enhanced by the fear of communism and the anxieties of the Cold War Era, adopted this concept of extreme, public religiosity as an essential part of the American way of life. Religious-themed books proliferated on best-seller lists - Angel Unaware, The Robe, Life Is Worth Living, A Man Called Peter, This I Believe, and The Greatest Faith Ever Known, The Power of Positive Thinking, The Silver Chalice. Televangelism began, with popular ministers having their own local and national prayer programs. Hollywood turned to Biblical themes for its blockbusters. In the wake of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, four thousand stone monuments bearing those Bible verses were erected on public land across America.

Kruse presents his argument carefully and in great detail, showing the growing presence of religion in the workings of government during Eisenhower’s administration, and detailing the network of connections between Christians liberationists and government officials, from Eisenhower and his vice-president, Richard Nixon, down. He also looks at the conflicts initiated by the encroachment of specific religious practices into daily life - for instance, the controversies over prayer and the distribution of King James Bibles by the Gideon Society in schools.

In a striking example if the success of this campaign for religion in public life, a legal challenge against the introduction of a prescribed prayer in the schools in New York state was rejected on the grounds that public religious observance was a traditional aspect of the American way if life. In support of their decision, one if the judges cited: “the references to the Deity in the Declaration of Independence; the words of our National Anthem: “In God is our trust”; the motto on our coins; the daily prayers in Congress; the universal practice in official oaths of calling upon God to witness the truth; the official thanksgiving proclamations beginning with those of the Continental Congress and the First Congress of the United States and continuing till the present; the provisions for chaplaincies in the armed forces; the directions by Congress in modern times for a National Day of Prayer and for the insertion of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag; [and] innumerable utterances by our presidents and other leaders.”

Kruse goes on to observe: “Most of these were recent innovations not yet reviewed by the courts, but no matter. In a sign of how swiftly and thoroughly the religious revival of the 1950s had taken root, these judges cited changes that had occurred in their own recent memory as proof that the country’s religious roots stretched back to time immemorial.”

When the Supreme Court reversed this ruling and agreed that there should not be mandated prayer in schools, the majority of Americans were angered by the decision, engaging in ‘slippery slope’ arguments that, once again, ended up with the spectre of a ban on Christmas. When the .supreme Court later ruled that mandated devotional readings from the Bible in schools were also unconstitutional, the demand for a constitutional amendment, which had ben broached from time to time in the past, began to gain more support. A petition was submitted to Congress which read: “Whereas the Supreme Court of the United States by its decisions has virtually outlawed the right to pray or read Scripture in public schools and other institutions, we, the undersigned citizens, respectfully petition you to take the initial steps necessary to bring about an amendment to the Constitution which will forever guarantee the protection of our Christian traditions and the right of our people to pray and honor Holy Scripture in their institutions.”

The election of Richard Nixon only served to heighten both the trappings of religion that now surrounded the office of the President, and the partisan nature of this display of piety. Nixon had worked closely with Billy Graham for many years on the Christian libertarian project, and now welcomed him into the White House as an advisor. Both Graham and Norman Vincent Peale spoke during Nixon’s inaugural ceremonies, which included a full church service. Nixon, with Graham’s encouragement, ordered that weekly religious services be held in the White House. Officiating ministers frequently delivered sermons that stressed not only Christian values, but conservative political policies. A decade later, Ronald Reagan upped the piety content further: “Rather than simply reaffirm the old faith of the Eisenhower era, Reagan created new political rites and rituals suited to his own time. The silent prayer at the end of his speech was one innovation; the sign-off of “God bless America” was another. While the phrase had a long history in American culture, it had actually been used only once before in a major address by a president or presidential candidate. ... Earlier presidents and presidential candidates had used other forms of divine invocation, of course, but only sparingly. ...the eight presidents from FDR through Carter called for God’s blessing in less than half of their speeches; indeed, most of them did so in only a quarter. But from Reagan on, presidents have asked for God’s blessing in roughly nine out of every ten speeches they made. Reagan’s campaign represented a turning point, a moment when this “God strategy” became the new norm.”

Any objective observer can confirm that, in recent decades, the rhetoric and ritual of Christian piety has become an integral part of the American political scene, to a degree unknown in any other major modern democracy. While Republicans presents themselves as the party of Christian values, Democrats have also adopted the cloak of public religiosity. The country as a whole has accepted this relatively recent cultural shift as a long-standing tradition, believing without question that the United States us, and always has been, a Christian nation, ‘one nation under God’ destined to lead the world because it, like no other country, is founded in religious truth. It’s a dangerous myth, and taken too far, can lead to the establishment of a repressive theocracy - as the critics of this movement have argued at every step along the way.

