Review: Machinehood, by S. B. Divya

Review: Machinehood, by S. B. Divya

by Rich Horton

Machinehood is S. B. Divya's first novel, from 2021. (Her second novel, Meru, appeared earlier this year and has attracted excited notice.) We chose it for our book club (run by Mark Tiedemann) this year. I read it in the audiobook version, with the printed book as a supplement. The audiobook is narrated by Inés de Castillo and Deepti Gupta.

Divya was kind enough to join us for the discussion. (Her full name is Divya Srinivasan Breed, and for several years she co-edited the Escape Pod audio magazine as Divya Breed.) She spent a number of years working in the engineering field, and her experience and knowledge comes through in the novel -- in a good way. 

The novel is told primarily from the POV of Welga Ramírez, with a number of chapters from the POV of her sister-in-law Nithya. It is set in 2095, and its themes are stated to some extent in extracts from the Machinehood Manifesto, a document issued during the action of the novel. The first two declarations from the manifesto we see are: "All forms of intelligence have the right to exist without persecution or slavery." and "No form of intelligence may own another." We are quickly aware that this is a significant issue in this future, as the society is heavily reliant on bots of various forms -- a fairly obtuse vendor bot is immediately introduced -- and by WAIs, or "weak artificial intelligences", such as Welga's personal aide Por Qué. A key issue, clearly, is "what is intelligence?" (The Machinehood defines it very expansively.) Another issue, already fraught for this future society, is labor rights -- the economy is largely a gig economy, and humans have struggled to compete for jobs as many jobs are performed by bots or WAIs. 

Welga herself is an ex-Marine, now working as a Shield, providing personal security for rich people who are often the targets of protesters. This is usually mostly for show, and protesting is a more about demonstration, and actual violence tends to redound against the reputation, at least, of the protesters' causes. Also, modern medicine is quite effective at repairing even extreme injuries. But the first mission we witness Welga performing goes horribly wrong. Her client is attacked by an extremely fast and mysterious being that seems either a very advanced robot or even a cyborg. The client dies and Welga is seriously injured.

Around this time the Machinehood announces itself, and demands an immediate stop to all use of bots and WAIs, and also to the design of the various performance enhancing "drugs" (they seem more than chemical) that workers use to enhance their physical and mental abilities, at least in the short term. They appear to have the power to enforce this, also, at least if they were responsible for the attack on Welga's client. There is another suspect -- or perhaps they are allied with the Machinehood? -- the mysterious Caliph who rules much of North Africa (the MARSOC), continuing to expand its borders, which are concealed technologically so that so signals work inside them. Welga herself was the only survivor of a mission inside the Caliphate years previously.

Welga has another problem -- she has a genetic condition that makes her unable to take "flow", the drug that improves ones mental ability; and now she is having another problem, that may be related to the drugs that increase her strength and speed during operations. And she asks Nithya -- whose expertise lies in that area, and who does gig work for a company involved in drug production -- to see if she can find out anything about this issue, or other side effects of some of the drugs. And what Nithya eventually finds is very concerning -- pointing to shortcomings in testing, and even concealment of negative results. 

There's a lot more going on -- a crisis in Nithya's personal life, climate effects impacting the life of Welga's grandfather, one of Nithya's online friends and colleagues getting caught up in the MARSOC's invasion of her country, a chance for Welga and her partner to move to one of the orbital colonies, and more Machinehood attacks while Welga is lured back into serving the US. Everything leads, of course, to a confrontation with the Machinehood, whoever they are. And to a somewhat surprising, and quite interesting, conclusion.

What's best about this novel is the density of the future it creates. It seems a real future, and a lived-in future, with not just one technological novum but many. And the effects of the technological changes are well thought through, including unexpected side effects. More key to the novel -- and very interesting -- is the philosophical issues. The definition of intelligence. The rights of intelligent beings. The questions that arise about labor. The possibility of machine/human integration. These questions are perhaps the central questions SF of our time is addressing. At our discussion we mentioned Annalee Newitz, Ray Nayler, and Rachel Swirsky as other writers addressing that issue (and they are only a few of many); and we also discussed the currently famous AI issue: Large Learning Models. Machinehood is another example of thought-provoking inquiry into such critical issues.

