Head of Zeus, 2024, 567 p.  Reviewed for ParSec 11.

A lot of fantasy takes as its societal template a mediæval setting, with kings, nobles, church, and so on clearly based on the feudal model. Very few, if any, have employed a late mediæval background based on the Italian city states. That, though, is what Bacigalupi has opted for here: a refreshing choice, and one which offers plenty of scope for intrigue and skullduggery, not to mention vendetta.

The family central to this story, though, is not descended from nobility. For three generations the di Regulai have built up their banking business in the city of Navola, using their money to thwart the encroachment of the nearby Empire of Cheroux on the city. That bank now has branches in every land with which Navola trades, its power and worth dependent on the bedrock of financial stability – not its gold but its promises. By its ever-growing influence through the years, its head, narrator Davico de Regulai’s father Davonico, is the de facto leader of Navola, its nominal ruler, the Callarino, sidelined, the ancient nobility’s domination of the forum of government, the Callendra, diminished, with rights granted to the ordinary people known as the vianomae.

The tone in which the book is written could easily be mistaken for a work of historical fiction, albeit history disguised, were it not for the fact that we start with a fossilised dragon’s eye. An eye with feather-like but sharp-edged tendril-like nerve remnants, an eye which sits on Davonico’s desk and draws attention to itself, seeming to follow you about the room with its gaze. Davico feels the eye’s power, and that of the dragon consciousness within it.

As the only heir to the di Regulai house Davico is being trained in the essence of banking, the art of governance, the necessity for faccioscuro – explained here as hidden face (though the apposite term in English would be poker face) – as opposed to clear face, facciochiaro. Faccioscuro is the signature trait of the Navolese whose rivals say, “‘The minds of the Navolese are as twisted as the plaits of their women’s hair.’” This is exemplified in the card game cartalegge, which requires a high degree of deception for a player to win. Davonico’s fixer and spymaster, the stilettotorre, Cazzeta, is an adept, as is Davico’s adopted “sister” Celia, taken in by Davonico when he disgraced and exiled her family, the di Basculi, to bring her up as if she were a di Regulai.

Unfortunately Davico has too open a heart to be able to dissemble much, is too burdened with conscience to accept without qualms the occasional need for harsh measures. Celia has a much keener appreciation of the ways of this world. Due to its constraints a woman has to be so much more aware than a man. Fiaccioscuro, she says, is “the weapon of the woman. The sharpest weapon a woman can wield.”

We see Davico’s growth from boy to man, his initial confusion over the feelings puberty invokes in him, his unease at the constant need to play his part in the game of life, all against the backdrop of intrigue, realpolitik and his father’s plans for him and Celia both. The dragon’s eye fades into the background somewhat until Davico’s naming day, when an attack on his life forces him, Celia and Cazzeta to use the secret passage behind his father’s library. Davico’s affinity with the dragon and its perceptions save their lives, but there are still twists to come.

This is an environment in which paranoia is justified. Even with eyes in the back of your head you might still not see danger approach. Fortunes can turn on an instant, loyalties suddenly evaporate. As one character reflects, “We are all flotsam in the maelstrom. To swim at all is triumph.” With the aid of the dragon’s eye Davico learns to swim. But it costs him.

In Navola, Bacigalupi has constructed a detailed image of a cut-throat world which would not be at all comfortable to live in. It is a very good novel indeed.

The following did not appear in the published review.

Pedant’s corner:- “I had seen thieves hung” (hanged,) another instance of ‘hung’ for ‘hanged’, “she lay down the black castello” (laid down.) “‘Trust is a vice a women can ill afford’” (either ‘a woman’ or just ‘women’,) “her her” (only one ‘her’ needed,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech, another missing at the end of one. “There was a collected intake of breath” (‘collective intake’ is the more usual phrasing,) “that our family, who was so deeply tied to Navola” (our family, which was so deeply tied,) octopi (the singular is not Latinate so; octopuses, or – in the extreme – octopodes.)

The latest edition of ParSec magazine (no 11) is available for purchase. At £5.99. It’s a bargain.

This edition contains no less than five of my reviews.

The Last Pantheon by Tade Thompson and Nick Wood.

The Phoenix Keeper by S A MacLean.

Dark Shepherd by Fred Gambino.

Sparks of Bright Matter by Leeanne O’Donnell.

And, last but not least, Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi.

Those reviews will appear here after a decent interval.

This time with Navola by Paolo Bacigalupi.

I’ve not read the blurb yet.

However, Bacigalupi is an author I have read before. See here and here.

But not for some time.

Orbit, 2015, 379 p

The south-western US states have run out of water. Federal authority has all but broken down; there are patrolled borders between states to cut down on refugees. Phoenix is a dust-bowl, any refugees that have made it from Texas face a life scraping on the margins, doing what they have to do. The South Nevada Water Authority under Catherine Case aggressively pursues its water rights over the Colorado River making Phoenix’s problems worse.

There are three narrative viewpoints; Angel, the water knife of the title, one of Catherine Case’s enforcers; Lucy, an investigative journalist; and Maria, a refugee from Texas scrabbling to survive. The plot centres round ancestral water rights which once belonged to Native Americans and which outweigh all others.