In the current American political environment, I doubt there are enough people willing to read this book, or other critiques of the entanglement of religion and governance, to effect any kind of change. And that gives me yet another reason to worry for the future of America, and the world that must live with whatever it does.

The third of Heather Rose Jones’ Alpenna novels, Mother of Souls, continues the story of Margerit Sovitre, wealthy thaumaturge and famed swordswoman Barbara, Countess of Savese.

Their circle of friends and associates has continued to expand, drawing more women from various professions and ways of life. Margerit’s extensive fortune has enabled her to continue being the patron of a number of women, both upper class and working class, who are expanding the scope of the female professions, women’s scholarship, and women’s engagement in the Mysteries - the very real forms of religious magic that can be seen, generated, shaped and directed by ritual, words and music.

The focus of the novel lies in one of the great mystery rituals which is supposed to bring safely to the small country of Alpenna. Margerit has already rewritten it, and yet the new version is not without flaws, a fact brought to her attention one of the new characters in Margerit’s circle, Serafina Talarico, an archivist, born in Rome but of Ethiopian ancestry, who has a rare gift for being able to see in detail the energy flows invoked by rituals. The flaw that reveals itself to Serafina’s vision may have some connection to rumours that have come to Barbara about mysterious, possibly unnatural storms in the mountains along part of Alpennia’s border. Amid the unfolding of this greater plotline lie a number personal stories: Serafina’s unhappy marriage, and her despair at being able to see the great mysteries but not evoke them; Barbara’s engagement in bringing order to a recently inherited title and lands that have been ignored for years by their previous lord; the revelation that Barbara’s armin, Tavit, is a trans man, deeply conflicted in a world that has no place or understanding of his nature; Luzie Valorin, an impoverished widow with a remarkable gift for musical composition and performance that evokes the energies associated with the Mysteries.

While I love the woman to woman relationships that are the backdrop to this series - Margerit and Barbara, Jeanne de Cherdillac and Antuniet - the most fascinating part of the culture in which Margerit’s adventures in ritual magic, and Barbara’s exercises in statecraft, take place is the feeling of watching a renaissance of women’s scholarship. In this novel, one of Margerit’s new projects is the creation of a college for women, with a print shop attached so that the works of the women Margerit has supported through her substantial fortune, and as well as more commercial projects, can be published without having to rely solely on subscriptions - which are harder for women scholars to generate. Interwoven in the major and minor plots are important stories about women struggling to be recognised for their work, intelligence, talent and skill, and the ways in which their efforts are undermined, blocked, trivialised, and even plagarised by men who cannot deal with women who think, and create, and do other such things with serious intent that have been by tradition reserved for men. Jones writes with a fiercely feminist vision, and an unabashed love for the hearts and souls of women making their own ways in the world.

So, I’ve been doing a fair bit of comfort reading lately, in between the other things I want to read, like Hugo finalists and some social justice and #ownvoices reading. My current comfort go-to series is the Sister Fidelma books by Peyer Tremayne. The Sister Fidelma books are soothing things for me, for all their murder and even occasional danger for the main character. There’s something about this precise combination - the idea of a female cleric who solves crimes in a historical setting that, to be honest, I find particularly fascinating because of my own Celtic heritage - that appeals to me. So...

Shroud of the Archbishop, the second volume in the Sister Fidelma mystery series by Peter Tremayne, follows closely on the events of the first volume. After the death of Archbishop Deusdedit of Canterbury, mentioned in the first book, Absolution by Murder, his chosen successor, Wighard, has travelled to Rome to be confirmed in his position by the Pope. As his secretary, Brother Eadulf has naturally accompanied him. And fortuitously, Sister Fidelma has also been ordered to Rome, to present the new Rule of her abbey of Kildare to the Holy Father for approval.

When Wighard is murdered and an Irish monk working in the Vatican’s Foreign Secretariat is arrested as the most likely suspect, the political implications of the case demand an unusual degree of sensitivity. Thanks to their successful unraveling of the murders during the Synod of Whitby, Sister Fidelma and Brother Eadulf are called on to investigate the murder and determine the truth.

Their investigation tajes many twists and turns, as not one, but many crimes, past and present, are found to have come together in a vast sequence of murder, false identity, theft and vengeance. And again, what makes the tale particularly fascinating to me is the wealth of historical detail that includes everything from a discussion of the relics collected by Empress Helena to the fate of the great Library of Alexandria.