The novel isn't perfect. The technological advances that drive the conclusion come off seeming a bit convenient. The arguments advanced are interrogated, and neither side is given full absolution, but I do think some aspects were a bit neglected -- the definition of "violence" might be one thing; the right to impose one's views without discussion or negotiation isn't unquestioned, but perhaps less vigorously than it might have been. And the ending is a tad rushed -- a common problem with novels of all kinds. But the novel, finally, does what a certain kind of SF does best -- interrogate our vision for the future, examine realistic issues that might arise, and raise worthwhile philosophical questions.

Review: A Dangerous Magic, by "Frances Lynch" (D. G. Compton)

Review: A Dangerous Magic, by "Frances Lynch" (D. G. Compton)

by Rich Horton

David Guy Compton is, as they say, a many-faceted writer -- he began with radio plays, and his first half-dozen or so books were crime fiction, as by "Guy Compton". He's best known for his science fiction, written as by "D. G. Compton" -- over a dozen novels witten from the mid-60s to the mid-90s -- an exceptional body of work that was admired but never got quite the notice I think it deserved (except perhaps for The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, which was filmed as Deathwatch.) He wrote some non-fiction and some non-genre work. His last couple of novels in the 1990s seem to combine the SF and mystery genres ... alas, they were never published in the US, so I have not read them. (I will remedy that omission soon.) And just last year he published a non-SF novel called So Here's Our Leo, with some autobiographical aspects.

And, in the 1970s, he published five romance novels, some with a Gothic flavor, using the name "Frances Lynch". Compton has told me that he wasn't very happy with his first novels, the crime novels, but that he was rather proud of the romance novels. And I enjoy the occasional category romance novel, so I found a copy of A Dangerous Magic, from 1978. My edition is the Fawcett Press paperback (the hardcover came from St. Martin's) and I'll make a brief comment about the cover -- it has nothing to do with the novel. Romance novels in those days -- much like many SF novels, come to think! -- often had very generic covers, almost stock, that basically just made sure to have a handsome man and a pretty woman.

A Dangerous Magic opens with an extract from what we quickly learn is the memoir-in-progress of Lady Otranta Tallanton, the widowed second of wife of a Scottish Laird. She was a magician's assistant when she met her then-married husband, so there is a hint of scandal there, and she promises to tell the whole truth in her memoirs. (Including, maybe, some juicy revelations about Queen Victoria and John Brown!)

We quickly shift to the main character, Bridie Tallanton, Lady Otranta's great-niece. Bridie's father has just died, leaving her nearly destitute, and she is struggling to make ends meet and to find a job. And suddenly a publishing firm gives her an offer -- they will hire her, and assign her to travel to Castle Tantallon, with the object of convincing Lady Otranta to finish her memoirs, which are very late. Reluctantly, Bridie accepts, and is soon in Scotland. She's painfully shy, and afraid of the reception her Great Aunt will give her (as her side of the family was estranged, due to her Grandfather's refusal to accept Lady Otranta's marriage to his elder brother Jamie.) Things get a bit worse when she is met on the train by a retainer who informs her that Lord Andrew, Lady Otranta's eldest son, does not wish her to come -- and, indeed, it seems a lot of the family are dead set against Lady Otranta's memoirs seeing the light of day.

Bridie soldiers on, however. She quickly realizes that the family is indeed a bit of a mess. Lady Otranta is very nice when in good spirits, but, alas, she has a drinking problem, and she is much less pleasant when drunk. Lord Andrew is a fine honest man, if a bit stiff-necked. His elder sister, Melissa, the child of Lady Otranta's husband's first wife, is generally nice enough, but oddly unmarried though some 30 years old. The younger son, Robert, is pleasant but perhaps a bit rackety, and seems very much against the memoirs. Lady Otranta's loyal maid, Peggy, who was with her when she worked for the magician, is also fiercely against the memoir project. And before long there are threats -- a runaway car nearly runs over Bridie, and a nasty note tells her she had better return to London.