It is an almost relentlessly misanthropic endeavour. Only one character states a view approaching anything compassionate, “‘We’re all each other’s people…. When everything’s going to pieces, people can forget. But in the end? We’re all in it together.’” Yet he then goes on to say what an immigrant from India had told him, “‘… people are alone here in America. And they don’t trust anyone except themselves, and they don’t rely on anyone except themselves….. India would survive all this apocalyptic shit but America wouldn’t. Because here, no one knew their neighbo(u)rs…. in America everyone had left their homes in other countries, so maybe that was why we’d forgotten what it was to have neighbo(u)rs.’”

More representative is when Angel describes “a view of the world that anticipated evil from people because people always delivered.” Contrast that to the essentially optimistic view of humanity in Naomi Mitchison’s The Bull Calves which I read just beforehand. If anything, The Water Knife actually shows the necessity for a resilient, well-ordered, balanced society, even in times of stress; but that is not an argument which Bacigalupi makes.

The back cover here reads (in part,) “One of the most exciting and original novels you will read this year.” I must disagree. It’s the same picture of degradation and selfishness peddled by too much recent SF. Only the details differ. Bacigalupi does it well though.

Pedant’s corner:- The copy I read was an uncorrected proof (ARC) riddled with “a”s or “the”s or “it”s or other words either missing or extraneously interpolated eg “His was face was puffy” and “just another of victim of”. There were so many I gave up noting them. I hope most of these were cleaned up before actual publication. Missing start quotes if a piece of dialogue began a chapter, “she wrapped her arms around her herself,” (no second “her” needed,) “The went after the Calies” (they went after.) “Do find that’s true?” (Do you find?) “out of Hell , he’d,” (out of Hell, he’d,) “Lucy’s sister was the kind of people who broke eas(il)y” (the kind of person.)

Robinson, 2013, 572 p. Borrowed from a threatened library.

The book cover and spine has 21^st Century but the title page Twenty-First Century. The editors choices were made from those writers whose rise to prominence came after 1999 – in a world where they say SF is no longer marginal but a part of the cultural landscape. So to the stories.

In Vandana Singh’s Infinities Abdul Karim is fascinated by mathematics. Visions of beings he calls farishte and sees out of the corners of his eyes lead him to ponder the variety of mathematical infinities and the intersection between transcendental numbers and primes. But life wears him down and his glimpse of the connections does not mesh with the troubles of a divided India. Rogue Farm by Charles Stross is set in a depopulated future and features trees which can store nitrate (effectively making them rockets/bombs) and collective farms composed of several people melded into some sort of tank-like vehicle. I know it was originally published in a US magazine but it’s located in Cumbria yet not only the prose but also the dialogue – with a few exceptions – was written in USian. The exceptions were some unconvincing “ayup”s and a sudden splattering of “Northern” speech in the second last paragraph.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Gambler sees an exiled Laotian struggle to get enough click-bait on his news stories, Neal Asher’s Strood features more or less beneficent invading aliens and their pets, which have unusual eating habits. In Eros, Philia, Agape by Rachel Swirsky, Adriana seeks love from and marries a robot called Lucian. Things go wrong when she lets Lucian have free will and their adopted daughter begins to believe she’s a robot. “The Tale of the Wicked” by John Scalzi is an updated version of Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics stories when the brains of two spaceships in a hot pursuit start to communicate. Bread and Bombs by M Rickert is a post-apocalypse, post twin towers, tale where no-one travels by air, indeed any sighting of an aeroplane is accompanied by fear, and outsiders are treated with suspicion.

Taking its inspiration from a Biblical text and the Uncertainty Principle, Tony Ballantyne’s The Waters of Meribah is set in a universe shrunk to only tens of miles across where a group of scientists is engaged in a bizarre experiment to create an alien in order to break out again. Tk’Tk’Tk by David D Levine features the experiences of a hereditary salesman on a planet inhabited by excessively polite aliens. He comes to an epiphany, as you do. Genevieve Valentine’s The Nearest Thing is the closest to a human an artificial entity can get but the process is neither morally nor emotionally simple for its software designer. In Ian Creasey’s Erosion the comparison evoked by its title is perhaps a touch over-egged in his tale of an augmented human about to leave for the stars out for a last hike along the North Yorkshire coast. Marissa Lingen’s The Calculus Plague tells of the beginnings of transfer of memories by viral infection. One of our Bastards is Missing by Paul Cornell is set in a future where early eighteenth century Great Powers have lasted into the space age, the balance of power is kept steady but they still plot against each other.