A sold mystery, with a wonderful historical setting and a formidable detective. I find myself very much enjoying Sister Fidelma as a character. Her profession, status, and cultural background give her an at times almost modern feeling, as a woman sure of her abilities and rights. And I’m liking the development of the relationship between Fidelma and Eadulf - which, in a time before celibacy became a requirement for members of religious orders, could develop in so many interesting directions.it’s nice to see a man appreciate a woman who is at least as intelligent and educated as he is.

Suffer the Children, the third of the Sister Fidelma novels, begins in a way that speaks to some of what I particularly enjoy in these novels, which is the (somewhat idealised) depiction of medieval Ireland as a place where women held status in society unparalleled in the rest Europe. It’s a world where a woman like Fidelma has no fear of riding alone from her home at the abbey of Kildare to Cashel, to answer a summons from her brother Colgu, the heir to the king of Muman, one of the five ancient kingdoms of Ireland. And a world where a woman can be a high-ranking official of the judiciary, or any other profession.

As one would expect, Colgu has a murder mystery for Fidelma to solve, one that threatens the peace between Muman and the neighbouring kingdom of Laigin. Dacan, a scholar of great renown and one with family ties to the king of Laigin, is dead, murdered at the abbey of Ros Ailithir. Brocc, the abbot of Ros Ailithir, and cousin to the king of Muman, is charged with responsibility for the crime. Because of the status of the deceased, the king of Laigin, as kin of the deceased, has demanded the return of Osraige, a disputed petty kingdom currently owing homage to the king of Muman, as an honor-price from the family of the person accused of responsibility for the death.

The king of Cashel is dying of plague, and Colgu, as tanaiste, or heir-elect, has commissioned Fidelma to investigate the murder and argue the case before the High Court at Tara in three weeks time. On her way to the abbey, located in the clan lands of the Corco Loígde, who are close kin to the king of Osraige, Fidelma is presented with another concern. She and her escort encounter a band of warriors, burning a village where, the leader claims, the plague has been active. But there are bodies in the village of people who have clearly died from violence, not plague, and Fidelma finds survivors, a young nun and a few children, who confirm the massacre of everyone else in the village. Worse, the leader of the band is the local chief and magistrate, who sits on the council of Salbach, the chieftain of the Corco Loígde.

Once more, Fidelma is faced with a crime - indeed, a series of crimes - that combines violence and politics. At the heart of the case is the search for the identity of the hidden heirs of the ancient princes of Osraige, who ruled before the clan of Corco Loígde. Everyone involved with the case has been looking for them, and the final pieces of the puzzle will not fall into place until Fidelma herself can find them.

The fourth Sister Fidelma novel, The Subtle Serpent, opens with a double mystery. Fidelma is on her way to the religious community of The Salmon of the Three Wells, located within the kingdom of her brother King Colgu, to investigate the murder of an unknown woman - her body found naked, headless, in a well, clutching a simple cross. While en route, the ship she is travelling on encounters an abandoned Gaullish merchant ship. Her cargo holds are empty, there are signs of blood recently shed, and perhaps worst of all, in one of the cabins Fidelma finds a book she had given as a gift to her dear companion of earlier adventures, Brother Eadulf.

As Fidelma seeks to solve both mysteries, she becomes aware that there is something very strange going on in the abbey and the surrounding community. There is open conflict between the abbess, Draigen, and the local chief, Adnar. Draigen herself is both arrogant and ambitious, and seems at times to be trying to impede Fidelma’s investigation. The abbey itself seems subtly wrong to Fidelma - there are few older members, and one of them, Bronach, is treated with much disrespect, as is Bronach’s protegee, Berrach, a severely disabled sister. Two sisters are missing - overdue to return from an errand - and though the younger one’s physical description matches the body, the abbess insists it cannot be her. And there is something strange about the abbey itself - sometimes strange noises seem to issue from the earth below the abbey, which Draigen says are the result of tidal water filling caves that riddle the area.

Meanwhile, Ross has been investigating the abandoned ship, and has discovered that it was brought to shore nearby, by a party of Irish warriors of the clan Ui Fidgenti, who pit the crew to work in the local copper mines. The ship itself vanished overnight while the Ui Fidgenti celebrated.

Fidelma finds things to concern her at Asnar’s stronghold as well. Draigen’s former husband, Ferbal, a bitter misogynist, lives in the compound. Adnar has guests - Torcan, prince of Ui Fidgenti and his companions, and Olcan, son of the local overlord, both families with ambition and grudes against her brother. And everywhere, in the abbey, on the abandoned vessel, even on the books in the abbey, Fidelma finds traces of an unusual red clay, commonly found in copper mines.