All along we see snippets of Lady Otranta's memoirs, even though she doesn't seem to be working on them at all, due to her drinking. These tell of her young life, her work in show business, her skill as a "mind reader", and then her meeting with Jamie Tallanton, and their rapidly growing romance. The main problem is, of course, Jamie's wife -- but it's worse, because the first Lady Tallanton seems to be poisoning Jamie. What can be done about her? At the same time, Bridie is falling love with Lord Andrew, and he with her. And Bridie is learning some surprising things about Lady Otranta ...

It all comes to a head, as such books do, with the surprising revelations in Lady Otranta's memoirs, as well as some ups and downs in Andrew and Bridie's relationship, and with a climactic party followed by a bit of a personal crisis for several characters. The plotting is really nicely handled, with some cool twists, and a really great closing gesture from Bridie.

I enjoyed this novel, though not so much for the romance element, which is pretty thin, as for the plot, which really works.

Resurrected Review: The Gammage Cup, by Carol Kendall

Another old review, originally from Black Gate, I think, back in the year 2000. 

The Gammage Cup

by Carol Kendall
Harcourt Young Classics, Orlando, Florida, 2000, (originally published 1959), $17, 284 pages
ISBN: 0-15-202487-5

A review by Rich Horton

A rising tide lifts all boats, they say. The rising tide caused by the phenomenal success of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter books has indeed lifted the boats of many writers of children's fantasy. One of the oddest cases is perhaps Carol Kendall, and her book The Gammage Cup. This is hardly an unsuccessful book: it was first published in 1959, and it was a Newbery Honor Book. It was reprinted at least as recently as 1990. But when a writer sued J. K. Rowling over supposed similarities between her obscure 1980s books and the Harry Potter books, notably including the use of the word "muggles", some unexpected attention was paid to The Gammage Cup. For it turns out that long before either J. K. Rowling or her suer, Carol Kendall used "Muggles" in this book. To be sure, Muggles in The Gammage Cup is a character name, but nonetheless, Kendall's book is proof enough that the word has a long history in children's fantasy.

Harcourt is reissuing this novel again in 2000. I will confess that I had not previously heard of it, despite having read a great many children's fantasies, and for that matter a great many Newbery Award and Newbery Honor books. But I'm glad to have seen it now. It's a decent book, very readable, displaying a nice touch for the cute turn of phrase, and with several clever notions. That said, it's a fairly minor book: pleasant enough but no patch on Alan Garner, or Lloyd Alexander, or Susan Cooper, or even J. K. Rowling.

The story is set in a small village in an idyllic valley. Centuries before, the Minnipins fled their drought-ridden land, as well as the evil "Mushrooms", and found their way to this valley. Now their past is all but forgotten. The townspeople of Slipper-on-the-Water live comfortable, complacent, and mostly conformist lives. They remember the centuries-past exploits of the great Fooley, who took a balloon over the mountains to their old land, and returned with some relics. Fooley's descendants, the Periods (called so for a cute reason I'll not reveal), are the leaders of the town. Everybody wears green cloaks, and paints their doors green, except for a few outcasts, called "them".

The main character is Muggles, a woman who runs the local museum (mostly housing artifacts Fooley brought with him from over the mountains). She is dangerously close to being one of "them", because though she wears a green cloak she sometimes belts it with an orange sash. As the story proper opens she notices something strange happening in the nearby mountains, and two of "them", the idler and poet Gummy, and the historian Walter the Earl, seem to be involved. Muggles is drawn closer and closer to "them" as the rest of the town, led by the Periods, whips itself into paroxysms of ultraconformity, in an attempt to win the "Gammage Cup". Finally Muggles and her friends are outlawed, even as they become convinced that the whole valley could be in great danger from over (or through) the mountains.

Naturally the outlaws save the day in the end, leading the fight against the menace from the desolate lands outside the valley. The story is throughout pleasantly and cleverly told, and the characters, particularly Muggles and her friends, are well-depicted. It is very tempting to try to think of the book in allegorical terms, not necessarily to its benefit. Read in this way, the book is clearly a warning against 1950s conformist tendencies. It's also a warning against the threat from "outside the valley", and this is one way the book falls down. This threat is seen as completely unhuman, and worthy simply of killing. In the context of the book this is no doubt the only option, but it made me feel a bit queasy.