A damaged war machine, the last of its platoon, roams the seashore in Elizabeth Bear’s Tideline, collecting material to make memorial necklaces for the fallen. Finistera by David Moles is set on a giant planet with a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere where floating creatures as large as mountains form homes for people and exploitable resources for the less scrupulous. In Mary Robinette Kowal’s Evil Robot Monkey an augmented chimpanzee wants only to make pottery; but humans – especially schoolchildren – remain humans. The junior of The Education of Junior Number Twelve by Madeline Ashby is the twelfth offspring of a kind of self-replicating android, designed so as not to allow harm to humans. They make perfect lovers though. Even if humans themselves remain as messed up as ever. Toy Planes by Tobias S Buckell sees a Caribbean island join the space-faring nations. Ken Liu’s The Algorithms of Love is curiously reminiscent of Flowers for Algernon in its tale of a designer of truly interactive dolls coming to believe she herself, and all humans, are merely reacting to inbuilt instructions. The Albian Message by Oliver Morton speculates on just exactly what is contained in a pyramid left by aliens in the Trojan Asteroids hundreds of millions of years ago while Karl Schroeder’s To Hie From Far Cilenia supposes layers of “cities” – or at least organised groupings of people – only existing in a kind of online virtual reality parallel to the real world. Brenda Cooper’s Savant Songs is about the search by a brilliant (but socially awkward) female physicist for her counterparts in the multiverse of worlds. Ikiryoh by Liz Williams is reminiscent of Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas in that the eponymous child is the repository of all the darkness that would otherwise be present in the goddess who rules. The Prophet of Flores by Ted Kosmatka is set in a world where Darwinism was disproved in the 1950s by dating techniques. Yet on the Indonesian island of Flores unusual bones have been discovered in a cave. The protagonist’s conclusion sticks neatly to the logic of his world.

According to Catherynne M Valente’s How to Become a Mars Overlord each solar system has its own Red Planet and the author provides a stepwise guide to its overlordship but the piece overall is less of a story than a disquisition. In Daryl Gregory’s Second Person, Present Tense Therese has taken an overdose of a drug called Zen, which alters her persona. Her parents don’t accept this. Third Day Lights by Alaya Dawn Johnson features a shape-shifting demon and a human looking for the afterlife of the afterlife. James L Cambias’s Balancing Accounts has a robotic/AI protagonist plying a living for its owners by trading in the Saturn system. An unusual cargo brings problems. A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel by Yoon Ha Lee is another disquisitive story about various different cultures’ star drives. Hannu Rajaniemi’s His Master’s Voice stars a dog (and, yes, it’s called Nipper) seeking the return of its master who has been “condemned to the slow zone for three hundred and fourteen years” for illegally producing copies of himself and, since Rajaniemi sojourned for a while in Edinburgh, could just perhaps have been inspired (a bit) by the tale of Greyfriars Bobby. Plotters and Shooters by Kage Baker is set on a space station dedicated to spotting and destroying Earth threatening asteroids. The station’s hierarchies are disrupted by a new arrival. In The Island by Peter Watts a never-ending mission to seed the universe with jump gates threatens the existence of a millimetre thin organism surrounding its sun like a gossamer Dyson sphere. Escape to Other Worlds With Science Fiction by Jo Walton is set in a world where not only did the New Deal fail but the Second World War did not occur as we know it. By 1960 the US is becoming fascistic. Cory Doctorow’s Chicken Little posits a future where the rich are utterly cut-off from even the wealthy but a drug called Clarity can enable true assessment of risk to take place.

On the whole, strong stuff. There is enough here to suggest that SF is a vigorous culture still.

Pedant’s corner:- “the cluster of competing stories are growing” (the cluster is growing,) metastized (metastasised – I have also substituted s for the USian z,) remittance (remission,) minutia (minutiae,) her sisters’ ability to overcome her fear of their father (their fear?) rung (rang,) “I hate to come out of that jump (I’d hate to,) none of the …. have (none has,) a they as an antecedent to an it, and the killed (and killed,) the architecture of the brains are different (the architecture is different,) a yearning gap (the context suggests yawning gap,) “where his regiment were dining” (his regiment was dining,) a Queen Mother is addressed as “Your Royal Highness,” (I suspect that would still be, “Your Majesty,”) “the Queen Mother’s Office are asking” (is asking,) “the unit are still in the fold” (is still in the fold,) the start quote mark is omitted at a story’s beginning, stripped off (stripped of,) Becqurel Reindeer (they are radioactive, so I presume Becquerel,) borne (born,) Hitchens’ (Hitchens’s – which is used later,) jewelery (the USian is jewelry, in British English it’s jewellery,) the total affect (the noun is effect,) goddess’ (goddess’s, which is used 12 lines later!) equilibriums (equilibria,) Deluvian Flood Theory (Diluvian? – which means flood, so is this Flood Flood Theory?) “Hands were shook” (shaken,) a phenomena (phenomena is plural; one of them is a phenomenon,) “It’s the circulating domain of their receptors that are different” (is different,) sunk (sank,) rarified (rarefied,) talk to the them (no “the”,) none of us get (gets,) aureoles (context suggests areolae,) “that whole series were built” (that series was built,) “a great deal of time to attempting” (no need for the “to”,) “The chained aurora borealis flicker and vanish,” (if its one aurora borealis that should be “flickers and vanishes”; otherwise it’s aurorae boreales.) “We sweeped over the dark waves,” (I think that really ought to be “swept”,) hemi sphere (hemisphere,) the Van Oort belt (a confusion of Oort Cloud with Van Allen Belt?) infered (even USian surely has inferred?) borne of parents (born of; definitely born of.)