Another satisfying mystery from Peter Tremayne, complex and rich in atmosphere, drawing on both Irish history and legend, and the history of the Irish and Roman churches and the conflicts between them. Fidelma must uncover the secrets of the community, and of politics and greed, to solve the mysteries, and then, perhaps most satisfying of all, she sets forth fir new adventures with Eadulf at her side.

Martin Delany, author of Blake, or The Huts of America, was a free black man, associate of Frederick Douglas, an abolitionist, journalist, physician, soldier and writer, and an early advocate of black nationalism. He wrote his two-part novel, the first part of which was serialised in the The Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Where Stowe’s book urged patience and resignation for enslaved black people, and valorised Christian piety among slaves, Delany tells a story of planning for an armed insurrection of black people in North America, and Cuba and labels Christianity as the religion of the oppressor. It should be noted, although, that by this he means a white-led Christian church which preaches patience and acceptance of one’s fate. His main character espouses instead a form of liberation Christianity in which black Christians will interpret scripture directly and in revolutionary terms.

Delany explains his concept of religion most clearly in this speech by his main character, Blake (known throughout the first part of the book as Henry Holland): “No religion but that which brings us liberty will we know; no God but He who owns us as his children will we serve. The whites accept of nothing but that which promotes their interests and happiness, socially, politically and religiously. They would discard a religion, tear down a church, overthrow a government, or desert a country, which did not enhance their freedom. In God’s great and righteous name, are we not willing to do the same?” .... “Our ceremonies, then,” continued Blake, “are borrowed from no denomination, creed, nor church: no existing organization, secret, secular, nor religious; but originated by ourselves, adopted to our own condition, circumstances, and wants, founded upon the eternal word of God our Creator, as impressed upon the tablet of each of our hearts.”

The full text of the novel has been lost, but Part One and a large part of Part Two survive. [1] It is a fascinating read, being of interest both as a work of African-American nationalist literature, and as an early work of black speculative fiction.

The novel begins with the heart-rending account of the break-up of a black family through the sale of a young slave woman. Colonel Franks, a Southern landowner, is persuaded by Arabella Ballard, a relative of his wife’s, and the wife of a business associate, to sell her Maggie, a house servant trained as a lady’s maid, to accompany her on a trip to Cuba. It is strongly suggested that his decision to sell Maggie - his biological daughter - is motivated by her refusal of his sexual advances toward her. By this sale she is separated from her young son Joe, her husband, known as Henry Holland, an educated black man from the West Indies tricked into slavery when young, and from her mother, Mammy Judy, the cook, and Mammy Judy’s husband Daddy Joe, who are also devastated by the loss.

But where Judy and Daddy Joe try to accept the loss of Maggie with Christian platitudes about suffering and being together again in Heaven, Henry is outraged at the callous destruction of his family and rejects the advice of the others to accept the loss and trust in God. He confronts the Colonel over the sale of his wife, and in turn is sold himself. But before his new master can take possession, he runs away. After arranging for his son to be carried to safety in Canada, he contacts two trusted friends, Andy and Charles, and shares with them his plan, not only to never be enslaved again, but to organise a country-wide slave revolution, a goal that they eagerly agree to support him in.

Delany makes the reader look at all aspects of slavery, from the philosophical arguments used to justify the ownership of human beings, to the economics of plantation culture, to the casual everyday cruelty exhibited toward enslaved blacks. He also examines the range of survival strategies used by black people under slavery, showing the ways in which the myths of the slave who is eager to please, happy amusing, slow-witted, childlike, or a comforting ‘mammy’ are all, to some degree or other, masks adopted as means of surviving interactions with whites - with varied results, depending on the skill of the actor and the mood and whim of the target. The real hearts and minds of black people appear only when they speak together, or act out of the sight of whites, in the black-occupied ‘huts of America’ where they can congregate away from the gaze of the master. Even the very real faith of some blacks is exaggerated into a performance of confused and frenzied religiosity - for example, when Mammy Judy uses this strategy as a way of avoiding uncomfortable questions about the whereabouts of Henry and his son Joe. There are no happy plantation stories here.

As Henry travels through the South, spreading the idea of an organised rebellion, his encounters with the workers on different plantations provide a sense of the scope of slavery as a means of cheap labour - the sheer numbers of blacks working to produce the cash crops that drove the economic growth of not only the plantation south but the industrial north - and the ways in which this commodified labour force was treated.