The Gammage Cup is certainly a very enjoyable book to read. But it falls some way short of excellence. I'm glad to have it still in print, but it stands at best in the second rank of the great children's fantasies.

Resurrected Review: The Covenant, by Modean Moon

Resurrected Review: The Covenant, by Modean Moon

I ran across this old review I did of a very early example of ebook publishing. I haven't changed anything -- obviously much of what I said then is either old hat now or just out of date, and some of my speculations were wrong. 

Embiid was not a basketball player, but an early ebook company that lasted from 2000 to 2006, publishing perhaps most notably Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's Liaden novels. I will note that The Covenant was reprinted physically by Norilana Books, and is now available in ebook form from Baen. (I'm not sure if Baen did a print edition. The cover reproduced to the left is from their ebook.)

The Covenant

by Modean Moon

Electronic edition: Embiid, Waianae HI, 2000, $5

(Originally published by Harper Monogram, 1995)

ISBN: 1-58787-003-7

Review Copyright 2000 by Rich Horton

Most of my reading is Science Fiction, and a major concern in that field is availability of older books. That is to say, the diminishing backlist. Lots of fine books are published and for all practical purposes are uavailable after the few months they are displayed in bookstores, or the slightly longer time they may still be obtainable from the publisher. As far as I can tell, this problem is still worse in the Romance field. There, the backlist seems almost nonexistent.

A lot of folks have suggested that new technologies can solve this problem. Print on demand books are one potential solution, and electronic books are another. (Keeping in mind that the interests of authors, readers, and publishers often clash in these areas, and that if a solution which seems ideal to a reader means an author doesn't get paid, for instance, it's not a very fair solution.) One company has just appeared and is reprinting some fine recent SF and Romance books, quintessential "midlist" titles, in electronic format, suitable for reading on a computer screen. This is Embiid, a Hawaii based company, which maintains a website at www.embiid.net.

I recently obtained a copy of the proprietary Embiid reader (available free with the purchase of one book: or a sampler version is completely free), along with one Embiid book. This reader has two functions: it decrypts the Embiid .ebk file format (an anti-piracy move), and it provides some basic functionality to help read the book on screen. This functionality includes such things as easy font size changes, display size changes, bookmarking, cover illustration display, and reading progress monitor. I found it easy to use, and in general the reading experience was tolerable. I am still much fonder of reading books on paper, but this reader did make it convenient to read a novel on screen without eye strain or difficulty finding my place.

The book I read was The Covenant, by Modean Moon. This novel was published in 1995, and won the Romance Writers of America Rita award for best Paranormal Romance. I enjoyed it quite a bit. Besides the romance element, there is a contemporary suspense story, and a link with an historical story. The various strands of the story are well integrated, with the romance arising naturally as part of the story, rather than driving the story, and with the resolution of the book being more closely tied to the characters' solving their personal problems than to the culmination of their romance.

The plot involves Megan McIntyre Hudson, a recently widowed daughter of a U. S. Senator. She has returned to rural Pitchlyn County, Oklahoma, to occupy a house her husband had owned, and to come to terms with her reactions to his death and the death of his sister, and to her own mistreatment, in a South American country they had been visiting for political reasons. Her emotions are complex, because her marriage was mostly a sham, and because her father has betrayed her in his politically-motivated response to the atrocities she witnessed in South American, and because she is only now coming to terms with a lonely emotional life. Unbeknownst to her, her onetime brother-in-law, the estranged husband of her husband's now dead sister, lives in a neighboring house. This man, Jake Kenyon, is a former DEA agent, then local sheriff, who has considerable issues with the current law enforcement officials of Pitchlyn County.

One night Jake hears signs of a struggle at Megan's house, and bursts in to rescue her from an illegal search conducted by the thuggish local sheriff. Thus Jake and Megan, who don't know each other despite being almost in-laws, are thrown together. Soon they find themselves, against their will, forced to try to figure out why people seem to be prowling about their two properties, and why the local police seem to be unduly interested as well.

At the same time, Megan, perhaps as a result of her psychiatrist's urging her to record her thoughts, begins to seemingly "channel" a young woman who lived in Pitchlyn County in the 1870s. Lydia was a white woman in the then Choctaw Nation, in love with a half-Choctaw ex-Ranger named Sam Hooker. Sam has angered an outlaw gang who then kidnap Lydia and rape her serially for several days until Sam can rescue her. This horrifying event scars her permanently, essentially ruining her relationship with Sam, which is already harmed by her hypocritical father's refusal to countenance her marriage to an Indian. Over time, Megan learns more and more of Lydia's story, and the half-parellels between her story and Megan's own story illuminate the contemporary plotline without being a slavish repetition.

The novel works itself out with a solid and suspenseful resolution to the story of Jake and Megan, as they fall in love, and also figure out the mysterious doings on their property, which turn out to have connections to both Jake's past and Megan's past, and perhaps even to the story of Sam and Lydia. The latter story is nicely revealed as well, and is effectively emotionally wrenching. The backdrop of the Oklahoma landscape is also well-evoked. The characters are convincing, and the love story is believable. This is a good example of what a "romance novel" really should be, in my opinion: a good novel on its own that has a solid romance story as a significant thread, as opposed to a contrived romance that drives the plot willy nilly (which I've seen too often elsewhere). Definitely worthy of reprinting.

Review: Waking the Moon, by Elizabeth Hand

Review: Waking the Moon, by Elizabeth Hand

by Rich Horton

I am a great fan of Elizabeth Hand's fiction, but I am quite behind on her novels, especially her early ones. I finally decided to read her  1994 novel Waking the Moon. I bought the audiobook version, and then, because I get impatient and also like to have text for rereading and such, I got the Kindle edition. I figured they would be the latest and best versions. And I read the book and was very impressed.

Then I investigated further ... the original 1994 version was published in the UK. The US edition appeared in 1995, and, it seems, was significantly shorter. Which version had I read? I ordered a UK copy, which took a while to come (the US Postal Service played some of their delightful games with it.) And as soon as I finally looked into it, I realized the version I read/listened to was indeed the shorter American version. And the changes are interspersed throughout -- there are the same number of chapters, but text has been added in many places. (Or, I should rather say, text had been cut in many places for the American version.) Somewhere I read that Liz actually prefers the shorter version. (I hoped to ask her about that at Readercon but we only got to talk for a minute or so.) Hah! -- I always want MORE. But, you know, things intervened -- like many other books. So I've only sampled the British edition. What I've read of the longer version has been good. But I think a full reading will wait until it's time for a reread. And so this review comes later than I meant it too, and probably suffers therefrom.

Waking the Moon is told primarily by Katherine Sweeney Cassidy, called Katie by her family, but Sweeney by everyone she meets as an adult. We meet her as she matriculates at the University of the Archangels and St. John the Divine in Washington, D. C. We already know from a preface that she will make two particular friends there: Oliver and Angelica, and that she will be in love with both of them, and that they are now (when is now?) gone. (The university is apparently based to some extent on Catholic University, where Hand herself went.) Sweeney is a typical smart young kid from a moderately privileged background, a mix of believing in her talent and totally unsure of herself. Soon after she gets there she runs into Oliver -- a legacy of sorts, and a gorgeous and undisciplined and dangerous and intelligent young man; and Angelica, astonishingly beautiful, also a legacy, raised by a single father. Soon they are inseparable, even as "signs" are happening -- living gargoyles or angels, portents of a potential change. Professor Balthasar Warnick is on alert. Visiting Professor Magda Kurtz is after something else ... And Sweeney's circle expands a bit to include Baby Joe and Hasel Bright and Annie Harmon (Angelica's roommate.) 

We get chapters detailing Sweeney's semester at the Divine, mostly spent learning the city and music and coffee and more from Oliver, while skpping class. We get an interlude with Magda Kurtz, as she leads an archaelogical dig in the USSR and discovers exhilarating (to her) evidence of human sacrifice in a Mother Goddess civilization. Sweeney and Angelica witness a dark scene with Balthasar encountering and exiling Magda ... and Angelica ends up with an ancient lunula that Magda had found at her dig. And everything climaxes at a retreat in which Angelica calls on mystical forces ... and before long Oliver is mad, and then dead, a suicide. And Sweeney is expelled, Angelica off to to Italy ...