Henry’s travels through the Southern states, rousing the black populace to prepare for a coming insurrection, occupy much of the book; having made this circuit, he returns to the Franks plantation, gathers these closest to him, and leads them to Canada, where he buys land and sets up a community of escaped slaves. Then, his family and friends taken care of, he heads toward Cuba in search of his wife. Thus ends Part One of Blake.

Where Part One was largely an exploration of the life of blacks under slavery, with some detailed advice on the dangers facing escaping slaves due to the Fugitive Slave Act and directions on how to reach Canada - complete with warnings not to expect much beyond freedom on arrival in what was still a very racially stratified society - the early chapters of Part Two examine first the conditions of slavery in Cuba, and then the conditions of the slave trade itself, as Henry’s adventures continue. It is in this section of the novel that Delany’s African nationalism is most strongly elucidated, in passage such as this:

“Heretofore that country [Africa] has been regarded as desolate-unadapted to useful cultivation or domestic animals, and consequently, the inhabitants savage, lazy, idle, and incapable of the higher civilization and only fit for bondmen, contributing nothing to the civilized world but that which is extorted from them as slaves. Instead of this, let us prove, not only that the African race is now the principal producer of the greater part of the luxuries of enlightened countries, as various fruits, rice, sugar, coffee, chocolate, cocoa, spices, and tobacco; but that in Africa their native land, they are among the most industrious people in the world, highly cultivating the lands, and that ere long they and their country must hold the balance of commercial power by supplying as they now do as foreign bondmen in strange lands, the greatest staple commodities in demand, as rice, coffee, sugar, and especially cotton, from their own native shores, the most extensive native territory, climate, soil, and greatest number of (almost the only natural producers) inhabitants in the universe; and that race and country will at once rise to the first magnitude of importance in the estimation of the greatest nations on earth, from their dependence upon them for the great staples from which is derived their national wealth.”

In Part Two, Henry, now using the name Gilbert, travels to Cuba in the service of a party of three young white men - Captain Richard Paul, Lieutenant Augustus Seely, and Midshipman Lawrence Spencer - desirous of entering the slave trade, and Cordelia Woodward, a young woman who later becomes Seely’s wife.

Once in Cuba, Henry leaves the party to search for his wife; finding Maggie at last, he gives her the money to purchase her freedom, and arranges for Joe to be brought to Cuba by some of his friends in Canada. We now learn that Henry, who speaks both Spanish and Creole fluently, is originally from Cuba, and that his name is actually Henrico Blacus - Henry Blake. He visits his cousin, Placido, a revolutionary poet, and they agree on working toward an uprising in Cuba. Henry then takes a position as a sailing master on a slave ship carrying arms - the Vulture, commanded by Captain Paul and his associates.

Blake’s journey to Africa, where the Vulture takes on two thousand kidnapped and branded Africans, gives Delany the opportunity to enumerate the horrors of the Middle Passage, the physical and mental torture endured by the transportees, the callousness toward the health and lives of their human cargo.

On his return, Blake discovers that he has been appointed the General of the Cuban Army of Emancipation; the revolutionaries, comprising many of the free blacks and people of mixed race in Cuba as well as soaves, plan for action. The last preserved chapter offers a picture of heightened political tensions between the Spanish administrators, the American platers who seek to have Cuba annexed by the US, and the black and mixed race general population, free and slave. Conditions are ripe for a revolution; but the conclusion of the book is lost to us.

Those looking for a cohesive personal narrative in Blake will be disappointed. This is not that kind of novel. Henry’s travels and exploits are governed, not by the desire to tell a story, but to impart information and promote a cause. Its shape is also affected by the length of time taken to write the work. Delany began publishing the chapters in 1959, before the outbreak of civil war. By the time he finished writing, it was 1862, and the possibility existed that a Union victory might end the rule of slavery in the South, rendering moot his main character’s arguments for a black insurrection. The value of Blake lies in its articulation of a nationalist vision of diasporic Africans, and its contemporary account of the conditions of black people under slavery.


[1] Part One has been published online (http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/africam/blakehp.html)

PM Press’ latest offering in its Outspoken Authors series features work from the undeniably, gloriously outspoken author Samuel R. Delany. In addition to the title novella, The Atheist in the Attic includes Delany’s classic critique of racism in science fiction, and an interview with the author. Delany being one of my literary heroes from a very early age - I fell in love with his writing when I read Babel-17 and never wavered afterward - I had to get the book.