The novel skips forward a couple of decades. Sweeney has graduated (from George Washington University) and taken a sort of routine job at the Smithsonian's Natural History museum. Her other friends from the Divine are surviving -- Baby Joe is a music critic of some note, Hasel a lawyer, and Annie a rising star in the Lesbian folk scene. Angelica is different ... she seems to be the leader of a sort of New Age feminist cult. But dark things start happening -- Hasel dies under mysterious circumstances that Baby Joe learns may be connected to Angelica. Annie is increasingly successful but is becoming scared of some of her fans, who seem to be ensnared in Angelica's cult, which has seriously misandric aspects. We learn of Angelica's father's past, and perhaps who Angelica's mother is; there are terrifying scenes at Angelica's home; Sweeney goes to one of Annie's concerts and finds herself in an hallucinatory state witnessing bizarre and horrifying acts. And she gets an intern who is terribly attractive, way too young, and who is Annie's son -- and maybe Oliver reincarnated?

I don't want to detail the plot any more -- perhaps I've already written too much. This is a novel that manages to be very scary and also very beautiful. It's a D.C. novel more than any other I know -- a true city novel, with great details about underground music and Washington's geography. It's feminist and inquisitive about a sort of cultist feminism that is both plausibly attractive and genuninely horrifying. It's about weather, oddly. It's beautiful, and beautifully written. It's a college novel for a while, and then it isn't. It's big and never boring in the least. It's sexy. It's musical. It's terrifying. It's tragic, and it has a (sort of) happy ending. It won the Tiptree Award and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award and probably deserved a few more. An excellent novel.  

Old Bestseller Review: David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

Old Bestseller Review: David Copperfield, by Charles Dickens

by Rich Horton

As regular readers of this blog (you happy few! :)) know, I have been reading a lot of Victorian fiction lately, and enjoying it immensely -- that last appropriate enough as many of these books are immense! But perhaps the most famous Victorian novelist, as well as one of the most popular in his time and to this day, is Charles Dickens. And I had not read a Dickens novel since I was 15 or so, when I read A Christmas Carol (of course!) and Nicholas Nickleby. I should say I enjoyed both those books, and it's hard to say why I didn't keep reading him. In those days (perhaps less so now) it was pretty common for Dickens to be assigned in high school. At my school, I believe, the usual choice was A Tale of Two Cities, though I've heard that each of David Copperfield and Great Expectations were also common. But he wasn't assigned in the English Literature class I took. (I believe Wuthering Heights, which at that time I hated, was the only Victorian novel on the reading list.)

At any rate, I knew I'd get to Dickens eventually, and I had pretty much decided that either David Copperfield or Great Expectations were logical first choices. And Copperfield got the nod, primarily because I found a free Librivox recording, so was able to listen to it on the way to work over the past few weeks. (Of course I also have a print copy, a Modern Library Classics edition.) The reader was T. Hynes (I think, sometimes it's hard to know) and he did a very fine job.

The novel's full title is given, in my Modern Library edition, as The Personal History, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery Which He Has Never Meant to be Published on any Account. This is a curious alteration of the title given on the serial edition: The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery. As for the first book edition, the title page reads simply The Personal History of David Copperfield. (I don't know if a fuller version was given a bit later in that edition.) The novel was serialized between May of 1849 and November of 1850. (Not, as I understand, in a magazine, but in independently sold parts.) The first book edition appeared from Bradbury and Evans in two volumes in November of 1850. 

I don't wish to go to much into the plot, which is surely familiar to many people, and which anyway, though enjoyable to follow, is not the key to the novel. It is a purely classic bildungsroman in form, and it is also semi-autobigraphical. (In the years before Dickens wrote Copperfield he had produced some autobiographical sketches, which he claimed to have burned -- but surely some of what he wrote was reworked to form parts of the novel.) At any rate, it treats of the life of its first person narrator from his birth as already half an orphan (his father having died months before his birth), through his mother's disastrous remarriage and subsequent death, to his abortive education followed by factory work, then to his fleeing to his aunt's house, and his more successful education, leading to a job training to be a proctor (a sort of lawyer), his courtship of his boss's pretty daughter and then marriage, his early career as a journalist and then novelist, and his eventual success, in both his career and a later remarriage.

Obviously that description leaves out, well, pretty much everything! For the book lives in the other characters, and much of the incidents and extended plot elements concern other characters too: his schoolboy friend Steerforth and his terrible betrayal of David's childhood friends; his impecunious one-time landlord Mr. Micawber; the scheming villain Uriah Heep, etc. Best perhaps, to just mention all the glorious characters, most of whom are wildly eccentric in one way or another. There are villains -- Heep, of course; and David's sadistic stepfather (called "father-in-law" in the book) Mr. Murdstone and his equally sadistic sister Jane; and Steerforth, somewhat ambiguously villainous but with a truly villainous servant, Littimer; his first schoomaster, Mr. Creakle; the rackety Jack Maldon, who tries to seduce David's second schoomaster Dr. Strong's young wife. And the long catalog of less terrible people: Mr. Micawber, ever ambitious but never willing to work for it, and his loyal wife; Miss Mowcher, a spirited dwarf and hairdresser; Thomas Traddles, David's much put-upon school friend who is perhaps the most deserving hard worker in the novel; David's aunt, Betsey Trotwood, perhaps my favorite character in the novel, a greathearted woman with a suspicion of marriage and a curious devotion to David's sister Betsey (the girl she feels David should have been); Betsey's lodger Mr. Dick, obssessed with the severed head of Charles I but as loyal and honest a man as may be; David's mother's maid, Clara Peggoty, and her whole family: her brother, unmarried himself but who has adopted his niece Emily and his nephew Ham, both orphans (of different parents) -- Emily is, in a way, David's first love, and her story is one of the more affecting in the book; the carter Mr. Barkis -- "Barkis is willin'" is one of the book's great lines; Mr. Wickfield, Aunt Betsey's lawyer and David's landlord for a time, almost ruined by his drinking; Agnes Wickfield, a sweet and greatly moral character, perhaps a tad too idealized; Mr. Omer, the wonderfully portrayed undertaker who buries David's mother (and remains a figure in David's life); Martha, the ruined woman who redeems herself in the end; Rosa Dartle, Mrs. Steerforth's fierce companion, not a good person but one more to be pitied than despised ... and many more. Some of these characters barely appear but are still memorable, others recur again and again. Even the tiniest characters are fun -- there are several delightfully portrayed waiters, for instance; and David's servants over time are pathetically awful at their jobs, and for all that quite funny.

There are many wonderful scenes worth mentioning as well: David's birth, especially Aunt Betsey's appearance; several death scenes; the great storm near the end; Micawber's denunciation of Heep; the dinner party at the Waterbrooks'; every scene with Miss Mowcher. And again, on and on.

It's a huge novel (roughly the same length as Middlemarch, I'd estimate) and it fully inhabits its length. It is by turns powerful, horrifying, very funny, very sentimental. It is moving when it wants to be, earnest when it wants to be. Certainly I was brought to tears several times, and to gales of laughter at other times. It is great-hearted, I think. It is far from perfect -- as Randall Jarrell said, "A novel is a prose narrative of some length with a flaw in it." David Copperfield is a prose narrative of great length with great flaws. And it is big enough, joyous enough, heartfelt enough, that the flaws don't matter and often are in their way also virtues.

It seems that its reputation has wavered over time. I sense that some critics disapprove of its sentimentality, probably of its relatively happy ending (for most characters), probably of its lack of devotion to social issues (they are not absent, but they are not central to the novel.) And I suppose that by this time several of Dickens' novels rank more highly in the general estimation: Great Expectations, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend in particular, I'd say. And perhaps they deserve it! -- I expect to get to them eventually. But I do love David Copperfield. 