Delany is an author of ideas, which he wraps in polished, precise, gorgeous prose. “The Atheist in the Attic” is a perfect example of the master at work, examining and interrogating the intellectual underpinnings of the Enlightenment. The publisher’s blurb says:

“The title novella, "The Atheist in the Attic," appearing here in book form for the first time, is a suspenseful and vivid historical narrative, recreating the top-secret meeting between the mathematical genius Leibniz and the philosopher Spinoza caught between the horrors of the cannibalistic Dutch Rampjaar and the brilliant "big bang" of the Enlightenment.”

Delany’s Leibnitz is an old man recollecting, and commenting on, a trip to Amsterdam he made when much younger, part if his purpose being to visit the old and reclusive Spinoza. The visits are secretive, because Leibnitz is a young man with a noble patron and a career still to be made among the the intelligentsia of Europe, and Spinoza is an outcast and a pariah, both Jew and alleged atheist, a man whose work caused riots in the street and the brutal deaths of some of those who championed his work.

Leibnitz and Spinoza talk. About their work, and their thoughts about each other’s work. About that terrible and violent reaction of the people to his anti-clerical, anti-theistic treatise. About the great Greek philosophers. About the relation of language and thought. About the meaning, the essence of what Spinoza calls Deus sive Natura - God, or otherwise Nature.

Leibnitz, as he recounts his visit to Spinoza, also contemplates issues of race - specifically anti-Semitism - and class antipathy, the latter brought on by the eagerness of a young manservant at the home he is staying in to do him personal services, and the stories of cannibalism among the peasants during a recent famine that he has heard, most recently from Spinoza.

As always, Delany leaves one thinking, wondering, speculating.

I had read the other work collected here, Delany’s essay on racism in science fiction, before, but it was worthwhile to read it again. So much has happened since it was first written in 1998. There are now many more visible writers of colour in the genre, and, as Delany predicted, there has been pushback.

In his essay, he said “As long as there are only one, two, or a handful of us, however, I presume in a field such as science fiction, where many of its writers come out of the liberal-Jewish tradition, prejudice will most likely remain a slight force—until, say, black writers start to number 13, 15, 20 percent of the total. At that point, where the competition might be perceived as having some economic heft, chances are we will have as much racism and prejudice here as in any other field.”

And lo and behold now that there are more than a handful of sff writers of colour, along comes RaceFail (Google it) and the Sadly Rabid Puppies and ComicGate and all the whiney (mostly) white boys of all ages who want stories with white boy heroes doing white boy hero things like conquering other planets and winning space battles against bug-eyed monsters.

Sadly, Delany knew whereof he spoke.

The volume closes with a pleasant interview by Terry Bisson, the editor of the series, which does not illuminate the author so much as give a hint at how vey much there is to learn about him and his work.

Catherynne Valente, "Down and Out in R'lyeh"; Uncanny Magazine, September/October 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/down-and-out-in-rlyeh/

This is not your average Cthulhu mythos story. In a style reminiscent of its other literary inspirations - Orwell's Down and out in Paris and London, Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - it's a travelogue, a drug-fueled expletive-filled exploration of the fetid underbelly of a city where that most fetid of all things, dead, lies dreaming. The narrator is an inconsequential 'eerie' named Moloch - not "the" Moloch, of course, just one of the thousand children of Shub-Niggurath, out for a night of tripping on the fumes of Cthulhu's farts. It's one wild ride, and it's worth it.


Allison Mills, "If a Bird Can Be a Ghost"; Apex Magazine, August 1, 2017
https://www.apex-magazine.com/if-a-bird-can-be-a-ghost/

Shelly's Grandmother is a Ghostbuster. Shelly has the gift as well, to see and communicate with ghosts, to send them on. Her grandmother has a lot to teach her, about when to send a ghost on, and when to let them be. About treating them like the people they were. But when Shelly's mother dies, she has to learn the hardest lessons on her own. Very strong story, it starts out sweet and turns powerful and full of meaning. By the end I was near tears.


Cassandra Khaw, "Don't Turn On the Lights"; Nightmare Magazine, October 2017
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/fiction/dont-turn-lights/

Oh, this is a dark little piece of horror indeed. Or, considering that it consists of multiple variations on a simple horror trope, a series of dark little pieces, each one successively darker and taking its motivations from deeper in the human psyche. Khaw turns the screws sublimely.


Mary Robinette Kowal, "The Worshipful Society of Glovers"; Uncanny Magazine, July/August 2017
https://uncannymagazine.com/article/worshipful-society-glovers/

Kowal's novelette, a historical fantasy set in Tudor times, features a journeyman glovemaker in a world where the crafting guilds have arrangements with the queen of fairies to produce enchanted goods - all properly licensed, of course, and the penalties for making unlicensed ensorcelled goods can be grave indeed. But laws intended to protect can also trap a good but desperate person in a maze of deceit and worse, with no way out. A story that is, ultimately, about the cruelty of class, the desperation of poverty, and the callousness of a system that makes no allowances for circumstance or simple human necessity.


Khaalidah Muhammad-Ali, "Concessions"; Strange Horizons, published in two parts, March 6 and 13, 2017
http://strangehorizons.com/fiction/concessions-part-1-of-2/

In a world where religious strife has led to wars and a suppression of faiths of all kinds, where religious exiles live in small communities in barren lands becoming increasingly less habitable, a muslimah doctor and scientist struggles to balance both her callings, and find a way to atone for her part in the devastation. A thoughtful, moving story about healing, responsibility, science and faith.


Vina Jie-Min Prasad, "A Series of Steaks"; Clarkesworld, January 2017
http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/prasad_01_17/

A delightful sf caper about a prime beef forger and her assistant threatened by a nasty client with blackmail on his mind. The details of the forged food business - and its cousin, the printed replacement organ business - are actually fascinating, and the way the women turn the tables and ride off into the sunset is delightful.


Kathleen Kayembe, "The Faerie Tree"; Lightspeed Magazine, November 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-faerie-tree/

Striking a bargain with the faeries is never something done lightly, but when the need is great enough, some are willing to pay the price. But the sacrifice can be even worse than you thought it would be. A well-told tale with a bitter lesson.


Rachel Swirsky, "The Day The Wizards Came"; Lightspeed Magazine, November 2017
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/day-wizards-came/

A short but many-layered story. What if wizards - mere schoolchildren, on brooms, not unlike the wizards everyone has been reading about - suddenly appeared and stopped a terrible thing from happening. And what if the mundanes, who the young wizards didn't have much respect for anyway, instead if being suitable grateful, wondered why now, why, if they had such power, they hadn't stopped other terrible things before then. And what if... But as I said, there are many levels to this unsettling tale, having to do with responsibility, and power, and expectations, and wanting things to be better without having to do it yourself, and other tricky questions.


Theodora Goss, "Come See the Living Dryad"; tor.com, March 9, 2017

Goss' novelette deals with an issue that I feel rather strongly about - the treatment of people who have visible differences and disabilities, by society, by those close to them, by institutions and media. Set in 19th century England (and thus evoking echoes of the life of a similar medical curiosity, Joseph Merrick, the famous Elephant Man), this is the story of the life and murder of Daphne Merwin, the Living Dryad. There is a real, and very rare, genetic condition known as Lewandowsky-Lutz dysplasia, in which damaged skin develops into hardened tissue and forms papules that resemble treebark, and branches. It is this condition that the fictional Daphne suffers from, and the reason that her husband - the man who found her alone and starving in the streets of London - exhibits her under the name of the Living Dryad.

The story is told through Daphne's journals, the internal narrative of her great-great-granddaughter, also named Daphne, who has inherited her condition, and various documents - handbills, news reports, excerpts from the younger Daphne's book on Victorian Freak Shows. The younger Daphne, reading the journal for her research, becomes suspicious about the official version of the murder, and seeks to resolve the questions she has. Daphne's journals provide clues. But what lies beneath the murder mystery - which is interesting in itself - is the tragedy of two woman turned into objects for display, for the financial benefit of the man who wooed and used them both, and the voyeuristic pleasure of others.


Carlie St. George, “If We Survive the Night”; The Dark Magazine, March 2017
http://thedarkmagazine.com/if-we-survive-the-night/

There’s a house in the woods where the girls who die in horror films go. Every day there’s an angel who calls on them to repent their sins, and every night they are murdered again. Because everyone knows it’s the bad girls who die. But who decides what’s good and what’s bad? And who determined that the appropriate punishment for any sin that a teenaged girl could commit is to be horrifically murdered?

In an interesting literary coincidence, shortly after reading this story, I encountered the following passage in Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life: “You can be made responsible whether or not you have modified your behavior in accordance, because gender fatalism has already explained the violence directed against you as forgivable and inevitable.”