Review: Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz, by Garth Nix

Review: Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz, by Garth Nix

a review by Rich Horton

This is a very enjoyable new collection from Garth Nix, of 9 stories that have appeared in the past 15 years or so (one original to the collection) about the two people mentioned in the title. Sir Hereward is a young man, an expert in artillery, but also the only male born in centuries to the Witches of Har. Mister Fitz is a very long-lived sorcerous puppet, who has worked with the Witches for most of (I suppose all of) his life. He was Hereward's nanny as a child (and then called Mistress Fitz), and now he is Hereward's partner on their clandestine missions. Godlets are creatures from another dimension who have somehow entered Hereward and Fitz's world. Sometimes they are benign, and work to improve the lives of the humans near them. Sometimes they are rather trivial. And sometimes they are "inimical", usually enslaving in some sense the living things near them, to increase their power. The Council of the Treaty for the Safety of the World  enjoins the Witches of Har (and possibly other people) to destroy (or return to their original dimensions) these godlets. Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz travel the world, ostensibly as mercenaries, selling Hereward's artillery skills, but in reality perform missions for the Council: missions in which, typically, Sir Hereward distracts the godlet and or eliminates interference by the humans in thrall to it; while Mister Fitz uses his sorcerous powers to deal with the godlet itself.

The stories feature plenty of dark events -- wasted lands, many deaths, including of innocents, many betrayals, and some fearsome monsters. Yet the tone throughout is rather light. The interaction of the two main characters is delightful: Sir Hereward smarter than he acts, but still prone to be distracted by a pretty girl, while Mister Fitz never forgets that he (she) was Sir Hereward's teacher, and teaches him still. 

The stories range across a broad swath of this secondary world. In "Sir Hereward and Master Fitz Go to War Again" the twosome visit a prosperous city threatened by its much poorer neighbors, planning to serve in the city's defense -- until they realize there is a dark reason for the city's relative riches. Alas for Sir Hereward, the very attractive member of the city guard he first duels to a draw is on duty that night ... "Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar-Pirates of Sarsköe" takes them along with a fierce and sexy pirate and her crew to the well-hidden tresure of the Scholar-Pirates: a treasure only too well guarded. In "A Suitable Present for a Sorcerous Puppet", a convalescing Sir Hereward happens across a book which tells him the traditional date of "birth" of Mister Fitz -- and in finding him a present finds something much more sinister. "Losing Her Divinity", one of my favorites, it told by a man who chance-meets our heroes on a train, and tells them of his meeting with a certain Goddess. The first person voice of this man is beautifully done. In "A Cargo of Ivories", the twosome's plan to steal a valuable set of ivory statuettes -- some of which are vessels for dangerous godlets -- is complicated by the appearance of a young thief with the same goal. "Home is the Haunter" has the pair transporting a huge cannon across a dry waste, until they reach an apparent refuge, unfortunately the same night as the yearly manifestation of a godlet called the Hag. "A Long Cold Trail" has them chasing an escaped monster that has possessed one of Hereward's great-great-Aunts, who has failed to banish it -- their job is to catch it before it can reach a city and gain energy from all its souls, and their effort is complicated by the foolish intervention of an ordinary man who thinks his magical sword makes him a God-Taker. "Cut me Another Quill, Mister Fitz" features the two of them searching through tax records to track down someone with an anomalous fortune on the theory that that might reveal a dragon and its hoard; though Sir Hereward has little patience with this task and much more interest in getting a glass of wine in the company of a pretty guard. And "The Field of Fallen Foe" is another case where Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz have to clean up a mistake by one of his aunts, and also clean up a dreadful field of dead soldiers, and a questionably proscribed godlet.

These are all very amusing, and clever. My summaries above reveal little of the twists involved: sometimes Mister Fitz and Sir Hereward have a brilliant plan, sometimes they make it up as they go along, sometimes Sir Hereward is ignorant of Mister Fitz's plan. Always, something goes wrong. Sometimes, even, Sir Hereward gets his wish to dally with one or another of the pretty women he encounters. They are series stories, and follow a bit of a template, but in a good way, with variations and plenty of interesting menaces. I enjoyed them all when they first appeared, and enjoyed them as much on this reread. (The last story is original to this volume.) Recommended!