Kirsten Valdez Quade, “Christina the Astonishing (1150 - 1224); The New Yorker, July 31, 2017
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/31/christina-the-astonishing-1150-1224

More mainstream/literary fiction. A thought-provoking story recounting the life of a late Medieval female saint from the perspective of her sister. Reading with a modern eye, one is unable to discern sanctity from madness. Did Christina really return from death, or from a paralytic fit that seemed like death to the uneducated villagers and barely educated priest? Her sisters suffer greatly from her ranting, accusations and erratic, sometimes violent behaviour - is it the wrath of God or schizophrenia? What tears at the heart is the anguish of a sister torn between love, resentment, anger and reverence.

Elizabeth Peters's novel The Murders of Richard III impressed me as being just the thing for reading when in need of light entertainment and amusement. So I tried another book in the same series, The Seventh Sinner, to see if the impression held. And it did.

Featuring librarian-sleuth Jacqueline Kirby again, this novel is set in Rome, among a small group of young research fellows and other advanced foreign students at an international institute for the study of art and architecture. Kirby herself is on a working vacation, improving her CV with an eye to an classics-related opening at her workplace back in the US.

The historical hook here is the remarkable architectural history of Rome, with particular emphasis on the history of Christian buildings, from secret underground churches and catacombs dating back to the early days of Christianity in Rome, to the proliferation of churches devoted to the saints - which leads to a delightful sidedish of hagiographic tidbits.

The murder mystery to be solved focuses on the eccentric theories of one of the young scholars of hagiocentric archeology, and in the process of solving it, Kirby leads us on a wild ride through the underbelly of academe.

I think i'm going to enjoy the rest of Peters' oeuvre.

Quite a few years ago, a person of my Internet acquaintance, who is known on the Net as The Plaid Adder, started writing one of the best fantasy series I have ever read. It grew to five volumes - a tight trilogy (Taken Child, Another Country and Darkness Bright), a sequel (Redemption) and a prequel (Better to Burn) - and it is in my opinion a great sadness that none of the books were ever published.

I've never really understood why my acquaintance was never able to get these published, unless it was that they were written from a deeply feminist perspective, featured mostly female protagonists, a goodly number of whom were lesbians, and provided, along with compelling stories well-written about interesting and fully realised characters, serious critiques about just about every aspect of Western culture and society, an invitation to really think seriously about things like love, good and evil, materialism and progress, religion, and other core stuff of life, and a meta-narrative about the process of creation. Plus, the core trilogy is somewhat of a genre-bender, encompassing elements of fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, suspense, romance and political satire, and while this kind of blurring of the boundaries has recently come more into vogue, it wasn't as salable back when these books were written.

I was fortunate enough to read these books chapter by chapter as they were written, and then to acquire printed copies of the complete and edited volumes from the author - which I of course reread. Then came my increasing environmental sensitivities, which made my treasured spiro-bound print copies unreadable. But now the author is distributing the novels as ebooks to those who know where to ask for them, and I've had the absolute delight of starting to reread these books again.

The first volume I reread was Taken Child, which introduces the land of Ideire and its low-tech, telepathy and magic-reliant culture, its somewhat eccentric semi-deity Idair and her nemesis the Dark One, the women-only order of magic-using clerics known as shriia who follow Idair and serve the people of Ideire, and their enemies, the female dark users of magic who receive their power from the Dark One.

At the centre of the trilogy is Theamh ni hUlnach, a shriia - albeit a somewhat unconventional one. In Taken Child, we meet as she goes about her duties, including the training of her apprentice Aine. In the course of this, she is sought out by a woman whose child has suffered the supernatural theft of its soul. In the process of trying to save the child, Theamh uncovers a horrifying secret linked to both an old enemy and a long-lost love, and a corrupt plot that threatens the very future of Ideire.

The second volume of the trilogy, Another Country, sees Theamh and Aine following the tracks of Theamh's nemesis, Lythril, into the neighbouring, technology-reliant Cretid Nation, which is in many ways a dystopic distillation of much that is wrong with our own society, as civil war erupts at home. A deft blend of heroic quest, political thriller, biting satire, and poignant love story, Another Country is genre-bending at its best.

The final volume, Darkness Bright, sees Theamh and Aine returned to an Ideire in chaos. They join up with the resistance - both martial and magical - fighting corrupt shriia and their secular allies who have overthrown the legitimate leadership of the country. An unflinching portrayal of the horrors and sacrifices made in war and the tragedy of a country torn apart by lies and greed, Darkness Bright is also a story of courage, commitment to the good, and enduring love.

If anything in what I've written here seems interesting to you, the author can be contacted on tumblr as http://plaidadder.tumblr.com/.